Three Seconds

never achieve, as he was the sort who, no matter how much he had tried to change it over the years, wanted to be liked and therefore tended to be amenable and not make a fuss.
    ‘There’s a young woman who lives on the fourth floor, a couple of doors down from the crime scene, and an old man up on the fifth floorabove. Both of them were at home at the time of the murder and said that they heard what they describe as a clear bang.’
    ‘A bang?’
    ‘Neither of them was willing to say more than that. They don’t know anything about weapons and couldn’t say whether it was a gun shot. But they are both certain that what they called a
bang
was loud and a sound that was not a normal part of the building.’
    ‘That’s all?’
    ‘That’s all.’
    The ringing from the phone on the desk was sharp and irritating, and did not let up, despite the fact that Sven remained sitting on the sofa and Ewert stayed on the floor.
    ‘Should I answer?’
    ‘I can’t understand why they don’t give up.’
    ‘Should I answer it, Ewert?’
    ‘It’s on my desk.’
    He got up patiently and lumbered towards the loud ringing.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘You sound out of breath.’
    ‘I was lying on the floor.’
    ‘I want you to come down here.’
    Grens and Sundkvist didn’t say anything, they just left the room and went down the corridor, waited impatiently for a lift that took for ever to go down. Nils Krantz was at the door to the forensics department and showed them into a narrow room.
    ‘You asked me to extend the search area. I did. All the stairwells between numbers seventy and ninety. And in the rubbish store of Västmannagatan 73, in a paper recycling container, we found this.’
    Krantz was holding a plastic bag. Ewert Grens leant closer and put on his reading glasses a few moments later. Something in fabric, grey and white checks, partially covered in blood, a shirt perhaps, or maybe a jacket.
    ‘Very interesting. This could be our breakthrough.’
    The forensic scientist opened the plastic bag and put the fabric on something that looked like a serving tray, and with a bent finger pointed at the obvious stains.
    ‘Blood stains and gunshot residue that take us back to the flat in Västmannagatan 79, as it’s the victim’s blood and gunpowder from the same charge that we found in the flat.’
    ‘Which doesn’t get us anywhere. Which doesn’t give us a damn shit more than we already knew.’
    Krantz pointed at the grey and white piece of clothing.
    ‘It’s a shirt. It’s got the victim’s blood on it. But there’s more. We’ve identified another blood group. I’m certain that it belongs to the person who fired. Ewert, this is the shirt that the murderer was wearing.’
    __________
    A courtroom. That’s what it felt like. A room that smelt of power. A document that described a violent incident lying on an important table. Göransson was the prosecutor who checked the facts and asked the questions; the state secretary was the judge who listened and made the decisions; Wilson, to his right, was the defence who claimed self-defence and asked for leniency. Piet Hoffmann wanted to get up and walk away, but was forced to stay calm. After all, he was the accused.
     
    ‘I didn’t have any choice. My life was in danger.’
    ‘You always have a choice.’
    ‘I tried to calm them down. But I could only go so far. I’m supposed to be a criminal, through and through. Otherwise I’m dead.’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    It was a bizarre feeling. He was sitting one floor away from the Swedish prime minister in the building that ruled Sweden. Outside, down on the pavement in the real world, people were walking back from lunch with a warm low-alcohol beer and a cup of coffee because they’d chosen to pay five kronor more, while he was here, with those in power, trying to explain why the authorities should not investigate a murder.
    ‘I’m their number one in Sweden. The people who were in the flat have been trained by the Polish intelligence service and know how to sniff out anything that doesn’t feel right.’
    ‘We’re talking about murder. And you, Hoffmann, or Paula, or whatever I should call you, could have prevented it.’
    ‘The first time they put the gun to the buyer’s head, I managed to stop them shooting. But the next time, he had just exposed himself, he was the enemy, a grass, dead …
I didn’t have a bloody choice.
’
    ‘And as you didn’t have a choice, neither do we, and so should we just