Three Seconds

by Anders Roslund

  Hermansson laughed briefly.

  "According to the chancellor of justice that question qualifies as investigation of sources. And that, I believe, Ewert, is a crime that carries a prison sentence.

  "Colleagues, in other words."

  She continued.

  "I've crossed them all out. So I have thirty qualified explanations." She moved her finger to the numbers at the bottom.

  "That leaves two phone calls. One in the morning, at nine twenty-three, and one in the afternoon at twelve minutes past two. Calls from Aspsås prison to a contract phone registered at the Ericsson offices in Vastberga."

  The next plastic sleeve, handwritten notes from a note pad.

  "I followed the number up. According to Ericsson's HR department, the phone is used by one of their employees called Zofia Hoffmann."

  Grens spluttered.

  "Hoffmann."

  "Married to a Piet Hoffmann."

  She turned over the piece of paper. More handwriting.

  "I checked the personal details I was given. Zofia Hoffmann is registered as living in Stockrosvägen in Enskede. According to her employer, the company's correct name is evidently Ericsson Enterprise AB. She disappeared from the workplace yesterday just before lunch."

  "While the hostage drama was ongoing."

  "Yes."

  "Between phone calls."

  " Yes.

  Ewert Grens got up out of the soft sofa and stretched his aching back while Hermansson took out another piece of paper.

  "According to the tax authorities, Zofia and Piet Hoffmann have two children together. The two boys have attended a nursery school at an address in Enskededalen every weekday for the past three years and are collected by either their mother or father at around five o'clock. But yesterday, a couple of hours before her husband was shot to death by us, and exactly twenty minutes after she left work, Zofia Hoffmann picked up the boys considerably earlier than normal without notifying any of the staff. She seemed tense-two of the nursery school teachers described her as that, she didn't meet their eye, didn't seem to hear their questions."

  Mariana Hermansson studied the older man who bent down to touch the floor, then up and leaned back; his large body and an exercise that he had no doubt learned in a strict gym half a century ago.

  "I sent a patrol car around to their house, a detached house built in the fifties, a few minutes' drive south of the city. We looked in through two closed windows, rang the doorbell, saw that the doors were locked, looked through the letter box and could see today's newspaper and yesterday's post. Nothing. Nothing, Ewert, to indicate that anyone in the family had been there since yesterday morning."

  Twice more. He bent forward and then leaned back.

  "Issue an arrest warrant."

  An arrest warrant was issued for Zofia Hoffmann thirty minutes ago." Ewert Grens nodded briefly; it might have been praise.

  "He phoned her. He warned her. He protected her from the consequences of his own death."

  She had stepped out into the corridor and closed the door when she stopped, turned round and opened it again.

  "There was one more thing."

  Grens was still standing in the middle of the floor.

  "Yes?"

  "Can I come in?"

  "You've never asked for permission before."

  It felt ominous.

  She had been on her way to tell him all morning and had still managed to leave his office without having spoken about why she really came.

  "I know something that may hold the key. And that you should have known yesterday, but I didn't get to you in time."

  She wasn't used to being out of control, of not being sure that she was doing the right thing.

  "I was on my way to tell you. I ran through the prison corridors and drove as fast as I could toward the church."

  It was a feeling she didn't like. Not anytime, and certainly not here, with Ewert.

  "I tried to call but your phone was switched off. I knew that every minute, second counted. I could hear you and the sniper talking on the car radio. Your order. The sound of the gun being fired."

  "Hermansson?"

  "Yes?"

  "Get to the point."

  She looked at him. She was nervous. It was a long time since she had felt like this in here.

  "You asked me to talk to Oscarsson. I did. The circumstances surrounding Hoffmann, Ewert-someone was giving Oscarsson orders, someone was telling him what to do."

  She had learned to read his face.

  She knew what it meant when the color started to rise in his cheeks and the vein on his temple started to throb.

