Three Seconds

police commissioner had a sharp, nasal voice.
    ‘I don’t want that to happen. You don’t want that to happen. Paula doesn’t have time for Västmannagatan.’
    Piet Hoffmann had a couple of minutes.
    He checked the CCTV close to the lifts, and positioned himself right underneath to be certain that he was in a blind spot. He made sure that he was on his own and then undid his trousers and soon got hold of the thin microphone lead and pulled it up to his crotch and positioned it on his groin.
    The tape had dislodged.
    Göransson’s hands had disturbed it when he searched him.
    A few more minutes.
    He pulled a thread loose from one of the inner seams, and with clumsy fingers tied the lead to the fabric and angled the microphone towards the zip of his trousers, then pulled down his sweater as far as he could over the waistband.
    It was not the best solution. But it was the only one he had time for.
    ‘You can come in again now.’
    The door midway down the corridor was open. The state secretary waved to him and he tried to walk as naturally as he could, with short steps.
    They had decided. At least, that’s what it felt like.
    ‘One more question.’
    The state secretary looked first at Göransson, then at Wilson.
    ‘Just over twenty-four hours ago, a preliminary investigation was opened. I’m guessing it’s being led by City Police. I want to know how you’ll, er, deal with that.’
    Erik Wilson had been waiting for her question.
    ‘You’ve read the report that I sent to the head of homicide.’
    He pointed at the copies of the document that were still lying in front of each one of them on the table.
    ‘And this is the report that the investigators, Grens, Sundkvist, Hermansson and Krantz have written. What they know, what they’veseen. Compare it with the contents of my report, with the actual events and background as to why Paula was taking part in the operation in the flat.’
    She leafed quickly through the pages.
    ‘A real report. And one that shows how much our colleagues know.’
    She didn’t like it. As she read, the dead face came alive for the first time, the mouth, the eyes, as if it was warding off the contempt and a decision that she thought she would never have to consider.
    ‘And now? What’s happened since this was written?’
    Wilson smiled, the first smile for a long time in a room that was being suffocated by its own solemnity.
    ‘Now? If I’ve understood rightly, the investigators have just found a shirt in a plastic bag in a rubbish store near the scene of the crime.’
    He looked at Hoffmann, still with a smile on his face.
    ‘A shirt covered in blood and gunshot residue. But … blood that’s not recorded in any Swedish database. My guess is that it may be a red herring, one that will get them nowhere but that will take time and effort to investigate.’
    __________
    The shirt was grey and white checks and had stains that now, after twenty-four hours, were more brown than red. Ewert Grens picked at it in irritation with a glove.
     
    ‘The murderer’s shirt. The murderer’s blood. But yet we’re getting nowhere.’
    Nils Krantz was still sitting in front of the image of red peaks above various numbers.
    ‘No identity. But maybe a place.’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    The cramped room was just as damp and dark as all the other rooms in forensics. Sven looked at the two men beside him. They were the same age, balding, not particularly jolly, tired but thorough, and, perhaps the greatest similarity, they had lived for their work until they became their work.
    The younger generation that were just starting out were not likely to ever be the same. Grens and Krantz were the sort of men who no longer had a natural place.
    ‘The smaller flecks of blood, the ones that belong to the murderer,don’t come from anyone in our databases. But a person with no name has to live somewhere and always takes something with them when they move around. I usually look for traces of persistent and organic pollutants that are stored in the body, difficult to break down, that have a long life and don’t dissolve easily – sometimes they point the investigation in the direction of a specific geographic place.’
    Krantz even moved like Grens. Sven, who had never noticed it before, looked around to see if there was a sofa, suddenly convinced that the forensic scientist also stayed in his office sometimes when the light had faded and his own flat meant loneliness.
    ‘But not this time.