Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

You were there and raised the alarm while someone was being murdered. Ewert Grens stood by the cardboard boxes, but didn't kick them again. You are either the murderer or a witness.

He sat down, leaned back against the boxes, covering the recent hole.

A murderer doesn't shoot someone, make it look like suicide, and then ring and raise the alarm.

It felt good to sit with his back to the forbidden music, he was probably just going to stay there on the hard floor through the night, until morning. You're a witness.

He had been sitting by the window for two hours, watching the specks of light that were so tiny when they were far away and then slowly grew as they sank through the dark toward the runway at Frédéric Chopin. Piet Hoffmann had lain down fully clothed on the hard hotel bed just before midnight, and tried to sleep, but had soon given up-the day that had started with someone being killed in front of him and ended with the responsibility of taking over the drug market in Swedish prisons continued to live inside him; it whispered and screamed until he couldn't be bothered to block his ears and wait for sleep.

It was blowing hard outside the window. Hotel Okęcie was just eight hundred meters from the airport and the wind often swept over the open ground, creating spots of light that were prettiest when the branches on the trees refused to stay still. He liked to sit here, for one night at a time, looking out over this last piece of Poland, where he always observed but never took part, even though he should feel at home here-he had cousins and aunts and an uncle here. He looked like them and talked like them but was forever someone who didn't belong.

He was nobody.

He lied to Zofia and she held him tight. He lied to Hugo and Rasmus and they hugged their daddy. He lied to Erik. He lied to Henryk. He had just lied to Zbigniew Boruc and drank another Zubrawka with him.

He had been lying for so long that he'd forgotten what the truth looked and felt like, who he was.

The specks of light had now become a huge plane that had just landed; it swerved in the strong crosswinds and the small wheels bounced out of control a couple of times on the asphalt before sinking down and rolling the plane toward some steps by the newer part of the arrivals hall.

He leaned forward to the window and rested his forehead on the cool glass.

The day that wouldn't end, that whispered and screamed.

A person had stopped breathing in front of him. He had realized too late. They had the same role, were part of the same game, but on different sides. A person who perhaps had children, a wife, who had maybe also lived a lie for so long that he didn't know who he was anymore.

My name is Paula. What was yours?

He sat on the window sill, looking out into the dark, as he cried.

It was the middle of the night in a hotel room a few kilometers from central Warsaw. He had a real person's death on his hands and he cried until he could cry no more and sleep took him, and he fell headlong into something that was black and couldn't be lied to.

Ewert Grens had woken when the first light forced its way through the thin curtains and started to irritate his eyes. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the three stacked cardboard boxes, but he then lay down on the hard linoleum to avoid the dawn light and slept for another couple of hours. It wasn't a bad place to sleep: his back barely ached and he had been able to keep his stiff leg stretched almost straight the whole night, which he never got room for on the soft corduroy sofa.

No more nights there.

Suddenly he was wide awake, rolled over on to his belly and used his arms to lever up his bulky frame. From the tin on his desk he grabbed a blue marker, which released a strong odor as he wrote on each side of the brown cardboard boxes.

PI Malmkvist.

Ewert Grens looked at the taped-up boxes and laughed out loud. He had been able to sleep with the packed music and felt more rested than he had done for a long time.

A couple of dance steps, no singing, no music, just unaccompanied steps.

He tried to lift the box on top, but it was far too heavy, so he pushed it out of the room and down the long corridor to the elevator. Three floors down, to the cellar, to the property store. He wrote a reference number on the top of the box with the marker again-I9361231. Then he went down another corridor, even darker than the last, and pushed and sweated on to the door that opened into confiscated property.

"Einarsson."

A young lad, civilian staff, was standing behind the long wooden counter that felt so old. Every time Grens came here he was reminded of a grocer's shop he often went to as a boy on his way home from school, a shop near Odenplan which had long since disappeared and was now yet another cafe for teenagers who drank milky coffee and compared mobile phones.

"Can I help you?"

"I want Einarsson to look after this."

"Yes, but I-"

"Einarsson."

The young man snorted loudly, but said nothing. He left the counter and went to get a man of Ewert's age, with a black apron tied tightly round his rotund body.

"Ewert."

"Tor."

One of the policemen who had been really good and then after years of working together, had suddenly sat down one morning and explained that he couldn't face all the crap anymore, let alone investigate it. They had talked a lot about it at the time and Ewert had understood that that was how things could be when you had something to live for, when you yearned for days without pointless deaths. Einarsson had sat there and did not get up until his superiors had opened the door to the basement and the confiscated goods that were indeed a part of ongoing investigations, but which seldom stayed with you all evening.

"I've got some boxes I want you to look after."

The older man behind the counter took the things and read the square letters in blue marker.

"PI Malmkvist. What the hell is that?"

"Preliminary investigation Malmkvist."

"I realize that. But I've never heard of the case."

"Closed investigation."

"But then it shouldn't-"

"I want you to keep them here. In a safe place."

"Ewert, I-"

Einarsson was silent, studied Grens for a long time, then the box. He smiled. Preliminary investigation Malmkvist. Reference number 19361231. He gave another even broader smile.

"Jesus, that's her birthday, isn't it?"

Grens nodded. "A closed investigation."

"Are you sure about that?"

"I'll be down with another two boxes."

"In that case… investigations like this are best stored here. If the stuff is unique, I mean. Better than some unsafe attic or damp cellar."

Ewert Grens hadn't realized how tense he was until, to his surprise, he felt his shoulders, arms and legs slowly relax. He hadn't been sure that Einarsson would understand.

"I need a chain of custody record. So, if you could just fill these in now. Then I can find a safe place."

Einarsson handed him two blank forms and a pen.

"In the meantime, I'll mark clearly that it's classified information. Because it is, isn't it?"

Grens nodded again.

"Good. Then it can only be opened by authorized persons."

The policeman who had once been a detective himself and who now wore a black apron and worked behind a counter in the basement, slapped a red sticker over the flaps of the box, a seal that could not be broken by anyone other than the man who could identify himself as DS Ewert Grens.

Ewert was full of gratitude as he watched his colleague struggle over to the shelves with the cardboard box in his arms.