Three Seconds (4 page)

    It was too late to call it off.

    He had time for a quick breakfast: blueberry pancakes, bacon, that light white bread. A cup of coffee and
The New York Times.
He always sat at the same table in a quiet corner of the dining room as he preferred to keep the morning to himself.

    He'd never had anyone like Paula before, someone who was so sharp, alert, cool; he was working with five people at the moment and Paula was better than all the others put together, too good to be a criminal.

    Another cup of black coffee, then he had to rush back to the room: he was late.

    Outside the open window, the green-and-white helicopter whirred high above the ground and three Border Patrol uniforms were hanging from a cable below, about a meter apart, as they shimmied down into pretend dangerous territory near the Mexican border. Yet another practice, always a practice here. Erik Wilson had been at the military base on the east coast of the United States for a week now; two weeks left of this training session for European policemen on informers, infiltration, and witness protection programs.

    He closed the window as the cleaners didn't like them being open-something about the new air conditioning in the officers' accommodation, that it would stop working if everyone aired their rooms whenever they pleased. He changed his shirt, looking at the tall and fairish middle-aged man in the mirror who should by now have been making his way toward a day indoors in a classroom with his fellow students and policemen from four American states.

    He stood still. Three minutes past eight. They should be done now. Paula's mobile phone was the extreme right of the five on the desk and just like all the others only had one number stored.

    Erik Wilson didn't even have time to ask.

"It's a total fucking mess."

      Sven Sundkvist had never learned to like the long, dark, and, at times, damp corridors of the homicide unit. He had worked with Stockholm City Police all his adult life, and from his office at one end of the unit, not far from the pigeonholes and vending machines, had investigated every category of crime in the penal code. This morning, as he made his way through the dark and damp, he stopped suddenly as he passed the open door to his boss's office.

    "Ewert?"

    A large, rather bulky man was crawling along one of the walls. Sven knocked gingerly on the doorframe.

    "Ewert?"

    Ewert Grens didn't hear him. He continued to crawl in front of a couple of large brown cardboard boxes and Sven repressed that sinking feeling. He had once before seen the obstreperous detective superintendent sit on another floor in the police headquarters. Eighteen months ago. Grens had sat on the floor in the basement with a pile of papers from an old case in his lap and slowly repeated two sentences over and over.
She's dead. I killed her.
A twenty-seven-year-old preliminary investigation into an assault on a constable, a young policewoman who had been seriously injured and would never again be able to live outside a nursing home. When he read the report later, Sven Sundkvist had come across her name in several places. Anni Grens. He had had no idea that they were married.

    "Ewert, what on earth are you doing?"

    He was packing something into the large brown cardboard boxes. That much was plain to see. But not what. Sven Sundkvist knocked again. The room was completely silent, and yet Ewert Grens still didn't hear him.

    It had been a difficult period.

    Like all others who grieve, Ewert's first reaction had been denial-it
hasn't happened-and
then anger-why
have they done this to me?
But he hadn't moved on to the next phase, he just carried on being angry, his way of dealing with most things. Ewert's grieving process had probably not started until very recently, a few weeks ago-he was no longer as irascible, but more reserved, more pensive, he talked less and presumably thought more.

    Sven went into the room. Ewert heard him, but didn't turn around, sighing loudly instead as he often did when he was irritated. Something was bothering him. It wasn't Sven, something had been bothering him since he had gone to the nursing home, which usually gave him peace. Susann, the medical student who had been there for so long and looked after Anni so well and who had now become a junior doctor, her comments, her disgust,
you can't regulate your grief;
well it was bloody easy enough for a little girl to run around Udine, spreading her twenty-five-year-old wisdom,
what you're frightened of has already happened.
What the hell did she know about loneliness?

    He had driven away from the nursing home faster than he'd intended, straight to the police headquarters, and, without knowing why, gone down to the stores to get three cardboard boxes and carried them to the office that he'd had for as long as he could remember. He had stood for a while in front of the shelf behind his desk and the only things that meant anything to him: the cassettes of Siw Malmkvist songs that he had recorded and mixed himself, the early record sleeves from the sixties that still had strong colors, the photograph of Siwan that he had taken one evening in Kristianstads Folkets Park; everything that belonged to a time when all was good.

    He had started to pack it all away, wrapped in newspaper, and then stacked one box on top of the next.

    "She doesn't exist anymore."

    Ewert Grens sat on the floor and stared at the brown cardboard. "Do you hear me, Sven? She will never sing in this room again."
Denial, anger, grief.

