Three Seconds (11 page)

    He was nobody.

    He lied to Zofia and she held him tight. He lied to Hugo and Rasmus and they hugged their daddy. He lied to Erik. He lied to Henryk. He had just lied to Zbigniew Boruc and drank another Zubrawka with him.

    He had been lying for so long that he'd forgotten what the truth looked and felt like, who he was.

    The specks of light had now become a huge plane that had just landed; it swerved in the strong crosswinds and the small wheels bounced out of control a couple of times on the asphalt before sinking down and rolling the plane toward some steps by the newer part of the arrivals hall.

    He leaned forward to the window and rested his forehead on the cool glass.

    The day that wouldn't end, that whispered and screamed.

    A person had stopped breathing in front of him. He had realized too late. They had the same role, were part of the same game, but on different sides. A person who perhaps had children, a wife, who had maybe also lived a lie for so long that he didn't know who he was anymore.

My name is Paula. What was yours?

    He sat on the window sill, looking out into the dark, as he cried.

    It was the middle of the night in a hotel room a few kilometers from central Warsaw. He had a real person's death on his hands and he cried until he could cry no more and sleep took him, and he fell headlong into something that was black and couldn't be lied to.

Tuesday

    Ewert Grens had woken when the first light forced its way through the thin curtains and started to irritate his eyes. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the three stacked cardboard boxes, but he then lay down on the hard linoleum to avoid the dawn light and slept for another couple of hours. It wasn't a bad place to sleep: his back barely ached and he had been able to keep his stiff leg stretched almost straight the whole night, which he never got room for on the soft corduroy sofa.

    No more nights there.

    Suddenly he was wide awake, rolled over on to his belly and used his arms to lever up his bulky frame. From the tin on his desk he grabbed a blue marker, which released a strong odor as he wrote on each side of the brown cardboard boxes.

PI Malmkvist.

    Ewert Grens looked at the taped-up boxes and laughed out loud. He had been able to sleep with the packed music and felt more rested than he had done for a long time.

    A couple of dance steps, no singing, no music, just unaccompanied steps.

    He tried to lift the box on top, but it was far too heavy, so he pushed it out of the room and down the long corridor to the elevator. Three floors down, to the cellar, to the property store. He wrote a reference number on the top of the box with the marker again-I9361231. Then he went down another corridor, even darker than the last, and pushed and sweated on to the door that opened into confiscated property.

    "Einarsson."

    A young lad, civilian staff, was standing behind the long wooden counter that felt so old. Every time Grens came here he was reminded of a grocer's shop he often went to as a boy on his way home from school, a shop near Odenplan which had long since disappeared and was now yet another cafe for teenagers who drank milky coffee and compared mobile phones.

    "Can I help you?"

    "I want Einarsson to look after this."

    "Yes, but I-"

    "Einarsson."

    The young man snorted loudly, but said nothing. He left the counter and went to get a man of Ewert's age, with a black apron tied tightly round his rotund body.

    "Ewert."

    "Tor."

    One of the policemen who had been really good and then after years of working together, had suddenly sat down one morning and explained that he couldn't face all the crap anymore, let alone investigate it. They had talked a lot about it at the time and Ewert had understood that that was how things could be when you had something to live for, when you yearned for days without pointless deaths. Einarsson had sat there and did not get up until his superiors had opened the door to the basement and the confiscated goods that were indeed a part of ongoing investigations, but which seldom stayed with you all evening.

    "I've got some boxes I want you to look after."

    The older man behind the counter took the things and read the square letters in blue marker.

    "PI Malmkvist. What the hell is that?"

    "Preliminary investigation Malmkvist."

    "I realize that. But I've never heard of the case."

    "Closed investigation."

    "But then it shouldn't-"

    "I want you to keep them here. In a safe place."

    "Ewert, I-"

    Einarsson was silent, studied Grens for a long time, then the box. He smiled. Preliminary investigation Malmkvist. Reference number 19361231. He gave another even broader smile.

    "Jesus, that's her birthday, isn't it?"

    Grens nodded. "A closed investigation."

    "Are you sure about that?"

    "I'll be down with another two boxes."

    "In that case… investigations like this are best stored here. If the stuff is unique, I mean. Better than some unsafe attic or damp cellar."

    Ewert Grens hadn't realized how tense he was until, to his surprise, he felt his shoulders, arms and legs slowly relax. He hadn't been sure that Einarsson would understand.

    "I need a chain of custody record. So, if you could just fill these in now. Then I can find a safe place."

    Einarsson handed him two blank forms and a pen.

    "In the meantime, I'll mark clearly that it's classified information. Because it is, isn't it?"

    Grens nodded again.

    "Good. Then it can only be opened by authorized persons."

    The policeman who had once been a detective himself and who now wore a black apron and worked behind a counter in the basement, slapped a red sticker over the flaps of the box, a seal that could not be broken by anyone other than the man who could identify himself as DS Ewert Grens.

    Ewert was full of gratitude as he watched his colleague struggle over to the shelves with the cardboard box in his arms.

    Someone who didn't need an explanation.

