Three Seconds

Grens went up the stairs of one of the many buildings in central Stockholm from the turn of the century, the first few years of the 1900s when the cityscape changed dramatically.

He stopped in front of a door on the first floor.

Hoffmann Security AB. Same old trick. A security firm as a front for the Eastern European mafia.

He opened the door with the keys that he'd got from Krantz.

A beautiful apartment, shining parquet floor, high ceilings, white walls. He looked out of the window with a view of Kungsbron and the Vasa theatre, an elderly couple on their way in to the evening performance, as he had often thought of doing himself, but never gotten around to.

You were sent up for a drug crime. But you weren't an amphetamine dealer. He walked down the hall and went into what must once have been the drawing room, but was now an office with two gun cabinets by an open fireplace.

You had links with Wojtek. But you were not a member of the mafia.

He sat down in the chair by the desk that he guessed Hoffmann must have sat in.

You were someone else.

He got up again and wandered around the apartment, looked in the two empty gun cabinets, touched the deactivated alarm, rinsed out some dirty glasses.

Who?

When he left Hoffmann Security AB, Grens had gone to look at the storage spaces that belonged to the apartment. He had opened a storeroom in the cellar with a strong smell of damp, and he had walked around in the loft with a fan heater whirring above his head while he looked for a storeroom that was more or less empty, except for a hammer and chisel that were lying on top of a pile of old tires.

It was late, and he should perhaps have driven the kilometer from the door on Vasagatan to his own flat on Sveavagen, but the anger and restlessness pushed back the tiredness-he wouldn't sleep tonight either.

The corridor of the homicide unit was waiting, abandoned. His colleagues would rather spend the first summer evenings with a glass of wine at one of the outside cafes on Kungsholmen followed by a slow walk home, than with twenty-four parallel investigations and unpaid overtime in a characterless office. He didn't feel left out, didn't miss it. He had chosen long ago not to take part and your own choice can never become ugly loneliness. This evening it would be a report on a shooting in a prison and tomorrow evening it would be a report on another shooting. There was always an investigation that was a trauma for the person who was shot, bat for the investigator generated a vicarious sense of belonging. Grens was almost at the coffee machine and two plastic cups of blackness when he stopped by his pigeonhole and saw a large padded envelope in the pile of unopened letters; too many damn reference lists and soulless mass mailings. He pulled it out and weighed it in his hand-not particularly heavy-turned it over without seeing any sender. His name and address were easy to read, a man's handwriting, he was sure of that, something square, unrhythmical, almost sharp about it, possibly in felt pen.

Ewert Grens put the envelope down in the middle of the desk and stared at it while he emptied the first cup. Sometimes you just get a feeling, impossible to explain. He opened a drawer and a bag with unused rubber gloves, put on a pair and opened the end of the envelope with his index finger. He peeped cautiously in. No letter, no accompanying text or paper.

He counted five things, took them out one at a time and placed them in a row in front of him, between the files of ongoing investigations.

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.