Three Seconds

by Anders Roslund

  Ewert Grens stretched up to the shelf behind the desk and the plastic bag that had not yet been recorded in any chain of custody list or delivered to forensics. He emptied the contents out of the bag, called one of the few numbers he knew by heart and put the receiver down on the desk so that the talking clock voice was close to the transmitter. He then left the room and closed the door while he held the silver receiver to his ear and listened to the clock striking at ten-second intervals.

  It worked.

  The receiver that he had just been sent in an envelope was set at exactly the same frequency as the transmitter they had found on the tower railing. One thing left. A CD.

  Grens balanced the shiny disk on his hand. No text on either side, nothing to give away the content.

  He pushed it into the narrow opening in the short end of his computer tower.

  "Government Offices, Tuesday, tenth of May."

  It was the same voice.

  He had listened to it together with Sven only a couple of hours ago. The voice that had raised the alarm. The voice that had threatened. Hoffmann.

  Grens swallowed the last drops in the plastic cup. A third?

  Later. He read the numbers on the sound file. Seventy-eight minutes and thirty-four seconds.

  When I've listened to this.

  The third cup of coffee from the machine was on the desk.

  Ewert Grens had gone to get it but didn't need it. The racing in his chest that was making him dizzy had nothing to do with caffeine.

  A legal police operation had just become legitimized murder.

  He listened again.

  First of all, scraping sounds, someone walking, fabric rubbing against a microphone with every step. After eleven minutes and forty-seven seconds-he checked on the sound file timer-a couple of voices, muffled. The microphone had been low, leg height, and it was obvious that Hoffmann moved every now and then to get closer to the sound source, had slowly stretched out a leg toward the person talking, suddenly got up and stood right next to them.

  "The document… I've read it. I assumed… I assumed that it concerned a… woman?"

  The only voice he hadn't heard before.

  A woman, forty, maybe fifty years old. A soft voice with harsh sentences, he was sure he would recognize it if he heard it again.

  "Paula. That's my name, in here."

  The clearest voice.

  The person with the microphone.

  Hoffmann. But he called himself Paula. A code name.

  "We have to make him more dangerous… He will have committed some serious crimes. He'll be given a long sentence."

  The third voice.

  Quite a high voice, the sort that doesn't fit the face, a colleague from the same corridor, only a few doors down and someone who had just happened to be passing on one of the first days of the investigation and had wanted to know how it was going and to give some ideas that pointed in the wrong direction.

  Ewert Grens slammed his hand down on the desk, hard.

  Erik Wilson.

  He hit the desk again, with both hands this time, swore loudly at the cold office walls that just stood there.

  Two more voices.

  The two he knew best, part of a hierarchical chain of command, links between a criminal and a government office.

  "Paula doesn’t have time for Västmannagatan."

  A sharp, nasal voice, a bit too loud.

  The national police commissioner.

  "You've dealt with similar cases before."

  A deep, resonant voice, that didn't swallow its words, but held them, vowels that were prolonged.

  Göransson.

  Ewert Grens stopped the recording and in one go drank the coffee that was still too hot and burned its way down from his throat to his stomach. He didn't feel it-.warm, cold, he was shaking as he had been since he listened to it the first time and was about to go back out into the corridor and pour more of the heat into himself until he managed to feel something other than the throttling rage.

  A meeting at Rosenbad.

  He took a felt pen from the pen holder and drew a rectangle and five circles straight onto the blotter.

  A meeting table with five heads.

  One who was probably a state secretary from the Ministry of Justice. One who called himself Paula. One who functioned as Paula's handler. One who was the most senior police officer in the country. And one, he looked at the circle that represented Göransson, who was Ewert Grens's immediate line manager and Erik Wilson's line manager and responsible for both their workloads and had therefore known all along why there were no answers in the Västmannagatan 79 case.

  "I am a useful idiot."

  Ewert Grens picked up the vandalized blotter and threw it to the floor. "I am a bloody useful idiot."

  He pressed play again, sentences that he had already heard.

  "Paula. That's my name, in here."

  You weren't the mafia. You were one of us. You were employed by us to pretend you were the mafia.

  And I murdered you.

  Sunday

  The big clock on Kungsholms church struck half past midnight when Ewert Grens left his office and the police headquarters and drove the short distance to Rosenbad. It was a lovely, warm night, but he didn't notice. He knew what had happened at Västmannagatan 79. He knew why Pier Hoffmann had done time at Aspsås prison. And he suspected why the exact same people who had arranged for Hoffmann's prison sentence had suddenly been there, searching for a bureaucratic reason for killing him.

  Piet Hoffmann was dangerous.

  Piet Hoffmann knew the truth about a murder that was less important than continued infiltration.

  When Grens identified Hoffmann's name on the periphery of the investigation and wanted to question him, he became even more dangerous.

  They had burned him.

  But he had survived an attack, taken hostages, and positioned himself where he was visible in a workshop window.

  You recorded the meeting. You sent it to me. The man who had to decide on your death.

