Three Seconds

criminals on the outside. When they’ve done their time they’ll be given the choice between working to pay off their debt or two bullets.’
    The moment when the Swedish police could make their move, squash the criminal expansion, the moment that would never come again.
    ‘Do you understand, Erik? This country has fifty-six prisons. Andmore are being built. Wojtek will control every single one. But also an army of indebted serious criminals on the outside.’
    The Eastern European mafia’s three areas of operation.
    Arms. Prostitution. Drugs
.
    Wilson sat at what would soon once more be a plastic-covered kitchen table with a view out to the communal gardens. Criminal organisations were in control and the police could only stand by and watch. Now Wojtek was about to make their final move. First the prisons, then the streets. But this time there was a massive difference. This time the police had their own man at the top. The police knew where, how and exactly when it would be possible to sweep in and launch a counter-attack.
    Erik Wilson watched Paula open the gate, close it and disappear into the house on the other side of the garden.
    It was time to call another meeting.
    At the Government Offices.
    They had to have guarantees that he wouldn’t be held responsible for the murder in Västmannagatan 79, so they could continue their infiltration work, even from inside prison.

There were still two cardboard boxes in one corner of the room. Soon he would push them down the corridor, down to Einarsson and the protection of a classified stamp and safe storage in the property store.
     
    She had been all on her own.
    He hadn’t really understood that at the time, it had been all about him, about his own fear and how lonely
he
had been.
    He hadn’t even gone. When she was being buried, he had lain, clean shaven, in a black suit, on the corduroy sofa in his office and stared at the ceiling.
    Ewert Grens turned around – he couldn’t bear to look at the boxes that were so strongly associated with her, he was ashamed.
    He had tried to forget about Västmannagatan 79 for a while – he was getting nowhere and his desk was full of ongoing investigations that were getting older and harder to solve by the hour. He looked through the preliminary investigation files and put them to the side, one after the other.
Attempted extortion
and spotty youths from the Södra Station area who had threatened shop owners in Ringens Centrum.
Car theft
and an unmarked police car that had been found stripped of its computer and communication equipment in a tunnel under the Sankt Eriksbron.
Violation of a woman’s integrity
and a former husband who had repeatedly breached his restraining order and gone to his former wife’s domicile on Sibyllegatan. Uninteresting and soulless, but nonetheless, such investigations were his daily fare and he would sort them out later. He was good at that, after all, at reality. But not right now. A dead man was lying in the way.
    ‘Come in.’
    Someone had knocked on the door. Even a knock echoed in a room with no music.
    ‘Do you have a moment?’
    Grens looked up at the doorway and someone he didn’t particularly like. He didn’t know why, there was no real reason, but sometimes that’s just the way it is, something that you can’t put your finger on, that bothers you all the same.
    ‘No, I don’t have time.’
    Thick blond hair, slim, bright eyed, eloquent, intellectual, presumably attractive, still quite young.
    Erik Wilson was everything that Ewert Grens was not.
    ‘Not even for a simple question?’
    Grens sighed.
    ‘There’s no such thing as a simple question.’
    Erik Wilson smiled and came in. Grens was about to protest, but stopped himself. Wilson was one of the few who had never complained about the loud music in their shared corridor, perhaps he had the right to pop in to the silence.
    ‘Västmannagatan 79. The shooting. If I’ve understood correctly … you’re the one investigating?’
    ‘That’s what you say.’
    Erik Wilson looked the curmudgeonly detective superintendent in the eye. The day before he’d had a look on the computer at the CR system and was convinced that he had found a good enough excuse to hide his real purpose.
    ‘Just a thought. Was it on the ground floor?’
    A Finnish name, stolen goods, a ton of refined copper.
    ‘No.’
    According to the entry in the register, a case that was no longer open, and a sentence that would already have come into