Three Seconds

never scale down murder cases, Ågestam. You solve them.’
    ‘You know—’
    ‘And that is what I have done for thirty-five years. Since you were running around peeing in your nappies.’
    The prosecutor wasn’t listening any more. You just needed to decide that you weren’t going to hear anything and then you didn’t. It was a long time now since Ewert Grens had been able to hurt him.
    ‘I read through the conclusions of the preliminary investigation. But it was … quick. You mentioned a number of names on the periphery of the investigation that haven’t been fully probed. Do that. Investigate every name on the periphery and close it. You’ve got three days. Then we’ll meet again. And if you haven’t got anything more by then, you can make as much fuss as you like, I will scale down the case.’
    Ewert Grens watched the determined suit-back leave his office and would no doubt have shouted after it if the other voice hadn’t already been there, the one that had been in his head every hour for two weeks now, that was once again whispering and wheedling its way in, persistently repeating the short sentences, driving him mad.
    ‘A dead man. Västmannagatan 79. Fourth floor.’
    He had three days.
    Who are you?
    Where are you?
    __________
    He had stood with his back pressed hard against the cell wall for twenty minutes, every muscle tensed, every sound an imagined threat of attack.
     
    Nothing had happened.
    His fifteen fellow prisoners had been to the toilet and showered and then gone to the kitchen for an early breakfast, but none of them hadstopped outside his door, no one had tried to open it. He was still only Piet Hoffmann here, a member of Wojtek, arrested with three kilos of Polish Yellow in his boot and convicted of possession, and a previous conviction for having beaten some bastard pig before firing two shots at him.
    They had disappeared, one by one, some to the laundry and the workshop, most to the classrooms, a couple to the hospital. No one went on strike and stayed in their cell, which often happened: the striker laughed at the threat of punishment and continued to refuse to work as the extra couple of months on twelve years existed only on official papers.
    ‘Hoffmann.’
    It was the principal prison officer who had welcomed him the day before, with blue eyes that pierced whoever was standing in front of him.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Time to get out of your cell.’
    ‘Is it?’
    ‘Your work duties. Cleaning. The administration building and the workshops. But not today. Today you’re going to come with me and try to learn how and where and when to use your brushes and detergents.’
    They walked side by side down the corridor through the unit and down the stairs to the underground passage.
    When Paula arrives at Aspsås, his work duties will already be fixed. On his first afternoon, he’ll start as the new cleaner in the administration block and workshop.
    The shapeless fabric of the prison-issue clothes chafed against his thighs and shoulders as they approached the second floor of Block B.
    Prison management usually only grants cleaning duties as a reward.
    They stopped in front of the toilets outside the main door to the workshop.
    Then reward him.
    Piet Hoffmann nodded – he would start his cleaning round here, with the cracked basin and piss pot in a changing room that stank of mould. They carried on into the big workshop with its faint smell of diesel.
    ‘The toilet out there, the office behind the glass window and then the entire workshop. You got it?’
    He stayed standing in the doorway, looking around the room. Workbenches with something that looked like bits of shiny piping onthem, shelves with piles of packing band, punch presses, pallet jacks, half full pallets and at every work station, a prisoner who earned ten kronor an hour. Prison workshops often produced simple items that were then sold on to commercial manufacturers; at Österåker, he had cut out square red wooden blocks for a toy manufacturer. Here it was lamp-post components: decimetre-long rectangular covers for the access hatch to the cables and switches that is positioned at the base, the kind that you see ten metres apart along every road, which no one ever notices but has to be made somewhere. The principal prison officer walked into the workshop and pointed at the dust and overflowing bins, while Hoffmann nodded at prisoners he didn’t recognise: the one in his twenties standing by a punching press bending over