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She starts waving her arms about to illustrate assault by phone, and yelling in what the two officers can only assume is the real estate agent’s imitation of their accents: “Oh, hell, no, I’ve ended up liking my ex on Instagram as well! Delete! Delete! ”

The younger police officer doesn’t look at all amused, which makes the real estate agent look less amused. In the meantime the older officer leans toward the younger officer’s notes and asks, as if the Realtor weren’t actually in the room: “So what did she say about the drawing? ”

“I didn’t get that far before you came in and interrupted! ” the younger man snaps.

“What drawing? ” the real estate agent asks.

“Well, as I was about to say before I was interrupted: we found this drawing in the stairwell, and we think the perpetrator may have dropped it. We’d like you to—, ” the younger officer says, but the older officer interrupts him.

“Have you talked to her about the pistol, then? ”

“Stop interfering! ” the younger man hisses.

This makes the older officer throw his arms up and mutter: “Okay, okay, sorry I’m here. ”

“It wasn’t real! The pistol! It was a toy! ” the real estate agent says quickly.

The older officer looks at her in surprise, then at the younger officer, before whispering in a way that only men of a certain age think is a whisper: “You… you haven’t told her? ”

“Told me what? ” the real estate agent wonders.

The younger police officer sighs and folds the drawing, as carefully as if he were actually folding his older colleague’s face. Then he looks up at the Realtor.

“Well, I was coming to that… You see, after the perpetrator released you and the other hostages, and we’d brought you here to the station…”

The older officer interrupts helpfully: “The perpetrator, the bank robber—he shot himself! ”

The younger officer clasps his hands tightly together to stop himself from strangling the older man. He says something the real estate agent doesn’t hear: her ears are already full of a monotonous buzzing sound that grows to a roar as shock takes hold of her nervous system. Long afterward she will swear that rain was pattering against the window of the room, even though the interview room had no windows. She stares at the policemen with her jaw hanging open.

“So… the pistol… it was…? ” she manages to say.

“It was a real pistol, ” the older officer confirms.

“I…, ” the Realtor begins, but her mouth is too dry to speak.

“Here! Have some water! ” the older officer offers, as if he’d just fetched it for her.

“Thanks… I… but, if the pistol was real, then we could all… we could all have died, ” she whispers, then gulps at the water in a state of retroactive shock. The older officer nods authoritatively, takes the younger man’s notes from him, and starts to make his own additions with a pen.

“Perhaps we should start this interview again? ” he says helpfully, which prompts the younger officer to take a short break so he can go out into the corridor and bang his head against the wall.

When the door slams shut the older man jumps. This business with words is tricky when you’re older and all you want to say to someone younger is: “I can see you’re in pain, and that causes me pain. ” The younger officer’s shoes have left reddish brown marks of dried blood on the floor under his chair. The older man looks at them disconsolately. This was precisely why he didn’t want his son to become a policeman.

The first person who saw the man on the bridge ten years ago was a teenage boy whose dad wished he would find a new dream. Perhaps the boy could have waited for help, but would you have done that? If your mom was a priest and your dad a policeman, if you’d grown up taking it for granted that you have to help people if you can, and not abandon anyone unless you really have to?

So the teenage boy ran out onto the bridge and shouted to the man, and the man stopped. The teenage boy didn’t know what he should do, so he just started… talking. Tried to win the man’s trust. Get him to take two steps back rather than forward. The wind was tugging gently at their jackets, there was rain in the air and you could feel the start of winter on your skin, and the boy tried to find the words to say how much there must be to live for, even if it maybe didn’t feel that way right now.

The man on the bridge had two children, he told the teenage boy that. Possibly because the boy reminded him of them. The boy pleaded with him, with panic weighing down each word: “Please, don’t jump! ”

The man looked at him calmly, almost sympathetically, and replied, “Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes. ”

The teenage boy probably didn’t really understand what he meant. His hands were shaking as he glanced over the side of the bridge and saw death all the way down. The man smiled weakly at him and took half a step back. Just then, that felt like the whole world.

