Three Seconds

lacked, which meant that a person had to be burnt and they needed a useful idiot to carry the can.
    ‘Thank you. You’ve done a good job.’
    He held out his hand to the prosecutor he would never learn to like.
    Lars Ågestam took it, shook for a bit too long perhaps, but it felt good, personal, on the same side for the first time, the long hours at night, each with a glass of whisky and Grens who had called him Lars on one occasion.
    He smiled.
    Conscious spite and attempted insult, he didn’t need to worry this time.
    He let go of his hand and had just started to head for the door with a strange joy in his heart when he suddenly turned round.
    ‘Grens?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘That map you showed me when I was here last.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘You asked about Haga. North Cemetery. If it was nice there.’
    It was lying on the desk. He had seen it as soon as he came in. A map of a resting place that had been used for over two hundred years and was one of the largest in the country.
    Grens kept it to hand. He was going to go there.
    ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’
    Ewert Grens was breathing heavily, rocking his great bulk.
    ‘Well, did you?’
    Grens turned round pointedly. He said nothing, just the laboured breathing as he faced the pile of files on the desk.
    ‘Hm, Ågestam?’
    ‘Yes?’
    He didn’t look at the visitor who was about to leave, his voice was different, it was a bit too high and the young prosecutor had long since learnt that that often meant discomfort.
    ‘You seem to have misinterpreted something.’
    ‘Right?’
    ‘You see, Ågestam, this is just work. I am not your bloody mate.’
    __________
    They had got their food, fish that wasn’t salmon, the waiter’s suggestion.
I need to know whether the recording that was left in an envelope in Grens’s pigeonhole is genuine.
They had eaten without speaking, without even looking at each other.
If what can be heard here is exactly what was said.
The questions were there on the table beside the candlestick and pepper grinder, waiting for them.
If three people who have never touched a trigger were accomplices to a legitimate murder.
     
    ‘Sundkvist?’
    Erik Wilson put his cutlery down on the empty plate, emptied his third glass of mineral water, lifted the napkin from his knee.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You’ve come a long way for nothing.’
    He had decided.
    ‘You see, in some way … it’s like we’re all in the same business.’
    ‘You went to see Grens the next day. You knew, Erik, but you said nothing.’
    ‘In the same bloody business. The criminals. The people investigating the crime. And the informants make up the grey zone.’
    He wasn’t going to say anything.
    ‘And Sundkvist, this is the future. More informants. More covert human intelligence. It’s a growth area. That’s why I’m here.’
    ‘If you had talked to us then, Erik, we wouldn’t have been sitting opposite each other today. On either side of a dead man.’
    ‘And that is why my European colleagues are here. We’re here to learn. As it will continue to expand.’
    They had worked on the same corridor for so bloody long.
    Wilson had never before seen Sven Sundkvist lose control.
    ‘I want you to listen bloody closely now, Erik!’
    Sven grabbed the laptop, a plate on the white marble floor, a glass on the white tablecloth.
    ‘I can fast forward or rewind to wherever you want. Here? See that? The exact moment that the bullet penetrates the reinforced glass.’
    A mouth shouting in a monitor.
    ‘Or here? The exact moment the workshop explodes.’
    A face in profile in a window
.
    ‘Or here, maybe? I haven’t shown you this one yet. The remnants. The flags on the wall. All that remains.’
    A person stopped breathing
.
    ‘You’re responding the way you’re supposed to respond, the way you’ve always responded, you protect your informant. But for Christ’s sake, Erik, he’s dead! There’s nothing to protect any more! Because you and your colleagues failed to do exactly that. That’s why he’s standing there in the window. That’s why he dies exactly … there.’
    Erik Wilson reached out to the computer screen that was turned towards him, closed it with a snap and pulled out the lead.
    ‘
I
have worked as a handler as long as you have sat a few doors down.
I
have been responsible for informants all my working life.
I
have never not succeeded.’
    Sven Sundkvist opened the laptop and turned it back again.
    ‘You can keep the lead. The battery’s