Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

Half a plastic cup of coffee more.

He started from the left. Three passports. Red with gold letters. EUROPEAN UNION, SWEDEN, PASSPORT. All Swedish, genuine, issued by the police authority in Stockholm.

The photographs had been taken in a normal photo booth.

A few centimeters in size, black and white, slightly blurred, small reflections in the shining eyes.

The same face three times. Different names, different ID numbers. The face of a dead person.

Pier Hoffmann.

Grens leaned back in his chair and looked over at the window and the light outside, dim street lights that guarded the straight, empty asphalt paths of the inner courtyard at Kronoberg.

If this is you.

He picked up the envelope, turned it around.

If this has come from you.

He held it closer, fingertips brushed lightly over the front. There were no stamps. But there was something that looked like a postmark in the top right-hand corner. He studied it for a long time. Difficult to read, half the letters had disappeared. FRANKFURT. He was more or less certain. And six numbers. 234212. Then a kind of symbol, maybe a bird, or a plane.

The rest was mainly streaks that had seen too much water.

Grens scoured his desk drawer and the telephone list that he found there in a plastic sleeve. Horst Bauer, Bundeskriminalamt, Wiesbaden. He liked the German detective superintendent with whom he had worked a few years ago on an investigation in connection with a busload of abandoned Romanian children. Bauer was at home and having dinner, but was friendly and helpful and while Ewert waited and his food got cold, made three phone calls to confirm that the envelope that had recently arrived in a pigeonhole at the City Police in Stockholm had probably been sent by a courier company with offices at Frankfurt am Main International Airport.

Grens thanked him and hung up.

One of the world's largest airports.

He gave a deep sigh.

If it's you. If this comes from you. You instructed someone to send it for you. After your death.

Two more objects on the desk. The first wasn't even a centimeter big. He held it in his clumsy rubber fingers. A receiver, a silver earpiece, electronic devices for listening to conversations that were caught by transmitters of the same size.

Dear God.

It wasn't even twelve hours since Sven had held such a transmitter in his hand, attached to a black wire and a solar cell painted in the same color. The church tower's fragile railing.

Fifteen hundred and three meters from the now blown-out workshop window.

Ewert Grens stretched up to the shelf behind the desk and the plastic bag that had not yet been recorded in any chain of custody list or delivered to forensics. He emptied the contents out of the bag, called one of the few numbers he knew by heart and put the receiver down on the desk so that the talking clock voice was close to the transmitter. He then left the room and closed the door while he held the silver receiver to his ear and listened to the clock striking at ten-second intervals.

It worked.

The receiver that he had just been sent in an envelope was set at exactly the same frequency as the transmitter they had found on the tower railing. One thing left. A CD.

Grens balanced the shiny disk on his hand. No text on either side, nothing to give away the content.

He pushed it into the narrow opening in the short end of his computer tower.

"Government Offices, Tuesday, tenth of May."

It was the same voice.

He had listened to it together with Sven only a couple of hours ago. The voice that had raised the alarm. The voice that had threatened. Hoffmann.

Grens swallowed the last drops in the plastic cup. A third?

Later. He read the numbers on the sound file. Seventy-eight minutes and thirty-four seconds.

When I've listened to this.

The third cup of coffee from the machine was on the desk.

Ewert Grens had gone to get it but didn't need it. The racing in his chest that was making him dizzy had nothing to do with caffeine.

A legal police operation had just become legitimized murder.

He listened again.

First of all, scraping sounds, someone walking, fabric rubbing against a microphone with every step. After eleven minutes and forty-seven seconds-he checked on the sound file timer-a couple of voices, muffled. The microphone had been low, leg height, and it was obvious that Hoffmann moved every now and then to get closer to the sound source, had slowly stretched out a leg toward the person talking, suddenly got up and stood right next to them.

"The document… I've read it. I assumed… I assumed that it concerned a… woman?"

The only voice he hadn't heard before.

A woman, forty, maybe fifty years old. A soft voice with harsh sentences, he was sure he would recognize it if he heard it again.

"Paula. That's my name, in here."

The clearest voice.

The person with the microphone.

Hoffmann. But he called himself Paula. A code name.

"We have to make him more dangerous… He will have committed some serious crimes. He'll be given a long sentence."

The third voice.

Quite a high voice, the sort that doesn't fit the face, a colleague from the same corridor, only a few doors down and someone who had just happened to be passing on one of the first days of the investigation and had wanted to know how it was going and to give some ideas that pointed in the wrong direction.

Ewert Grens slammed his hand down on the desk, hard.

Erik Wilson.

He hit the desk again, with both hands this time, swore loudly at the cold office walls that just stood there.

Two more voices.

The two he knew best, part of a hierarchical chain of command, links between a criminal and a government office.

"Paula doesn’t have time for Västmannagatan."

A sharp, nasal voice, a bit too loud.

The national police commissioner.

"You've dealt with similar cases before."

A deep, resonant voice, that didn't swallow its words, but held them, vowels that were prolonged.

Göransson.

Ewert Grens stopped the recording and in one go drank the coffee that was still too hot and burned its way down from his throat to his stomach. He didn't feel it-.warm, cold, he was shaking as he had been since he listened to it the first time and was about to go back out into the corridor and pour more of the heat into himself until he managed to feel something other than the throttling rage.

A meeting at Rosenbad.

He took a felt pen from the pen holder and drew a rectangle and five circles straight onto the blotter.

A meeting table with five heads.

One who was probably a state secretary from the Ministry of Justice. One who called himself Paula. One who functioned as Paula's handler. One who was the most senior police officer in the country. And one, he looked at the circle that represented Göransson, who was Ewert Grens's immediate line manager and Erik Wilson's line manager and responsible for both their workloads and had therefore known all along why there were no answers in the Västmannagatan 79 case.

"I am a useful idiot."

Ewert Grens picked up the vandalized blotter and threw it to the floor. "I am a bloody useful idiot."

He pressed play again, sentences that he had already heard.

"Paula. That's my name, in here."

You weren't the mafia. You were one of us. You were employed by us to pretend you were the mafia.

And I murdered you.

The big clock on Kungsholms church struck half past midnight when Ewert Grens left his office and the police headquarters and drove the short distance to Rosenbad. It was a lovely, warm night, but he didn't notice. He knew what had happened at Västmannagatan 79. He knew why Pier Hoffmann had done time at Aspsås prison. And he suspected why the exact same people who had arranged for Hoffmann's prison sentence had suddenly been there, searching for a bureaucratic reason for killing him.