    Sven Sundkvist was standing directly behind his boss, looking down at his balding pate and seeing images from all the times he had waited while Ewert slowly rocked back and forth alone in his room in the dismal light-early mornings and late evenings and Siw Malmkvist's voice, standing dancing with someone who wasn't there, holding her tight in his arms. Sven realized that he would miss the irritating music, the lyrics that had been forced on him until he knew them by heart, an intrinsic part of all the years he had worked with Ewert Grens.

    He would miss the picture.

    He should laugh, really, because finally they were gone.

    Ewert had gone through his adult life with a crutch under each arm. Anni. Siw Malmkvist. And now, finally, he was going to walk alone. Which was presumably why he was crawling around on the floor.

    Sven sat down on the tired sofa and watched him lift up the last box and put it on top of the two others in a corner of the room, then laboriously and carefully tape it up. Ewert Grens was sweating and determined. He pushed the boxes until they were exactly where he wanted them and Sven wanted to ask how he felt, but didn't, it would be wrong, mostly out of consideration to himself, because the very fact that Ewert was doing what he was doing was answer enough in itself. He was moving on, though not yet aware of it himself.

    "What have you done?"

    She hadn't knocked.

    She had walked straight into the room and stopped abruptly in the absence of music, in front of the gaping hole on the shelf behind the desk. "Ewert? What have you done?"

    Mariana Hermansson looked at Sven who first nodded at the gap on the shelf and then at the pile of three cardboard boxes. Never before had she been to his room without hearing music, the now removed Siw Malmkvist. She didn't recognize it without her voice.

    "Ewert…"

    "You want something?"

    "I want to know what you've done."

    "She no longer exists."

    Hermansson went over to the empty shelf, ran a finger along the dusty lines left by the cassettes, the cassette player, speakers, and a black and white photo of the singer that had stood there all these years.

    She wiped off a dust ball, hid it in her hand.

"She
doesn't exist?"

    "No."

    "Who?

    "Her."

    "Who? Anni? Or Siw Malmkvist?"

    Ewert finally turned around and looked at her.

    "Did you want something, Hermansson?"

    He was still sitting on the floor, leaning against the boxes and wall. He had been grieving for nearly a year and a half now, lurching between a breakdown and madness. It had been an awful time, and she had told him to go to hell more than once and just as many times apologized afterward. On a couple of occasions she had almost given up, resigned and walked away from this difficult man's bitterness that seemed to have no end. She had gradually come to believe that one day he would capitulate, go to pieces completely, lie down and never get up again. But his face now, in the midst of all the suffering, had something purposeful about it, a determination that had not been there before.

    Some cardboard boxes, a gaping hole on a bookshelf, things like that could spark unexpected relief.

    "Yes, I did want something. We've just had a call-out. Västmannagatan 79."

    He was listening, she knew that, he was listening to her in that intense way that she had nearly forgotten.

    "An execution."

    Piet Hoffmann looked out of one of the beautiful apartment's big windows. It was a different flat in a different part of the center of Stockholm, but they were similar, three carefully renovated rooms, high ceilings and light-colored walls. Only there was no prospective buyer lying on the wooden floor here, with a gaping hole in one temple and two in the other.

    Down on the wide pavement, groups of well-dressed people were making their way, full of anticipation, into a matinee performance at the large theater; breathless and slightly hammy actors going in and out of doors onto the stage, proclaiming their lines.

    Sometimes he longed for that kind of life, just everyday, normal people doing normal things together.

    He left the dressed-up, excited people and the window with a view of both Vasagatan and Kungsbron, and crossed the largest room in the flat, his room, his office with its antique desk and two locked gun cabinets and an open fire that was very effective. He heard the last mule spewing up in the kitchen-she had been at it for a long time now. She wasn't used to it: it took a couple of trips before you were. Jerzy and Mariusz were standing by the sink with yellow rubber gloves on, picking out the bits of brown rubber that the young woman threw up, along with the milk and something else, in the two buckets on the floor in front of her. She was the fifteenth and final mule. They had emptied the first one in Västmannagatan, and had been forced to empty the rest here. Piet Hoffmann didn't like it. This flat was his protection, his cover, he didn't want it to be linked with either drugs or Poles. But they didn't have time. Everything had gone wrong. A person had been shot through the head. He studied Mariusz; the man with the shaved head and expensive suit had killed someone only a couple of hours ago, but showed nothing. Maybe he couldn't, maybe he was being professional. Hoffmann wasn't frightened of him, and he wasn't frightened of Jerzy, but he respected the fact that they had no limits; if he had made them nervous, suspicious of his loyalty, the shot that had been fired could just as easily have been aimed at him.