Three Seconds

he sat in the place that he’d taken from someone who no longer dared to take it back and he boasted about the fucking pig in Söderhamn who had begged for his life when he aimed at his forehead and he smoked rollies for the first time in years and he talked about a woman he was going to shag senseless on his first supervised leave and they laughed loudly and he leant back and looked around at the room and the corridor that was full of people who had longed to get away for so long that they no longer knew where.
     

tuesday
     

He had driven slowly through the Stockholm dark which now had turned to light – one of those nights again, long hours of turmoil and restlessness. He hadn’t been there for more than two weeks, but at around half past three he had found himself in the middle of the Lidingö bridge once again, looking at the sky and water,
I never want to see you here again
, he had been on his way to the nursing home that he was no longer allowed to visit and the window where she no longer sat,
what you are frightened of has already happened
, when he suddenly turned round, drove back towards the houses and people, the capital that was so big and yet so small, where he had lived and worked all his life.
     
    Ewert Grens got out of the car.
    He had never been here before. He hadn’t even known he was on his way here.
    He had thought about it so many times and planned and started to drive, but never made it. Now, here he was standing by the southern entrance that was called Gate 1 and his legs felt rubbery like they would both collapse and there was pressure in his chest from his stomach or maybe his heart.
    He started to walk but then stopped after a few steps.
    He couldn’t do it, his legs lacked the strength and whatever it was that was pressing inside came in regular thumps.
    It was a gentle dawn and the sun shone so beautifully on the graves and grass and trees, but he wasn’t going to go on. Not this morning. He would turn back to the car and drive into the city again as North Cemetery disappeared into the distance in his rear-view mirror.
    Maybe next time.
    Maybe then he’d find out where her stone was, and maybe then he would go all the way there.
    Next time.
    __________
    The corridor at Homicide was deserted and dark. He helped himself to a forgotten, rather dry slice of bread from the basket on the table in the staffroom and pressed two cups of coffee out of the machine and then carried on down to the office that would never sing again. He ate and drank his simple breakfast and lifted up the thin file for an ongoing investigation that was at a standstill. They had managed to identify the victim within the first couple of days as an informant for the Danish police, had secured traces of drug mules and amphetamine and confirmed that there had been at least one other Swedish-speaking person in the flat at the time of the murder, the voice that had raised the alarm that he had now listened to so often it had become a part of him.
     
    They had discovered a Polish mafia branch called Wojtek, assumed to have a head office in Warsaw, and then they hit a wall.
    Ewert Grens chewed the dry, hard bread and drank up the coffee that was left in the plastic cup. He didn’t often give up. He wasn’t the sort to do that. But this wall was so long and high and no matter how much he had pushed and shoved and shouted in the past fortnight, he had not managed to get round it or beyond it.
    He had followed up the blood stains on the shirt that was found in a rubbish container and had come to a dead end in a register with no matches.
    Then he had gone to Poland with Sven to follow up the yellow stains that Krantz had found on the same item of clothing and had ended up in the remains of an amphetamine factory in a town called Siedlce. For a couple of days they had worked closely with some of the three thousand policemen assigned to a special police force to combat organised crime, and had encountered a sense of helplessness, a hunt that never gave results, a nation with five hundred criminal groups that fought every day for a slice of the domestic Polish capital cake, eighty-five even larger criminal groups with international connections, police who frequently took part in armed battles, and a nation that raked in more than five hundred billion kronor every year from the production of synthetic drugs.
    Ewert Grens remembered the smell of tulips.
    The amphetamine factory that was connected to the stains on the