Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

Erik Wilson was careful to look everyone straight in the eye when he spoke.

"With other people. In a room that we haven't secured. Where we don't have control."

He held up the report, the detailed description of a murder witnessed by one of the people at a meeting table in the Government Offices.

"An unprecedented meeting. And I hope that we will leave having made an unprecedented decision."

Ewert Grens had been lying on the office floor when Sven Sundkvist had knocked on his door a couple of minutes earlier and walked in. Sven hadn't said anything, hadn't asked any questions, he just sat down on the corduroy sofa and waited, like he always did.

"It's better here."

"Here?"

"On the floor. The sofa is starting to get too soft."

He had slept there for a second night. His stiff leg didn't ache at all and he had more or less gotten used to the cars accelerating all the way up the steep slope on Hantverkargatan.

"I want to report on Västmannagatan."

"Anything new?"

"Not much."

Ewert Grens lay on the floor and peered at the ceiling. There were some large cracks near the lamp, which he had never paid attention to before. Whether they were new or whether the music had always just been in the way.

He sighed.

He had investigated murders all his adult life. Västmannagatan 79, a feeling somewhere in his chest-there was something that didn't fit. They had identified the body, the flat owner, even the remains of amphetamine and bile from the mule. They had blood stains and the angle from which the gun was fired. They had a witness with a Swedish voice who chose to raise the alarm and a Polish security firm that meant the Eastern European mafia.

They had as good as bloody nothing.

They were no closer to a solution than they had been in Copenhagen Airport the evening before.

"There are fifteen flats in that block. I've interviewed everyone who was there at the time of the murder. Three of them have observations that might be of interest. On the ground floor- Are you listening, Ewert?"

"Carry on."

"On the ground floor there's a Finn who can give a pretty good description of two men he'd never seen before, as he has the best possible observation point-everyone who goes in or out passes his door. Pale, shaved heads, dark clothes, forties. Only through the peephole and only for a few seconds, but you can actually see and hear more than I thought from there and he also mentioned a Slavic language, so it all fits."

"Polish."

"In terms of the tenant, that would seem likely."

"Mules, bodies, Poles. Drugs, violence, Eastern Europe."

Sven Sundkvist looked down at the older man on the floor. He just lay there and couldn't care less what anyone else thought, with a confidence that Sven could never achieve, as he was the sort who, no matter how much he had tried to change it over the years, wanted to be liked and therefore tended to be amenable and not make a fuss.

"There's a young woman who lives on the fourth floor, a couple of doors down from the crime scene, and an old man up on the fifth floor above. Both of them were at home at the time of the murder and said that they heard what they describe as a clear bang."

"A bang?"

"Neither of them was willing to say more than that. They don't know anything about weapons and couldn't say whether it was a gun shot. But they are both certain that what they called a bang was loud and a sound that was not a normal part of the building."

"That's all?"

"That's all."

The ringing from the phone on the desk was sharp and irritating, and did not let up, despite the fact that Sven remained sitting on the sofa and Ewert stayed on the floor.

"Should I answer?"

"I can't understand why they don't give up."

"Should I answer it, Ewert?"

"It's on my desk."

He got up patiently and lumbered toward the loud ringing.

"Yes?"

"You sound out of breath."

"I was lying on the floor."

"I want you to come down here."

Grens and Sundkvist didn't say anything, they just left the room and went down the corridor, waited impatiently for the elevator that took for ever to go down. Nils Krantz was at the door to the forensics department and showed them into a narrow room.

"You asked me to extend the search area. I did. All the stairwells between numbers seventy and ninety. And in the trash store of Västmannagatan 73, in a paper recycling container, we found this."

Krantz was holding a plastic bag. Ewert Grens leaned closer and put on his reading glasses a few moments later. Something in fabric, gray-and white checks, partially covered in blood, a shirt perhaps, or maybe a jacket.

"Very interesting. This could be our breakthrough."

The forensic scientist opened the plastic bag and put the fabric on something that looked like a serving tray, and with a bent finger pointed at the obvious stains.

"Blood stains and gunshot residue that take us back to the flat in Västmannagatan 79, as it's the victim's blood and gunpowder from the same charge that we found in the flat."

"Which doesn't get us anywhere. Which doesn't give us a damn shit more than we already knew."

Krantz pointed at the gray-and-white piece of clothing.

"It's a shirt. It's got the victim's blood on it. But there's more. We've identified another blood group. I'm certain that it belongs to the person who fired. Ewert, this is the shirt that the murderer was wearing."

A courtroom. That's what it felt like. A room that smelled of power. A document that described a violent incident lying on an important table. Göransson was the prosecutor who checked the facts and asked the questions; the state secretary was the judge who listened and made the decisions; Wilson, to his right, was the defense who claimed self-defense and asked for leniency. Piet Hoffmann wanted to get up and walk away, but was forced to stay calm. After all, he was the accused.

"I didn't have any choice. My life was in danger."

"You always have a choice."

"I tried to calm them down. But I could only go so far. I'm supposed to be a criminal, through and through. Otherwise I'm dead."

"I don't understand."

It was a bizarre feeling. He was sitting one floor away from the Swedish prime minister in the building that ruled Sweden. Outside, down on the pavement in the real world, people were walking back from lunch with a warm low-alcohol beer and a cup of coffee because they'd chosen to pay five kronor more, while he was here, with those in power, trying to explain why the authorities should not investigate a murder.

"I'm their number one in Sweden. The people who were in the flat have been trained by the Polish intelligence service and know how to sniff out anything that doesn't feel right."

"We're talking about murder. And you, Hoffmann, or Paula, or whatever I should call you, could have prevented it."

"The first time they put the gun to the buyer's head, I managed to stop them shooting. But the next time, he had just exposed himself, he was the enemy, a snitch, dead… I didn't have a bloody choice."

"And as you didn't have a choice, neither do we, and so should we just pretend that the whole thing never happened?"

All four of them looked at him, each with the report in front of them on the table. Wilson, Göransson, and the state secretary. The fourth person had remained silent. Hoffmann couldn't understand why.

"Yes, if you want to break this new mafia branch before it gets established. If you want to do that, then you don't have any choice."

This courtroom was like all the others, just as cold, no real people. He had been in this situation five times before, the accused, in front of people he did not respect but who would decide whether he should be part of society or live in a few square meters behind a secure door. A couple of suspended sentences, a couple of acquittals due to lack of evidence, and just one prison sentence, and a year from hell in Österåker.