Three Seconds

either side, nothing to give away the content.
    He pushed it into the narrow opening in the short end of his computer tower.
    ‘Government Offices, Tuesday tenth of May.’
    It was the same voice.
    He had listened to it together with Sven only a couple of hours ago.
    The voice that had raised the alarm. The voice that had threatened.
    Hoffmann.
    Grens swallowed the last drops in the plastic cup. A third?
    Later. He read the numbers on the sound file. Seventy-eight minutes and thirty-four seconds.
    When I’ve listened to this.

The third cup of coffee from the machine was on the desk.
     
    Ewert Grens had gone to get it but didn’t need it. The racing in his chest that was making him dizzy had nothing to do with caffeine.
    A
legal police operation
had just become
legitimised murder
.
    He listened again.
    First of all, scraping sounds, someone walking, fabric rubbing against a microphone with every step. After eleven minutes and forty-seven seconds – he checked on the sound file timer – a couple of voices, muffled. The microphone had been low, leg height, and it was obvious that Hoffmann moved every now and then to get closer to the sound source, had slowly stretched out a leg towards the person talking, suddenly got up and stood right next to them.
    ‘The document … I’ve read it. I assumed … I assumed that it concerned a … woman?’
    The only voice he hadn’t heard before.
    A woman, forty, maybe fifty years old. A soft voice with harsh sentences, he was sure he would recognise it if he heard it again.
    ‘Paula. That’s my name, in here.’
    The clearest voice.
    The person with the microphone.
    Hoffmann. But he called himself Paula. A code name.
    ‘We have to make him more dangerous … He will have committed some serious crimes. He’ll be given a long sentence.’
    The third voice.
    Quite a high voice, the sort that doesn’t fit the face, a colleague from the same corridor, only a few doors down and someone who had just happened to be passing on one of the first days of the investigation and had wanted to know how it was going and to give some ideas that pointed in the wrong direction.
    Ewert Grens slammed his hand down on the desk, hard.
    Erik Wilson.
    He hit the desk again, with both hands this time, swore loudly at the cold office walls that just stood there.
    Two more voices.
    The two he knew best, part of a hierarchical chain of command, links between a criminal and a government office.
    ‘Paula doesn’t have time for Västmannagatan.’
    A sharp, nasal voice, a bit too loud.
    The national police commissioner.
    ‘You’ve dealt with similar cases before.’
    A deep, resonant voice, that didn’t swallow its words, but held them, vowels that were prolonged.
    Göransson.
    Ewert Grens stopped the recording and in one go drank the coffee that was still too hot and burnt its way down from his throat to his stomach. He didn’t feel it – warm, cold, he was shaking as he had been since he listened to it the first time and was about to go back out into the corridor and pour more of the heat into himself until he managed to feel something other than the throttling rage.
    A meeting at Rosenbad.
    He took a felt pen from the pen holder and drew a rectangle and five circles straight onto the blotter.
    A meeting table with five heads.
    One who was probably a state secretary from the Ministry of Justice. One who called himself Paula. One who functioned as Paula’s handler. One who was the most senior police officer in the country. And one, he looked at the round circle that represented Göransson, who was Ewert Grens’s immediate line manager and Erik Wilson’s line manager and responsible for both their workloads and had therefore known all along why there were no answers in the Västmannagatan 79 case.
    ‘I am a useful idiot.’
    Ewert Grens picked up the vandalised blotter and threw it to the floor.
    ‘I am a bloody useful idiot.’
    He pressed play again, sentences that he had already heard.
    ‘Paula. That’s my name, in here.’
    You weren’t the mafia. You were one of us. You were employed by us to pretend you were the mafia.
    And I murdered you.

sunday
     

The big clock on Kungsholms church struck half past midnight when Ewert Grens left his office and the police headquarters and drove the short distance to Rosenbad. It was a lovely, warm night, but he didn’t notice. He knew what had happened at Västmannagatan 79. He knew why Piet Hoffmann had done time at Aspsås prison. And he