* * *

It’s been just Jack and Jim since then. They send her money every time she calls, every time she pretends she’s going to come home, only she just needs help with the airfare, this one last time. And maybe a bit extra to pay a few little debts. Nothing much, she’s going to sort it all out, if they could just… they know they shouldn’t, of course. You always know. Addicts are addicted to their drugs, and their families are addicted to hope. They cling to it. Every time her dad gets a call from a number he doesn’t recognize, he always hopes it’s her, whereas her younger brother is terrified because he’s always convinced this will be the call when someone tells him she’s dead. The same questions echo through both of them: What sort of police officers can’t even look after their own daughter and sister? What sort of family can’t help one of their own to help herself? What sort of god makes a priest ill, and what sort of daughter doesn’t show up for the funeral?

When both children were still living at home, when everyone was still tolerably happy, Jack asked his mom one evening how she could bear to sit beside people when they were dying, in their final hours, without being able to save them. His mom kissed the top of his head and said: “How do you eat an elephant, sweetheart?” He replied the way a child who’s heard the same joke a thousand times does: “One bit at a time, Mom.” She laughed just as loudly, for the thousandth time, the way parents do. Then she held his hand tightly and said: “We can’t change the world, and a lot of the time we can’t even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we do what we can to help whenever we get the chance, sweetheart. We save those we can. We do our best. Then we try to find a way to convince ourselves that that will just have to… be enough. So we can live with our failures without drowning.”

* * *

Jack couldn’t help his sister. He couldn’t save the man on the bridge. Those who jump… they jump. The rest of us have to get out of bed the following day, priests walk out of the door to do their job, as do police officers. Now Jack is looking at the stage blood on the floor, the bullet hole in the wall, the little side table where the phone was lying, and the large coffee table with the discarded pizza boxes.

He looks at Jim, and his dad holds his hands up and smiles weakly.

“I give up. You’re the genius here, son. What have you come up with?”

Jack nods at the pizza boxes. Brushes the hair from the lump on his forehead. Counts out the names again.

“Roger, Anna-Lena, Ro, Jules, Estelle, Zara, Lennart, the bank robber, the real estate agent. Nine people.”

“Nine people, yes.”

“But when they dropped that lime on my head, the note only asked for eight pizzas.”

Jim thinks about this so hard that his nostrils quiver.

“Maybe the bank robber doesn’t like pizza?”

“Maybe.”

“But that’s not what you think?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Jack stands up, packs the witness statements away in his bag. He bites his tongue.

“Is the real estate agent still at the station?”

“She should be, yes.”

“Call and make sure no one lets her go anywhere!”

Jim frowns so hard that you could lose a paper clip in the wrinkles.

“But… why, son? What’s—?”

Jack interrupts his dad: “I don’t think there were nine people in this apartment. I think there were eight. There’s one person we’ve just assumed was here the whole time! Bloody hell, Dad, don’t you see? The perpetrator didn’t hide, and didn’t escape, either. She just walked right out into the street in front of us!”

47

The bank robber was sitting alone in the hall. She could hear the voices of the people she’d taken hostage, but they might as well have been in a different time zone. There were eternities between her and everyone else now, between her and the person she had been that morning. She wasn’t alone in the apartment, but no one in the world shared her prospects, and that’s the greatest loneliness in the world: when no one is walking beside you toward your destination. In a short while, when they all walked out of the apartment, the others would be victims the moment their feet reached the sidewalk. She would be the criminal. If the police didn’t shoot her on sight, she’d end up stuck in prison for… she didn’t even know how long… years? She’d grow old in a cell. She’d never see her daughters learn to swim.

The girls. Oh, the girls. The monkey and the frog who would grow up and have to learn to be good liars. She hoped their dad would have the sense to teach them to do that properly. So that they could lie and say their mom was dead rather than tell the truth. She slowly removed the mask. It no longer served any purpose, she realized that, to think otherwise would be nothing but childish delusion. She was never going to be able to escape the police. Her hair fell around her neck, damp and tangled. She weighed the pistol in her hand, clutching it harder and harder, a little at a time so she barely noticed. Only her whitening knuckles betrayed what was happening, until her forefinger suddenly felt for the trigger. Without any great drama, she asked herself: “If this had been real, would I have shot myself?”

She didn’t have time to finish the thought. Someone’s fingers suddenly wrapped around hers. They didn’t tear the pistol from her hand, just lowered it. Zara stood there looking at the bank robber, neither sympathetic nor concerned, but without taking her hand off the pistol.

* * *

Ever since the start of the hostage drama, Zara had tried not to think about anything in particular, in fact she always did her best not to think about anything at all—when you’re in as much pain as she has been for the past ten years, that’s a vital survival skill. But something slipped through her armor when she saw the bank robber sitting there alone with the pistol. A brief memory of those hours in the office with the picture of the woman on the bridge, the psychologist looking at Zara and saying: “Do you know what, Zara? One of the most human things about anxiety is that we try to cure chaos with chaos. Someone who has got themselves into a catastrophic situation rarely retreats from it, we’re far more inclined to carry on even faster. We’ve created lives where we can watch other people crash into the wall but still hope that somehow we’re going to pass straight through it. The closer we get, the more confidently we believe that some unlikely solution is miraculously going to save us, while everyone watching us is just waiting for the crash.”

Zara looked around the office then. There were no fancy certificates hanging on the walls; for some reason it’s always the people with the most impressive diplomas who keep them in their desk drawers.

So Zara asked, without any sarcasm, “Have you learned any theories about why people behave like that, then?”

“Hundreds,” the psychologist smiled.

“Which one do you believe?”

“I believe the one that says that if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.”

Zara usually fought to keep all thoughts at bay, but that one slipped through. So when she found herself standing in the hall of the apartment, she put her hand around the pistol and said the kindest thing a woman in her position could say to a woman in the bank robber’s position. Four words.