Three Seconds

Saturday

It was probably as dark as it could get at night toward the end of May.

The houses and trees and fields were waiting all around with dissolving corners, to reappear when the light crept back.

Ewen Grens was driving along the empty road, almost halfway, about twenty kilometers north of Stockholm. His body was tense, every joint and every muscle still ached with adrenaline, even though it was more than twelve hours now since the shot had been fired, the explosion and death. He hadn't even tried to sleep, though he had lain down for a while on the sofa in his office and listened to the silent police headquarters, without closing his eyes-he just couldn't turn off the roaring inside. He had tried to lose himself in thoughts of Anni and the cemetery, imagined what her resting place looked like. He still hadn't been there, but he would go soon. It was one of those nights when, eighteen months ago, he would have talked to her, nights that he had managed to survive with her help; he would have called the nursing home, even though he wasn't supposed to, nagged one of the staff until they woke her and handed over the receiver, and gradually calmed down as he told her everything, her presence in his ear. After she was gone, he had stopped calling and instead took the car and drove out toward Gardet and Lidingö bridge and the nursing home that was so well situated on the wealthy island. He would sit in the parking place by her window, look up at it, and after a while get out of the car and walk around the house.

Ewert, you can't regulate your grief. Ewert, what you're frightened of has already happened. Ewert, I never want to see you here again.

Now he didn't even have that.

After a few hours he had gotten up, walked down the corridor and to the car on Bergsgatan and started to drive toward Solna and North Cemetery. He wanted to talk to her again. He had stood by one of the gates and searched the shadows and then carried on north, through the smudged landscape to a wall around a prison and a church with a beautiful tower.

"Grens."

The dark, the quiet-if it had not been for the searing smell of fire and soot and diesel, it could all have been a dream, a head in a window, a mouth forming the word death, and in a while there would perhaps be nothing more than the birds singing their hearts out to the dawn and a town waking up without having heard anything about a hostage drama and a person lying motionless on the floor.

"Yes?"

He had pressed the button beside the gate and was talking into the intercom.

"I'm the detective investigating all this mess. Can you let me in?" "It's three in the morning."

"Yes."

"There's no one here who-"

"Can you let me in?"

He slipped through the gate and central security, then crossed one of the prison's dry inner yards.

He had never fired death at a person before.

It had been his decision.

His responsibility.

Ewert Grens approached the building called Block B, paused a while outside the front door, and looked up at the second floor.

The acrid smell of fire had almost intensified.

First an explosion and a projectile that penetrated and shattered a window and a person's head. Then another, more powerful one, the god-awful black smoke that never seemed to stop, that concealed what they were trying to see; an explosion that could not be explained.

His decision.

He started to walk up the stairs, past all the closed doors, toward the smell of smoke.

His responsibility.

Ewen Grens had in fact never had any relationship to death. He worked with it, frequently came face to face with it, and any thoughts of his own death were irrelevant. They had stopped thirty years ago the moment that he, as the driver of a police van, had driven over a head that had then ceased to function. Anni's head. He had no desire to die, it wasn't that, nor did he desire to live. In his meeting with guilt and grief he had developed the ability to encapsulate it, and had continued to do so, and now he didn't even know where to start.

The door was open and the inside was black with soot.

Grens looked into the burned-out workshop, pulled some transparent plastic bags over his shoes and stepped over the blue and white cordon.

There was always something lonely about places that have been destroyed by fire, the all-engulfing flames that eventually turned and subsided. He was walking on the remains of shelves that had fallen, between machines that were black and had been chewed and stopped.

It was there. On the ceiling, on the walls. What he had come for.

He had seen the white ones before, the forensic team's markers for body parts. More than in Västmannagatan. But the red ones, he had never been to a crime scene with red flags.

Two bodies, hundreds… maybe thousands of pieces.

He wondered whether Errfors, the forensic pathologist, would ever be able to piece enough together for an identification. People who had been alive until recently, who no longer existed, other than in bits marked by small flags. He started to count them without knowing why, just a few square meters of wall, but tired of it when he reached three hundred seventy-four. He crossed over the window that was no longer there, a light breeze through the hole in the wall. He stood in the place where Hoffmann had stood, the church and the church rower silhouetted against the sky. The sniper had lain up there, he had aimed and fired a bullet on Ewert Grens's command.

