Three Seconds

by Anders Roslund

  He was not alone.

  Visitors, park attendants, and watering cans, all heading toward the grass and rows of headstones. He rolled down the window, it was muggy, air than stuck to your back.

  "Do you work here?"

  A person in blue overalls with two spades on the back of a moped. The park attendant, or church warden, stopped by the man who was still in his car, shielded by the door, not daring to get out.

  "Have for seventeen years."

  Grens fidgeted uneasily and moved the sandwich wrapper that rustled on the seat. His eyes followed an old lady leaning over a small gray stone that looked new, a plant in one hand and an empty pot in the other.

  "So you know the place well?"

  "You could say that."

  She started to dig, then with great care put the plant in the soil, had just enough room in the thin strip between the headstone and the grass.

  "I was wondering…"

  "Yes?"

  "I was wondering… if you want to find out about a particular grave, where someone is buried… what do you do?"

  Lennart Oscarsson stood by the window at the far end of a room he had aspired to all his adult life. The chief warden's office at Aspsås prison. After twenty-one years as a prison warden, principal officer and acting chief, he had finally been appointed as prison chief warden four months ago and had moved all his files into the shelves that were slightly longer and attached to the wall next to the sofas that were slightly softer. He had dreamed of having this office for so long that when he stood there with his dream in his hands, he didn't know what to do with it. What do you do when you no longer have dreams? Escape? He gave a faint sigh as he looked out of the window at prisoners on a break in the yard: large groups of people who had murdered, abused, stolen, and were sitting out there on the dry gravel, either reflecting or repressing their emotions in order to cope. He looked up over the wall to the small town with rows of white-and-red houses, stopped at the window that had for a long time been a family bedroom-now he lived there alone, he had made a choice, but he had made the wrong choice, and sometimes it is too late to right our wrongs.

  He sighed again without realizing it. The evening and night had been filled with fury, the sort that crept up on you, started to ferment in your mind, then grew into frustration. It had started with a feeling of irritation just by his temples when he heard the voice that he recognized, but had never spoken to before. He had been sitting at the kitchen table eating his supper as he always did, even though it was now only set for one, and he had almost finished when the phone rang. The general director had been friendly but firm when he told him that the detective superintendent from city police who was coming to Aspsås in the morning to question a prisoner in G2, Piet Hoffmann, must not be allowed to do so. They must not meet under any circumstances, not today nor the next day nor the next. Lennart Oscarsson had not asked any questions and had not understood until later, when he was washing up one plate, one glass, one knife and fork, where the irritation that had turned into rage was coming from.

  A lie.

  A lie that had just been born.

  He had asked Ewert Grens to leave and had been on his way out when the alarm sucked all the air from the small room. A prisoner had been threatened, an emergency escort from G2 to the voluntary isolation unit.

  Piet Hoffmann.

  The name he had been ordered to lie about.

  Oscarsson bit his lower lip until it started to bleed. He chewed the wound with his teeth until it stung, as if to punish himself, maybe in order to forget for a moment the fury that made him want to open the window and jump out and run to the town and the people who knew nothing.

  The attack and the phone call to say that a policeman must not be allowed to carry out an interview were linked. There was more-he had been given another order-he was to allow a lawyer to visit a client last evening. They did come knocking every now and then when an imminent trial or recently pronounced sentence required a lawyer in the cell, but never on order and seldom after lock-up. This one had visited a Pole in G2 and was one of the lawyers paid to convey planted information, Oscarsson was sure of it.

  A late visit by a lawyer in the same unit as a reported attack the next morning.

  Lennart Oscarsson bit his lower lip again, his blood tasting of iron and something else. He didn't know what he'd expected. Perhaps he had been naive, all the days he had looked up at the room where he was now standing and thought about the uniform he was now wearing. Whatever it was, he had never imagined that it would mean this.

  A cell with absolutely no personal belongings, just a bunk, a chair, a wardrobe, no colors and no soul. He had not left it since he got here and he wasn't going to be staying. His death sentence had gotten here before him. It had been standing in the bathroom, waiting, with a kick to the hip and a mouth that whispered stukatj with the promise of more. If he was going to survive a week, he could only do it in another sort of isolation, solitary confinement, where prisoners were separated not only from the rest of the prison but also from each other, locked into the cells every hour of the day.

  He stood on his toes when he pissed-the sink was a bit too high on the wall, but he wasn't going to go out there, not to the toilets.

  Then he pressed a button by the door and held it down.

  "You want something?"

  "I want to make a phone call."

  "There's a phone in the corridor."

  "I'm not going out there."

  The guard stepped into the cell and bent over the sink.

  "It stinks."

  "I have the right to make a phone call."

  'Tuck, you pissed in the sink."

  "I have the right to call my lawyer, non-custodial services, the police and my five approved numbers. And I want to do that now."

  "In this unit, which you asked to come to yourself, we use the toilets in the corridor. And I haven't got your damn list."

