Three Seconds

murderer’s shirt had been in the basement of a block of flats in the middle of a rundown and dirty neighbourhood a couple of kilometres west of the centre – uniform buildings once built in their thousands asa temporary solution to an acute housing problem. Ewert Grens and Sven Sundkvist had sat in the car and watched a raid that had ended in a shoot-out and the death of a young policeman. The six people who were in some of the rooms in the basement had then not said a peep to either the Polish or Swedish interrogating officers, and had remained silent, just sneering or staring at the floor, as they knew, of course, that anyone who opened their mouth would not live for long.
    Grens swore out loud in the empty room, opened the window and shouted something at someone in civvies who happened to be walking along the asphalt path across the courtyard of Kronoberg, then wrenched open the door and limped up and down the long corridor until his back and forehead were wet with sweat, then sat down on his chair to catch his racing breath.
    He had never felt like this before.
    He was used to anger, almost addicted to it. He always looked for conflict, hid himself away in it.
    It wasn’t that.
    This feeling, like it was there, the truth, as if the answer was staring at him, laughing at him, a peculiar feeling of being so close without being able to see.
    Ewert Grens took the file in his hand and went to lie down with his legs outstretched on the floor behind the corduroy sofa. He started to leaf through the papers starting with the voice informing the police about a dead man in Västmannagatan, through the following two weeks working at full capacity with access to all technical resources, to his trips to Copenhagen and Siedlce.
    He swore again, maybe shouted at someone again.
    They hadn’t got anywhere.
    He was going to lie on the floor until he understood whose voice he had listened to so many times, what it was he didn’t understand and couldn’t quite get hold of, why the feeling that the truth was close at hand, laughing at him, was so intense.

He heard the keys jangling.
     
    Two screws unlocking and opening the cells at the far end, the ones with a view over the large gravel pitch, Cell 8 and opposite, Cell 16.
    He braced himself, prepared himself for the twenty minutes each day that could mean death.
    It had been a bloody awful night.
    Despite having been awake for days, he had lain there, waiting for sleep that never came. They were there with him, Zofia and Hugo and Rasmus, they had stood outside the window and sat on the edge of his bed, lain down beside him and he had been forced to drive them away. They no longer existed; inside he had to stop feeling, he had a mission that he had chosen to complete and that left no room for dreaming – he had to suppress, forget. Anyone who dreamt in prison soon went under.
    They were getting closer. The keys jangled again, Cell 7 and Cell 15 were opened and he heard a faint
morning
and someone else reply
go to hell.
    He had eventually got up – when Zofia had disappeared and the dark outside was densest he had held the dread at bay with chin-ups and sit-ups and jumping on and off the bed with both his feet held together. There wasn’t much space and he had hit the wall a couple of times, but it was good to sweat and to feel his heart beating in his rib cage.
    His work had already begun.
    In a matter of hours on that first afternoon he had earned himself the respect in the unit that he needed to continue. He now knew who was in charge of supplies and dealing, in which units and in which cells. One of them was here, the Greek in Cell 2, the other two were on separate floors in Block H. Piet Hoffmann would get in the first grams soon, the ones he was responsible for and that he would use to blow out the competition.
    The screws were even closer, opened Cell 6 and Cell 14, only a couple of minutes more.
    The time after the cells were opened, between seven and seven twenty, was crucial. If he survived that, he would survive the rest of the day.
    He had prepared himself in the way that he would prepare himself every morning. In order to survive, he had to assume that in the course of the evening or night, someone had found out about his other name, that there was a Paula who worked for the authorities, a grass who was there to break the organisation. He was safe as long as the cell was locked, a closed door would hold off an attack, but the first twenty minutes once the cell