Aspsås shrank in the rear view mirror.

He had stayed for a couple of hours in the stench of burned oil and heavy smoke. The feeling had continued to torment him, no matter how many red and white flags marking body parts he counted, he still couldn't understand it, and the unease kept him awake, a reminder of the adrenaline and irritation. He didn't like it, tried to lose it in the mess on the floor and the tools that would never be used again, but it clung to him, whispering something he couldn't understand. He was approaching Stockholm through the northern satellite towns and suburbs when his mobile phone sang out from the back seat. He slowed down, leaned back for his jacket.

"Ewert?"

"Are you awake?"

"Where are you?"

"This early, Sven? Shouldn't it be me who's calling you?"

Sven Sundkvist smiled. It was a long time since he and Anita had been bothered by the phone ringing in the bedroom between midnight and dawn. Ewert always called the minute he had something that needed an immediate answer, and that tended to be at night when everyone else was asleep. But he hadn't been able to sleep himself last night. He had lain close to Anita and listened to the ticking of the alarm clock until, after a couple of hours, he crept out of bed and went down to the kitchen on the ground floor of their terraced house, and sat there doing crosswords, as he sometimes did when the nights were long. But the unease refused to leave his house. The same unease that Ewert had talked about earlier that evening, thoughts that had nowhere to go.

"I'm on my way into the city, Ewert. I'm just by Gullmarsplan and then heading west. To Kungsangen. Sterner just called."

"Sterner?"

"The sniper."

Grens accelerated-the early morning commuters were still in their garages, so it was easy to drive.

"Then we've got about the same distance. I'm just passing Haga Park. What's it about?"

"Tell you when we get there."

Another locked gate in another uniformed world.

Grens and Sundkvist arrived at the Svea Life Guards in Kungsangen only a few minutes apart. Sterner was waiting for them by the regiment guardhouse. He looked rested, but was wearing the same clothes as the day before, white-and-gray camouflage, creased after a night on top of the bedclothes. Standing in front of the closed gate and with the barracks behind him, he looked the cliché of a model American marine, cropped hair and broad-shouldered, square face, the kind that on films always stand too near and shout too loud.

"Same clothes as yesterday?"

"Yup. When the helicopter dropped me off… I went and lay down." "And you slept?"

"Like a baby."

Grens and Sundkvist exchanged looks. The guy who had fired had slept. But the one who had made the decision to fire, and his closest colleague, had not.

Sterner signed them in and showed the way to a deserted barrack square, with solid buildings that stared down at all visitors. Sterner walked fast and Grens had difficulty keeping up when they went through the first door and carried on up the stairs, down long corridors with stone floors, conscripts still in underpants ahead of a day in uniform.

"Life Guards. First company. The ones who are going to be officers and stay longest."

He stopped in a room with simple, institutional furniture, white walls that needed painting, and plastic flooring on hard concrete.

Four work stations, one in each corner.

"My colleagues won't be coming in today. A two-day exercise in north Uppland, around Tierp. We won't be disturbed here."

He closed the door.

"I called as soon as I woke up. The thought that I had as I fell asleep came back to me and refused to leave the bed."

He leaned forward.

"I observed. With the binoculars. I watched him for a long rime. I followed his movements, his face for nearly half an hour."

"And?"

"He was standing in the window, fully exposed. You mentioned it too, I heard you. Like he knew he could be seen, that he wanted to demonstrate his power over the hostages, the whole situation, maybe even you. You said that he was doing it because he was sure he was out of range."

"Right."

"That's what you said. What you believed."

He looked at the door, as if he wanted to reassure himself that it really was shut.

"I didn't think that. Not then. And not now."

"I think you'll need to explain that."

Grens felt uneasy, the same feeling that had kept him awake, that was in some way connected to the feeling he got in the burned-out workshop. There was something that wasn't right.

"When I was watching him through the binoculars. Object in clear sight. Awaiting order. I don't know, it was like he knew. I repeat. Awaiting order. As if he knew that he was in range."

