Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

The secret intelligence report that was also on the laptop, but so fresh that it was in another file.

The one I didn't show you last night.

The one that I'm going to show you because I have no intention of carrying someone else's guilt.

"It's not social, it's work. Västmannagatan 79. The preliminary investigation you just scaled down."

"You're welcome to come to the Regional Public Prosecution Office tomorrow during the day."

"You can open it again. As I know what actually happened. But I need your help one more time, Ågestam. Tomorrow morning is too late. That is when the head of the Government Offices security realizes that something is missing and passes on that information. When the wrong people then have time to adapt their versions, manipulate the evidence, change reality yet again."

Grens coughed extensively close to the mouthpiece, as if he was uncertain as to how to continue.

"And I apologize. For that. I was perhaps… well, you know." "No, what?"

"Damn it, Ågestam!"

"What?"

"I was perhaps… I may have been a bit… churlish, a bit… well, unnecessarily harsh."

Lars Ågestam walked down the seven flights of stairs in the offices at Kungsbron. A pleasant evening, warm, he longed for heat, as he always did after eight months of bitter wind and unpredictable snow. He turned around, looked at the windows of the Regional Public Prosecution Office, all dark. Two late phone calls had been longer than he expected: one phone call home-he had explained that he had to stay late and several times promised that he would wash the glasses from last night which still smelled of alcohol before he went to bed-then one call with Sven Sundkvist. He had gotten hold of him somewhere that sounded like an airport. He had wanted more information about the part of the investigation that involved Poland and their trip there to a now defunct amphetamine factory.

"His flat?"

"Yes."

"You're going to Ewert Grens's flat?"

Sven Sundkvist hadn't said anything but didn't want to hang up-their conversation was already finished and Ågestam was impatient, wanted to get on his way.

"Yes. I'm going to Ewert Grens's flat."

"I'm sorry, Ågestam, but there's something I don't quite understand. I've known Ewert, I've been his closest colleague for nearly fourteen years. But I have never, never ever, Ågestam, been invited to his flat. It's… I don't know… so private, a strange kind of… protection. Once, five years ago, one time only, Ågestam, the day after the hostage drama in the morgue at Soder hospital, I forced my way into his home, against his will. But now you're saying that he asked you there? And you're quite sure about that?"

Lars Ågestam wandered slowly through the city, lots of people on the street despite the fact it was a Sunday and past nine o'clock-after winter's drought of warmth and company it was always harder to go home when life had just returned.

He hadn't realized that it might be more than just an investigation, more than just a question of working late. It really felt like something had changed last night in the kitchen at Åkeshov; the whisky and three hundred and two copies of secret intelligence reports resembled a kind of closeness. But Ewert Grens had soon killed that feeling, happy to hurt in the way that only he knew how. So if it was as extraordinary to be invited to his flat as Sven made out, maybe there had been a change, they were perhaps closer to tolerating each other.

He looked at the people around him again, those drinking beer in their coats and scarves in outside cafés, laughing, chatting, as people who get on well together do.

He sighed.

There had been no change, there never would be.

Grens had other reasons, Ågestam was sure of it, his own reasons, ones that he would never dream of sharing with a young public prosecutor he had decided to despise.

"Grens."

Still a lot of traffic on Sveavägen. He had to concentrate to hear the voice on the intercom.

"It's Ågestam, will you-"

"I'll open. Four flights up."

A thick reddish carpet on the floor, walls that were possibly marble, lights that were bright without being offensive. If he had lived in town, in a flat, he would have looked for an entrance like this.

He avoided the elevator, broad staircase all the way up, E AND A GRENS on the mailbox in a dark door.

"Come in."

The large detective superintendent with the thinning hair opened the door, same clothes as that afternoon and the night before, a gray jacket and even grayer trousers.

Ågestam looked around in wonder-the hall seemed endless. "It's big."

"I haven't spent much time here in the last few years. But still manage to find my way around."

Ewert Grens smiled. It looked unnatural. He had never experienced it before. His coarse face was normally tense, harassing the people it was facing; the smile, a different face that made Ågestam uncertain.

He walked down the long hall with rooms opening off it, counted at least six empty rooms that looked untouched, asleep. That was how Sven had described them, rooms that didn't want to wake up.

The kitchen was as spacious, as untouched.

He followed Grens through the first section and into the next, a small eating area, a gateleg table and six chairs.

"Do you live here on your own?"

"Sit yourself down."

A pile of blue files and a large notepad in the middle, two glasses that were still wet with a bottle of Seagram's between them.

He was prepared.

"A dram? Or are you driving?"

He had made an effort. Even the same kind of whisky.

"Here? With you in the vicinity? I wouldn't dare. You might have some dusty parking fine papers in your glove compartment."

Ewert Grens remembered a cold winter's night one and a half years ago. He had crawled around on his hands and knees, his creased suit trousers in the wet new snow and measured the distance between a car and Vasagatan.

Ågestam's car.

He smiled again, a smile that was almost unnerving.

"As I remember it, the parking fine was dismissed. By the prosecutor himself."

In a fury, he had fined Lars Ågestam for his eight-centimeter error in parking, weary of a public prosecutor who made things difficult when the search for a sixteen-year-old girl who had disappeared forced them down into the tunnels under Stockholm.

"You can pour me half a glass."

They both took a drink while Grens produced a document from one of the files and put it down in front of Ågestam.

"You got three hundred and two secret intelligence reports. About what actually happened, things the rest of us didn't know and so couldn't present in our official investigations."

Lars Ågestam nodded.

"That unit at Aspsås. For only police officers. When I charge Them all." "They were reports from last year. But this copy, this is still warm."

M pulls a gun

(Polish 9mm Radom)

from shoulder holster.

M cocks the gun and holds it to the buyer's head.

"Submitted to the county police commissioner, like all the others."

P orders M to calm down.

IA lowers the gun, takes a step

back, his weapon half-cocked.

Lars Ågestam was about to speak when Grens interrupted.

"I've spent… I'd guess… half my time working on Vastmannagaran since the alarm was raised. Sven Sundkvist and Mariana Hermansson as well. Nils Krantz estimates that he and three other colleagues spent a week searching the place with magnifying glasses and fingerprint lifting tape, Errfors says that he used as much time to analyze the body of a Danish citizen. A number of constables and detectives have guarded the crime scene, questioned neighbors and looked for bloody shirts in garbage cans for-if I'm conservative-twenty days."