Three Seconds

before.
    It had been his decision.
    His responsibility.
    Ewert Grens approached the building called Block B, paused a while outside the front door, and looked up at the second floor.
    The acrid smell of fire had almost intensified.
    First an explosion and a projectile that penetrated and shattered a window and a person’s head. Then another, more powerful one, the god-awful black smoke that never seemed to stop, that concealed what they were trying to see; an explosion that could not be explained.
    His decision
.
    He started to walk up the stairs, past all the closed doors, towards the smell of smoke.
    His responsibility.
    Ewert Grens had in fact never had any relationship to death. He worked with it, frequently came face to face with it, and any thoughts of his own death were irrelevant. They had stopped thirty years ago the moment that he, as the driver of a police van, had driven over a head that had then ceased to function. Anni’s head. He had no desire to die, it wasn’t that, but nor did he desire to live. In his meeting with guilt and grief he had developed the ability toencapsulate it, and had continued to do so, and now he didn’t even know where to start.
    The door was open and the inside was black with soot.
    Grens looked into the burnt-out workshop, pulled some transparent plastic bags over his shoes and stepped over the blue and white cordon.
    There was always something lonely about places that have been destroyed by fire, the all-engulfing flames that eventually turned and subsided. He was walking on the remains of shelves that had fallen, between machines that were black and had been chewed and stopped.
    It was there. On the ceiling, on the walls. What he had come for.
    He had seen the white ones before, the forensic team’s markers for body parts. More than in Västmannagatan. But the red ones, he had never been to a crime scene with red flags.
    Two bodies, hundreds … maybe thousands of pieces.
    He wondered whether Errfors, the forensic pathologist, would ever be able to piece enough together for an identification. People who had been alive until recently, who no longer existed, other than in bits marked by small flags. He started to count them without knowing why, just a few square metres of wall, but tired of it when he reached three hundred and seventy-four. He crossed over the window that was no longer there, a light breeze through the hole in the wall. He stood in the place where Hoffmann had stood, the church and the church tower silhouetted against the sky. The sniper had lain up there, he had aimed and fired a bullet on Ewert Grens’s command.
    __________
    Aspsås shrank in the rear-view mirror.
     
    He had stayed for a couple of hours in the stench of burnt oil and heavy smoke. The feeling had continued to torment him, no matter how many red and white flags marking body parts he counted, he still couldn’t understand it, and the unease kept him awake, a reminder of the adrenaline and irritation. He didn’t like it, tried to lose it in the mess on the floor and the tools that would never be used again, but it clung to him, whispering something he couldn’t understand. He was approaching Stockholm through the northern satellite towns and suburbs when his mobile phone sang out from the back seat. He slowed down, leant back for his jacket.
    ‘Ewert?’
    ‘Are you awake?’
    ‘Where are you?’
    ‘This early, Sven? Shouldn’t it be me who’s calling you?’
    Sven Sundkvist smiled, it was a long time since he and Anita had been bothered by the phone ringing in the bedroom between midnight and dawn. Ewert always called the minute he had something that needed an immediate answer, and that tended to be at night when everyone else was asleep. But he hadn’t been able to sleep himself last night. He had lain close to Anita and listened to the ticking of the alarm clock until, after a couple of hours, he crept out of bed and went down to the kitchen on the ground floor of their terraced house, and sat there doing crosswords, as he sometimes did when the nights were long. But the unease refused to leave his house. The same unease that Ewert had talked about earlier that evening, thoughts that had nowhere to go.
    ‘I’m on my way into the city, Ewert. I’m just by Gullmarsplan and then heading west. To Kungsängen. Sterner just called.’
    ‘Sterner?’
    ‘The sniper.’
    Grens accelerated – the early morning commuters were still in their garages, so it was easy to drive.
    ‘Then