"I don't understand."

"I aborted. Abort. Object out of sight. I aborted twice."

"Yes, and?"

Well, both times… it was like he knew when I was going to shoot. He moved so… precisely."

"He moved several times."

Sterner got up, he was restless, went over to the door, checked it, then over to the window with a view of the square.

"He did. But both times… precisely as I was about to fire."

"And the third time?"

"He stood still. Then… it was like… like he'd decided. He stood still and waited."

'And?"

"One bullet, one hit. The motto of sniper training. I only shoot if I know I'm going to hit the target."

Grens went over to the same window.

"Where?"

"Where…

"Where did you hit him?"

"The head. I shouldn't have done it. But I had no choice."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that from a distance, we always aim at the chest. The largest target area. I should have aimed there. But he was standing in profile the whole time and so… to get as big a target area as possible… I shot at his head."

And the explosion?"

"I don't know."

"Don't know?"

"I don't know."

"But you-"

"It wasn't connected to the shot."

A group of about twenty teenagers in uniform marched across the gravel in two rows.

They tried to lift their legs and swing their arms at the same time, while someone who was a bit older walked beside them screeching something. They weren't succeeding.

"And one more thing."

"Yes?"

"Who was he?"

"Why?"

"I killed him."

The two rows were now standing at ease.

The older uniform demonstrated how their guns should lie on their shoulders while they marched.

It was important that they all held them the same way.

"I killed him. I want to know his name. I feel I have the right." Grens hesitated, looked at Sven, and then back at Sterner.

"Pier Hoffmann."

Sterner's face showed nothing. If it was a name he recognized he hid it well.

"Hoffmann. Do you have his personal details?"

"Yes."

"I want to go over to administration. And I'd like you to come with me. There's something I want to check."

Ewert and Sven followed Sterner's back across the barrack square to a building that was smaller than the others and housed the regimental commander's quarters, administration, and a slightly better officers' mess. On the second floor, Sterner rapped on the doorframe of an open door, and an older man sitting in front of a computer gave them a friendly nod.

"I need his personal ID number."

Sven had already gotten out a notebook from his inner pocket, which he flicked through until he found what he was looking for.

"721018-0010."

The older man in front of the computer typed in the ten-digit number, waited for a few seconds and then shook his head.

"Born in the early 1970s? Then he won't be here. Ten years back, that's what the law stipulates. Any documents older than that are stored in the military archives."

He smiled, looked pleased.

"But… I always make my own copies of anything we have before sending it off. Svea Life Guards' own archive. Every young man who has done his military service here in the past thirty years can be found on the shelves next door."

A room crowded with shelves on every wall, from floor to ceiling. He got down on his knees and ran his finger along the backs of the files before picking out a black one.

"Born 1972. Now, if he was here… ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three, maybe even ninety-four. Life Company, you said. Sniper training?" ^"Yes.^"

He leafed through the papers, put the file back, then took out the one beside it.

"Not ninety-one. So we'll try ninety-two."

He had got about halfway when he stopped and looked up.

"Hoffmann?"

"Piet Hoffmann."

"Then we've got a match."

Ewert and Sven stepped forward simultaneously to get a better look at the papers that the archivist was holding up. Hoffmann's full name, Hoffmann's personal ID number, then a long row of combined numbers and letters, some sort of record.

"What does that mean?"

"It means that someone called Piet Hoffmann, someone with the personal ID number that you just gave me, completed his military service here in 1993. He followed an eleven-month training program, as a sniper."

Ewert Grens scanned the piece of paper once more.

It was him.

The person they had seen die sixteen hours earlier.

"Special training in weapons and shooting, all positions-prone, kneeling, standing, short range, long range… I think you get the gist?"

Sterner opened the file, took out the piece of paper and copied it on a machine that was as big as the room.

"That feeling that I had… that he knew exactly where I was, what I was doing. If he was trained here… he would have enough skills to know that Aspsås church tower was the only place that we could get him from. He knew that it was possible to kill him."

Sterner held the copy crushed in his hand and then gave it to Grens.

