Three Seconds

ran across the room to the desk and the shelves behind. A hole with edges of dust. It wasn’t there. The music that had given him comfort and strength for all these years. It was at times like this he had needed it most, when anger tipped over into rage, starting somewhere in his belly, burning its way to every part of his body, and it would stay there until he knew who had made him into a useful idiot, who had let him shoot.
    ‘With that information, I wouldn’t have ordered the sniper to fire.’
    He looked at his young colleague.
    ‘If I had known what I know now … Hoffmann would never have died.’
    __________
    The brown plastic cup would soon be full of strong, black, bitter coffee. The machine rattled as it normally did, mostly towards the end, reluctant to give up the last drops. Chief Superintendent Göransson drank the coffee while he was out in the corridor. He saw Mariana Hermansson coming out of Grens’s office, a file under her arm. He knew what their meeting had been about, they were doing exactly what they should, filing the reports required following a lethal shooting at Aspsås.
     
    I did not participate
.
    He crushed the cup, the hot liquid running down the back of his hand.
    I jumped ship.
    Göransson drank some more of the bitterness, emptied the cup. He greeted Sven Sundkvist who was passing. He also had a couple of files under his arm, on his way to the office that Hermansson had just left, to Ewert Grens.
    __________
    He noticed the flushed cheeks, the pulsing vein by his temple.
     
    Sven knew Ewert Grens better than anyone else in the building, he had had to face his boss’s anger and learn to deal with it, so now when the shouting and the kicking of bins took over he no longer saw or heard it, it had nothing to do with him, only Ewert could chase his own demons.
    ‘You don’t look happy.’
    ‘Drop by Hermansson when you’re done here. She’ll explain. I can’t face it right now.’
    Sven looked at the man in the middle of the floor. They had met earlier that morning. This boiling rage hadn’t been there then.
    Something had happened.
    ‘What do you know about Wilson?’
    ‘Erik?’
    ‘Are there any other Wilsons on the bloody corridor?’
    Another kind of anger. Clear, tangible. Ewert could be angry about most things, a difficult, irritated anger that was such a frequent caller that it never got through. But this anger was serious, it demanded space and he tried not to downplay it.
    I must go to Hermansson afterwards.
    ‘I don’t know him. Even though we’ve been here almost the same length of time. It just turned out that way. But … he seems like a nice enough guy. Why?’
    ‘I just heard his name today in the wrong circumstances.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘We’ll talk about that later too.’
    Sven didn’t ask any more questions. He knew he wouldn’t get any answers yet.
    ‘I’ve got the first report on Hoffmann Security AB. You interested?’
    ‘You know I am.’
    He put two pieces of paper down on Ewert’s desk.
    ‘I want you to have a look. Come over here.’
    Ewert stood beside Sven.
    ‘A close company with annual reports and normal articles of association. I can look into that more, if you want, take a really good look at the figures.’
    He pointed at the second piece of paper.
    ‘But this, I want you to have a look at this, right now.’
    A drawing of four squares stacked on top of each other.
    ‘The ownership structure, Ewert. This is interesting. A board that consists of three people. Piet Hoffmann, Zofia Hoffmann and a Polish citizen, Stanislaw Rosloniec.’
    A Polish citizen
.
    ‘I’ve run a check on Rosloniec. He lives in Warsaw, is not registered in any international criminal intelligence databases and – now it gets really interesting – is employed by a Polish company called Wojtek Security International.’
    Wojtek
.
    Ewert Grens searched Sven’s pattern of squares but saw an airport in Denmark and a detective superintendent called Jacob Andersen.
    Eighteen days ago.
    They had sat in a meeting room at Kastrup police station and eaten greasy pastries and Andersen had spoken about a Danish informant who was supposed to buy amphetamines. In a flat in Stockholm. With two Poles and their Swedish contact.
    Swedish contact
.
    ‘Damn it … hang on a tick, Sven!’
    Grens pulled open one of his desk drawers and took out a CD player and the CD of the voice that Krantz had burnt for him. Headphones on and three sentences he knew off by