  "The night before you went there, Oscarsson was ordered to let a lawyer visit one of the prisoners in the same unit as Hoffmann, and then to prevent you or anyone else from questioning him or meeting him. He was ordered to move him back to the unit where he came from, despite the fact that prisoners who have been threatened are never moved back, and, in contravention of the prison service's own regulations, that the gates should be kept shut, even if Hoffmann demanded that they be opened."

  "Hermansson, what the hell-"

  "Ewert, let me finish. I had the information but I didn't get to you in time. And after… the explosion, it didn't seem relevant to talk about it just then."

  He put his hand on her shoulder. Something he had never done before. "Hermansson. I'm furious, but not at you. You did the right thing. But I do want to know who."

  "Who?"

  "Who made the orders?"

  "I don't know."

  "Don't know!"

  "He wouldn't tell me."

  Ewert Grens almost ran across the room to the desk and the shelves behind. A hole with edges of dust. It wasn't there. The music that had given him comfort and strength for all these years. It was at times like this he had needed it most, when anger tipped over into rage, starting somewhere in his belly, burning its way to every part of his body, and it would stay there until he knew who had made him into a useful idiot, who had let him shoot.

  "With that information, I wouldn't have ordered the sniper to fire." He looked at his young colleague.

  "If I had known what I know now… Hoffmann would never have died."

  The brown plastic cup would soon be full of strong, black, bitter coffee. The machine rattled as it normally did, mostly toward the end, reluctant to give up the last drops. Chief Superintendent Göransson drank the coffee while he was out in the corridor. He saw Mariana Hermansson coming out of Grens's office, a file under her arm. He knew what their meeting had been about, they were doing exactly what they should, filing the reports required following a lethal shooting at Aspsås.

  I did not participate.

  He crushed the cup, the hot liquid running down the back of his hand.

  I jumped ship.

  Göransson drank some more of the bitterness, emptied the cup. He greeted Sven Sundkvist, who was passing. He also had a couple of files under his arm, on his way to the office that Hermansson had just left, to Ewert Grens.

  He noticed the flushed cheeks, the pulsing vein by his temple.

  Sven knew Ewert Grens better than anyone else in the building, he had had to face his boss's anger and learn to deal with it, so now when the shouting and the kicking of trash cans took over he no longer saw or heard it, it had nothing to do with him. Only Ewert could chase his own demons.

  "You don't look happy."

  "Drop by Hermansson when you're done here. She'll explain. I can't face it right now."

  Sven looked at the man in the middle of the floor. They had met earlier that morning. This boiling rage hadn't been there then.

  Something had happened.

  "What do you know about Wilson?"

  "Erik?"

  "Are there any other Wilsons on the goddamn corridor?"

  Another kind of anger. Clear, tangible. Ewert could be angry about most things, a difficult, irritated anger that was such a frequent caller that it never got through. But this anger was serious, it
demanded space and he tried not to downplay it.

  I must go to Hermansson afterwards.

  "I don't know him. Even though we've been here almost the same length of time. It just turned out that way. But… he seems like a nice enough guy. Why?"

  "I just heard his name today in the wrong circumstances."

  "What do you mean?"

  "We'll talk about that later too."

  Sven didn't ask anymore questions. He knew he wouldn't get any answers yet.

  "I've got the first report on Hoffmann Security AB. You interested?" "You know I am."

  He put two pieces of paper down on Ewert's desk.

  "I want you to have a look. Come over here."

  Ewert stood beside Sven.

  "A close company with annual reports and normal articles of association. I can look into that more, if you want, take a really good look at the figures."

  He pointed at the second piece of paper.

  "But this, I want you to have a look at this, right now."

  A drawing of four squares stacked on top of each other.

  "The ownership structure, Ewert. This is interesting. A board that consists of three people. Piet Hoffmann, Zofia Hoffmann, and a Polish citizen, Stanislaw Rosloniec."

  A Polish citizen.

