Three Seconds

'What?'

'I haven't got time.'

His tie was still flung over his shoulder, there were bits of food on it, or maybe it was just wet and lying there to dry.

'Haven't got time? Who does have time?'

The guard pulled his beard, flared his nostrils, his eyes hurt.

'But by all means. Go. I'll open for you.'

Two steps up to the metal detector.

Then two steps to the door that was opened from inside the glass box.

Piet Hoffmann turned around, nodded to the guard who was waving his hands around in irritation.

Lennart Oscarsson was still there, right behind him.

Their eyes met again.

He expected someone to start shouting, to come running.

But not a word, not a movement.

The man who was clean-shaven with cropped hair and wearing a warden's uniform when he disappeared out through the gate in the prison wall may have seemed familiar but he didn't have a name-the summer temps seldom did-this one smiled when his face was brushed by the warm wind. It was going to be a lovely evening.

Yet Another Day Later

Ewert Grens was sitting at his desk in front of a bookshelf with a hole that could not be filled, no matter how hard he tried, and the dust lay in straight lines no matter how often he wiped it away. He had been sitting there for nearly three hours. And he would continue to sit there until he had worked our whether what he had just seen was something he should be concerned about or whether it was just one of those moments that seemed to be important but that lost all significance if it wasn't shared with someone else.

The day had started with a beautiful morning.

He had slept on the brown corduroy sofa with the window to the courtyard open and had been woken by the first trucks on Bergsgatan. He had stood for a while looking up at the blue sky and gentle wind and then, with a coffee cup in each hand, had gone to the elevators and the remand jail a couple of floors up.

He couldn't resist it.

If you were there early enough and it was clear enough, at this time of day, for a few hours, you could walk along the obvious line cast by the sun in the corridor of the remand jail. This morning he had walked where the floor shone most, making sure to pass the cells where he knew they were in custody for the third day with full restrictions. Agestam had been careful to ensure that they would wait for most of the statutory seventy-two hours and later that day Grens would attend the court proceedings for the issue of arrest warrants for a chief superintendent, a national police commissioner, and a state secretary from the Ministry of Justice.

The hole on the bookshelf It was as if it was growing.

It would continue to do so until he had made up his mind.

He had spent two days fast forwarding and rewinding tapes from the security cameras at Aspsas prison, frame by frame through locked doors and long passages and gray walls and barbed wire barriers back to those seconds that exploded with thick smoke and dead people. He had studied

Krantz's forensic reports and Errfors' autopsy report and all Sven's and Hermansson's interviews.

He had spent considerable time on two things in particular.

A transcript of the dialogue between the sniper and the observer just before the shot was fired.

Where they talked about a rug that Hoffmann had put over the hostage and tied with something that later in the investigation proved to be a pentyl fuse.

A rug that encapsulates and directs the blast pressure downward, protecting anyone standing nearby.

An interview with a principal prison officer called Jacobson.

Where Jacobson described how Hoffmann covered the hostage's skin with small plastic bags filled with some sort of fluid, which later in the investigation proved to be nitroglycerine.

Nitroglycerine in such large amounts that every part of the body is shattered and can never be identified.

Ewert Grens had laughed out loud in the office.

He had stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the video recorder and the transcripts on the desk and had continued to laugh as he left the police headquarters and drove out to Aspsas and the wall that dominated the small town. He had gone to central security and requested to see all footage from the prison security cameras from twenty-six minutes past two in the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of May and thereafter. He had driven back, got himself some fresh coffee from the machine and sat down to watch every moment that had passed since a lethal shot was fired from a church tower.

Grens had already known what he was looking for.

He had selected the camera that was called number fourteen and was installed about a meter above the glass front of central security. He had then fast forwarded and stopped to study every person who went out. Wardens, visitors, prisoners, suppliers, one head at a time as they passed, their hairline close to the lens; some showed their ID, some signed the register, most were waved through by a guard who recognized them.

He got as far as a tape that was recorded four days after the shot was fired.

Ewert Grens had known instantly that he'd found it.

A man with cropped hair in a Prison and Probation Service uniform had looked up at the camera as he left at six minutes past eight in the evening, looked up for just too long, and then gone on.

Grens had felt the pressure in his stomach and chest that was normally anger, but this time was something else.

He had stopped the tape and rewound, studied the man who chatted with the guard for a while and then looked up at the camera in the same way that he had done three weeks earlier with another guard in another glass-fronted security office, the one in the Government Offices. Grens had followed the uniformed person through the metal detector and the gate and the wall via cameras number fifteen and sixteen and had observed that the person had problems with his balance: it had been an almighty blast, the sort that could burst your eardrums.

You're alive.

That was why he had been sitting at his desk for three hours looking at a hole growing on the bookshelf.

I didn't make a decision about death.

That was why he had to determine if what he had just seen was something he should be concerned about or whether it was of no significance if no one else knew.

Hoffmann is alive. You didn't make a decision about death either.

He laughed again while he took a document out of the desk drawer-summons to the court proceedings for the issue of arrest warrants that he was about to attend and that would lead all the way to a conviction and long sentences for three high-ranking officers who had abused their power.

He laughed even louder, danced across the floor of the silent office, after a while quietly humming something that anyone passing just then might have recognized as a melody that perhaps sounded like a song from the sixties, like 'Somebody's Fool' and Siw Malmkvist.

And Yet Another Day Later

It was as if the sky were slowly closing in.

Erik Wilson stood in the asphalt yard, his thin clothes itching as nervous flies searched among the pearls of