"He'd chosen that place with great care. It's no coincidence that he went to the workshop and that window, in particular. He provoked us to fire. He knew that a good, well-trained marksman could shoot him if he had to.

He shook his head.

"He wanted to die."

The corridor of the intensive care unit at Danderyd hospital had yellow walls and a light blue floor. The nurses sent them friendly smiles and

Ewert Grens and Sven Sundkvist gave equally friendly smiles back. It was a quiet morning-they had both been there for work on many occasions before, often in the evening or weekend, injured people waking on beds in the harsh light of the corridor, which was empty now, as it normally was when alcohol, football matches, and snowy roads were not the order of the day.

They had driven there straight from Kungsingen and the Svea Life Guards, via Norrviken and Edsberg, through small and pleasant suburbs with big detached houses, which made Sven phone home to Anita and Jonas. They had had breakfast together and were about to go to their separate schools. He missed them.

The doctor was a young man, tall and thin, on the verge of skinny, with reserved eyes. He greeted them and showed them into a dark room with drawn curtains.

"He's got a severe concussion. I'll have to ask you to keep the room dark."

One single bed in the room.

A man in his sixties, graying hair, tired eyes, scratches and wounds on both his cheeks, a cut on his forehead that looked deep, his right arm in a sling.

He was found lying under a wall.

"My name is Johan Ferm. We met last night when you came in. I've got two policemen with me who would like to ask you some questions."

The fire and rescue service had searched the burned-out workshop for a long time before they heard faint sounds from underneath one of the piles of rubble. A naked and bruised prison officer with a broken collar bone, but a person who was still breathing.

"I've given them five minutes. Then I'll ask them to leave."

The gray-haired man pulled himself up, grimaced with pain and threw up in a bowl by the side of the bed.

"He is not allowed to move. Severe concussion. Your five minutes have already started."

Ewert Grens turned toward the young doctor.

"We'd prefer it if we could be left alone."

"I'm staying here. For medical reasons."

Grens stood by the window while Sven Sundkvist moved a stool from the sink to the bedside, making sure that his face was at about the same height as the injured prison warden's.

"You know Grens?"

Martin Jacobson nodded. He knew who Ewert Grens was, they had met several times; the detective superintendent regularly visited the place where he had chosen to work all his life.

"This is not an interview, Jacobson. We'll do that later, when you're well enough and we have more time. But we do need some information now." "Sorry?"

"This is not-"

"You'll have to speak louder. My eardrums burst in the explosion." Sven leaned forward and raised his voice.

"We've got a fairly good picture of what happened when you were taken hostage. Your colleagues have given us a detailed description of the shooting of a prisoner in solitary confinement."

The doctor tapped on Sven's shoulder.

`Ask short questions. That's all he can manage. Short answers. Otherwise you'll just be wasting your five minutes."

Sven considered turning around and telling the man in the white coat to shut up. But he didn't. He never snapped at people as it seldom helped the situation.

"First of all… can you remember any of what happened yesterday?" Jacobson was breathing heavily, he was in a lot of pain and struggled to find the words that disappeared in his seriously concussed brain.

"I remember everything. Until I lost consciousness. If I've understood correctly, a wall fell on me?"

"It fell down as a result of an explosion. But I want to know… what happened just before?"

"I don't know. I wasn't there."

"You weren't… there?"

"I was in another room, Hoffmann put me there, hands tied behind my back, somewhere at the back of the workshop, near the main door. He moved me there after we'd stripped. And after that I think we only had contact once. You're not going to die. That's what he said. Just before the explosion."

Sven looked at Ewert-they had both registered what the elderly guard had just said.

"Jacobson… do you think that Hoffmann moved you in order to… protect you?"

Martin Jacobson answered straight away.

"I'm sure that's why he did it. Despite everything that happened. •. I didn't feel threatened anymore."

Sven leaned even farther forward, it was important that Jacobson could hear.

"The explosion. I want to ask more about that. If you think back, can you remember anything that might explain it) And the incredible force of it?"

"No."

"Nothing at all?"

"I've thought about it. And of course, it was a workshop and there was diesel. That explains the smoke. But the actual explosion… nothing."

The color of Jacobson's face had changed from white to ashen gray and great drops of sweat were running from his hairline.

