Three Seconds

heart.
    A dead man. Västmannagatan 79. Fourth floor.
    He removed the headphones and put them on Sven’s head.
    ‘Listen.’
    Sven Sundkvist had analysed the recording from Emergency Services on the ninth of May at 12.37.50 as many times as Ewert.
    ‘And now listen to this.’
    The voice had been stored in one of the computer’s sound files. They had both encountered it when they were waiting in a churchyard twenty-four hours ago.
    ‘He’s a dead man in three minutes
.’
    The one whispered
dead
and the other screamed
dead
, but when Ewert Grens and Sven Sundkvist listened carefully and compared the pronunciation of the
d
and the
e
and the
a
, it was obvious.
    It was the same voice.
    ‘It’s him.’
    ‘It sure as hell is him, Sven! It was Hoffmann who was in the flat! It was Hoffmann who raised the alarm!’
    Grens was already on his way out of the room.
    Wojtek is the Polish mafia
.
    Hoffmann Security AB is linked to Wojtek
.
    The car was parked on Bergsgatan and he hurried down the stairs, even though the lift was empty.
    So why did you raise the alarm?
    So why did you shoot another member in solitary confinement and blow a third member up?
    He turned out of Bergsgatan and drove down Hantverkargatan towards the city. He was going to visit the person whose death he was responsible for.
    __________
    He stopped the car in a bus lane outside the door to Vasagatan 42.
     
    A couple of minutes, then Nils Krantz knocked on the window.
    ‘Anything in particular?’
    ‘I don’t know yet. It just feels right. An hour maybe, I have to think.’
    ‘Here, keep them for the moment. I’ll let you know if I need them.’
    Krantz gave him a set of keys and Ewert Grens put it in the inner pocket of his jacket.
    ‘By the way, Ewert …’
    The forensic scientist had stopped a bit further down the pavement.
    ‘I’ve identified the two explosives. Pentyl and nitroglycerine. It was the pentyl that caused the actual explosion, the wave that forced out the window and the heat that ignited the diesel. And the nitroglycerine had been applied directly onto someone’s skin – I don’t know whose yet, though.’
    Grens went up the stairs of one of the many buildings in central Stockholm from the turn of the century, the first few years of the nineteen hundreds when the cityscape changed dramatically.
    He stopped in front of a door on the first floor.
    Hoffmann Security AB. Same old trick. A security firm as a front for the Eastern European mafia.
    He opened the door with the keys that he’d got from Krantz.
    A beautiful flat, shining parquet floor, high ceilings, white walls.
    He looked out of the window with a view of Kungsbron and the Vasa theatre, an elderly couple on their way in to the evening performance, as he had often thought of doing himself, but never got around to.
    You were done for a drugs crime. But you weren’t an amphetamine dealer.
    He walked down the hall and went into what must once have been the drawing room, but was now an office with two gun cabinets by an open fire.
    You had links with Wojtek. But you were not a member of the mafia.
    He sat down in the chair by the desk that he guessed Hoffmann must have sat in.
    You were someone else
.
    He got up again and wandered round the flat, looked in the two empty gun cabinets, touched the deactivated alarm, rinsed out some dirty glasses.
    Who?
    __________
    When he left Hoffmann Security AB, Grens had gone to look at the storage spaces that belonged to the flat. He had opened a storeroom in the cellar with a strong smell of damp, and he had walked around in the loft with a fan heater whirring above his head while he looked for a storeroom that was more or less empty, except for a hammer and chisel that were lying on top of a pile of old tyres.
     
    It was late, and he should perhaps have driven the kilometre from the door on Vasagatan to his own flat on Sveavägen, but the anger and restlessness pushed back the tiredness – he wouldn’t sleep tonight either.
    The corridor of the homicide unit was waiting, abandoned. His colleagues would rather spend the first summer evenings with a glass of wine at one of the outside cafés on Kungsholmen followed by a slow walk home, than with twenty-four parallel investigations and unpaid overtime in a characterless office. He didn’t feel left out, didn’t miss it, he had chosen long ago not to take part and your own choice can never become ugly loneliness. This evening it would be a report on a shooting in a prison