Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

Piet Hoffmann had knocked down half of the fiberglass tiles from the ceiling when he suddenly stopped his angry movements. He had heard something. A noise in his ear. He'd heard it clearly. What until now had just been a light wind in the receiver became a bang, then steps, and then scraping. Someone was walking around, more than one, there were several pairs of feet. He ran to the window. He could see them, they were standing up on the church tower, four of them, standing there, looking at him.

A shadow at the very edge of the window, just briefly, then gone.

He had been standing there, he had seen them and then disappeared.

"This is a good place. The best place to access him. We'll operate from here."

John Edvardson gripped the iron balcony railings even harder. It was blowing more than he'd realized up here and it was a long way down.

"I need your help, Rydén. From now on, I'll be working from here but I also need someone closer to the prison, with an overview, someone like you, eyes that know the surroundings."

Rydén watched some of the visitors to the graveyard; they had looked up anxiously at the tower several times and were now leaving, the peace they had sought and shared with others was gone and wouldn't be recaptured here today.

He nodded slowly. He had been listening and understood, but had another solution.

"I'd be happy to do that, but there's a policeman, a commanding officer, who knows the prison even better, who worked in this district while it was being built and who has come here regularly ever since, to hand over prisoners for questioning. A proper detective."

"And who's that?

"A DS at city police. His name's Ewert Grens."

Every word was transmitted with perfect clarity, the silver receiver worked just as well as he knew it would.

`And who's that?"

He adjusted it slightly, a gentle push on the thin metal disc with his index finger to push the earpiece harder against his inner ear.

"A DS at city police. His name's Ewert Grens."

Their voices were clear, as if they were holding the transmitter to their mouths and trying to talk straight into it.

Piet Hoffmann waited by the window.

They were standing by the low iron railing, perhaps even leaning ever so slightly forward.

Then something happened.

Clear scraping noises, first a metal gun meeting a wooden floor, then a heavy body lying down.

"Fifteen hundred and three meters."

"Fifteen hundred and three meters. Is that right?"

"Yes."

"Too far. We don't have any equipment for that distance. We can see him, but we can't reach him."

The car was barely moving.

The morning traffic was bumper to bumper, tired and tetchy as it crept along in both lanes of the Klarastrand road.

An angry passenger got off a bus in front and started to walk along the edge of the busy main artery, and looked happier as he passed the warm vehicles and reached the slip road to the E4 long before his fellow passengers. Ewert Grens thought about tooting at the man who was walking where he shouldn't, or maybe even getting out his police sign, but he didn't; he understood him and if a furious walk in polluted air alongside cars that had fused together prevented people from thumping the dashboard and frightening their fellow commuters, then that was exactly what they should be allowed to do.

He fingered the crumpled map that was lying in the passenger seat. He had decided. He was on his way to her.

In a couple of kilometers he would stop in front of one of the gates to North Cemetery that were always open and he would get out of the car and he would find her grave and he would say something to her that resembled a farewell.

His mobile phone was under the map.

He let it stay there for the first three rings, then looked at it for the next three, then picked it up when he realized that it wasn't going to stop.

The duty officer.

"Ewert?"

"Yes."

"Where are you?"

The familiar tone. Grens had already started to look for ways out of the frozen queue-a duty officer who sounded like that wanted help quickly. "The Klarastrand road, northbound."

"You've got an order."

"For when?"

"It's damned urgent, Ewert."

Ewert didn't like changing plans that had been decided.

He liked routine and he liked closure and therefore found it difficult to change directions when in his heart he was already on his way.

And so he should have sighed, perhaps protested a bit, but what he felt was relief.

He didn't need to go. Not yet.

"Wait."

Grens indicated, nudged the nose of the car out into the opposite lane to make a U-turn over the continuous white line, accompanied by hysterical hooting from vehicles that had to brake suddenly. Until he'd had enough, rolled down the window and put the blue flashing light on the roof.

All cars went silent. All the drivers ducked their heads.

"Ewert?"

"I'm here."

"An incident at Aspsås prison. You know the prison better than any other officer in the county. I need you there, now, as gold command."

"Okay.”

"We've got a critical situation."

John Edvardson was standing in the middle of the beautiful churchyard at Aspsås. Twenty minutes earlier he had come down from the church tower, leaving the marksmen who had seen Hoffmann and the hostages on two occasions now. They could force their way in whenever they wanted-a few seconds was all they needed to break down the door or come through a skylight and overpower the hostage taker, but as long as the hostages were alive, as long as they were unharmed, they wouldn't risk it.

He looked around.

The churchyard was being guarded by a patrol from Uppsala Police, who had cordoned off the area. No visitors were allowed inside the blue-andwhite plastic tape, no priests, no church wardens. Two patrol cars had come from Arlanda and another two from Stockholm and he had positioned one at each corner of the concrete wall that surrounded the prison. He now had four police officers from Aspsås district, and as many again each from Uppsala, Arlanda, and Stockholm, and when the twelve remaining members of the national task force arrived shortly, a total of thirty-seven police officers would be in place to watch, protect, attack.

John Edvardson was tense. He stood in the churchyard looking at the gray wall and felt the unease that had been there from the start, gnawing at him, irritating him, yet he couldn't put a finger on it, there was something… something that wasn't right.

Hoffmann.

The man over there who had threatened to kill again, it didn't fit.

In the past decade, Edvardson guessed there had been two, maybe three hostage takings a year in Swedish prisons. And each time the national task force was called in, with the same predictable scenario. An inmate had somehow managed to get hold of moonshine somewhere in the prison and had got steaming drunk, and then come to the conclusion that he had been wronged and treated unfairly, by the female prison staff in particular and, with the grandiosity that so often accompanies intoxication, had acted on impulse, become potent, dangerous, and had taken hostage some poor twenty-nine-year-old female warden who was only working there for the summer, rusty screwdriver to her throat. The alarm had been raised and two dozen specially trained police marksmen had been called out and then it was just a matter of time-the amount of time it took for the alcohol to leave his system and for it to gradually dawn on the hungover prisoner where the balance of power actually lay-before he gave himself up with hands above his head, and as a result was given a farther six years and more stringent terms for leave.