  Ewert Grens parked on Fredsgatan close to the dark building from where Sweden was governed. He would soon make his way in there. He had just listened to a meeting that had been recorded in one of its many senior offices twenty-one days ago.

  He got out his mobile phone and dialed Sven Sundkvist's number. Three rings. Someone coughed and struggled to find strength.

  "Hello?"

  "Sven, it's me. I want-"

  "Ewert, I'm asleep. I've been asleep since eight. We missed out on last night, remember?"

  "You're not going to get much more sleep tonight either. You're going to go to the USA, to south Georgia. Your plane leaves Arlanda in two and half hours. You'll arrive-"

  "Ewert."

  Sven had pulled himself up, his voice was stronger-it was probably easier to talk when your chest and airways were free of pillows and duvets. "What are you talking about?"

  "I want you to get up and get dressed, Sven. You're going to meet Erik Wilson and you're going to get him to confirm that a meeting I've now listened to actually rook place. I'll call you in a couple of hours. By that time, you'll be sitting in a taxi and you'll have listened to the sound file that I've forwarded to your computer. You'll understand exactly what this is all about."

  Grens cut the engine and got out of the car.

  The doors to power were made of glass and had opened automatically whenever he had been there during the day. Now they remained closed and he had to press a bell to wake the security guard one floor up.

  "Yes?"

  "Detective Superintendent Grens, City Police. I'm here to look at some of your surveillance camera footage."

  "Now?"

  "Do you have anything else to do?"

  Some rustling papers near the microphone made the speaker crackle. "Did you say Grens?"

  "You can see me in the camera. And now you can see the ID that I'm holding up."

  "No one said you were coming. I want to see it again properly when
you're in here with me. Then I'll decide whether you can stay or whether I'd rather you came back tomorrow."

  Ewert Grens accelerated, the E18 north of Roslagstull was almost empty and right now he didn't give a damn about signs that limited the speed to seventy kilometers an hour.

  He had first checked the security company's signing-in book.

  The state secretary of the Ministry of Justice had had a total of four visitors on the tenth of May. They had arrived separately within twenty-five minutes of each other. First the national police commissioner, then Göransson, a bit later Erik Wilson, and finally, in handwriting that was difficult to read, Grens and the security man were eventually convinced that the visitor who had signed in at 15:36 was Pier Hoffmann.

  He passed Danderyd, Taby, Vallentuna… for the third time in twenty-four hours he was approaching the small town of Aspsås, but he wasn't going to the prison or the church, he was going to a terraced house and a man he would not leave until he had answered the one question that Grens had come to ask.

  With the signing-in book in his hand, Ewert Grens had demanded to see footage from two of the cameras that watched over the Government Offices and every person passing in or out. He had identified them one by one. First when they signed in, the camera was above the security desk in the entrance to Rosenbad and they stood there, all four of them, without looking up. Then a camera at face level in a corridor on the second floor opposite the door to the state secretary's office. He had seen the national police commissioner and Göransson knock on the door and go in, within a couple of minutes of each other. Wilson had arrived twenty minutes later and Hoffmann had sauntered down the corridor about seven minutes after that. He had known exactly where the camera was and twigged it early, looked into it for a bit too long, looked into the lens aware that his presence had been documented.

  Piet Hoffmann had knocked on the door just like all the others but had not been let in immediately like them. He was instructed to stay in the corridor, to hold out his arms while Göransson frisked him. Grens found it hard to stand still when he realized that the loud noise he had heard about nine minutes into the recording was the chief superintendent's hand knocking the microphone.

  He was speeding and slammed his foot on the brake when the turn to Aspsås emerged from the dark.

  A couple more kilometers; he wasn't laughing yet, but he was smiling.

  Sunday was only a few hours old. He didn't have much time but he would manage, still more than twenty-four hours left until Monday morning, when the security company's report of the weekend's surveillance tapes was passed on to the Government Offices' security department.

  He had heard the voices, and now he had seen pictures as well.

  He would shortly confirm the connection between three of the meeting participants and the orders that a prison chief warden had been given before and during a hostage drama that ended in death.

  A terraced house on a terraced house road in a terraced house area.

  Ewert Grens parked the car in front of a mailbox with the number fifteen on it and then sat there and looked at the silence. He had never liked places like this. People who lived too close to each other and tried to look alike. In his big apartment in Sveagatan, he had someone walking on his ceiling and someone else standing under his floor and others who drank glasses of water on the other side of the kitchen wall, but he didn't see them, didn't know them; he heard them sometimes but he didn't know what they were wearing, what kind of car they had, didn't have to meet them in their dressing gown with the newspaper under their arm and didn't need to think about whether their plum tree was hanging a little too low over the fence.

  He could hardly stand himself.

  So how the hell was he going to stand the smell of barbecued meat and the sound of footballs on wooden doors?

  He would ask Sven later, when this was all over, how you do it, how you talk to people you're not interested in.

  He opened the door and got out into an almost balmy spring night. A couple of hundred meters away stood the high wall, a sharp line against the sky that refused to go dark and would continue to do so until yet another summer had turned into early autumn.