  "I've run a check on Rosloniec. He lives in Warsaw, is not registered in any international criminal intelligence databases and-now it gets really interesting-is employed by a Polish company called Wojtek Security International."

  Wojtek.

  Ewert Grens searched Sven's pattern of squares but saw an airport in Denmark and a detective superintendent called Jacob Andersen.

  Eighteen days ago.

  They had sat in a meeting room at Kastrup police station and eaten greasy pastries and Andersen had spoken about a Danish informant who was supposed to buy amphetamines. In an apartment in Stockholm. With two Poles and their Swedish contact.

  Swedish contact.

  "Damn it „. hang on a minute, Sven!"

  Grens pulled open one of his desk drawers and took out a CD player and the CD of the voice that Krantz had burned for him. Headphones on and three sentences he knew by heart.

  A dead man. Vdstrnannagatan 79. Fourth floor.

  He removed the headphones and put them on Sven's head.

  "Listen."

  Sven Sundkvist had analyzed the recording from Emergency Services on the ninth of May at 12:37:50 as many times as Ewert.

  And now listen to this."

  The voice had been stored in one of the computer's sound files. They had both encountered it when they were waiting in a churchyard twenty-four hours ago.

  "He's a dead man in three minutes."

  The one whispered dead and the other screamed dead, but when Ewert Grens and Sven Sundkvist listened carefully and compared the pronunciation of the d and the e and the a, it was obvious.

  It was the same voice.

  "It's him."

  "It sure as hell is him, Sven! It was Hoffmann who was in the apartment! It was Hoffmann who raised the alarm!"

  Grens was already on his way out of the room.

  Wojtek is the Polish mafia.

  Hoffmann Security AB is linked to Wojtek.

  The car was parked on Bergsgatan and he hurried down the stairs, even though the elevator was empty.

  So why did you raise the alarm?

  So why did you shoot another member in solitary confinement and blow a third member up?

  He turned out of Bergsgatan and drove down Hantverkargatan toward the city. He was going to visit the person whose death he was responsible for.

  He stopped the car in a bus lane outside the door to Vasagatan 42. A couple of minutes, then Nils Krantz knocked on the window. "Anything in particular?"

  "I don't know yet. It just feels right. An hour maybe, I have to think." "Here, keep them for the moment. I'll let you know if I need them." Krantz gave him a set of keys and Ewert Grens put it in the inner pocket of his jacket.

  "By the way, Ewert…"

  The forensic scientist had stopped a bit farther down the pavement.

  "I've identified the two explosives. Pentyl and nitroglycerine. It was the pentyl that caused the actual explosion, the wave that forced out the window and the heat that ignited the diesel. And the nitroglycerine had been applied directly onto someone's skin-I don't know whose yet, though."

  Grens went up the stairs of one of the many buildings in central Stockholm from the turn of the century, the first few years of the 1900s when the cityscape changed dramatically.

  He stopped in front of a door on the first floor.

  Hoffmann Security AB. Same old trick. A security firm as a front for the Eastern European mafia.

  He opened the door with the keys that he'd got from Krantz.

  A beautiful apartment, shining parquet floor, high ceilings, white walls. He looked out of the window with a view of Kungsbron and the Vasa theatre, an elderly couple on their way in to the evening performance, as he had often thought of doing himself, but never gotten around to.

  You were sent up for a drug crime. But you weren't an amphetamine dealer. He walked down the hall and went into what must once have been the drawing room, but was now an office with two gun cabinets by an open fireplace.

  You had links with Wojtek. But you were not a member of the mafia.

  He sat down in the chair by the desk that he guessed Hoffmann must have sat in.

  You were someone else.

  He got up again and wandered around the apartment, looked in the two empty gun cabinets, touched the deactivated alarm, rinsed out some dirty glasses.

  Who?

  When he left Hoffmann Security AB, Grens had gone to look at the storage spaces that belonged to the apartment. He had opened a storeroom in the cellar with a strong smell of damp, and he had walked around in the loft with a fan heater whirring above his head while he looked for a storeroom that was more or less empty, except for a hammer and chisel that were lying on top of a pile of old tires.