    He left the form on the counter and turned to leave when he heard Einarsson singing one of Siw Malmkvist's songs somewhere between the rows of seized property.

The tears I cried for you could fill an ocean

    The Swedish version of "Everybody's Somebody's Fool." Ewert Grens stopped and shouted in the direction of the cramped storage space.

    "Not now."

But you don't care how many tears I cry

    "Einarsson!" Ewert bellowed, and Einarsson popped his head round some shelves in surprise.

    "Not now, Einarsson. You're disturbing my grief."

    He felt lighter when he left-the basement was almost attractive and he shook his head at the elevator and decided instead to take the stairs three floors up. He was about halfway when the mobile phone in the inner pocket of his jacket began to chime.

    "Yes?"

    `Are you heading the investigation into the murder in Västmannagatan 79?"

    Ewert Grens was out of breath. He didn't often take the stairs. "Who's asking?"

    "Says who?"

    The voice was Danish, but easy to understand, probably from somewhere near Copenhagen, the part of Denmark that Grens had worked with most over the years.

    "Was it you or me who phoned?"

    "Apologies. Jacob Andersen, crime operations unit Copenhagen, or what you call homicide."

    "And what do you want?"

    "To know whether you are leading the investigation into the murder in Västmannagatan 79?"

    "Who said it was a murder?"

    "I did. And it's just possible that I know who the victim is."

    Grens stopped on the last step, tried to catch his breath while he waited for the voice that had presented itself as a Danish policeman to continue.

    "Do you want me to call you back?"

    "Put the phone down."

    Grens hurried to his room, found the file he was looking for in the third drawer of his desk. He leafed through it for a moment or two and then left it open in front of him as he dialed the switchboard of Copenhagen police and asked for Jacob Andersen from the crime operations unit.

    "Andersen." It was the same voice.

    "Put the phone down."

    He called the switchboard again and asked to be transferred to Jacob Andersen's mobile phone.

    Andersen."

    The same voice.

    "Open the window."

    "What?"

    "If you want the question answered, then open the window."

    He heard the voice put the phone down on the desk and fiddle for a while with a rusty window hook.

    "Okay?"

    "What can you see?"

    "Hambrogade."

    "Anything else?"

    "The water if I lean out far enough."

    "Half of Copenhagen can see water."

    "Langebro."

    Grens had looked out of the window from the crime operations unit several times. He knew that it was the water by Langebro that was sparkling in the sun.

    "Where does Moelby sit?"

    "My boss?"

    "Yes."

    "In the room opposite. He's not here right now Otherwise-" 'And Christensen?"

    "There is no bloody Christensen here."

    "Good. Good; Andersen. Now we can continue."

    Grens waited, it was the Danish voice that had phoned him, so it was the one that should continue. He went over to his own window. Not much water to be seen in the dreary courtyard of the police headquarters.

    "I have reason to believe that the dead person worked for us. I'd like to see a photograph, if possible. Could you fax one to me?"

    Ewert Grens reached for a folder that was lying on his desk, checked that Krantz's pictures were still there, the ones that had been taken in the flat, when the face still had skin.

    "You'll get a photo in five minutes. I'll wait for the call when you've had a look."

     Erik Wilson enjoyed walking in the center of Stockholm.

    Mad people, suits, beautiful women, pushers, strollers, running clothes, dogs, bikes, and the odd person who wasn't going anywhere. Half past ten, mid-morning in the city. He had passed them all on the recently repaired pavement in the short distance from the police headquarters to Sankt Eriksplan. It was cooler here, easier to breathe; it had already been too warm in southern Georgia, and in a few weeks it would be unbearable. He had left Newark Liberty International in the afternoon, just after five local time, and landed at Arlanda eight hours later, early in the morning. He must have slept a bit on the plane, fallen asleep despite the two old ladies in the seats in front who chatted incessantly, and the man in the seat beside him who coughed loudly every five minutes. As the taxi approached the city and the police headquarters at Kronoberg, he asked the driver to stop first at Västmannagatan 79, the address he had been given by Paula. Wilson showed his ID to the security guard at the door of the fourth floor flat, with blue-and-white tape criss-crossed over the doorway and a sign that said it was a secured crime scene, and then walked on his own through the abandoned rooms that not even a day earlier had witnessed a man being killed. He started by the large, dark patch on the carpet under the table in the sitting room. A life had seeped away just here. An overturned chair was lying by the edge of the patch, the stain of death. He peered at a hole in the ceiling and another hole in the closed kitchen door, obvious damage from the split bullet. Then he stood for a while by the pins and flags that marked the discoloring on the sitting room wall, and which was interesting in terms of the angle and force of the shot. That was what he had come for, to analyze the blood splashes. That was what he needed for the next meeting, that and Paula's version. Erik Wilson concentrated on the funnel-shaped area that the guys from forensics had marked out with two pieces of string, one end of which had no flags and no blood and no brain tissue. He studied and memorized it until he was certain of exactly where the two people who were important to him had been at the moment the shot was fired: where the person who fired had stood and where the person who
hadn't
fired must have been standing.