Three Seconds

hours.
’
    ‘Abort.’
    ‘
Too late. Fifteen Polish mules on their way in.
’
    Erik Wilson sat down on the edge of the bed, in the same place as before, where the bedspread was crumpled.
    A major deal.
    Paula had penetrated deep into the organisation, deeper than he’d ever heard of before.
    ‘Get out. Now.’
    ‘
You know it’s not that easy. You know that I’ve got to do it. Or I’ll get two bullets to the head
.’
    ‘I repeat, get out. You won’t get any back-up from me. Listen to me, get out, for Christ’s sake!’
    The silence when someone hangs up mid-conversation is always deeply unnerving. Wilson had never liked that electronic void. Someone else deciding that the call was over.
    He went over to the window again, searching in the bright light that seemed to make the practice ground shrink, nearly drown in white.
    The voice had been strained, almost frightened.
    Erik Wilson still had the mobile phone in his hand. He looked at it, at the silence.
    Paula was going to go it alone.

monday
     

He had stopped the car halfway across the bridge to Lidingö.
     
    The sun had finally broken through the blackness a few minutes after three, pushing and bullying and chasing off the dark, which wouldn’t dare return now until late in the evening. Ewert Grens wound down the window and looked out at the water, breathing in the chill air as the sun rose into dawn and the cursed night retreated and left him in peace.
    He drove on to the other side and across the sleeping island to a house that was idyllically perched on a cliff with a view of the boats that passed by below. He stopped in the empty car park, removed his radio from the charger and attached a microphone to his lapel. He had always left it in the car when he came to visit her – no call was more important than their time together – but now, there was no conversation to interrupt.
    Ewert Grens had driven to the nursing home once a week for twenty-nine years and had not stopped since. Even though someone else lived in her room now. He walked over to what had once been her window, where she used to sit watching the world outside, and where he sat beside her, trying to understand what she was looking for.
    The only person he had ever trusted.
    He missed her so much. The damned emptiness clung to him, he ran through the night and it gave chase, he couldn’t get rid of it, he screamed at it, but it just carried on and on … he breathed it in, he had no idea how to fill such emptiness.
    ‘Superintendent Grens.’
    Her voice came from the glass door that normally stood open when the weather was fine and all the wheelchairs were in place around the table on the terrace. Susann, the medical student who was now, according to the name badge on her white coat, already a junior doctor. She had once accompanied him and Anni on the boat trip round the archipelago and had warned him against hoping
too much
.
    ‘Hello.’
    ‘You here again.’
    ‘Yes.’
    He hadn’t seen her for a long time, since Anni was alive.
    ‘Why do you do it?’
    He glanced up at the empty window.
    ‘What are you talking about?’
    ‘Why do you do this to yourself?’
    The room was dark. Whoever lived there now was still asleep.
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    ‘I’ve seen you out here twelve Tuesdays in a row now.’
    ‘Is there a law against it?’
    ‘Same day, same time as before.’
    Ewert Grens didn’t answer.
    ‘When she was alive.’
    Susann took a step down.
    ‘You’re not doing yourself any favours.’
    Her voice got louder.
    ‘Living with grief is one thing. But you can’t regulate it. You’re not living
with
grief, you’re living
for
it. You’re holding on to it, hiding behind it. Don’t you understand, Superintendent Grens? What you’re frightened of has already happened.’
    He looked at the dark window, the sun reflecting an older man who didn’t know what to say.
    ‘You have to let go. You have to move on. Without the routine.’
    ‘I miss her so much.’
    Susann went back up the steps, grabbed the handle of the terrace door and was about to shut it when she stopped halfway, and shouted: ‘I never want to see you here again.’

It was a beautiful flat on the fourth floor of Västmannagatan 79. Three spacious rooms in an old building, high-ceilinged, polished wooden floors, and full of light, with windows that faced out over Vanadisvägen as well.
     
    Piet Hoffmann was in the kitchen. He opened the fridge and took out yet another carton of