Three Seconds

ago?’
    ‘Yep, back then too.’
    Twelve bloody awful months in Österåker prison.
    ‘One gram of amphetamine costs one hundred and fifty kronor on the street. In the prisons it’s three times as much. A gram of heroin costs a thousand kronor on the street. On the inside, three times as much.’
    Zbigniew Boruc had had this conversation before. With other colleagues in other operations in other countries. It was always about the same thing. Being able to calculate.
    ‘Four thousand locked up drug addicts – the amphetamine freaks who take two grams a day, the heroin addicts who use one gram a day. Just one day’s business, Hoffmann … between eight and nine million kronor.’
    Paula had been born nine years ago. He had lived with death every day since then. But this, this moment, made it all worthwhile. All the damn lies. The manipulation. This was where he was headed. And now he had arrived.
    ‘An unprecedented operation. Initially though, big money has to be invested before we can even start, before we get anything back.’
    The Deputy CEO looked at the empty chair between them.
    Wojtek had the power to invest, to wait as long as it took for the closed market to be theirs. Wojtek had a financial guarantee, the Eastern European mafia’s variant of the consigliere, but with more capital and more power.
    ‘Yes. It’s an unprecedented operation. But possible. And you are going to lead it.’

Ewert Grens opened the window. He normally did around midnight to listen to the clock on Kungsholms Church and then another one that he had never managed to locate, he only knew that it was further away and couldn’t be heard on nights when the wind swallowed any fragile sound. He had been pacing round his office with a strange sensation in his body, the first evening and night in the police headquarters without Siwan’s voice anywhere in the dark. He had got so used to falling asleep to the past, and at this time of night had always listened to one of the cassettes he had recorded and mixed himself.
     
    There was nothing here now that even remotely resembled peace.
    He had never been bothered by all the night sounds that played outside his window before, and already he loathed the cars on Bergsgatan which accelerated as they approached the steep incline on Hantverkargatan. He closed the window and sat down with the sudden silence and the fax that he had just received from Klövje, from the Swedish section at Interpol. He read the interview, which he was reliably informed had been requested by the Swedish police, with a Polish citizen who had been the registered tenant of the flat in Västmannagatan 79 for the past two years. A man with a name that Ewert Grens didn’t recognise and couldn’t pronounce, forty-five years old, born in Gda ń sk, registered in the electoral roll for Warsaw. A man who had never been convicted or even suspected of any crime and who, according to the Polish policeman who had questioned him, had, without any doubt, been in Warsaw at the time when the incident in Stockholm took place.
    You’re involved in some way
.
    Ewert Grens held the printout in his hand.
    The door was locked when we got there.
    He got up and went out into the dark corridor.
    There were no signs of a break-in and no signs of violence.
Two cups from the coffee machine.
Someone had used a key to get in and out.
A cheese sandwich wrapped in plastic and a banana-flavoured yoghurt from the vending machine.
Someone who is linked to you
.
    He stood there in the silence and dark, emptied one cup of coffee and ate half the yoghurt, but left the sandwich in the bin. It was too dry, even for him.
    He felt safe here.
    The big, ugly police headquarters where colleagues were swallowed up or hid away, the only place where he could bear to be, really – he always knew what to do here, he belonged; he could even sleep on the sofa if he wanted to and avoid the long nights on a balcony with a view of Sveavägen and a capital that never stopped.
    Ewert Grens went back to the only room in the homicide unit where the lights were still on, to the boxes of packed-away music, which he gave a light kick. He hadn’t even gone to the funeral. He had paid for it, but hadn’t taken part, and he kicked the boxes again, harder this time. He wished he had been there, maybe then she would be gone, truly gone.
    Klövje’s fax was still lying on the desk. A Polish citizen who could in no way be linked to a dead body. Grens swore, marched across the