  "The police. I want to call a number on the City Police switchboard. You can't refuse me."

  "There's a telephone in-"

  "I want to call from here. I have the right to call the police in private." Twelve rings.

  Piet Hoffmann held the cordless phone in his hand. Erik Wilson wasn't there, he knew that he was away in the United States, at some course in the south-east, during the period that they were not going to have any contact. But that was where he called, his office, that was where he had to begin.

  He was put through again.

  When you've asked to be put in isolation, once you have that protection, contact us and wait for a week. That's the time we'll need to get the papers sorted for someone to come and get you out.

  Fourteen rings.

  Erik wasn't going to answer, no matter how long he waited.

  "I want to call the switchboard."

  I am alone.

  The regular tone of a switchboard, muffled, feeble.

  No one knows yet.

  "Police Authority, Stockholm, can I help you?"

  "Göransson."

  "Which one?"

  "The head of criminal operations."

  The female voice put him through. Then that muffled, feeble ringing, again and again. I am alone. No one knows yet. He waited with the receiver pressed to his ear. The regular sound got louder, with each ring it got a little louder until it was piercing his brain and mixing with the voice from the bathroom that passed the closed cell and shouted stukatj once, twice, three times.

  Ewert Grens lay on the corduroy sofa and looked at the shelf behind the desk and the hole that he had filled again early that morning, the row of files and a lonely cactus that concealed a whole life. As if there hadn't been any dust. He turned round and looked at the ceiling, spotted new cracks that were about to separate and then come together, only to separate again. He had stayed in the car. The park attendant had pointed toward the lawns and trees that were practically a forest, explained that the new graves were at the far end toward Haga. He had even offered to go with him, show the
way to someone who had never been there before. Grens had thanked him and shaken his head, he would go there another day.

  "The noise?"

  Someone had stopped in his doorway.

  "Do you want something?"

  The noise."

  "What damned noise?"

  "The noise. That… atonal one. Dissonance."

  Lars Ågestam crossed the threshold.

  "The noise that I normally hear. Siw Malmkvist. I was heading for it now. Until I realized that I'd walked past. That it was… silent."

  The public prosecutor stepped into an office that looked different, as if it had taken on new dimensions and what had previously been at the center had disappeared.

  "Have you rearranged the furniture?"

  He looked at the shelf. The files, preliminary investigations, a dead potted plant. A bit of wall that had previously been something else, presumably the center.

  "What have you done?"

  Grens didn't answer. Lars Ågestam listened to the music that had always been there, that he detested and had been forced to listen to.

  "Grens? Why…?"

  "That's got nothing to do with you."

  "You've-"

  "I don't want to talk about it."

  The prosecutor swallowed-there might have been something to talk about that wasn't to do with law; he had tried and he regretted it as usual. "Västmannagatan."

  "What about it?"

  "I gave you three days."

  Not a sound. And that wasn't how it should be, in here.

  "Three days. For the last names."

  "We're not quite finished."

  "If you still haven't got anything… Grens, I will scale down the case this time."

  Ewert Grens had been lying down until now. He quickly got up, his body leaving a deep impression on the soft sofa.

  "You damn well won't! We've done exactly what you suggested. Identified and contacted several names on the periphery of the investigation. We've questioned them, dismissed them. All except one. A certain Piet Hoffmann who is already doing time and right now is in the prison's hospital unit and out of bounds."

  "Out of bounds?"

  "Isolation. For three or four days."

  "What do you think?"

  "I think he's very interesting. There's something… he doesn't fit."

  The young prosecutor looked at the files and the potted plant that disguised what once had been. He would never have believed it, that Grens would let go of something that he only needed to love at a distance.

  "Four days. So that you can question this last guy. Either you manage to link him to the crime in that time, or I scale it down."

  The detective superintendent nodded and Lars Ågestam started to walk out of the room he had never laughed in, not even smiled in. Every visit here had been fraught with conflict and an inhabitant that tried at once to repel and hurt. He moved quickly in order to get away from the staleness and so didn't hear the cough and didn't notice when a piece of paper was pulled from an inner pocket.

  "Ågestam?"

  The prosecutor stopped, wondered whether he'd heard correctly. It was Grens's voice and it sounded almost friendly, perhaps even apologetic.

  "Do you know what this is?"

  Ewert Grens unfolded the piece of paper and put it down on the table in front of the sofa.

  A map.

  "North Cemetery."

  "Have you been there?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Have you? Been there?"

  Strange questions. The closest they had ever come to a conversation. "Two of my relatives are buried there."

  Ågestam had never seen this arrogant bastard so… small. Grens played with the map of one of Sweden's largest cemeteries and struggled for words. "Then you'll know… I wondered… is it nice there?"

