Three Seconds

a small eating area, a gateleg table and six chairs.
    ‘Do you live here on your own?’
    ‘Sit yourself down.’
    A pile of blue files and a large notepad in the middle, two glasses that were still wet with a bottle of Seagrams between them.
    He was prepared.
    ‘A dram? Or are you driving?’
    He had made an effort. Even the same kind of whisky.
    ‘Here? With you in the vicinity? I wouldn’t dare. You might have some dusty parking fine papers in your glove compartment.’
    Ewert Grens remembered a cold winter’s night one and a half years ago. He had crawled around on his hands and knees, his creased suit trousers in the wet new snow and measured the distance between a car and Vasagatan.
    Ågestam’s car.
    He smiled again, a smile that was almost unnerving.
    ‘As I remember it, the parking fine was dismissed. By the prosecutor himself.’
    In a fury, he had fined Lars Ågestam for his eight centimetre error in parking, weary of a public prosecutor who made things difficult whenthe search for a sixteen-year-old girl who had disappeared forced them down into the tunnels under Stockholm.
    ‘You can pour me half a glass.’
    They both took a drink while Grens produced a document from one of the files and put it down in front of Ågestam.
    ‘You got three hundred and two secret intelligence reports. About what
actually
happened, things the rest of us didn’t know and so couldn’t present in our official investigations.’
    Lars Ågestam nodded.
    ‘That unit at Aspsås. For only police officers. When I charge them all.’
    ‘They were reports from last year. But this copy, this is still warm.’
M pulls a gun
(Polish 9mm Radom)
from shoulder holster.
M cocks the gun and holds it to
the buyer’s head.
    ‘Submitted to the county police commissioner, like all the others.’
P orders M to calm down.
M lowers the gun, takes a step
back, his weapon half-cocked.
    Lars Ågestam was about to speak when Grens interrupted.
    ‘I’ve spent … I’d guess … half my time working on Västmannagatan since the alarm was raised. Sven Sundkvist and Mariana Hermansson as well. Nils Krantz estimates that he and three other colleagues spent a week searching the place with magnifying glasses and fingerprint lifting tape, Errfors says that he used as much time to analyse the body of a Danish citizen. A number of constables and detectives have guarded the crime scene, questioned neighbours and looked for bloody shirts in rubbish containers for – if I’m conservative – twenty days.’
    He looked at the prosecutor.
    ‘And you? How many hours have you put into this case?’
    Ågestam shrugged.
    ‘Hard to say … a week.’
Suddenly the buyer shouts
‘I’m the police’.
M again aims the gun
at the buyer’s head.
    Ewert Grens snatched the intelligence report out of Ågestam’s hands and waved it in front of him.
    ‘Thirteen and a half working weeks. Five hundred and forty man-hours. When my colleagues and bosses who sit in the same corridor already had the answer. He even phoned, Ågestam, it says here, Hoffmann bloody well rang himself and raised the alarm!’
    Lars Ågestam reached out for the report.
    ‘Can I have it back?’
    He left the table, went into the other part of the kitchen and opened one of the wall cupboards, looking for something, opened another one.
    ‘What’s the purpose of all this?’
    ‘I want to solve a murder.’
    ‘Do you not understand what I’m asking, Grens? What’s the
purpose
of all this?’
    He found what he was looking for, a glass, filled it with water.
    ‘I have no intention of carrying the guilt.’
    ‘Guilt?’
    ‘You’ve got nothing to do with it, Ågestam. But that’s the truth. I’m not going to carry the guilt any more. That’s why I’m going to make sure that the people responsible are going to carry it for me.’
    The public prosecutor looked at the report.
    ‘And you can use the report to do that?’
    ‘Yes. If I manage to finish this. Before tomorrow morning.’
    Lars Ågestam stood in the middle of the large kitchen. He could hear the traffic through the open window – it had slowed, fewer cars that drove faster, it was starting to get late.
    ‘Can I wander around a bit? Here in the flat?’
    ‘Feel free.’
    The hall seemed even longer than before, thick rugs on a parquet floor that was dark but not worn, brown wallpaper with a seventies’ design. He turned off and into the first and best door, into something that resembleda library, sat down in the