Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

"Ågestam will get the report when you've finished it. Put it to one side. I want you to make a list of all outgoing calls from Aspsås prison between eight forty-five and nine forty-five in the morning and one-thirty and two-thirty in the afternoon. Then I want you to check them. I want to know which ones we can forget and which ones might have been made from the workshop office."

He had expected her to protest.

She didn't.

"Hoffmann?"

"Hoffmann."

The prison yard was full of inmates-it was the morning break with spring sun and they sat in groups and looked up at the sky with cheeks that turned rosy. Grens had no wish to listen to sarcastic remarks from anyone he had previously investigated and questioned and so chose to go underground, via a concrete passageway that reminded him of another investigation. Neither Ewert Grens nor Sven Sundkvist said anything, but they were thinking about the same case, how they had walked side by side five years ago, a father who had killed his daughter's murderer and then been given a long sentence himself, a case that often returned and niggled, with images that they had tried to forget for a long time. Some investigations did that.

They came out of the passage and were struck by the silence, even in the stairwell of Block B. The annoying banging had stopped. They passed solitary confinement in B1 and the normal units in B2, which were all empty as the prisoners had been evacuated to Block K and would remain there as long as the building that still echoed from the explosion was a cordoned off crime scene and part of an investigation.

Four forensic technicians were creeping around in different parts of the charred workshop and soot-licked walls that had once been white. The smell of diesel oil stuck to everything, a thick and sharp smell that reminded those there of how poisonous each breath had been only a day earlier. Nils Krantz left the remains of death, concentrated and determined. Neither Ewert nor Sven had ever seen him laugh; he was simply someone who functioned far better with a microscope than a cocktail glass.

"Follow me."

Krantz walked over to the part of the workshop that looked out over the prison yard, hunkered down in front of a wall with a hole about the size of a grapefruit, then turned and pointed straight across the room.

"So, the bullet penetrated the window there. The window that you could see from the church tower, where Hoffmann chose to stand, fully exposed, for the whole drama. We're talking about fire and explosive ammunition and an initial velocity of eight hundred and thirty meters per second. That means three seconds from the shot being fired to hitting its target."

Nils Krantz had never witnessed a crime happening, he had never been in a place when it became a crime scene. But that was precisely what his work entailed, being there, getting others to be there later, at the exact time that it happened.

"The projectile penetrated a window and a skull with massive impact. Then it flattened and the velocity slowed until it reached here, see the big hole, and met the next wall."

He closed his hand around a long metal pole in the middle of the hole that showed the angle of the trajectory-the shot had been fired from somewhere higher up.

"The bullet when loaded is nearly ten centimeters long. But the part that is fired, the bit that remains if you discount the jacket, is three, maybe even three and a half centimeters, and this then hit and ripped through parts of the wall and continued out into the prison yard. And a projectile that slices through glass, human bone, and a thick concrete wall in that order will totally flatten out and look more or less like an old eighteenth-century coin."

Grens and Sundkvist looked at the crater in the wall. They had both listened to Jacobson talking about a sound like a whiplash, the force had been unimaginable.

"It's out there somewhere. We haven't found it yet, but we will soon. I've got several police officers from Aspsa's district on their hands and knees in the gravel looking."

Krantz walked over to the window where Hoffmann had stood. Red and white flags on the wall, the floor, the ceiling. More than Grens could remember from his visit during the night.

"I've had to make a kind of system. Red for bloodstains, white for remains. I've never worked with bodies that have been so totally blown apart."

Sven studied the small flags, tried to understand what they actually signified, moved closer-he who normally avoided unmistakeable death.

"We're talking about an explosion and fragments of dead people. But there's something I don't understand."

This time, Sven moved even closer. He wasn't frightened, didn't feel any discomfort. This wasn't death, he couldn't see it like that.

"Human tissue. Thousands of bits. This type of projectile rips bodies apart. Into big bits. It doesn't explode."

People broken down into particles that were only centimeters away from Sven, they stopped being people then.

"So we're looking for something else. Something that exploded. Something that blows things into smithereens, not big bits."

"Such as?"

"An explosive. I can't think of any other explanation."

Ewert Grens saw the red and white flags, shards of glass, soot that blanketed everything.

"Explosive. What kind?"

Krantz made an irritation gesture with his arms.

"TNT. Nitroglycerine. C4. Semtex. Pentyl. Octogen. Dynamex Or something else. I don't know, Grens. We're still looking. But what I do know… it was definitely close to the bodies, maybe even directly on the skin."

He nodded at the flags.

"Well… you understand."

Red for bloodstains, white for remains.

"We also know that it was an explosive that generates extreme heat." "I see…"

"Enough heat to ignite the diesel in the barrel."

"I can smell it."

The forensic scientist gave a gentle kick to the barrel standing below the hole that had been a window the day before.

"It was the diesel that had been mixed with gas that caused all that god-awful smoke. You find barrels and cans of diesel oil in every workshop in every prison, fuel for the machines and any forklift trucks, and for cleaning the tools. But this barrel… it was standing very close to Hoffmann. And it had been moved there."

Nils Krantz shook his head.

"Explosives. Poisonous smoke. It was no accident that the barrel was there, Ewert. Piet Hoffmann wanted to be certain."

"Certain?"

"That he and one of the hostages would die."

Grens turned off the engine and got out of the car. He waved at Sven to drive on ahead and started to walk over the fields in what was to be a fifteen-hundred-and-three-meter stroll from Aspsås prison to Aspsås church. The open areas of grass cleansed him of the lack of sleep and the stench of diesel oil, but not the feeling that had gripped him, which he didn't like and knew would stay with him until he understood what it was he couldn't see.

He should have worn other shoes.

The green that looked so soft from a distance was full of dips and clay and he had stumbled a couple of times, fallen heavily to the ground, his trousers stained green by the grass and brown by the earth by the time he finally stopped outside a side gate into the churchyard.

He turned around. The morning mist had evaporated and the gray walls were clear in the sunlight. He had stood here exactly twenty-four hours ago; he still hadn't made the decision about another person's death.

A handful of visitors were moving around between the headstones, flowers in their hands, spouses or children or friends who cared. Grens avoided their eyes but watched their hands as they dug in between the green bushes and wreaths, as if he was testing himself, but being by a grave that meant nothing didn't feel like anything either.