Three Seconds

from bad coffee from the nearest petrol station. He picked up one of the chairs and waited pointedly until Ewert took the next one. They left the room that would soon be a private gathering place for the bereaved and opened the door to thestairs up into the tower, a swift glance into the nave and the priest who was pushing a trolley of bibles between two rows of pews. He saw them and raised his hand.
    ‘Are you going up?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘The passing bell … there’s only twenty minutes to go.’
    ‘We’ll be done by then.’
    They went up the stairs and the aluminium ladder and somehow it felt further and higher than the day before. The door to the church tower balcony was open and creaked gently in the wind that played over the gravestones and grass. Grens was about to close it when he noticed the mark on the door frame. The wood was newly splintered on a level with the door handle. It was obvious and he remembered that the first sniper had remarked that the door had been forced open. He poked the splintered wood with a pen – it hadn’t even darkened yet, it couldn’t have been that long ago.
    The morning mist was clearing and the sky would soon be as blue as the day before. Aspsås prison was waiting under them like great lumps of grey, silent cement, walls and buildings that kept out dreams and laughter.
    Ewert Grens went out onto the flimsy wooden structure.
    ‘Sven, carry on reading.’
    A sniper had lain here twenty-four hours ago.
    ‘There isn’t anything else.’
    A gun aimed at a person’s head.
    ‘Read!
’
    ‘
Shooting incident involving a police officer in Söderhamn, at a public space on the edge of the town, he hit—’
    ‘That’s enough.’
    He had made his decision.
    His order was death.
    __________
    The wind picked up. It felt good on his face, and for a while there was only the sun that warmed his pale cheeks and the birds flying way above his head, chasing what couldn’t be seen. He held on to the low railing, a moment of dizziness, one single step would pitch him headlong. He looked at his feet and at a couple of dark round stains onthe last wooden board, the one that stopped a few centimetres out from the railing. He touched them with his fingertips, smelt them, gun grease, must have escaped from the gun barrel and would now forever discolour the floor of the balcony.
     
    Ewert Grens knelt down, then lay so that his whole body was where the marksman had been. His elbows on the wooden floor, an imaginary gun in his hands, he aimed at the window that was no longer there, a hole surrounded by soot right up to the roof of the building called Block B.
    ‘This was where he was lying. When he was waiting for my order.’
    Ewert looked up at Sven.
    ‘When he was waiting for me to ask him to kill.’
    He waved impatiently at his colleague.
    ‘You lie down too. I want you to know what it feels like.’
    ‘I don’t like heights. You know that.’
    ‘Sven, just lie down. The railing, it’s enough, it’ll protect you.’
    Sven Sundkvist crept gingerly out, going a bit further so he didn’t need to lie near Grens’s heavy body. He hated heights, too much to lose if you fell, a fear that got stronger every year. He crept and wriggled and stretched out his hand when he was sufficiently close, and clung on to the railing.
    It was high. Ewert was breathing heavily. The wind was blowing.
    Sven wrapped his fingers tighter round a cold iron railing and felt something coming loose; he was holding something in his hand. He pulled it back, even more came off, something black and rectangular, three or four centimetres long, a lead at one end.
    ‘Ewert.’
    An outstretched hand.
    ‘This was on the railing.’
    They both realised what it was.
    A solar cell.
    Painted black, the same colour as the railing, the hand that had put it there did not want it to be seen.
    Sven pulled carefully at the equally black lead. It came loose and he pulled harder, hauling in a round piece of metal, smaller than the first, barely a centimetre in diameter.
    An electronic transmitter.
    When I was watching him through the binoculars. I don’t know, it was like he knew.
    ‘A transmitter, a lead, a solar cell. Ewert … Sterner was right.’
    As if he knew that he was in range.
    Sven held the lead, swinging it back and forth, forgot for a moment to be frightened of what was far below.
    ‘Hoffmann heard every word that was said between you and the sniper.’

Ewert Grens had been careful to close the door to