Then the man explained that he’d had a pretty good job, he’d set up his own relatively successful business, bought a fairly nice apartment. That he’d invested all his savings in shares in a real estate development company, so that his children could get even better jobs and even nicer apartments, so that they could have the freedom not to have to worry, not have to fall asleep exhausted every night with a pocket calculator in their hands. Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure. They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven’t yet realized that we don’t actually know what we’re doing. So the man did what we all do: he pretended he knew. When his children started to ask why poo was brown, and what happens after you die, and why polar bears don’t eat penguins. Then they got older. Sometimes he managed to forget that for a moment and found himself reaching to hold their hands. They were so embarrassed. Him too. It’s hard to explain to a twelve-year-old that when you were little and I walked too fast, you would run to catch up with me and take hold of my hand, and that those were the best moments of my life. Your fingertips in the palm of my hand. Before you knew how many things I’d failed at.

The man pretended—about everything. All the financial experts promised him that shares in the real estate development company were a safe investment, because everyone knows that property values never go down. And then they did just that.

There was a financial crisis somewhere in the world and a bank in New York went bankrupt, and far away in a small town in a completely different country lived a man who lost everything. He saw the bridge from his study window when he hung up after the phone call with his lawyer. It was early in the morning, still unusually mild for the time of year, but there was rain in the air. The man drove his children to school as if nothing had happened. Pretending. He whispered in their ears that he loved them, and his heart broke when he saw them roll their eyes and sigh. Then he drove toward the water. Stopped the car where you weren’t allowed to stop. Left the keys in it. Walked out onto the bridge and climbed up onto the railing.

He told the teenage boy all this, and then of course the teenage boy knew that everything was going to be all right. Because if a man standing on a railing takes the time to tell a stranger how much he loves his children, you know he doesn’t really want to jump.

And then he jumped.

Ten years later the young police officer is standing in the corridor outside the interview room. His dad is still in there with the real estate agent. Of course his mom was right: they should never have worked together, he and his dad, there was bound to be trouble. He didn’t listen, because of course he never does. Occasionally when she was tired or she’d had a couple of glasses of wine, enough to make her forget to hide her emotions, his mom looked at her son and said: “There are days when I can’t help thinking you never really came back from that bridge, love. That you’re still trying to save that man on the railing, even though it’s as impossible now as it was back then. ” Perhaps that’s true, he doesn’t feel like checking. He still has the same nightmares, ten years on. After Police College, exams, shift after shift, late nights, all his work at the station that’s garnered so much praise from everyone but his dad, even more late nights, so much work that he’s come to hate not working, unsteady walks home at dawn to the piles of bills in the hall and an empty bed, sleeping pills, alcohol. On nights when everything has been completely unbearable he’s gone out running, mile after mile through darkness and cold and silence, his feet drumming against the pavement faster and faster, but never with the intention of getting anywhere, of accomplishing anything. Some men run like hunters, but he ran like their prey. Drained with exhaustion he would finally stagger home, then head off to work and start all over again. Sometimes a few whiskies were enough to get him to sleep, and on good mornings ice-cold showers were enough to wake him up, and in between he did whatever he could to take the edge off the hypersensitivity of his skin, stifle the tears when he felt them in his chest, long before they reached his throat and eyes. But all the while: still those same nightmares. The wind tugging at his jacket, the dull scraping sound as the man’s shoes slid off the railing, the boy’s scream across the water that neither sounded nor felt like it came from him. He barely heard it anyway, the shock was too great, too overwhelming. It still is.

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.

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.

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.

Now they’re seated opposite each other, typing, constantly out of sync with each other. Jim is slow, Jack efficient. Jim tells a story; Jack simply gives a report. Jim deletes and edits and starts again, Jack just types and types as if there were nothing on the planet that could be described in more than one way. In his youth Jim had dreams of becoming a writer. In fact he was still dreaming about that until long into Jack’s childhood. Then he started to dream that Jack might become a writer instead. That’s an impossible thing for sons to grasp, and a source of shame for fathers to have to admit: that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.

They have pictures of the same woman on their desks. The mother of one of them, the wife of the other. Jim’s desk also has a photograph of a young woman, seven years older than Jack, but they don’t often talk about her, and she only gets in touch when she needs money. At the start of each winter Jim says hopefully: “Maybe your sister will come home for Christmas, ” and Jack replies: “Sure, Dad, we’ll see. ” The son never tells his dad he’s being naive. It’s an act of love. His dad’s shoulders are weighed down with invisible boulders when he says, late each Christmas Eve: “It’s not her fault, Jack, she’s…, ” and Jack always replies: “She’s ill. I know, Dad. Do you want another beer? ”

There are so many things that stand between the older policeman and the younger one now, regardless of how close they live to each other. Because Jack eventually stopped running after his sister—that’s the main difference between the brother and the father.

