Three Seconds

of her office further down the corridor, she had heard him, the limping, it was just Grens lumbering around.
    ‘Breakfast, lunch, I don’t know. Did you want something?’
    She shook her head, they walked slowly, side by side.
    ‘This morning, early … Ewert, was it
your
voice?’
    ‘You live here in Kungsholmen?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Nearby?’
    ‘I don’t have far to go.’
    Grens nodded.
    ‘Then it was probably me you heard.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Up in the remand yards on the roof. You get a good view from up there.’
    ‘I heard. And so did the rest of Stockholm.’
    Ewert Grens looked at her, smiled, something he didn’t do often.
    ‘It was a choice between that and firing a bullet through a wardrobe door. I understand that some prefer the latter.’
    They had come to his door. He stopped, it felt like she was going to come in.
    ‘Did you want something, Hermansson?’
    ‘Zofia Hoffmann.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I’m not getting anywhere. She’s disappeared.’
    The banana-flavoured yoghurt was finished. He should have bought one more.
    ‘I’ve checked with her work again. She hasn’t been in touch since the hostage drama. The children’s nursery, same story.’
    Mariana Hermansson tried to peer into his office. Grens closed the door a bit more. He didn’t know why, she had come there several times a day since he employed her three years ago. But he had just been asleep there, nearly seven hours on the sofa – it was as if he didn’t want her to know that.
    ‘I’ve located her closest family. Not many of them. Her parents, an aunt, two uncles. All in the Stockholm area. She isn’t there. The kids aren’t there.’
    She looked at him.
    ‘I’ve spoken to the three women who are described as her best friends. With neighbours, with a gardener who works for the family for a couple of hours every now and then, with several members of a choir where she sings a couple of times a week, with the oldest son’s football trainer and the youngest son’s gymnastics teacher.’
    She shrugged.
    ‘No one has seen them.’
    Hermansson waited for a response. She didn’t get one.
    ‘I’ve checked the hospitals, hotels, hostels. They aren’t anywhere, Ewert. Zofia and the two boys, they can’t be found anywhere.’
    Ewert Grens nodded.
    ‘Wait here. I want to show you something.’
    He opened the door, closed it behind him, careful that she shouldn’t see in or follow him.
    You came to Aspsås prison as Wojtek’s contact man in Sweden.
    You were there to knock out the competition for them and then establish Wojtek and expand.
    One single moment and you were someone else.
    One single meeting with a lawyer, a messenger, and they knew who you really were.
    You rang her. You warned her
.
    Grens lifted up a padded envelope that was lying on his desk and was now emptied of three passports, a receiver and a CD with a secretrecording. He went back out to the corridor and Hermansson with it under his arm.
    ‘She received two short phone calls from Hoffmann. We don’t know what they were about and we haven’t found anything to indicate that she was involved in any way. We have no reasonable grounds to suspect her of anything whatsoever.’
    Grens held up the envelope so that Hermansson could see it.
    ‘We can’t issue a warrant for her arrest abroad. Even though that is where she is.’
    He pointed at the postmark.
    ‘I’m convinced that it was Zofia Hoffmann who sent this. Frankfurt am Main International Airport. Two hundred and sixty-five destinations, fourteen hundred flights, one hundred and fifty thousand passengers. Every day.’
    He started to head for the vending machine – he needed another yoghurt, another cinnamon bun.
    ‘She’s well gone, Hermansson. And she knows. She knows that we have no grounds to get her or even look for her.’

The sun was high.
     
    It had been warm since early morning. He had fought with the damp sheets and a pillow drowned in sweat from his hairline, the temperature rising a couple of degrees every hour until now, just before lunch, the heat and the sharp light forced him to stop abruptly in front of the great gate until what was double had disappeared.
    Erik Wilson sat quietly in the front seat of the hire car.
    He had been here for five days, back in Glynco, Georgia at a military base called FLETC, to continue the work that had been interrupted when Paula rang about a buyer in Västmannagatan who had paid with a Polish bullet to the head.
    He started the car again,