Three Seconds

suspected why the exact same people who had arranged for Hoffmann’s prison sentence had suddenly been there, searching for a bureaucratic reason for killing him.
     
    Piet Hoffmann was dangerous.
    Piet Hoffmann knew the truth about a murder that was less important than continued infiltration.
    When Grens identified Hoffmann’s name on the periphery of the investigation and wanted to question him, he became even more dangerous.
    They had burnt him.
    But he had survived an attack, taken hostages and positioned himself where he was visible in a workshop window.
    You recorded the meeting. You sent it to me. The man who had to decide on your death.
    Ewert Grens parked on Fredsgatan close to the dark building from where Sweden was governed. He would soon make his way in there. He had just listened to a meeting that had been recorded in one of its many senior offices twenty-one days ago.
    He got out his mobile phone and dialled Sven Sundkvist’s number. Three rings. Someone coughed and struggled to find strength.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Sven, it’s me. I want—’
    ‘Ewert, I’m asleep. I’ve been asleep since eight. We missed out on last night, remember?’
    ‘You’re not going to get much more sleep tonight either. You’re going to go to the USA, to south Georgia. Your plane leaves Arlanda in two and half hours. You’ll arrive—’
    ‘Ewert.’
    Sven had pulled himself up, his voice was stronger – it was probably easier to talk when your chest and airways were free of pillows and duvets.
    ‘What are you talking about?’
    ‘I want you to get up and get dressed, Sven. You’re going to meet Erik Wilson and you’re going to get him to confirm that a meeting I’ve now listened to actually took place. I’ll call you in a couple of hours. By that time, you’ll be sitting in a taxi and you’ll have listened to the sound file that I’ve forwarded to your computer. You’ll understand exactly what this is all about.’
    Grens cut the engine and got out the car.
    The doors to power were made of glass and had opened automatically whenever he had been there during the day. Now they remained closed and he had to press a bell to wake the security guard one floor up.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Detective Superintendent Grens, City Police. I’m here to look at some of your surveillance camera footage.’
    ‘Now?’
    ‘Do you have anything else to do?’
    Some rustling papers near the microphone made the speaker crackle.
    ‘Did you say Grens?’
    ‘You can see me in the camera. And now you can see the ID that I’m holding up.’
    ‘No one said you were coming. I want to see it again properly when you’re in here with me.
Then
I’ll decide whether you can stay or whether I’d rather you came back tomorrow.’
    __________
    Ewert Grens accelerated, the E18 north of Roslagstull was almost empty and right now he didn’t give a damn about signs that limited the speed to seventy kilometres an hour.
     
    He had first checked the security company’s signing-in book.
    The state secretary of the Ministry of Justice had had a total of four visitors on the tenth of May. They had arrived separately within twenty-five minutes of each other. First the national police commissioner, then Göransson, a bit later Erik Wilson and finally, in handwriting that wasdifficult to read, Grens and the security man were eventually convinced that the visitor who had signed in at 15.36 was called Piet Hoffmann.
    He passed Danderyd, Täby, Vallentuna … for the third time in twenty-four hours he was approaching the small town of Aspsås, but he wasn’t going to the prison or the church, he was going to a terraced house and a man he would not leave until he had answered the one question that Grens had come to ask.
    With the signing-in book in his hand, Ewert Grens had demanded to see footage from two of the cameras that watched over the Government Offices and every person passing in or out. He had identified them one by one. First when they signed in, the camera was above the security desk in the entrance to Rosenbad and they stood there, all four of them, without looking up. Then a camera at face level in a corridor on the second floor opposite the door to the state secretary’s office. He had seen the national police commissioner and Göransson knock on the door and go in, within a couple of minutes of each other. Wilson had arrived twenty minutes later and Hoffmann had sauntered down the corridor about seven minutes after that. He had known