  Square slabs in a well-trimmed lawn. He walked up to the door and looked at the windows that were lit both downstairs and up: probably the kitchen, probably the bedroom. Lennart Oscarsson lived the other side of his life only a few minutes' walk from his workplace. Grens was sure that being able to cope with living in a terraced house was somehow connected CO not needing to separate one reality from the other.

  His intention was to surprise. He hadn't phoned to say he was coming, had hoped to meet someone who had just been asleep and therefore didn't have the energy to protest.

  It wasn't like that.

  "You?"

  He remembered Hermansson's description of a person on the edge. "What do you want?"

  Oscarsson was wearing the prison uniform.

  "So you're still working?"

  "Sorry?"

  "Your clothes."

  Oscarsson sighed.

  "In that case I'm not alone. Unless you've come here in the middle of the night to have some tea and help me with the crossword?"

  "Will you let me in? Or do you want to stand out here and talk?"

  Pine floors, pine stairs, plain walls. He guessed that the prison chief warden had done up the hall by himself. The kitchen felt older: cupboards and counters from the eighties, pastel colors that you couldn't buy anymore.

  "Do you live here on your own?"

  "These days."

  Ewert Grens knew only too well how a home sometimes refuses to be changed and a person who has moved out somehow seems to stay in the colors and furniture.

  "Thirsty?"

  "No."

  "Then I'll have a drink myself."

  Lennart Oscarsson opened the fridge, neat and well stocked, vegetables at the bottom, the beer bottle that he was now holding in his hand from the top shelf.

  "You nearly lost a good friend yesterday."

  The warden sat down and took a swig without answering.

  "I went to see him this morning. Danderyd hospital. He's shaken." "I know. I've spoken to him as well. Twice."

  "How does it feel?"

  "Feel?"

  "To know that you're to blame."

  The guilt. Grens knew everything about that too.

  "It's half past one in the morning. I'm still in my uniform in my own kitchen. And you wonder how it feels?"

  "Because that's right, isn't it? You're to blame?"

  Oscarsson threw up his hands.

  "Grens, I know what you're after."

  Ewert Grens looked at another man who wasn't going to get to bed tonight either.

  "You spoke to one of my colleagues about thirty-six hours ago. You admitted that you had made at least four decisions that had forced Hoffmann to act as he did."

  Lennart Oscarsson was red in the face.

  "I know what you're after!"

  "Who?"

  The chief warden jumped up, poured out what was left in the bottle, then threw it against the wall and waited until the last shard of glass was still. He unbuttoned his uniform jacket, put it on the now empty kitchen table, fetched big scissors from the cutlery drawer. With great care he straightened out one of the sleeves, stroked the material with the back of his hand until he was sure it was flat and then started to cut, quite a large piece, five, maybe six centimeters wide.

  "Who gave you the orders?"

  He held the first piece of material in his hand, felt the frayed edge. He smiled, Grens was convinced of it, an almost shy smile.

  "Oscarsson, who?"

  He cut as he had done before, straight, considerate lines, the rectangular pieces neatly on top of the first.

  "Stefan Lygis. A prisoner you were responsible for. A prisoner who is now dead."

  "It wasn't my fault."

  "Pawel Murawski. Piet Hoffmann. Two other prisoners you were responsible for. Two other prisoners who are
now dead."

  "It wasn't my fault."

  "Martin Jacobson. A-"

  "All right, that's enough."

  "Martin Jacobson, a prison warden who-"

  "For Christ's sake, Grens, that's enough!"

  The first arm was ready. Pieces of material stacked in a small pile. Oscarsson pulled out the next one, shook it lightly, a crease more or less in the middle, hand backwards and forward across it until it disappeared.

  "Pål Larsen."

  He cut again, faster now.

  "General Director Pål Larsen ordered me."

  Grens remembered, about half an hour into the recording, a trouser leg scraping against the microphone as it stretched, and the sound of a teaspoon against porcelain when someone had taken a sip from a coffee cup.

  "I appointed you. And that means that you decide what happens in the Prison and Probation Service."

  A short pause while the state secretary left the room to get the head of the Prison and Probation Service who had been sitting waiting outside in the corridor.

  "You decide what you and I agree that you should decide."

  The general director had been given an order. The general director had passed that order on. From the real sender.

  Ewert Grens looked at a bare-torsoed man who was cutting to pieces the uniform that he had longed for all his adult life, and he hurried out of the kitchen that would never change color and the home that was even lonelier than his own.

  "Do you know what I'm going to do with these?"

  Lennart Oscarsson stood in the open doorway as Grens got into his car. The recently shredded pieces in his raised hands, he dropped a couple and they fell slowly to the ground.

  "Wash the car, Grens. You know, you always need clean bits when you're polishing, and this, this is damn expensive material."

  He dialed the number as the car rolled out of the silent rows of terraced houses. He looked at the church and the square church tower, at the prison and the workshop that could be seen behind the high wall.

  Not even thirty-six hours had passed. It would haunt him For the rest of his life.

  "Hello?"

  Göransson had been awake.

  "Difficulties sleeping?"

  "What do you want, Ewert?"