Today he was the first police officer through the door after the hostages were released and the pistol shot rang out inside the apartment. He was the one who rushed through the living room, over the bloodstained carpet, tore the balcony door open, and stood there staring disconsolately over the railing, because no matter how illogical it might seem to everyone else, his first instinct and greatest fear was: “He’s jumped!” But there was nothing down there, just the reporters and curious locals who were all peering up at him from behind their mobile phones. The bank robber had vanished without a trace, and the policeman was alone up there on the balcony. He could see all the way to the bridge from there. Now he was standing in the corridor of the police station, unable even to make himself wipe the blood from his shoes.
12
The air passes through the older policeman’s throat as roughly as a piece of heavy furniture being dragged across an uneven wooden floor. When he’d reached a certain age and weight, he’d noticed himself starting to sound like that, as if older breaths were heavier. He smiles awkwardly at the real estate agent.
“My colleague, he… He’s my son.”
“Ah!” the Realtor nods, as if to say that she’s got children, too, or perhaps that she hasn’t got children but that she’d read about them in a manual during her real estate agent’s training. Her favorites are the ones with toys in neutral colors, because they match everything.
“My wife said it was a bad idea for us to work together,” the policeman admits.
“I understand,” the Realtor lies.
“She said I’m overprotective. That I’m one of those penguins that squats on top of a stone because I don’t want to accept that the egg has gone. She said you can’t protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end.”
The Realtor considers pretending to understand, but replies honestly instead.
“What did she mean by that?”
The police officer blushes.
“I never wanted… Look, it’s silly of me to sit here and go on about this to you, but I never wanted my son to join the police. He’s too sensitive. He’s too… good. Do you know what I mean? Ten years ago he ran onto a bridge and tried to talk some sense into a man who was going to jump. He did all he could, all he could! But the man jumped anyway. Can you imagine what that does to a person? My son… he always wants to rescue everyone. After that I thought maybe he’d stop wanting to be a policeman, but the opposite happened. He suddenly wanted it more than ever. Because he wants to save people. Even the bad guys.”
The real estate agent’s breathing has slowed, her chest is rising and falling almost imperceptibly.
“You mean the bank robber?”
The older policeman nods.
“Yes. There was blood everywhere inside the apartment when we got in. My son says the bank robber’s going to die unless we find him in time.”
The real estate agent can see how much this means to him from the sadness in his eyes. Then he runs his fingers across the tabletop and adds with forced formality, “I have to remind you that everything you say during this interview is being recorded.”
“Understood,” the real estate agent assures him.
“It’s important that you understand that. Everything we say here will be included in the file and can be read by any other police officer,” he insists.
“Everyone can read. Definitely understood.”
The older officer carefully unfolds the piece of paper the younger officer left on the table. It’s a drawing, produced by a child who is either extremely talented or completely devoid of talent for their age, depending entirely on what that age is. It appears to show three animals.
“Do you recognize this? As I said before, we found it in the stairwell.”
“Sorry,” the real estate agent says, looking genuinely sorry.
The policeman forces himself to smile.
“My colleagues reckon it looks like a monkey, a frog, and a horse. I think that one looks more like a giraffe than a horse. I mean, it hasn’t even got a tail! Giraffes don’t have tails, do they? I’m sure it’s a giraffe.”
The real estate agent takes a deep breath and says what women usually say to men who never seem to think that their lack of knowledge should get in the way of a confident opinion.
“I’m sure you’re right.”
* * *
In truth, it wasn’t the man on the bridge that made the teenage boy want to be a policeman. It was the teenage girl who was standing on the same railing a week later that made him want it. The one who didn’t jump.
13
The coffee cup is thrown in anger. Right across the two desks, but the unfathomable ways of centrifugal force mean that it retains most of its contents until it shatters against the henceforth cappuccino-colored wall.
The two policemen stare at each other, one embarrassed, the other concerned. The older policeman’s name is Jim. The younger officer, his son, is Jack. This police station is too small for these two men to be able to avoid each other, so as usual they’ve ended up on either side of their desks, only half hidden behind their respective computer screens, because these days police work consists of one-tenth actual police work, with the rest of the time devoted to making notes about exactly what you did during the course of that police work.
Jim was born in a generation that regarded computers as magic, Jack in one that has always taken them for granted. When Jim was young, children used to be punished by being sent to their rooms, but these days you have to force children to come out of them. One generation got told off for not being able to sit still, the next gets told off for never moving. So when Jim writes a report he hits every key all the way down very deliberately, then checks the screen at once to make sure it hasn’t tricked him, and only then does he press the next key. Because Jim isn’t the sort of man who lets himself be tricked. Jack, in turn, types the way young men who’ve never lived in a world without the Internet do, he can do it blindfolded, stroking the keys so gently that even a forensics expert wouldn’t be able to prove that he’d touched them.
The two men drive each other crazy, of course, about the smallest things. When the son is looking for something on the Internet, he calls it “googling,” but when his dad does the same thing he says: “I’ll look that up on Google.” When they disagree about something, the father says: “Well, it must be right, because I read it on Google!” and the son exclaims: “You don’t actually read things on Google, Dad, you search for them there…”
It isn’t really the fact that his dad doesn’t understand how to use technology that drives his son mad, but the fact that he almost understands. For instance, Jim still doesn’t know how to take a screenshot, so when he wants to take a picture of something on his computer screen, he takes a photograph of the screen with his mobile phone. When he wants to take a picture of something on his mobile, he uses the photocopier. The last really big row between Jim and Jack was when some boss’s boss decided that the town’s police force should become “more accessible on social media” (because in Stockholm the police are evidently massively accessible the whole damn time), and asked them to take pictures of each other in the course of an ordinary day at work. So Jim took a photograph of Jack in the police car. While Jack was driving. With a flash.