Three Seconds

by Anders Roslund

  Erik Wilson reached out to the computer screen that was turned toward him, closed it with a snap, and pulled out the plug.

  "I have worked as a handler as long as you have sat a few doors down. I have been responsible for informants all my working life. I have never not succeeded."

  Sven Sundkvist opened the laptop and turned it back again.

  "You can keep the cord. The battery's got plenty of juice."

  He pointed to the screen.

  "I don't understand, Erik. You've worked together for nine years. But when I show you that picture there… the exact moment he… there, do you see, exactly there he dies… you don't react."

  Erik Wilson snorted.

  "He wasn't my friend."

  You trusted me.

  "But I was his friend."

  I trusted you.

  "That's the way it works, Sundkvist. A handler pretends to be the informant's best friend. A handler has to play the role of the informant's best friend so goddamn well that the informant is willing to risk his life every day to get more information for his handler."

  I miss you.

  "So the guy you saw on the screen? You were right. I didn't react." Erik Wilson dropped his linen napkin on the table.

  "Are you paying, Sundkvist?"

  He started to leave. The tasteful restaurant around him, the lady on her own at the table to the left with a glass of red wine, two men to the right at a table full of papers and dessert plates.

  "Västmannagatan 79."

  Sven Sundkvist caught up with him, beside him.

  "You knew everything, Erik. But you chose to say nothing. And contributed to the disappearance of someone associated with a murder. You manipulated police authority records and the national courts administration database. You placed-"

  "Are you threatening me?"

  Erik Wilson had stopped, red face, shoulders up.

  He was showing something that was more than just nothing. "Are you, Sundkvist? Threatening me?"

  "What do you think?"

  "What do I think? You've tried to convince me by showing me evidence and tried to get me to feel something by showing me pictures of death. And now you're trying to threaten me with some kind of goddamn investigation? Sundkvist, you've used all the chapters in the interview book. What do I think? You're insulting me."

  He continued on down the small step, past the table with four older men who were looking for their glasses and studying the menu and the empty serving carts and the two green climbers on a white wall.

  One last look.

  He stopped.

  "But… the truth is that I don't like people who burn my best informant when I'm not there."

  He looked at Sven Sundkvist.

  "So… yes, that recording. The meeting you're talking about. It did happen. What you heard is genuine. Every single word."

  Ewert Grens should perhaps have laughed. At least felt whatever it was that sometimes bubbles up in your belly, a delight that can't be heard.

  The recording was genuine.

  The meeting had taken place.

  Sven had called from a restaurant in the center of Jacksonville as he watched Wilson walk to his car and start the journey back to south Georgia, after he had confirmed it all.

  Grens didn't laugh. He had emptied himself that morning in a cage on a roof. He had screamed until the rage was released and let him sleep on a sofa. So now there was a space to be filled.

  But not with more anger, that was no longer enough.

  Not with satisfaction, even though he knew he was so close.

  But hate.

  Hoffmann had been burned. But survived. And taken hostages in order to continue surviving.

  I carried out a legitimate murder.

  Ewert Grens phoned a person he loathed for the second time. "I need your help again."

  "Okay.”

  "Can you come to my apartment tonight?"

  "Your flat?"

  "Corner of Odengatan and Sveavägen."

  "Why?"

  "As I said. I need your help."

  Lars Ågestam scoffed.

  "You want me to meet you? After work? Why should I want to do that?

  After all… I'm not… now how did you put it… your buddy."

  The secret intelligence report that was also on the laptop, but so fresh that it was in another file.

  The one I didn't show you last night.

  The one that I'm going to show you because I have no intention of carrying someone else's guilt.

  "It's not social, it's work. Västmannagatan 79. The preliminary investigation you just scaled down."

  "You're welcome to come to the Regional Public Prosecution Office tomorrow during the day."

  "You can open it again. As I know what actually happened. But I need your help one more time, Ågestam. Tomorrow morning is too late. That is when the head of the Government Offices security realizes that something is missing and passes on that information. When the wrong people then have time to adapt their versions, manipulate the evidence, change reality yet again."

  Grens coughed extensively close to the mouthpiece, as if he was uncertain as to how to continue.

  "And I apologize. For that. I was perhaps… well, you know." "No, what?"

  "Damn it, Ågestam!"

  "What?"

  "I was perhaps… I may have been a bit… churlish, a bit… well, unnecessarily harsh."

  Lars Ågestam walked down the seven flights of stairs in the offices at Kungsbron. A pleasant evening, warm, he longed for heat, as he always did after eight months of bitter wind and unpredictable snow. He turned around, looked at the windows of the Regional Public Prosecution Office, all dark. Two late phone calls had been longer than he expected: one phone call home-he had explained that he had to stay late and several times promised that he would wash the glasses from last night which still smelled of alcohol before he went to bed-then one call with Sven Sundkvist. He had gotten hold of him somewhere that sounded like an airport. He had wanted more information about the part of the investigation that involved Poland and their trip there to a now defunct amphetamine factory.

  "His flat?"

  "Yes."

  "You're going to Ewert Grens's flat?"

