Three Seconds

shaken.’
    ‘I know. I’ve spoken to him as well. Twice.’
    ‘How does it feel?’
    ‘Feel?’
    ‘To know that you’re to blame.’
    The guilt. Grens knew everything about that too.
    ‘It’s half past one in the morning. I’m still in my uniform in my own kitchen. And you wonder how it feels?’
    ‘Because that’s right, isn’t it? You’re to blame?’
    Oscarsson threw up his hands.
    ‘Grens, I know what you’re after.’
    Ewert Grens looked at another man who wasn’t going to get to bed tonight either.
    ‘You spoke to one of my colleagues about thirty-six hours ago. You admitted that you had made at least four decisions that had forced Hoffmann to act as he did.’
    Lennart Oscarsson was red in the face.
    ‘I know what you’re after!’
    ‘Who?’
    The governor jumped up, poured out what was left in the bottle, then threw it against the wall and waited until the last shard of glass was still. He unbuttoned his uniform jacket, put it on the now empty kitchen table, fetched big scissors from the cutlery drawer. With great care he straightened out one of the sleeves, stroked the material with the back of his hand until he was sure it was flat and then started to cut, quite a large piece, five maybe six centimetres wide.
    ‘Who gave you the orders?’
    He held the first piece of material in his hand, felt the frayed edge. He smiled, Grens was convinced of it, an almost shy smile.
    ‘Oscarsson,
who
?’
    He cut as he had done before, straight, considerate lines, the rectangular pieces neatly on top of the first.
    ‘Stefan Lygás. A prisoner you were responsible for. A prisoner who is now dead.’
    ‘It wasn’t my fault.’
    ‘Pawel Murawski. Piet Hoffmann. Two other prisoners you were responsible for. Two other prisoners who are now dead.’
    ‘It wasn’t my fault.’
    ‘Martin Jacobson. A—’
    ‘All right, that’s enough.’
    ‘Martin Jacobson, a prison warden who—’
    ‘For Christ’s sake, Grens, that’s enough!’
    The first arm was ready. Pieces of material stacked in a small pile.
    Oscarsson pulled out the next one, shook it lightly, a crease more or less in the middle, hand backwards and forwards across it until it disappeared.
    ‘Pål Larsen.’
    He cut again, faster now.
    ‘General Director Pål Larsen ordered me.’
    Grens remembered, about half an hour into the recording, a trouser leg scraping against the microphone as it stretched, and the sound of ateaspoon against porcelain when someone had taken a sip from a coffee cup.
    ‘I appointed you. And that means that you decide what happens in the Prison and Probation Service.’
    A short pause while the state secretary left the room to get the head of the Prison and Probation Service who had been sitting waiting outside in the corridor.
    ‘You decide what you and I agree that you should decide.’
    The general director had been given an order. The general director had passed that order on. From the real sender.
    Ewert Grens looked at a bare-torsoed man who was cutting to pieces the uniform that he had longed for all his adult life and he hurried out of the kitchen that would never change colour and the home that was even lonelier than his own.
    ‘Do you know what I’m going to do with these?’
    Lennart Oscarsson stood in the open doorway as Grens got into his car. The recently shredded pieces in his raised hands, he dropped a couple and they fell slowly to the ground.
    ‘Wash the car, Grens. You know, you always need clean bits when you’re polishing, and this, this is bloody expensive material.’
    __________
    He dialled the number as the car rolled out of the silent rows of terraced houses. He looked at the church and the square church tower, at the prison and the workshop that could be seen behind the high wall.
     
    Not even thirty-six hours had passed. It would haunt him for the rest of his life.
    ‘Hello?’
    Göransson had been awake.
    ‘Difficulties sleeping?’
    ‘What do you want, Ewert?’
    ‘You and me to have a meeting. In about half an hour.’
    ‘I don’t think so.’
    ‘A meeting. In your office. In your capacity as CHIS controller.’
    ‘Tomorrow.’
    Grens looked at the sign in his rear-view mirror; it was hard to read in the dark but he knew what the town he had just left was called.
    He hoped it would be a while before he had to return.
    ‘Paula.’
    ‘Excuse me?’
    ‘That’s what we’re going to talk about.’
    He waited, there was a long silence.
    ‘Paula who?’
    He didn’t