Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

If you're about to be exposed, you can't escape very far in a prison, but you can demand to be put in isolation.

There were ten of them, helmets and riot shields to protect them, and armed with sedatives to keep control. The prison riot squad had run across the yard and up the stairs of Block G. Six of them would stay to prevent and discourage repeated violence, four of them would escort the vulnerable prisoner down the passage and deep into the bowels of the earth, to Block C and the voluntary isolation unit, two escorts behind, two in front.

You might be given a death sentence. But you're not going to die.

Sixteen cells here as well. Voluntary isolation was built to look like any other unit in any prison-the wardens' room, the TV corner, the showers, the kitchen, the Ping-Pong table-the people who asked to come here could move around freely without the risk of bumping into prisoners from other units in the prison. The faces he saw were the only ones he would meet.

A week.

He would wait, avoid confrontation; he could stay alive here, survive here. Outside the door he was dead-every part of the big prison was a potential screwdriver to the throat, a table leg against his forehead as many times as was needed to make it cave in. In one week, Erik and the city police would come and get him. He wouldn't die, not yet, not with Hugo and Rasmus, not with Zofia, he wouldn't

would not

would not

would

not

Are you all right?"

He had fallen to the floor without using his hands, hitting his cheek and chin, and for a few seconds was somewhere else: the attack, the guards in the aquarium, the mouths forming stukatj, the riot guys in their black uniforms. He suddenly found it hard to breathe and had felt his legs swaying as he tried to stay upright.

He hadn't known until now that all the damned energy just drains from your body when the only thing that exists is a fear of death.

"I don't know. Toilet, I need to wash my face, I'm sweating."

The sink in the middle looked almost clean. He turned on the tap and let the water run until it was cold, stuck his head under it to cool his neck and back, then filled his hands and rubbed against the skin of his face, as if he was returning-he wasn't even particularly dizzy.

The kick caught him on the side.

The pain was intense, burning from somewhere on his hip.

Piet Hoffmann hadn't seen or heard the solid, long-haired guy in his twenties coming in, running toward him, but with guards from the riot squad outside he wasn't going to do much more, he just spat and whispered stukatj and closed the door when he left.

Death sentence. Already on his head.

He got up, coughed, and felt over his hip with one hand. The kick had caught him farther up than he first thought, broken a couple of his ribs. He had to get out of here. To the next level. Solitary confinement. Total isolation, only contact with the guards, never have any contact with other prisoners, twenty-four hours a day, locked in a cell with no way in and no way out.

Stukatj.

He had to get away again. He mustn't die.

Ewert Grens had stopped halfway back from Aspsås, at the OK gas station in Taby, and was sitting on one of the stools by the window with an orange juice and a cheese sandwich. Soaring temperatures. Isolation. Three, maybe four days. He had stood in the visiting room with its toilet rolls and plastic-covered mattress and wanted to thump the walls, but had refrained; it would be pointless to argue with a prison doctor about infections he'd never heard about. He bought another artificial sandwich, it was the final stretch back to Stockholm and he couldn't put it off any longer. He turned off the E4 at Haga South, drove past the hospital and stopped some way down Solna kyrkvag. Entrance 1, as far as he had come the last time.

He was not alone.

Visitors, park attendants, and watering cans, all heading toward the grass and rows of headstones. He rolled down the window, it was muggy, air than stuck to your back.

"Do you work here?"

A person in blue overalls with two spades on the back of a moped. The park attendant, or church warden, stopped by the man who was still in his car, shielded by the door, not daring to get out.

"Have for seventeen years."

Grens fidgeted uneasily and moved the sandwich wrapper that rustled on the seat. His eyes followed an old lady leaning over a small gray stone that looked new, a plant in one hand and an empty pot in the other.

"So you know the place well?"

"You could say that."

She started to dig, then with great care put the plant in the soil, had just enough room in the thin strip between the headstone and the grass.

"I was wondering…"

"Yes?"

"I was wondering… if you want to find out about a particular grave, where someone is buried… what do you do?"

Lennart Oscarsson stood by the window at the far end of a room he had aspired to all his adult life. The chief warden's office at Aspsås prison. After twenty-one years as a prison warden, principal officer and acting chief, he had finally been appointed as prison chief warden four months ago and had moved all his files into the shelves that were slightly longer and attached to the wall next to the sofas that were slightly softer. He had dreamed of having this office for so long that when he stood there with his dream in his hands, he didn't know what to do with it. What do you do when you no longer have dreams? Escape? He gave a faint sigh as he looked out of the window at prisoners on a break in the yard: large groups of people who had murdered, abused, stolen, and were sitting out there on the dry gravel, either reflecting or repressing their emotions in order to cope. He looked up over the wall to the small town with rows of white-and-red houses, stopped at the window that had for a long time been a family bedroom-now he lived there alone, he had made a choice, but he had made the wrong choice, and sometimes it is too late to right our wrongs.

He sighed again without realizing it. The evening and night had been filled with fury, the sort that crept up on you, started to ferment in your mind, then grew into frustration. It had started with a feeling of irritation just by his temples when he heard the voice that he recognized, but had never spoken to before. He had been sitting at the kitchen table eating his supper as he always did, even though it was now only set for one, and he had almost finished when the phone rang. The general director had been friendly but firm when he told him that the detective superintendent from city police who was coming to Aspsås in the morning to question a prisoner in G2, Piet Hoffmann, must not be allowed to do so. They must not meet under any circumstances, not today nor the next day nor the next. Lennart Oscarsson had not asked any questions and had not understood until later, when he was washing up one plate, one glass, one knife and fork, where the irritation that had turned into rage was coming from.

A lie.

A lie that had just been born.

He had asked Ewert Grens to leave and had been on his way out when the alarm sucked all the air from the small room. A prisoner had been threatened, an emergency escort from G2 to the voluntary isolation unit.

Piet Hoffmann.

The name he had been ordered to lie about.

Oscarsson bit his lower lip until it started to bleed. He chewed the wound with his teeth until it stung, as if to punish himself, maybe in order to forget for a moment the fury that made him want to open the window and jump out and run to the town and the people who knew nothing.

The attack and the phone call to say that a policeman must not be allowed to carry out an interview were linked. There was more-he had been given another order-he was to allow a lawyer to visit a client last evening. They did come knocking every now and then when an imminent trial or recently pronounced sentence required a lawyer in the cell, but never on order and seldom after lock-up. This one had visited a Pole in G2 and was one of the lawyers paid to convey planted information, Oscarsson was sure of it.