  Sven Sundkvist hadn't said anything but didn't want to hang up-their conversation was already finished and Ågestam was impatient, wanted to get on his way.

  "Yes. I'm going to Ewert Grens's flat."

  "I'm sorry, Ågestam, but there's something I don't quite understand. I've known Ewert, I've been his closest colleague for nearly fourteen years. But I have never, never ever, Ågestam, been invited to his flat. It's… I don't know… so private, a strange kind of… protection. Once, five years ago, one time only, Ågestam, the day after the hostage drama in the morgue at Soder hospital, I forced my way into his home, against his will. But now you're saying that he asked you there? And you're quite sure about that?"

  Lars Ågestam wandered slowly through the city, lots of people on the street despite the fact it was a Sunday and past nine o'clock-after winter's drought of warmth and company it was always harder to go home when life had just returned.

  He hadn't realized that it might be more than just an investigation, more than just a question of working late. It really felt like something had changed last night in the kitchen at Åkeshov; the whisky and three hundred and two copies of secret intelligence reports resembled a kind of closeness. But Ewert Grens had soon killed that feeling, happy to hurt in the way that only he knew how. So if it was as extraordinary to be invited to his flat as Sven made out, maybe there had been a change, they were perhaps closer to tolerating each other.

  He looked at the people around him again, those drinking beer in their coats and scarves in outside cafés, laughing, chatting, as people who get on well together do.

  He sighed.

  There had been no change, there never would be.

  Grens had other reasons, Ågestam was sure of it, his own reasons, ones that he would never dr
eam of sharing with a young public prosecutor he had decided to despise.

  "Grens."

  Still a lot of traffic on Sveavägen. He had to concentrate to hear the voice on the intercom.

  "It's Ågestam, will you-"

  "I'll open. Four flights up."

  A thick reddish carpet on the floor, walls that were possibly marble, lights that were bright without being offensive. If he had lived in town, in a flat, he would have looked for an entrance like this.

  He avoided the elevator, broad staircase all the way up, E AND A GRENS on the mailbox in a dark door.

  "Come in."

  The large detective superintendent with the thinning hair opened the door, same clothes as that afternoon and the night before, a gray jacket and even grayer trousers.

  Ågestam looked around in wonder-the hall seemed endless. "It's big."

  "I haven't spent much time here in the last few years. But still manage to find my way around."

  Ewert Grens smiled. It looked unnatural. He had never experienced it before. His coarse face was normally tense, harassing the people it was facing; the smile, a different face that made Ågestam uncertain.

  He walked down the long hall with rooms opening off it, counted at least six empty rooms that looked untouched, asleep. That was how Sven had described them, rooms that didn't want to wake up.

  The kitchen was as spacious, as untouched.

  He followed Grens through the first section and into the next, a small eating area, a gateleg table and six chairs.

  "Do you live here on your own?"

  "Sit yourself down."

  A pile of blue files and a large notepad in the middle, two glasses that were still wet with a bottle of Seagram's between them.

  He was prepared.

  "A dram? Or are you driving?"

  He had made an effort. Even the same kind of whisky.

  "Here? With you in the vicinity? I wouldn't dare. You might have some dusty parking fine papers in your glove compartment."

  Ewert Grens remembered a cold winter's night one and a half years ago. He had crawled around on his hands and knees, his creased suit trousers in the wet new snow and measured the distance between a car and Vasagatan.

  Ågestam's car.

  He smiled again, a smile that was almost unnerving.

  "As I remember it, the parking fine was dismissed. By the prosecutor himself."

  In a fury, he had fined Lars Ågestam for his eight-centimeter error in parking, weary of a public prosecutor who made things difficult when the search for a sixteen-year-old girl who had disappeared forced them down into the tunnels under Stockholm.

  "You can pour me half a glass."

  They both took a drink while Grens produced a document from one of the files and put it down in front of Ågestam.

  "You got three hundred and two secret intelligence reports. About what actually happened, things the rest of us didn't know and so couldn't present in our official investigations."

  Lars Ågestam nodded.

  "That unit at Aspsås. For only police officers. When I charge Them all." "They were reports from last year. But this copy, this is still warm."

  M pulls a gun

  (Polish 9mm Radom)

  from shoulder holster.

  M cocks the gun and holds it to the buyer's head.

  "Submitted to the county police commissioner, like all the others."

  P orders M to calm down.

  IA lowers the gun, takes a step

  back, his weapon half-cocked.

  Lars Ågestam was about to speak when Grens interrupted.

  "I've spent… I'd guess… half my time working on Vastmannagaran since the alarm was raised. Sven Sundkvist and Mariana Hermansson as well. Nils Krantz estimates that he and three other colleagues spent a week searching the place with magnifying glasses and fingerprint lifting tape, Errfors says that he used as much time to analyze the body of a Danish citizen. A number of constables and detectives have guarded the crime scene, questioned neighbors and looked for bloody shirts in garbage cans for-if I'm conservative-twenty days."

  He looked at the prosecutor.

  "And you? How many hours have you put into this case?"

  Ågestam shrugged.

  "Hard to say… a week."