The doctor moved over to the bed.

"He can't deal with much more. Just one more question. Then I'll have to ask you to leave."

Sven nodded. The final question.

"Throughout the entire hostage drama, Hoffmann is silent. No communication. Except for right at the end. He's a dead man. We don't understand why. I want to know if you saw him communicating at any point? Or anything that might resemble communication? We don't understand his silence."

The warden who was lying in a hospital bed with a wounded ashen-gray face took a while to answer. Sven got the feeling that he was drifting off, and the doctor had indicated that he should stop when Jacobson raised an arm, he wanted to continue, he wanted to answer.

"He used the phone."

Jacobson looked at Sven, at Ewert.

"He used the phone. In the office at the back of the workshop. Twice."

Ewert Grens was driving to Aspsås and the large prison for the second time that morning.

They had paid for a cup of bitter tea and a white bread sandwich with meatballs and something purplish that Sven claimed was beetroot salad. They had sat in the cafe by the hospital entrance and eaten in silence, with Jacobson's answers to keep them company. According to the injured warden, Hoffmann had left the hostages on two occasions and gone into the workshop office. He kept them in full view through the glass partition wall while he lifted the receiver of the phone that sat on the desk and talked for about fifteen seconds each time. Once right at the start, Hoffmann had warned them not to move and had walked backward toward the office with the gun pointing at them, the other time just before the explosion. From his position behind the partition wall, the naked and bound guard had clearly seen him phoning again and saw that he was now very nervous, only a few seconds, but Jacobson was sure of it; a few moments of doubt and fear, maybe the only ones throughout the whole drama.

There were no empty spaces in the parking lot that had been peaceful only a few hours ago. Morning had woken one of Sweden's maximum security prisons. Ewert Grens parked on some grass near the wall and, while he waited for Sven Sundkvist, made a phone call to Hermansson, who for the third day was working on a report of the murder at Vdstmannagatan 79, which was to be delivered to the prosecutor that afternoon. He would then decide whether to downgrade the investigation.

"I want you to put it to one side for the moment."

"Ågestam was here yesterday. He wants it this afternoon." "Hermansson?"

"Yes?"

"Ågestam will get the report when you've finished it. Put it to one side. I want you to make a list of all outgoing calls from Aspsås prison between eight forty-five and nine forty-five in the morning and one-thirty and two-thirty in the afternoon. Then I want you to check them. I want to know which ones we can forget and which ones might have been made from the workshop office."

He had expected her to protest.

She didn't.

"Hoffmann?"

"Hoffmann."

The prison yard was full of inmates-it was the morning break with spring sun and they sat in groups and looked up at the sky with cheeks that turned rosy. Grens had no wish to listen to sarcastic remarks from anyone he had previously investigated and questioned and so chose to go underground, via a concrete passageway that reminded him of another investigation. Neither Ewert Grens nor Sven Sundkvist said anything, but they were thinking about the same case, how they had walked side by side five years ago, a father who had killed his daughter's murderer and then been given a long sentence himself, a case that often returned and niggled, with images that they had tried to forget for a long time. Some investigations did that.

They came out of the passage and were struck by the silence, even in the stairwell of Block B. The annoying banging had stopped. They passed solitary confinement in B1 and the normal units in B2, which were all empty as the prisoners had been evacuated to Block K and would remain there as long as the building that still echoed from the explosion was a cordoned off crime scene and part of an investigation.

Four forensic technicians were creeping around in different parts of the charred workshop and soot-licked walls that had once been white. The smell of diesel oil stuck to everything, a thick and sharp smell that reminded those there of how poisonous each breath had been only a day earlier. Nils Krantz left the remains of death, concentrated and determined. Neither Ewert nor Sven had ever seen him laugh; he was simply someone who functioned far better with a microscope than a cocktail glass.

"Follow me."

Krantz walked over to the part of the workshop that looked out over the prison yard, hunkered down in front of a wall with a hole about the size of a grapefruit, then turned and pointed straight across the room.

