Three Seconds

responsible for other people’s actions.’
    One more glass, more bubbles.
    ‘Like you said, we’ll burn him.’

thursday
     

He had dreamt about the hole. For four nights in a row, the straight edges in the dust on the shelf behind his desk had become a yawning, bottomless hole and no matter where he was or how much he tried to get away, he was drawn towards the black hole and then just as he started to fall, he woke up breathless on the floor behind the corduroy sofa, his back slippery with sweat.
     
    It was half past four and already warm and bright in the courtyard of Kronoberg. Ewert Grens went out into the corridor and over to the small pantry, where a blue J-cloth was hanging from the tap. He wet it and went back to the office and the hole that was much smaller in reality. So many hours, such a large part of his day for thirty-five years had revolved around a time that no longer existed. With the wet cloth he wiped over the long, hard edges that marked where the cassette recorder he had been given for his twenty-fifth birthday had stood, then the considerably short edges from the cassettes and the photo, even the squares that had been the two loudspeakers, which were kind of beautiful in their clarity.
    And now there wasn’t even dust.
    He moved a cactus plant from the window sill, the files from the floor – the majority of which contained long-since completed preliminary investigations that should have been filed somewhere – and filled every tiny space on the now empty shelves so that he wouldn’t need to fall any more; the hole had gone and if there wasn’t a hole, there couldn’t be a bottomless pit.
    A cup of black coffee, the air was still full of swirling dust particles looking for a new home and it didn’t taste as good as usual, as if the dust had dissolved in the brown liquid; it even looked a shade lighter.
    He left early – he wanted straight answers and prisoners who were still sleepy were often less mouthy, not so insolent and scornful; interviews were either a power struggle or an attempt to gain confidence and he didn’t have time to build up trust. He drove out of the city too fast and along the first kilometres of the E4, then suddenlyslowed when he passed Haga and the large cemetery on the left, hesitated before continuing straight on and accelerating again. He could turn off the road on the way back, drive slowly past the people with plants and flowers in one hand and a watering can in the other.
    It was still thirty kilometres to the prison that he had visited at least twice a year for the past three decades. As a policeman in Stockholm he would regularly be involved in investigations that ended up there, questioning, prison transport, there was always someone who knew something and someone who had seen something but the hatred of uniforms was greater there than anywhere else and their fear of the consequences justified, as a grass never survived long in an enclosed space, so the most usual answer on the recorder was a sneering laugh or simply empty silence.
    Yesterday, Ewert Grens had met and written off two of three names on the periphery of the investigation who owned security firms with official links to Wojtek International. He had drunk coffee with a certain Maciej Bosacki in Odensala outside Märsta, and more coffee with Karl Lager in Södertalje and after only a couple of minutes at each table had known that they didn’t do executions in city centre flats.
    Far in the distance, the mighty wall.
    He had on occasion walked under the huge prison yard through a network of passages and each time he had met people he avoided in reality, in life. He had taken days and years from them, and he understood why they spat at him, he even respected it, but it did not affect him, they had all pissed on other people and in Ewert Grens’s world, anyone who felt they had the right to harm someone else should have the balls to stand up for it later.
    The grey concrete grew longer, higher.
    He had one name left on the brown-stained paper. Piet Hoffmann, previously convicted of aiming and firing at a policeman, and who had then been granted a gun licence all the same. Something was amiss.
    Ewert Grens parked the car and walked over to the prison entrance and the prisoner who would shortly be sitting in front of him.
    __________
    It didn’t feel right.
     
    He didn’t know why. Maybe it was too quiet. Maybe he was getting locked into his own head as well.
    He had fought off any