Three Seconds

should be concerned about or whether it was just one of those moments that seemed to be important but that lost all significance if it wasn’t shared with someone else.
     
    The day had started with a beautiful morning.
    He had slept on the brown corduroy sofa with the window to the courtyard open and had been woken by the first lorries on Bergsgatan. He had stood for a while looking up at the blue sky and gentle wind and then, with a coffee cup in each hand, had gone to the lifts and the remand jail a couple of floors up.
    He couldn’t resist it.
    If you were there early enough and it was clear enough, at this time of day, for a few hours, you could walk along the obvious line cast by the sun in the corridor of the remand jail. This morning he had walked where the floor shone most, making sure to pass the cells where he knew they were in custody for the third day with full restrictions. Ågestam had been careful to ensure that they would wait for most of the statutory seventy-two hours and later that day Grens would attend the court proceedings for the issue of arrest warrants for a chief superintendent, a national police commissioner and a state secretary from the Ministry of Justice.
    The hole on the bookshelf. It was as if it was growing.
    It would continue to do so until he had made up his mind.
    He had spent two days fast forwarding and rewinding tapes from the security cameras at Aspsås prison, frame by frame through locked doors and long passages and grey walls and barbed wire barriers back to those seconds that exploded with thick smoke and dead people. He hadstudied Krantz’s forensic reports and Errfors’ autopsy report and all Sven’s and Hermansson’s interviews.
    He had spent considerable time on two things in particular.
    A transcript of the dialogue between the sniper and the observer just before the shot was fired.
    Where they talked about a rug that Hoffmann had put over the hostage and tied with something that later in the investigation proved to be a pentyl fuse.
    A rug that encapsulates and directs the blast pressure downward, protecting anyone standing nearby.
    An interview with a principal prison officer called Jacobson.
    Where Jacobson described how Hoffmann covered the hostage’s skin with small plastic bags filled with some sort of fluid, which later in the investigation proved to be nitroglycerine.
    Nitroglycerine in such large amounts that every part of the body is shattered and can never be identified.
    Ewert Grens had laughed out loud in the office.
    He had stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the video recorder and the transcripts on the desk and had continued to laugh as he left the police headquarters and drove out to Aspsås and the wall that dominated the small town. He had gone to central security and requested to see all footage from the prison security cameras from twenty-six minutes past two in the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of May and thereafter. He had driven back, got himself some fresh coffee from the machine and sat down to watch every moment that had passed since a lethal shot was fired from a church tower.
    Grens had already known what he was looking for.
    He had selected the camera that was called number fourteen and was installed about a metre above the glass front of central security. He had then fast forwarded and stopped to study every person who went out. Wardens, visitors, prisoners, suppliers, one head at a time as they passed, their hairline close to the lens; some showed their ID, some signed the register, most were waved through by a guard who recognised them.
    He got as far as a tape that was recorded four days after the shot was fired.
    Ewert Grens had known instantly that he’d found it.
    A man with cropped hair in a Prison and Probation Service uniformhad looked up at the camera as he left at six minutes past eight in the evening, looked up for just too long, and then carried on.
    Grens had felt the pressure in his stomach and chest that was normally anger, but this time was something else.
    He had stopped the tape and rewound, studied the man who chatted with the guard for a while and then looked up at the camera in the same way that he had done three weeks earlier with another guard in another glass-fronted security office, the one in the Government Offices. Grens had followed the uniformed person through the metal detector and the gate and the wall via cameras number fifteen and sixteen and had observed that the person had