When Jack and Jim reached the floor with the box and the wires, Jim started so hard with fear that he hurt his back (here it should be noted that Jim had recently hurt his back in the same place when he happened to sneeze unexpectedly, but still.) He yanked Jack back and hissed: “BOMB!”

Jack rolled his eyes the way only sons can and said: “That isn’t a bomb.”

“How do you know that?” Jim wondered.

“Bombs don’t look like that,” Jack said.

“Maybe that’s what whoever made the bomb wants you to think.”

“Dad, pull yourself together, that isn’t…”

If it had been any other colleague, Jim would probably have let him carry on up the stairs. Maybe that’s why some people think it’s a bad idea for fathers and sons to work together. Because Jim said instead: “No, I’m going to call Stockholm.”

Jack never forgave him for that.

* * *

The bosses and the bosses’ bosses and whoever was above them in the hierarchy who issued orders immediately issued an order that the two officers should go back down to the street and wait for backup. Obviously it wasn’t easy to find backup, even in the big cities, because who the hell robs a bank the day before New Year’s Eve? And who the hell takes people hostage at an apartment viewing? “And who the hell has an apartment viewing the day before…?” as one of the bosses wondered, and they carried on like that for a good while over the radio. Then a specialist negotiator, from Stockholm, called Jack’s phone to say that he was going to be taking charge of the entire operation. He was currently in a car, several hours away, but Jack needed to understand very clearly that he was expected merely to “contain the situation” until the negotiator arrived. The negotiator spoke with an accent that definitely wasn’t from Stockholm, but that didn’t matter, because if you asked Jim and Jack, being a Stockholmer was more a state of mind than a description of geographic origin. “Not all idiots are Stockholmers, but all Stockholmers are idiots,” as people often said at the police station. Which was obviously extremely unfair. Because it’s possible to stop being an idiot, but you can’t stop being a Stockholmer.

After talking to the negotiator Jack was even angrier than he’d been the last time he’d had to speak to a customer service representative at his Internet provider. Jim in turn felt the weight of responsibility for the fact that his son wasn’t now going to get the chance to show that he could apprehend the bank robber on his own. All their decisions for the remainder of the day would come to be governed by those feelings.

“Sorry, son, I didn’t mean…,” Jim began sheepishly, without knowing how he was going to finish the sentence without admitting that if Jack had been any other man’s son, Jim would most likely have agreed that it wasn’t a bomb. But you don’t take any risks if the son is your own son.

“Not now, Dad!” Jack replied sullenly, because he was talking to their boss’s boss on the phone again.

“What do you want me to do?” Jim asked, because he needed to be needed.

“You can start by trying to get hold of people living in the neighboring apartments, the ones we never reached because of you and your ‘bomb,’ so we know that the rest of the building is empty!” Jack snapped.

Jim nodded, crushed. He looked up the phone numbers on Google. First the owner of the apartment on the floor where Jim had seen the bomb. A man replied, said he and his wife were away, and when his wife snapped: “Who’s that?” irritably in the background, the man snapped back: “It’s the brothel!” Jim didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, so he asked instead if there was anyone in their apartment. When the man said there wasn’t, Jim didn’t want to worry him by talking about the bomb, and there was no way the man could possibly have known at that point that if he had just said: “By the way, that box on the landing contains Christmas lights,” then this whole story would have changed instantly, so the man merely asked instead: “Was there anything else?” and Jim said: “No, no, I think that’s everything,” then thanked him and hung up.

Then he called the owners of the apartment at the top of the building, the one on the same floor as the apartment where the hostage drama was going on. The owners of that one turned out to be a young couple in their early twenties, they were in the middle of splitting up and had both moved out. “So the apartment’s empty?” Jim asked, relieved. It was, but in two separate conversations Jim still had to listen as two twentysomethings took it for granted that Jim would want to know why they had split up. It turned out that one of them couldn’t live with the fact that the other one had such ugly shoes, and the other was turned off by the fact that the first dribbled when he brushed his teeth, and that both of them would rather have a partner who wasn’t quite so short. One said that the relationship was doomed because the other liked coriander, so Jim said: “And you don’t?” only to receive the reply: “I do, but not as much as her!” The other one said they’d started to hate each other after an argument that, as far as Jim could understand, started when they were unable to find a juicer in a color that reflected them both as individuals but also as a couple. That was when they realized that they couldn’t live together another minute longer, and now they hated each other. It struck Jim that today’s youngsters had far too much choice, that was the whole problem—if all those modern dating apps had existed when Jim’s wife first met him, she would never have ended up becoming his wife. If you’re constantly presented with alternatives, you can never make up your mind, Jim thought. How could anyone live with the stress of knowing that while their partner was in the bathroom, they could be swiping right or left and finding their soul mate? A whole generation would end up getting urinary tract infections because they had to keep waiting to pee until the charge on their partner’s phone ran out. But obviously Jim said none of this, merely asked one last time: “So the apartment’s empty?”

They each confirmed that it was. All that was left in there was a juicer in the wrong color. The apartment was going to be put up for sale in the new year, with an estate agency whose name one of them couldn’t remember, only that it was “really corny, kind of dad-joke corny!” The other one confirmed this: “Whoever named that estate agency has a worse sense of humor than hairdressers! Did you know there’s one here called ‘The Upper Cut’? I mean, like, what?”

Jim hung up then. He thought it was a shame that they’d split up, those two, because they deserved each other.

He went over to Jack and tried to tell him about it, but Jack just said: “Not now, Dad! Did you get hold of the neighbors?”

Jim nodded.

“Is anyone home?” Jack asked.

Jim shook his head. “I just wanted to say that…,” he began, but Jack shook his head and resumed his conversation with his boss.

“Not now, Dad!”

So Jim didn’t say anything more.

* * *

What then? Well, then everything slid out of control, little by little. The whole hostage drama took several hours, but the negotiator got caught up in traffic and ended up stuck behind the worst multi-vehicle pileup of the year on the motorway (“Bound to be Stockholmers who set out without proper studded tires,” Jim declared confidently), so he never arrived. Jim and Jack were left to deal with the situation themselves, which wasn’t without its complications seeing as it took them a long time before they even managed to establish contact with the bank robber (culminating in Jack getting a large bump on his head, which itself is quite a long story). But eventually they managed to get a phone inside the apartment (which is an even longer story), and once the bank robber had released all the hostages and the negotiator made a call to that phone, that was when the pistol shot was heard from inside the apartment.