Three Seconds

I am alone.

The regular tone of a switchboard, muffled, feeble.

No one knows yet.

'Police Authority, Stockholm, can I help you?'

'Goransson.'

'Which one?'

'The head of criminal operations.'

The female voice put him through. Then that muffled, feeble ringing, again and again. I am alone. No one knows yet. He waited with the receiver pressed to his ear. The regular sound got louder, with each ring it got a little louder until it was piercing his brain and mixing with the voice from the bathroom that passed the closed cell and shouted stukatj once, twice, three times.

Ewert Grens lay on the corduroy sofa and looked at the shelf behind the desk and the hole that he had filled again early that morning, the row of files and a lonely cactus that concealed a whole life. As if there hadn't been any dust. He turned round and looked at the ceiling, spotted new cracks that were about to separate and then come together, only to separate again. He had stayed in the car. The park attendant had pointed toward the lawns and trees that were practically a forest, explained that the new graves were at the far end toward Haga. He had even offered to go with him, show the way to someone who had never been there before. Grens had thanked him and shaken his head, he would go there another day.

'The noise?'

Someone had stopped in his doorway.

'Do you want something?'

The noise.'

'What damned noise?'

'The noise. That… atonal one. Dissonance.'

Lars Agestam crossed the threshold.

'The noise that I normally hear. Siw Malmkvist. I was heading for it now. Until I realized that I'd walked past. That it was… silent.'

The public prosecutor stepped into an office that looked different, as if it had taken on new dimensions and what had previously been at the center had disappeared.

'Have you rearranged the furniture?'

He looked at the shelf. The files, preliminary investigations, a dead potted plant. A bit of wall that had previously been something else, presumably the center.

'What have you done?'

Grens didn't answer. Lars Agestam listened to the music that had always been there, that he detested and had been forced to listen to.

'Grens? Why…?'

'That's got nothing to do with you.'

'You've-'

'I don't want to talk about it.'

The prosecutor swallowed-there might have been something to talk about that wasn't to do with law; he had tried and he regretted it as usual. 'Vastmannagatan.'

'What about it?'

'I gave you three days.'

Not a sound. And that wasn't how it should be, in here.

'Three days. For the last names.'

'We're not quite finished.'

'If you still haven't got anything… Grens, I will scale down the case this time.'

Ewert Grens had been lying down until now. He quickly got up, his body leaving a deep impression on the soft sofa.

'You damn well won't! We've done exactly what you suggested. Identified and contacted several names on the periphery of the investigation. We've questioned them, dismissed them. All except one. A certain Piet Hoffmann who is already doing time and right now is in the prison's hospital unit and out of bounds.'

'Out of bounds?'

'Isolation. For three or four days.'

'What do you think?'

'I think he's very interesting. There's something… he doesn't fit.'

The young prosecutor looked at the files and the potted plant that disguised what once had been. He would never have believed it, that Grens would let go of something that he only needed to love at a distance.

'Four days. So that you can question this last guy. Either you manage to link him to the crime in that time, or I scale it down.'

The detective superintendent nodded and Lars Agestam started to walk out of the room he had never laughed in, not even smiled in. Every visit here had been fraught with conflict and an inhabitant that tried at once to repel and hurt. He moved quickly in order to get away from the staleness and so didn't hear the cough and didn't notice when a piece of paper was pulled from an inner pocket.

'Agestam?'

The prosecutor stopped, wondered whether he'd heard correctly. It was Grens's voice and it sounded almost friendly, perhaps even apologetic.

'Do you know what this is?'

Ewert Grens unfolded the piece of paper and put it down on the table in front of the sofa.

A map.

'North Cemetery.'

'Have you been there?'

'What do you mean?'

'Have you? Been there?'

Strange questions. The closest they had ever come to a conversation. 'Two of my relatives are buried there.'

Agestam had never seen this arrogant bastard so… small. Grens played with the map of one of Sweden's largest cemeteries and struggled for words. 'Then you'll know… I wondered… is it nice there?'

The door to the cell at the end of the corridor in the voluntary isolation unit was open. The prisoner from G2 had been escorted there through the underground tunnel by four members of the prison riot squad and after that he had demanded to phone the police, and then proceeded to make their lives hell. He had kept ringing the bell and demanding to be moved again, had shouted about solitary confinement and hit the walls, overturned the wardrobe, smashed the chair and pissed all over the floor until it ran our under the door into the corridor. He had been terrified but seemed to hold himself together, scared but in control. He knew what he was saying and why and he didn't go to pieces and collapse-the prisoner called Piet Hoffmann would only be quiet when he knew that someone was listening. Lennart Oscarsson had been standing in his office looking out over the prison yard and town hall in the distance when he had been informed of the disturbance involving a prisoner in the voluntary isolation unit in Block C and had decided to go there himself, to meet someone he didn't know but who had haunted him since a late phone call the night before.

'In there?'

He had seen him before. The cleaner in the administration block. He had seemed taller then, more straight- backed, eyes that were curious and alert. The person sitting on the bunk with his knees pulled up under his chin and his back pressed hard to the wall was someone else.

Only death, or fleeing from it, could change someone so quickly. 'Is there a problem, Hoffmann?'

The prisoner who couldn't be questioned tried to look more together than he actually was.

'I don't know. What d'you think? Or did you come here to get your trash emptied?'

'I think it would seem so. And that it's you that's causing it. The problem.' The order to grant a lawyer access to your unit.

'You asked for voluntary isolation. You refused to say why. And now you've got it, voluntary isolation.'