Three Seconds

and tomorrow evening it would be a report on another shooting. There was always an investigation that was a trauma for the person who was shot, but for the investigator generated a vicarious sense of belonging. Grens was almost at the coffee machine and two plastic cups of blackness when he stopped by his pigeonhole and saw a large padded envelope in the pile of unopened letters; too many bloody reference lists and soulless mass mailings. He pulled it out and weighedit in his hand – not particularly heavy – turned it over without seeing any sender. His name and address were easy to read, a man’s handwriting, he was sure of that, something square, unrhythmical, almost sharp about it, possibly in felt pen.
    Ewert Grens put the envelope down in the middle of the desk and stared at it while he emptied the first cup. Sometimes you just get a feeling, impossible to explain. He opened a drawer and a bag with unused rubber gloves, put on a pair and opened the end of the envelope with his index finger. He peeped cautiously in. No letter, no accompanying text or paper. He counted five things, took them out one at a time and placed them in a row in front of him, between the files of ongoing investigations.
    Half a plastic cup of coffee more.
    He started from the left. Three passports. Red with gold letters. EUROPEAN UNION, SWEDEN, PASSPORT . All Swedish, genuine, issued by the police authority in Stockholm.
    The photographs had been taken in a normal photo booth.
    A few centimetres in size, black and white, slightly blurred, small reflections in the shining eyes.
    The same face three times. Different names, different ID numbers.
    The face of a dead person.
    Piet Hoffmann.
    Grens leant back in his chair and looked over at the window and the light outside, dim street lights that guarded the straight, empty asphalt paths of the inner courtyard at Kronoberg.
    If this is you.
    He picked up the envelope, turned it round.
    If this has come from you.
    He held it closer, fingertips brushed lightly over the front. There were no stamps. But there was something that looked like a postmark in the top right-hand corner. He studied it for a long time. Difficult to read, half the letters had disappeared. FRANKFURT . He was more or less certain. And six numbers. 234212. Then a kind of symbol, maybe a bird, or a plane.
    The rest was mainly streaks that had seen too much water.
    Grens scoured his desk drawer and the telephone list that he found there in a plastic sleeve. Horst Bauer, Bundeskriminalamt, Wiesbaden. He liked the German detective superintendent with whom he hadworked a few years ago on an investigation in connection with a busload of abandoned Romanian children. Bauer was at home and having dinner, but was friendly and helpful and while Ewert waited and his food got cold, made three phone calls to confirm that the envelope that had recently arrived in a pigeonhole at the City Police in Stockholm had probably been sent by a courier company with offices at Frankfurt am Main International Airport.
    Grens thanked him and hung up.
    One of the world’s largest airports.
    He gave a deep sigh.
    If it’s you. If this comes from you. You instructed someone to send it for you. After your death.
    Two more objects on the desk. The first wasn’t even a centimetre big. He held it in his clumsy rubber fingers. A receiver, a silver earpiece, electronic devices for listening to conversations that were caught by transmitters of the same size.
    Dear God.
    It wasn’t even twelve hours since Sven had held such a transmitter in his hand, attached to a black lead and a solar cell painted in the same colour.
    The church tower’s fragile railing.
    Fifteen hundred and three metres from the now blown-out workshop window.
    Ewert Grens stretched up to the shelf behind the desk and the plastic bag that had not yet been recorded in any chain of custody list or delivered to forensics. He emptied the contents out of the bag, rang one of the few numbers he knew off by heart and put the receiver down on the desk so that the talking clock voice was close to the transmitter. He then left the room and closed the door while he held the silver receiver to his ear and listened to the clock striking at ten-second intervals.
    It worked.
    The receiver that he had just been sent in an envelope was set at exactly the same frequency as the transmitter they had found on the tower railing.
    One thing left. A CD.
    Grens balanced the shiny disc on his hand. No text on