Three Seconds

tasted the same. He was holding the third in his hand when he realised why.
    It was like a film on his palate.
    He had started the day with two whiskies in Ågestam’s kitchen. He didn’t normally do that. He didn’t generally drink much spirits, it was years since he’d stopped drinking on his own.
    Ewert Grens sat at his desk and felt strangely empty.
    The first early birds had already come and passed his open door, but hadn’t annoyed him, not even those who had tried to stop and say good morning.
    He had released his anger.
    He had driven from Ågestam, a few newspaper delivery boys, the odd cyclist, that was all – a city that was at its weariest just before five.
    There had been plenty of room for guilt. The guilt that others had tried to lay on him. He had raged against it, tried to silence it when it sat beside him, chased it into the back seat. It had continued to nag him, forcing him to drive faster. He had been on his way to Göransson to offload it, then managed to control himself – he would confront them, but not yet, soon, he would meet the people who were truly responsible very soon. He had parked in Bergsgatan by the entrance to the police headquarters but had not gone directly to his office, he had taken the lift up to Kronoberg remand and then carried on up to the roof and eight long, narrow cages. One hour of fresh air every day and twenty metres to move in, then jail. He had ordered the wardens on duty to call in two prisoners who, in ill-fitting prison clothes and separate cages, were standing looking out over the city and freedom, and then to leave their posts and go down two floors for an early morning coffee. Grens had waited until he was completely alone and then gone out into one of the small yards. He had looked at the sky through the criss-cross of bars and he had screamed, high above thesleeping buildings in the Stockholm dawn. For fifteen minutes he had held the stolen laptop with another reality in his hands and screamed louder than ever before, he had released his fury and it raced over the rooftops and evaporated somewhere above Vasastan, leaving him extremely hoarse, tired, almost spent.
    The coffee still tasted odd. He put it to one side and sat down on the corduroy sofa, lay down after a while, closed his eyes while he searched for a face in the window of a prison workshop.
    I don’t get it.
    Someone who chooses a life where each day is a potential death sentence.
    For the excitement? For some kind of romantic spy nonsense? For personal morals?
    I’m not convinced. That sort of thing just sounds good.
    For the money?
    Ten thousand crappy kronor a month paid from reward money in order to avoid formal pay rolls and to protect your identity?
    Hardly.
    Grens straightened the fabric on the arm of the sofa that was slightly too high; it was chafing his neck and made it difficult to relax.
    I just don’t get it.
    You could commit whatever bloody crime you wanted, you were outside the law, but only for as long as you were useful, until you became someone who could be spared.
    You were an outlaw.
    You knew it. You knew that’s how it worked.
    You had everything that I don’t have, you had a wife, children, a home, you had something to lose.
    And still you chose it.
    I don’t get it.
    __________
    His neck was stiff. The slightly too high sofa arm.
     
    He had fallen asleep.
    The face in the window of a prison workshop had disappeared, sleep had taken over; the kind that came after rage that was soft and had rocked him gently for nearly seven hours. He might have woken up once, he wasn’t sure, but it felt like that, like the telephone had rung,like Sven had said that he was sitting in an airport outside New York waiting for the next flight to Jacksonville, that the sound file was interesting and that he had prepared himself for a meeting with Wilson on the plane.
    It was a long time since Ewert Grens had slept so well.
    Despite the bright sunlight in the room, despite all the bloody noise.
    He stretched. His back was as sore as it usually was after sleeping on the narrow sofa, his stiff leg ached when it reached the floor. He was slowly falling to bits, one day at a time, fifty-nine-year-old men who exercised too little and ate too much generally did.
    A cold shower in the changing room that he seldom used, two cinnamon buns and a bottle of banana-flavoured drinking yoghurt from the vending machine.
    ‘Ewert?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Is that your lunch?’
    Hermansson had come out