"So, the bullet penetrated the window there. The window that you could see from the church tower, where Hoffmann chose to stand, fully exposed, for the whole drama. We're talking about fire and explosive ammunition and an initial velocity of eight hundred and thirty meters per second. That means three seconds from the shot being fired to hitting its target."

Nils Krantz had never witnessed a crime happening, he had never been in a place when it became a crime scene. But that was precisely what his work entailed, being there, getting others to be there later, at the exact time that it happened.

"The projectile penetrated a window and a skull with massive impact. Then it flattened and the velocity slowed until it reached here, see the big hole, and met the next wall."

He closed his hand around a long metal pole in the middle of the hole that showed the angle of the trajectory-the shot had been fired from somewhere higher up.

"The bullet when loaded is nearly ten centimeters long. But the part that is fired, the bit that remains if you discount the jacket, is three, maybe even three and a half centimeters, and this then hit and ripped through parts of the wall and continued out into the prison yard. And a projectile that slices through glass, human bone, and a thick concrete wall in that order will totally flatten out and look more or less like an old eighteenth-century coin."

Grens and Sundkvist looked at the crater in the wall. They had both listened to Jacobson talking about a sound like a whiplash, the force had been unimaginable.

"It's out there somewhere. We haven't found it yet, but we will soon. I've got several police officers from Aspsa's district on their hands and knees in the gravel looking."

Krantz walked over to the window where Hoffmann had stood. Red and white flags on the wall, the floor, the ceiling. More than Grens could remember from his visit during the night.

"I've had to make a kind of system. Red for bloodstains, white for remains. I've never worked with bodies that have been so totally blown apart."

Sven studied the small flags, tried to understand what they actually signified, moved closer-he who normally avoided unmistakeable death.

"We're talking about an explosion and fragments of dead people. But there's something I don't understand."

This time, Sven moved even closer. He wasn't frightened, didn't feel any discomfort. This wasn't death, he couldn't see it like that.

"Human tissue. Thousands of bits. This type of projectile rips bodies apart. Into big bits. It doesn't explode."

People broken down into particles that were only centimeters away from Sven, they stopped being people then.

"So we're looking for something else. Something that exploded. Something that blows things into smithereens, not big bits."

"Such as?"

"An explosive. I can't think of any other explanation."

Ewert Grens saw the red and white flags, shards of glass, soot that blanketed everything.

"Explosive. What kind?"

Krantz made an irritation gesture with his arms.

"TNT. Nitroglycerine. C4. Semtex. Pentyl. Octogen. Dynamex Or something else. I don't know, Grens. We're still looking. But what I do know… it was definitely close to the bodies, maybe even directly on the skin."

He nodded at the flags.

"Well… you understand."

Red for bloodstains, white for remains.

"We also know that it was an explosive that generates extreme heat." "I see…"

"Enough heat to ignite the diesel in the barrel."

"I can smell it."

The forensic scientist gave a gentle kick to the barrel standing below the hole that had been a window the day before.

"It was the diesel that had been mixed with gas that caused all that god-awful smoke. You find barrels and cans of diesel oil in every workshop in every prison, fuel for the machines and any forklift trucks, and for cleaning the tools. But this barrel… it was standing very close to Hoffmann. And it had been moved there."

Nils Krantz shook his head.

"Explosives. Poisonous smoke. It was no accident that the barrel was there, Ewert. Piet Hoffmann wanted to be certain."

"Certain?"

"That he and one of the hostages would die."

Grens turned off the engine and got out of the car. He waved at Sven to drive on ahead and started to walk over the fields in what was to be a fifteen-hundred-and-three-meter stroll from Aspsås prison to Aspsås church. The open areas of grass cleansed him of the lack of sleep and the stench of diesel oil, but not the feeling that had gripped him, which he didn't like and knew would stay with him until he understood what it was he couldn't see.

He should have worn other shoes.

The green that looked so soft from a distance was full of dips and clay and he had stumbled a couple of times, fallen heavily to the ground, his trousers stained green by the grass and brown by the earth by the time he finally stopped outside a side gate into the churchyard.

He turned around. The morning mist had evaporated and the gray walls were clear in the sunlight. He had stood here exactly twenty-four hours ago; he still hadn't made the decision about another person's death.

