In a couple of kilometers he would stop in front of one of the gates to North Cemetery that were always open and he would get out of the car and he would find her grave and he would say something to her that resembled a farewell.
His mobile phone was under the map.
He let it stay there for the first three rings, then looked at it for the next three, then picked it up when he realized that it wasn't going to stop.
The duty officer.
'Ewert?'
'Yes.'
'Where are you?'
The familiar tone. Grens had already started to look for ways out of the frozen queue-a duty officer who sounded like that wanted help quickly. 'The Klarastrand road, northbound.'
'You've got an order.'
'For when?'
'It's damned urgent, Ewert.'
Ewert didn't like changing plans that had been decided.
He liked routine and he liked closure and therefore found it difficult to change directions when in his heart he was already on his way.
And so he should have sighed, perhaps protested a bit, but what he felt was relief.
He didn't need to go. Not yet.
'Wait.'
Grens indicated, nudged the nose of the car out into the opposite lane to make a U-turn over the continuous white line, accompanied by hysterical hooting from vehicles that had to brake suddenly. Until he'd had enough, rolled down the window and put the blue flashing light on the roof.
All cars went silent. All the drivers ducked their heads.
'Ewert?'
'I'm here.'
'An incident at Aspsas prison. You know the prison better than any other officer in the county. I need you there, now, as gold command.'
'Okay.”
'We've got a critical situation.'
John Edvardson was standing in the middle of the beautiful churchyard at Aspsas. Twenty minutes earlier he had come down from the church tower, leaving the marksmen who had seen Hoffmann and the hostages on two occasions now. They could force their way in whenever they wanted-a few seconds was all they needed to break down the door or come through a skylight and overpower the hostage taker, but as long as the hostages were alive, as long as they were unharmed, they wouldn't risk it.
He looked around.
The churchyard was being guarded by a patrol from Uppsala Police, who had cordoned off the area. No visitors were allowed inside the blue-andwhite plastic tape, no priests, no church wardens. Two patrol cars had come from Arlanda and another two from Stockholm and he had positioned one at each corner of the concrete wall that surrounded the prison. He now had four police officers from Aspsas district, and as many again each from Uppsala, Arlanda, and Stockholm, and when the twelve remaining members of the national task force arrived shortly, a total of thirty-seven police officers would be in place to watch, protect, attack.
John Edvardson was tense. He stood in the churchyard looking at the gray wall and felt the unease that had been there from the start, gnawing at him, irritating him, yet he couldn't put a finger on it, there was something… something that wasn't right.
Hoffmann.
The man over there who had threatened to kill again, it didn't fit.
In the past decade, Edvardson guessed there had been two, maybe three hostage takings a year in Swedish prisons. And each time the national task force was called in, with the same predictable scenario. An inmate had somehow managed to get hold of moonshine somewhere in the prison and had got steaming drunk, and then come to the conclusion that he had been wronged and treated unfairly, by the female prison staff in particular and, with the grandiosity that so often accompanies intoxication, had acted on impulse, become potent, dangerous, and had taken hostage some poor twenty-nine-year-old female warden who was only working there for the summer, rusty screwdriver to her throat. The alarm had been raised and two dozen specially trained police marksmen had been called out and then it was just a matter of time-the amount of time it took for the alcohol to leave his system and for it to gradually dawn on the hungover prisoner where the balance of power actually lay-before he gave himself up with hands above his head, and as a result was given a farther six years and more stringent terms for leave.
But Hoffmann didn't fit that pattern.
According to the wardens he had locked up in two separate cells, he was not under the influence, his actions were planned, each step seemed to have been analyzed, he was not acting on impulse, but with purpose.
John Edvardson turned up the volume on his radio when he gave out instructions for the twelve members of the task force who had just arrived: four outside the door into the workshop in Block B to set up microphones, five to scale the walls of the building to get up onto the roof with more listening equipment, and three to reinforce those already out in the stairwell.
He was closing in on the workshop and he had sealed off the churchyard.
He had done everything that he could and should for the moment. The next step was up to the hostage taker.
The heavy steel door into the third floor of the police headquarters was open. Ewert Grens ran his card through the card-reader, punched in a four-digit code and waited while the wrought-iron gate slid open. He went into the small space and over to the box with a number on it, opening it with his key and taking out the gun that he seldom used. The magazine was full and he pushed it into place: ammunition with a slightly pitted jacket, which was compensated for with something that looked like transparent glass, the kind of bullet that tore things to shreds. He then hurried back to Homicide, slowed down as he passed Sven Sundkvist's office,
There was something up on the roof.
Scraping noises, shuffling noises.
Piet Hoffmann was standing by the pile of fiberglass tiles. He had made the right decision. If they had still been up there under the ceiling, they would have swallowed and muffled the small movements that were now happening above his head.
More scraping sounds.
This time outside the door.
They were up the church tower, on the roof, by the door. They were reducing his field of action. There were enough of them now to guard the prison and still prepare for an assault on several fronts.
He picked up the square fiberglass tiles and threw them, one after the other, at the door. They would hear it. They would be standing out there with their listening equipment and they would know that it was now more difficult to get in; that there was something in the way that would take another second to pass, the extra time a person holding a gun needs to shoot his hostages.
Mariana Hermansson was driving far too fast, sirens wailing and blue lights flashing. They were now some distance north of Stockholm and were strangely silent, perhaps remembering previous hostage takings, or earlier visits to the prison as part of their day-to-day investigations. Sven rummaged around in the glove compartment and after a while managed to find what he was looking for, as he usually did: two cassettes of Siwan's sixties hits. He put one into the player, as they had always listened to Grens's past in order to avoid talking and gloss over the realisation that they didn't have much to say to each other.
'Take that out!'
Ewert had raised his voice and Sven wasn't sure that he understood why. 'I thought-'
'Take it out, Sven! Show some respect for my grief.'