  Suddenly the buyer shouts

  "I'm the police."

  M again aims the gun

  at the buyer's head.

  Ewert Grens snatched the intelligence report out of Ågestam's hands and waved it in front of him.

  "Thirteen and a half working weeks. Five hundred and forty man-hours. When my colleagues and bosses who sit in the same corridor already had the answer. He even phoned, Ågestam, it says here, Hoffmann damn well rang himself and raised the alarm!"

  Lars Ågestam reached out for the report.

  "Can I have it back?"

  He left the table, went into the other part of the kitchen and opened one of the wall cupboards, looking for something, opened another one.

  "What's the purpose of all this?"

  "I want to solve a murder."

  "Do you not understand what I'm asking, Grens? What's the purpose of all this?"

  He found what he was looking for, a glass, filled it with water. "I have no intention of carrying the guilt."

  "Guilt?"

  "You've got nothing to do with it, Ågestam. But that's the truth. I'm not going to carry the guilt anymore. That's why I'm going to make sure that the people responsible are going to carry it for me."

  The public prosecutor looked at the report.

  "And you can use the report to do that?"

  "Yes. If I manage to finish this. Before tomorrow morning."

  Lars Ågestam stood in the middle of the large kitchen. He could hear the traffic through the open window-it had slowed, fewer cars that drove faster, it was starting to get late.

  "Can I wander around a bit? Here in the flat?"

  "Feel free."

  The hall seemed even longer than before, thick rugs on a parquet floor that was dark but not worn, brown wallpaper with a seventies design. He turned off and into the first and best door, into something that resembled a library, sat down in the leather armchair that seemed to protest while the sunken seat waited for its owner. The only room in the flat that didn't scream loneliness. He followed the shelves and rows of same-size books, turned on the standard lamp that was beautifully angled and that gave off a light that colored the printed pages yellow. He leaned back as he imagined the detective superintendent did, once more read the secret intelligence report that had been written by a policeman the day after the murder at Västmannagatan 79, whereas the investigation for which he and Grens were responsible had slowly led to nothing and closure.

  M holds the gun harder to

  the buyer's head and pulls the trigger.

  The buyer falls to the floor, at a right angle to the chair.

  Lars Ågestam reached for the lampshade and pulled it closer, he wanted to see properly, be sure, now that he had decided.

  He wouldn't be going home tonight.

  He would, in a while, go directly from here to the Regional Public Prosecution Office and reopen the preliminary investigation.

  He stood up and was about to leave the room when he noticed two black-and-white photographs on the wall between two bookshelves: a woman and a man. They were young and full of anticipation, they were wearing police uniforms and their eyes were alive.

  He had always wondered what he looked like, back then, when he was someone else.

  "Have you decided?"

  Grens was sitting where he had left him, among the blue files and empty glasses at an elegant kitchen table.

  "Yes."

  "If you prosecute, Ågestam, we're not just talking about normal policemen. I'll give you a commanding officer. And an even higher ranking officer. And a state secretary."

  Lars Ågestam looked at the three pieces of letter-sized paper in his hand. "And you maintain that there's enough? I assume that I haven't
seen everything."

  A security camera in Rosenbad with five people on their way into one of the offices. A recording of five voices in a closed meeting.

  You haven't seen everything.

  "There's enough."

  Ewert Grens smiled for the third time.

  Lars Ågestam thought that it looked almost natural, he smiled fleetingly back.

  "Haul them in. I'll have the arrest warrants sorted within three days."

  He went down the stairs in the silent building.

  It was years ago now, his painful leg on the stone stairs, but tonight he had walked past the elevator, his hand gripping the handrail. Two doors had greeted him with scurrying footsteps to doormats and peepholes as he passed, curious eyes that wanted to see him up on the fourth floor, he who never used the stairs suddenly doing so. At the bottom and the door nearest the entrance, a wall clock that chimed, he counted, twelve times.

  Sveav5gen was almost empty and it was still warm, maybe they'd get a damned summer this year as well. He breathed in, one deep breath, slowly released the air.

  Ewert Grens had invited another person into his home.

  Ewert Grens hadn't immediately experienced a pain in his chest and asked him to leave.

  He had never done that before, not since the accident-it had been her place and their shared home. He shrugged off the gentle breeze and started to walk west along Odengatan, just as empty, just as warm. He took off his jacket and undid the top buttons on his shirt.

  Of all people, the well-groomed prosecutor whom he hated, whom he had met a few years ago and loathed.

  He had even almost enjoyed it.

  He slowed down by the kiosk on Odenplan, stood in the queue with the mobile kids sending text messages to other mobile kids, bought a hamburger and a drink that tasted of orange but had lost its bubbles. He had said no to the prosecutor's suggestion of finishing the evening with a beer in the lawyers' haunt at Frescati, only to regret it and wander restlessly from room to room until he was compelled to go out, just somewhere else, at least for a while.

  Two rats at his feet, from a hole under the kiosk into the park with sleeping men on wooden benches. Four young women over there, short skirts and high-heeled shoes, running toward one of the buses that had just closed its doors and was pulling out.