Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

Mariana Hermansson had only had a couple of hundred meters left before she would reach Aspsås church.

She turned around, toward the prison.

A sharp, intense fire.

Then thick, black smoke that forced its way out of a gaping hole that until moments ago had been a window in the front of a prison workshop building.

It was probably as dark as it could get at night toward the end of May.

The houses and trees and fields were waiting all around with dissolving corners, to reappear when the light crept back.

Ewen Grens was driving along the empty road, almost halfway, about twenty kilometers north of Stockholm. His body was tense, every joint and every muscle still ached with adrenaline, even though it was more than twelve hours now since the shot had been fired, the explosion and death. He hadn't even tried to sleep, though he had lain down for a while on the sofa in his office and listened to the silent police headquarters, without closing his eyes-he just couldn't turn off the roaring inside. He had tried to lose himself in thoughts of Anni and the cemetery, imagined what her resting place looked like. He still hadn't been there, but he would go soon. It was one of those nights when, eighteen months ago, he would have talked to her, nights that he had managed to survive with her help; he would have called the nursing home, even though he wasn't supposed to, nagged one of the staff until they woke her and handed over the receiver, and gradually calmed down as he told her everything, her presence in his ear. After she was gone, he had stopped calling and instead took the car and drove out toward Gardet and Lidingö bridge and the nursing home that was so well situated on the wealthy island. He would sit in the parking place by her window, look up at it, and after a while get out of the car and walk around the house.

Ewert, you can't regulate your grief. Ewert, what you're frightened of has already happened. Ewert, I never want to see you here again.

Now he didn't even have that.

After a few hours he had gotten up, walked down the corridor and to the car on Bergsgatan and started to drive toward Solna and North Cemetery. He wanted to talk to her again. He had stood by one of the gates and searched the shadows and then carried on north, through the smudged landscape to a wall around a prison and a church with a beautiful tower.

"Grens."

The dark, the quiet-if it had not been for the searing smell of fire and soot and diesel, it could all have been a dream, a head in a window, a mouth forming the word death, and in a while there would perhaps be nothing more than the birds singing their hearts out to the dawn and a town waking up without having heard anything about a hostage drama and a person lying motionless on the floor.

"Yes?"

He had pressed the button beside the gate and was talking into the intercom.

"I'm the detective investigating all this mess. Can you let me in?" "It's three in the morning."

"Yes."

"There's no one here who-"

"Can you let me in?"

He slipped through the gate and central security, then crossed one of the prison's dry inner yards.

He had never fired death at a person before.

It had been his decision.

His responsibility.

Ewert Grens approached the building called Block B, paused a while outside the front door, and looked up at the second floor.

The acrid smell of fire had almost intensified.

First an explosion and a projectile that penetrated and shattered a window and a person's head. Then another, more powerful one, the god-awful black smoke that never seemed to stop, that concealed what they were trying to see; an explosion that could not be explained.

His decision.

He started to walk up the stairs, past all the closed doors, toward the smell of smoke.

His responsibility.

Ewen Grens had in fact never had any relationship to death. He worked with it, frequently came face to face with it, and any thoughts of his own death were irrelevant. They had stopped thirty years ago the moment that he, as the driver of a police van, had driven over a head that had then ceased to function. Anni's head. He had no desire to die, it wasn't that, nor did he desire to live. In his meeting with guilt and grief he had developed the ability to encapsulate it, and had continued to do so, and now he didn't even know where to start.

The door was open and the inside was black with soot.

Grens looked into the burned-out workshop, pulled some transparent plastic bags over his shoes and stepped over the blue and white cordon.

There was always something lonely about places that have been destroyed by fire, the all-engulfing flames that eventually turned and subsided. He was walking on the remains of shelves that had fallen, between machines that were black and had been chewed and stopped.

It was there. On the ceiling, on the walls. What he had come for.

He had seen the white ones before, the forensic team's markers for body parts. More than in Västmannagatan. But the red ones, he had never been to a crime scene with red flags.

Two bodies, hundreds… maybe thousands of pieces.

He wondered whether Errfors, the forensic pathologist, would ever be able to piece enough together for an identification. People who had been alive until recently, who no longer existed, other than in bits marked by small flags. He started to count them without knowing why, just a few square meters of wall, but tired of it when he reached three hundred seventy-four. He crossed over the window that was no longer there, a light breeze through the hole in the wall. He stood in the place where Hoffmann had stood, the church and the church rower silhouetted against the sky. The sniper had lain up there, he had aimed and fired a bullet on Ewert Grens's command.

Aspsås shrank in the rear view mirror.

He had stayed for a couple of hours in the stench of burned oil and heavy smoke. The feeling had continued to torment him, no matter how many red and white flags marking body parts he counted, he still couldn't understand it, and the unease kept him awake, a reminder of the adrenaline and irritation. He didn't like it, tried to lose it in the mess on the floor and the tools that would never be used again, but it clung to him, whispering something he couldn't understand. He was approaching Stockholm through the northern satellite towns and suburbs when his mobile phone sang out from the back seat. He slowed down, leaned back for his jacket.

"Ewert?"

"Are you awake?"

"Where are you?"

"This early, Sven? Shouldn't it be me who's calling you?"

Sven Sundkvist smiled. It was a long time since he and Anita had been bothered by the phone ringing in the bedroom between midnight and dawn. Ewert always called the minute he had something that needed an immediate answer, and that tended to be at night when everyone else was asleep. But he hadn't been able to sleep himself last night. He had lain close to Anita and listened to the ticking of the alarm clock until, after a couple of hours, he crept out of bed and went down to the kitchen on the ground floor of their terraced house, and sat there doing crosswords, as he sometimes did when the nights were long. But the unease refused to leave his house. The same unease that Ewert had talked about earlier that evening, thoughts that had nowhere to go.

"I'm on my way into the city, Ewert. I'm just by Gullmarsplan and then heading west. To Kungsangen. Sterner just called."

"Sterner?"

"The sniper."

Grens accelerated-the early morning commuters were still in their garages, so it was easy to drive.