A handful of visitors were moving around between the headstones, flowers in their hands, spouses or children or friends who cared. Grens avoided their eyes but watched their hands as they dug in between the green bushes and wreaths, as if he was testing himself, but being by a grave that meant nothing didn't feel like anything either.

A plastic cordon was wound between the trees and some arbitrary poles. He pushed it down and stepped over it, raising his stiff leg high in the air. Four people were waiting at the heavy church door. Sven Sundkvist, two uniformed policemen from Aspsås district and an older man with a dog collar.

He held out his hand, took another hand.

"Gustaf Lindbeck. I'm the parish priest."

The sort who pronounced Gustaf with a very dear f. Grens felt his mouth twitch. I should perhaps say Ewert with a very clear w.

"Grens, detective superintendent with city police."

"Are you the one who's responsible for this?"

The parish priest tugged at the cordon.

"I'm leading the investigation, if that's what you mean."

Ewert Grens pulled at the same tape.

"Is this a problem for you?"

"I've already had to cancel a christening and a marriage. I have a funeral in an hour. I just wanted to know whether it would be possible to go ahead."

Grens looked at the church, at Sven, at the visitors on their knees in front of gravestones, watering plants in narrow beds.

"This is what we'll do."

He tugged lightly at the tape until one of the temporary poles fell down.

"I need to look over parts of the ground floor again. That'll take about half an hour. In the meantime, you-and only you-can be there and prepare what you have to prepare. When we're done, we'll remove the cordon and the funeral party can come in. But, for investigation purposes, I'll keep the church tower cordoned off for another day. Does that sound like a reasonable solution?"

The priest nodded.

"I'm very grateful. Bur… one more thing. The passing bell should be rung in about an hour. Can we use the church bell?"

Ewert looked up at the tower and the heavy cast iron bell that hung in the middle.

"Yes, you can. The bell itself isn't cordoned off."

They walked toward the now open door. The church bell. The churchyard was watching him. The passing bell. A year and a half had passed and he hadn't even chosen her gravestone.

The priest carried on straight ahead, into the cool and quiet church, whereas Grens and Sundkvist went right just inside the door. The chairs were still stacked up against the wall, the map folded out over the wooden altar near the only window in the vestibule.

"Sven?"Yes?"7 want to hear it again. Who he is. What he capable of" Ewert held the drawing of a prison.

"Extremely antisocial personality disorder. No ability to empathise." Slowly he folded it up.

"Significant characteristics include impulsiveness, aggression, lack of respect for own and others' safety, lack of conscience."

Map in his inner pocket, they wouldn't need it anymore.

"Ewert, give me a hand."

Sven had picked up and emptied six plastic cups emblazoned with the red and yellow Shell logo-a couple of hours of decisions about life and death based on the energy from bad coffee from the nearest gas station. He picked up one of the chairs and waited pointedly until Ewert took the next one. They left the room that would soon be a private gathering place for the bereaved and opened the door to the stairs up into the tower, a swift glance into the nave and the priest who was pushing a cart of bibles between two rows of pews. He saw them and raised his hand.

"Are you going up?"

"Yes."

"The passing bell… there's only twenty minutes to go."

"We'll be done by then."

They went up the stairs and the aluminum ladder and somehow it felt farther and higher than the day before. The door to the church tower balcony was open and creaked gently in the wind that played over the gravestones and grass. Grens was about to close it when he noticed the mark on the doorframe. The wood was newly splintered on a level with the door handle. It was obvious and he remembered that the first sniper had remarked that the door had been forced open. He poked the splintered wood with a pen-it hadn't even darkened yet, it couldn't have been that long ago.

The morning mist was clearing and the sky would soon be as blue as the day before. Aspsås prison was waiting under them like great lumps of gray, silent cement, walls and buildings that kept out dreams and laughter.

Ewert Grens went out onto the flimsy wooden structure.

"Sven, carry on reading."

A sniper had lain here twenty-four hours ago.

"There isn't anything else."

A gun aimed at a person's head.

"Read!"

"Shooting incident involving a police officer in Söderhamn, at a public space on the edge of the town, he hit-"

"That's enough."