  The door to the cell at the end of the corridor in the voluntary isolation unit was open. The prisoner from G2 had been escorted there through the underground tunnel by four members of the prison riot squad and after that he had demanded to phone the police, and then proceeded to make their lives hell. He had kept ringing the bell and demanding to be moved again, had shouted about solitary confinement and hit the walls, overturned the wardrobe, smashed the chair and pissed all over the floor until it ran our under the door into the corridor. He had been terrified but seemed to hold himself together, scared but in control. He knew what he was saying and why and he didn't go to pieces and collapse-the prisoner called Piet Hoffmann would only be quiet when he knew that someone was listening. Lennart Oscarsson had been standing in his office looking out over the prison yard and town hall in the distance when he had been informed of the disturbance involving a prisoner in the voluntary isolation unit in Block C and had decided to go there himself, to meet someone he didn't know but who had haunted him since a late phone call the night before.

  "In there?"

  He had seen him before. The cleaner in the administration block. He had seemed taller then, more straight-backed, eyes that were curious and alert. The person sitting on the bunk with his knees pulled up under his chin and his back pressed hard to the wall was someone else.

  Only death, or fleeing from it, could change someone so quickly. "Is there a problem, Hoffmann?"

  The prisoner who couldn't be questioned tried to look more together than he actually was.

  "I don't know. What d'you think? Or did you come here to get your trash emptied?"

  "I think it would seem so. And that it's you that's causing it. The problem." The order to grant a lawyer access to your unit.

  "You asked for voluntary isolation. You refused to say why. And now you've got it, voluntary isolation."

  The order that you must not be questioned.

  "So… what's your problem?"

  "I want to be put in the hole."

  "You want what?"

  "The hole. Solitary confinement."

  I see you.

  You're sitting there in the clothes we've issued.

  But I don't understand who you are.

  "Solitary confinement? Exactly… what exactly are you talking about, Hoffmann?"

  "I don't want to have any contact with the other prisoners."

  "Are you being threatened?"

  "No contact. That's all I'm saying."

  Piet Hoffmann looked out through the open door. Prisoners who moved around freely represented death just as much here as in any other unit. They had been moved away from others but not from each other.

  "That's not the way it works. Hoffmann, solitary confinement is our decision. It's not something that individual prisoners can decide. You've been moved here on your request, in accordance with Paragraph eighteen. That's our duty. We are under obligation to do that if you request it. But the hole, solitary confinement, has a completely different set of regulations and conditions. Paragraph fifty is not something you can request, it's not voluntary, it is a decision that is enforced. By a principal officer in your unit. Or by me."

  They were walking around out there, and they knew. He wouldn't survive the week here.

  "Enforced?" "Yes."

  "And how the fuck is that decision made?"

  "If you're a danger to someone else. Or to yourself."

  With walls that locked you in there was nowhere to hide.

  "A danger?" "Yes."

  "In what way?"

  "Violence. Toward fellow prisoners. Or one of us, one of the staff."

  They were waiting for him.

  They whispered stuka.

  He moved closer to the chief warden and looked into a face that crumpled with pain-he had hit him hard.

  He sat on the hard concrete floor. He'd heard talk of solitary confinement cells that were called the hole or the cage, he'd heard tales of people who excelled in violence in the world outside but who had broken after a few days in solitary confinement and were taken to the hospital unit in a fetal position, or those who had quietly hanged themselves with a sheet. A person couldn't be farther removed from li
fe, from what was natural.

  He was sitting on the floor as there wasn't a chair. A heavy metal bed and a cement toilet bowl that was solidly attached to the floor. That was it.

  He had hit the chief warden in the middle of the face with his fist. The top of the cheek, eye, and nose. Oscarsson had fallen from the chair onto the floor, bleeding but conscious. The guards had rushed in, the governor held his hands in front of his face to protect himself against anything else, and Piet Hoffmann had voluntarily stretched his arms and legs for them to carry him out. The four guards each struggled with a part of his body while the prisoners lined the corridor and watched.

  He had survived the attack. He had survived voluntary isolation. He had managed to get here, as much protection as you could get in a closed prison, but he shrank just as he had before, I am alone, no one knows yet, he curled up on the hard surface, freezing then sweating then freezing again. He was still lying there when one of the guards opened the square hatch in the door to ask if he wanted his hour out in the fresh air-an hour a day in a cake slice-shaped cage with blue sky high above the metal mesh-but he shook his head. He didn't want to leave the cell, didn't want to expose himself to anyone.

  Lennart Oscarsson closed the door to the voluntary isolation unit and went slowly down the stairs, one at a time, to the ground floor of Block C. One hand to his cheek, his fingertips touching the swelling. It was tender and particularly swollen along the zygomatic bone, and there was a taste of blood on his tongue and in his throat. Give it about an hour, then the area around his eye would turn blue. The chief warden felt physical pain every second from a face that would take a long time to heal, but it meant nothing. It was the other pain, the one from the inside that he felt-all his working life he had lived with men who had no place in real society and he had been proud that he could read difficult people better than anyone, his professional knowledge, the only thing he felt was worth anything anymore.

  This punch, he hadn't seen it coming.