Three Seconds

younger. He himself had been ten years younger. If it had been today would he have recruited Hoffmann? Would Hoffmann have wanted to be recruited? Piet had done time in Österåker. A prison some way north of Stockholm with a whole host of small-timecrooks. Piet had been one of them. His first sentence. The kind who would serve his twelve months, run around for a while, then be sentenced to twelve more. But his roots, mother tongue and personality could be used for more than just confirming statistics on reoffenders.
    ‘This one? Five minutes left to live.’
    Sundkvist had changed the picture. Another security camera. It was closer, no frame, just the window, the face was clearer.
    They had added a few pistols to the property seized in connection with the already registered judgement, probably some kind of Kalashnikov, they normally did. It had later been easy to ask for a new potential danger classification and tighter restrictions, no leave, no contact with the outside world. Piet had been desperate, he had listened, after months with no human contact, touch or talk, he could have been recruited for anything.
    ‘Three minutes. I think you can see in this picture. He’s shouting. A camera inside the workshop.’
    A face that filled the picture.
    It’s him.
    ‘
He’s a dead man
. We’ve analysed it. That’s what he’s shouting.’
    Erik Wilson looked at the absurd picture. The distorted face. The open, desperate mouth.
    He had built up Paula methodically.
    A petty thief had been developed into one of the country’s most dangerous criminals, document by document. Criminal record, the national court administration databases, the police criminal intelligence database. The myth of his potency enhanced by patrol after patrol who unknowingly responded on the basis of the available information. And when he was about to take that last step, right into Wojtek’s nerve centre, when the mission required even more respect, he had also provided it. Erik Wilson had copied a DSM-IV-TR statement, a psychopathic test that was carried out on one of Sweden’s criminals with the highest security classification.
    A document that had then been planted in the Prison and Probation Service records.
    Piet Hoffmann suddenly had a chronic lack of conscience, was extremely aggressive and very dangerous in terms of other people’s safety.
    ‘My last picture.’
    Thick, black smoke, in the distance what might be a building, at the top, what might be blue sky.
    ‘Two twenty-six p.m. When he died.’
    The square screen, he heard Sundkvist talking but continued to search in the dense blackness, tried to see the person who had just been standing there.
    ‘There were five of you at that meeting, Erik. I need to know whether the recording that was left in an envelope in Grens’s pigeonhole is genuine. If what can be heard here is exactly what was said. If three people who have never touched a trigger were accomplices to legitimate murder.’
    __________
    His neck was now red all the way up, his fringe had flopped and for a while stood out in every direction, he paced, frustrated, up and down in front of Grens’s desk.
     
    Lars Ågestam was almost hissing.
    ‘This bloody system, Grens. Criminals working for the police. Criminals’ own crimes being covered up and downplayed. One crime is legitimised so that another one can be investigated. Policemen who lie and withhold the truth from other policemen. Damn it, Grens, in a democratic society.’
    During the night he had printed out three hundred and two secret intelligence reports from the county police commissioner’s laptop. So far he had managed to go through one hundred of them, comparing the truth with the City Police investigations. Twenty-five had resulted in
nolle prosequi
, thirty-five in an acquittal.
    ‘Judgements were given in the remaining forty cases, but I can tell you that the judgements were wrong due the lack of underlying information. The people who were tried were given sentences, but for the wrong crime.
Grens, are you listening?
In all cases!’
    Ewert Grens looked at the prosecutor, suit and tie, a file in one hand, glasses in the other.
    A bloody rotten system.
    And there’s more, Ågestam.
    Soon we’ll talk about the intelligence report you haven’t seen yet, the one that is so hot off the press that it’s in a separate file.
    Västmannagatan 79.
    An investigation that we closed when other policemen with offices on the same corridor had the answer we