When his daughter was a teenager, Jim used to think that children were like kites, so he held on to the string as tightly as he could, but eventually the wind carried her off anyway. She pulled free and flew off into the sky. It’s hard to tell exactly when a person’s substance abuse begins, which is why everyone is lying when they say: “I’ve got it under control. ” Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we’re the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belongs to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes.

A few years ago Jim found out that Jack had withdrawn all his savings, which he was planning to use to buy an apartment, and used them to pay for his sister’s treatment in an exclusive private clinic. Jack drove his sister there. She checked herself out two weeks later, too late for him to get his money back. She didn’t get in touch for six months, when she suddenly phoned in the middle of the night as if nothing had happened, and asked if Jack could lend her “a few thousand. ” For a plane ticket home, she said. Jack sent the money, she never came. Her dad is still running about on the ground, trying not to lose sight of the kite way up in the sky, that’s the difference between the father and the brother. Next Christmas one of them will say: “She’s…, ” and the other will whisper: “I know, Dad, ” then get him another beer.

Obviously they find ways to argue about beer, too. Jack is one of those young men who is curious about beers that taste of grapefruit and gingerbread and sweets and all sorts of other crap. Jim wants beer that tastes of beer. Sometimes he calls the complicated version “Stockholm beer, ” but not too often, naturally, because then his son gets so angry that Jim has to buy his own damn beer for several weeks. He sometimes thinks it’s impossible to know if children end up completely different despite the fact that they grew up together, or precisely because of that. He glances over the top of the computer screens and watches his son’s fingertips on the keyboard. The little police station in their not especially large town is a fairly quiet place. Not much happens there, they’re not used to hostage dramas, or any sort of drama at all, really. So Jim knows that this is Jack’s big chance to show the bosses what he can do, what sort of police officer he can be. Before the experts from Stockholm show up.

Jack’s frustration is dragging his eyebrows down and restlessness is blowing a gale inside him. He’s been teetering on the verge of a furious outburst ever since he was the first officer into the apartment. He’s been keeping a lid on it, but after the last interview he marched into the staffroom and exploded: “One of these witnesses knows what happened! Someone knows and is lying to our faces! Don’t they understand that a man could be lying hidden somewhere, bleeding to death right now? How the hell can anyone lie to the police while someone’s dying? ”

Jim didn’t say a word when Jack sat down at his computer after his outburst. But when the coffee cup hit the wall, it wasn’t Jack who threw it. Because even if his son was furious about not being able to save the perpetrator’s life, and hated the fact that a group of damn Stockholmers were about to show up and take the investigation away from him, that came nowhere close to the frustration his father felt at not being able to help him.

A long silence follows. First they glare at each other, then down at their keyboards. Eventually Jim manages to say: “Sorry. I’ll clean it up. I just… I can understand that this is driving you crazy. I just want you to know that it’s driving me crazy… too. ”

He and Jack have both studied every last inch of the plan of the apartment. There are no hiding places in there, nowhere to go. Jack looks at his dad, then at the remains of the coffee cup behind him, and says quietly: “He must have had help. We’re missing something here. ”

Jim stares at the notes from the interviews with the witnesses.

“We can only do our best, son. ”

It’s easier to talk about work when you haven’t quite got the words to talk about the other things in life, but obviously those words apply to both things at the same time. Jack has been thinking about the bridge ever since the hostage drama started, because during his best nights he still dreams that the man didn’t jump, that Jack managed to save him. Jim thinks about the same bridge all the time, because during his worst nights he dreams that it was Jack who jumped instead.

“Either one of the witnesses is lying, or they all are. Someone must know where this man is hiding, ” Jack repeats mechanically.

Jim sneaks a glance at Jack’s two index fingers, tapping the desktop the same way as his mother after a heavy night at the hospital or prison. Too much time has passed for the father to ask his son how he’s doing, too much time for the son to be able to explain. The distance between them is too great now.

But when Jim slowly gets up from his chair with the full symphony of a middle-aged man’s groans, to wipe the wall and pick up the pieces of the cup he threw, Jack gets quickly to his feet and walks to the staffroom. He comes back with two more cups. Not that Jack drinks coffee, but he understands that it occasionally means something to his father not to have to drink alone.

