Three Seconds

hospital unit and out of bounds.’
    ‘Out of bounds?’
    ‘Barrier nursing. 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 pot 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 Ågestam 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.
    ‘Ågestam?’
    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.’
    Ågestam 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 thenproceeded 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 out 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 bin 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.’
    The order that you must not be questioned
.
    ‘So … what’s your problem?’
    ‘I want to be put in the hole.’
    ‘You want what?’
    ‘The hole. Solitary confinement.’
    I see you.
    You’re sitting there in the clothes we’ve issued.
    But I don’t understand who you are.
    ‘Solitary confinement? Exactly … what exactly are you talking about, Hoffmann?’
    ‘I don’t want to have any contact with the other prisoners.’
    ‘Are you being threatened?’
    ‘No contact. That’s all I’m saying.’
    Piet Hoffmann looked out through the open door. Prisoners who moved around freely represented death just as much here as in any other unit. They had been moved away from others but not from each other.
    ‘That’s not the way it works. Hoffmann, solitary confinement is our decision.