  It was late, and he should perhaps have driven the kilometer from the door on Vasagatan to his own flat on Sveavägen, but the anger and restlessness pushed back the tiredness-he wouldn't sleep tonight either.

  The corridor of the homicide unit was waiting, abandoned. His colleagues would rather spend the first summer evenings with a glass of wine at one of the outside cafes on Kungsholmen followed by a slow walk home, than with twenty-four parallel investigations and unpaid overtime in a characterless office. He didn't feel left out, didn't miss it. He had chosen long ago not to take part and your own choice can never become ugly loneliness. This evening it would be a report on a shooting in a prison and tomorrow evening it would be a report on another shooting. There was always an investigation that was a trauma for the person who was shot, bat for the investigator generated a vicarious sense of belonging. Grens was almost at the coffee machine and two plastic cups of blackness when he stopped by his pigeonhole and saw a large padded envelope in the pile of unopened letters; too many damn reference lists and soulless mass mailings. He pulled it out and weighed it in his hand-not particularly heavy-turned it over without seeing any sender. His name and address were easy to read, a man's handwriting, he was sure of that, something square, unrhythmical, almost sharp about it, possibly in felt pen.

  Ewert Grens put the envelope down in the middle of the desk and stared at it while he emptied the first cup. Sometimes you just get a feeling, impossible to explain. He opened a drawer and a bag with unused rubber gloves, put on a pair and opened the end of the envelope with his index finger. He peeped cautiously in. No letter, no accompanying text or paper.

  He counted five things, took them out one at a time and placed them in a row in front of him, between the files of ongoing investigations.

  Half a plastic cup of coffee more.

  He started from the left. Three passports. Red with gold letters. EUROPEAN UNION, SWEDEN, PASSPORT. All Swedish, genuine, issued by the police authority in Stockholm.


  The photographs had been taken in a normal photo booth.

  A few centimeters in size, black and white, slightly blurred, small reflections in the shining eyes.

  The same face three times. Different names, different ID numbers. The face of a dead person.

  Pier Hoffmann.

  Grens leaned back in his chair and looked over at the window and the light outside, dim street lights that guarded the straight, empty asphalt paths of the inner courtyard at Kronoberg.

  If this is you.

  He picked up the envelope, turned it around.

  If this has come from you.

  He held it closer, fingertips brushed lightly over the front. There were no stamps. But there was something that looked like a postmark in the top right-hand corner. He studied it for a long time. Difficult to read, half the letters had disappeared. FRANKFURT. He was more or less certain. And six numbers. 234212. Then a kind of symbol, maybe a bird, or a plane.

  The rest was mainly streaks that had seen too much water.

  Grens scoured his desk drawer and the telephone list that he found there in a plastic sleeve. Horst Bauer, Bundeskriminalamt, Wiesbaden. He liked the German detective superintendent with whom he had worked a few years ago on an investigation in connection with a busload of abandoned Romanian children. Bauer was at home and having dinner, but was friendly and helpful and while Ewert waited and his food got cold, made three phone calls to confirm that the envelope that had recently arrived in a pigeonhole at the City Police in Stockholm had probably been sent by a courier company with offices at Frankfurt am Main International Airport.

  Grens thanked him and hung up.

  One of the world's largest airports.

  He gave a deep sigh.

  If it's you. If this comes from you. You instructed someone to send it for you. After your death.

  Two more objects on the desk. The first wasn't even a centimeter big. He held it in his clumsy rubber fingers. A receiver, a silver earpiece, electronic devices for listening to conversations that were caught by transmitters of the same size.

  Dear God.

  It wasn't even twelve hours since Sven had held such a transmitter in his hand, attached to a black wire and a solar cell painted in the same color. The church tower's fragile railing.

  Fifteen hundred and three meters from the now blown-out workshop window.