“I shouldn’t have got involved in your interview, son, ” Jim says in a low voice.

“It’s okay, Dad, ” Jack replies.

Neither of them means it. We lie to those we love. They hunch over their keyboards again and type up the final transcripts of all the interviews with the witnesses, reading them through one more time in search of clues.

They’re right, both of them. The witnesses aren’t telling the truth, not all of it. Not all of them.

Witness Interview

Date: December 30

Name of witness: London

JACK: You’d probably be more comfortable if you sat on the chair instead of the floor.

LONDON: Have you got something wrong with your eyes or something? You can see that the charging cable for my cell phone won’t reach the chair.

JACK: And moving the chair is out of the question, obviously.

LONDON: What?

JACK: Nothing.

LONDON: You’ve got really crap reception in here. Like, one bar…

JACK: I’d like you to switch your phone off now so I can ask my questions.

LONDON: I’m not stopping you, am I? Ask away. Are you really a cop? You look too young to be a cop.

JACK: Your name is London, is that correct?

LONDON: “Correct. ” Is that how you talk? You sound like you’re doing role-play with someone who gets turned on by accountants.

JACK: I’d appreciate it if you could try to take this seriously. Your name is L-o-n-d-o-n?

LONDON: Yes!

JACK: I have to say, that’s an unusual name. Well, maybe not unusual, but interesting. Where’s it from?

LONDON: England.

JACK: Yes, I understand that. What I meant was, is there a special reason why you’re called that?

LONDON: It’s what my parents decided to call me. Have you been smoking something?

JACK: You know what? Let’s forget that and just move on.

LONDON: It’s not worth getting upset about, is it?

JACK: I’m not upset.

LONDON: Right, because you don’t sound at all upset.

JACK: Let’s focus on the questions. You work in the bank, is that correct? And you were working at the counter when the perpetrator came in?

LONDON: Perpetrator?

JACK: The bank robber.

LONDON: Yes, that’s “correct. ”

JACK: You don’t have to do that with your fingers.

LONDON: They’re perverted commas. You’re writing this down, right, so I want you to use perverted commas when I do that, so anyone reading your notes will get that I’m being ironic. Otherwise anyone reading this is going to think I’m a complete moron!

JACK: They’re called inverted commas.

LONDON: Is there an echo in here or something?

JACK: I was just telling you what they’re called.

LONDON: I was just telling you what they’re called!

JACK: That’s not what I sound like.

LONDON: That’s not what I sound like!

JACK: I’m going to have to ask you to take this more seriously. Can you tell me about the robbery?

LONDON: Look, it wasn’t even a robbery. We’re a cashless bank, okay?

JACK: Please, just tell me what happened.

LONDON: Did you put that my name is London? Or have you just put “witness”? I want you to use my name, in case this ends up online and I get famous.

JACK: This isn’t going to end up online.

LONDON: Everything ends up online.

JACK: I’ll make sure I use your name.

LONDON: Sick.

JACK: Sorry?

LONDON: “Sick. ” Don’t you know what “sick” means? It means good, okay?

JACK: I know what it means. I just didn’t hear what you said.

LONDON: I just didn’t hear what you saaaid…

JACK: How old are you?

LONDON: How old are you?

JACK: I’m asking because you seem quite young to be working in a bank.

LONDON: I’m twenty. And I’m, like, only a temp, because no one else wanted to work the day before New Year’s Eve. I’m going to study to be a bartender.

JACK: I didn’t know you needed to study to do that.

LONDON: It’s tougher than being a cop, anyway.

JACK: Of course it is. Can you tell me about the robbery now, please?

LONDON: God, could you be any more annoying? Okay, I’ll tell you about the “robbery”…

It was a day completely devoid of weather. During some weeks in winter in the central part of Scandinavia the sky doesn’t seem to bother even attempting to impress us, it greets us with the color of newspaper in a puddle, and dawn leaves behind it a fog as if someone has been setting fire to ghosts. It was, in other words, a bad day for an apartment viewing, because no one wants to live anywhere at all in weather like that. On top of that, it was also the day before New Year’s Eve, and what sort of lunatic holds a viewing on a day like that? It was even a bad day for a bank robbery, although, in defense of the weather, that was more the fault of the bank robber.

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