Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

He left early-he wanted straight answers and prisoners who were still sleepy were often less mouthy, not so insolent and scornful; interviews were either a power struggle or an attempt to gain confidence and he didn't have time to build up trust. He drove out of the city too fast and along the first kilometers of the E4, then suddenly slowed when he passed Haga and the large cemetery on the left, hesitated before continuing straight on and accelerating again. He could turn off the road on the way back, drive slowly past the people with plants and flowers in one hand and a watering can in the other.

It was still thirty kilometers to the prison that he had visited at least twice a year for the past three decades. As a policeman in Stockholm he would regularly be involved in investigations that ended up there, questioning, prison transport, there was always someone who knew something and someone who had seen something, but the hatred of uniforms was greater there than anywhere else and their fear of the consequences justified, as a never survived long in an enclosed space, so the most usual answer on the recorder was a sneering laugh or simply empty silence.

Yesterday, Ewert Grens had met and written off two of three names on the periphery of the investigation who owned security firms with official links to Wojtek International. He had drunk coffee with a certain Maciej Bosacki in Odensala outside Marsta, and more coffee with Karl Lager in Sodertalje and after only a couple of minutes at each table had known that they didn't do executions in city center flats.

Far in the distance, the mighty wall.

He had on occasion walked under the huge prison yard through a network of passages and each time he had met people he avoided in reality, in life. He had taken days and years from them, and he understood why they spat at him, he even respected it, but it did not affect him. They had all pissed on other people and in Ewert Grens's world, anyone who felt they had the right to harm someone else should have the balls to stand up for it later.

The gray concrete grew longer, higher.

He had one name left on the brown-stained paper. Piet Hoffmann, previously convicted of aiming and firing at a policeman, and who had then been granted a gun license all the same. Something was amiss.

Ewert Grens parked the car and walked over to the prison entrance and the prisoner who would shortly be sitting in front of him.

It didn't feel right.

He didn't know why. Maybe it was too quiet. Maybe he was getting locked into his own head as well.

He had fought off any thoughts that carried Zofia with them, which had been worst around two in the morning, just before it started to get light.

He had gotten up, like before, chin-ups, jumping with his feet together until the sweat poured from his forehead and down his chest.

He should be relaxed. Wojtek had gotten their reports, three days in a row. He had stamped out and taken over. From this afternoon, he would be getting bigger deliveries and selling more.

"Morning, Hoffmann."

"Morning."

But he couldn't relax. Something was bothering him, something that demanded space and couldn't be reasoned away.

He was scared.

The doors had been unlocked, his neighbors were moving around out there, he couldn't see them but they were there, shouting and whispering. The sock between the door and the doorframe, the chair in front of the threshold, the pillow under the covers.

Two minutes past seven. Eighteen minutes to go.

He pressed himself against the wall.

The older man at central security studied his police ID, typed something on a computer, sighed.

"Questioning, you say?"

"Yes. "

"Grens."

"Yes."

"Piet Hoffmann?"

"I've reserved a room. So it would be great if you could let me in. So I could get to it."

The older man was in no rush. He lifted the phone and punched in a number.

"You'll have to wait a moment. There's something I need to check."

It took fourteen minutes.

Then all hell broke loose.

The door was pulled open. One second. The chair was kicked over. One second. Stefan passed close to him on the right, a screwdriver in his fist.

There's a moment left, a beat, people always experience half a second in such different ways.

There were probably four of them.

He had seen this happen several times, even taken part himself twice.

Someone ran in with a screwdriver, a table leg, a cut piece of metal. And straight behind, more hands to punch or kill. Two out in the corridor, always at a distance to keep watch.

The pillow and sweatshirt under the covers, his two and half seconds were over, his protection, his escape.

One blow.

He wouldn't manage more.

One single blow, right elbow to the carotid receptors on the left side of the throat, a hard blow right there and Stefan's blood pressure would rocket, he would collapse, faint.

His heavy body fell to the floor, blocking the door for the next pair of balled fists, a sharp piece of metal from the workshop, Karol Tomasz hit out in the air with it in order to keep his balance. Piet Hoffmann squeezed out between the doorframe and a shoulder that still hadn't quite fathomed where the person who was going to die was hiding. He ran out into the corridor between the two who were standing guard and on toward the closed door of the security office.

They know.

He ran and looked around, they were standing there.

They know.

He opened the door and went into the guards' room and someone roared stukatj behind him and the principal prison officer shouted get the hell out of here. He probably didn't shout anything himself, he couldn't be certain but it didn't feel like it, he stayed where he was in front of the closed door and whispered I want to be put in isolation, and when they didn't react, he said a bit louder I want a P18 and when none of the goddamn staring guards moved at all, in spite of everything he did scream, now, you fuckers, presumably that's what he did, I need to be in isolation now.

Ewert Grens sat on a chair in the visiting room and looked at a roll of toilet paper on the floor by the bed and a mattress that was covered in plastic and stuck our over the end of the frame-fear and longing that for one hour every month was distilled down to two bodies holding each other tight. He moved over to the window, not much of a view: a couple of crude bars edged with barbed wire and farther back, the lower part of a thick gray concrete wall. He sat down again, the restlessness that was always in him and never let him relax. He played with the black cassette recorder that stood in the middle of the table every time he came here to question people who hadn't seen or heard anything; he remembered the faces as they came closer and lowered their voices, stared at the floor, full of hate, until he shut off. He wasn't sure that any of the interviews he'd done in this room had ever really helped him to solve an investigation.

There was a knock at the door and a man came in. According to the documents, Hoffmann was not yet middle-aged, so this was someone else, considerably older and in a blue prison staff uniform.

"Lennart Oscarsson. Chief Warden of Asps5s."

Grens took his outstretched hand and smiled.

"Well blow me down, the last time we met you were just a lowly principal officer. You've come up in the world. Have you managed to let anymore go?"

A few years in a couple of seconds.

They were there, back to the time when Principal Prison Officer Lennart Oscarsson had granted a convicted, relapsed pedophile an escorted hospital visit, a pervert who had done a runner while he was being transported and murdered a five-year-old girl.