He had made his decision.

His order was death.

The wind picked up. It felt good on his face, and for a while there was only the sun that warmed his pale cheeks and the birds flying way above his head, chasing what couldn't be seen. He held on to the low railing, a moment of dizziness, one single step would pitch him headlong. He looked at his feet and at a couple of dark round stains on the last wooden board, the one that stopped a few centimeters out from the railing. He touched them with his fingertips, smelled them. Gun grease, must have escaped from the gun barrel and would now forever discolor the floor of the balcony.

Ewert Grens knelt down, then lay so that his whole body was where the marksman had been. His elbows on the wooden floor, an imaginary gun in his hands, he aimed at the window that was no longer there, a hole surrounded by soot right up to the roof of the building called Block B.

"This was where he was lying. When he was waiting for my order."

Ewert looked up at Sven.

"When he was waiting for me to ask him to kill."

He waved impatiently at his colleague.

"You lie down too. I want you to know what it feels like."

"I don't like heights. You know that."

"Sven, just lie down. The railing, it's enough, it'll protect you."

Sven Sundkvist crept gingerly out, going a bit farther so he didn't need to lie near Grens's heavy body. He hated heights, too much to lose if you fell, a fear that got stronger every year. He crept and wriggled and stretched

out his hand when he was sufficiently close, and clung on to the railing.

It was high. Ewert was breathing heavily. The wind was blowing.

Sven wrapped his fingers tighter around a cold iron railing and felt something coming loose; he was holding something in his hand. He pulled it back, even more came off, something black and rectangular, three or four centimeters long, a lead at one end.

"Ewers."

An outstretched hand.

"This was on the railing."

They both realized what it was.

A solar cell.

Painted black, the same color as the railing, the hand that had put it there did not want it to be seen.

Sven pulled carefully at the equally black lead. It came loose and he pulled harder, hauling in a round piece of metal, smaller than the first, barely a centimeter in diameter.

An electronic transmitter.

When I was watching him through the binoculars. I don't know, it was like he knew.

"A transmitter, a lead, a solar cell. Ewert… Sterner was right."

As if he knew that he was in range.

Sven held the lead, swinging it back and forth, forgot for a moment to be frightened of what was far below.

"Hoffmann heard every word that was said between you and the sniper."

Ewert Grens had been careful to close the door to his room.

Two cups of coffee and a cheese-and-ham roll from the vending machine in the corridor.

He could still feel the force of the explosion and the smell of smoke and imagined breathing that vanished as he watched.

He hadn't had a choice.

According to all the documentation, Piet Hoffmann was one of the few criminals who had the potential to actually do what he threatened. Ewert Grens went through the Prison and Probation Service documents, including psychopathic tests and sentences, read through his criminal record on the computer screen, five years, attempted murder and assault of a police officer, observations in the criminal intelligence database of a criminal who was KNOWN DANGEROUS ARMED.

He had not had any choice.

He was about to turn off the computer and go back out into the corridor for another cheese-and-ham roll when he noticed something at the bottom of the screen, the first entry in Piet Hoffmann's criminal record.

Date last modified.

Grens worked it out. Eighteen days ago.

A sentence that was served ten years ago.

He stayed in the room, pounding from wall to wall, from window to door, that feeling again that something was wrong, something didn't fit.

He dialed a number that he had long since learned off by heart, data support, he had spent many a night swearing over the keys and symbols that seemed to have a mind of their own.

A young male voice answered. They were always young and they were always male.

"This is Grens. I need a bit of help."

"Detective superintendent? Just one moment."

Ewert Grens had on a couple of occasions walked through the whole building in order to see what they were explaining, which was why he knew that what he heard while he waited, metal against metal, was the young male voice, just like all the others, disposing of an empty Coke can on one of the piles around his computer.

"I want to know who's changed an entry in someone's criminal record. Can you access that?"

"I'm sure I can. But that comes under the national court administration. You'll need to talk to their support team."

"But if I was to ask you? Now?"

The young voice opened a new can.

"Give me five minutes."

Four minutes and forty-five seconds later, Grens smiled at the receiver. "What have you got?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary. It was changed on one of the national court administration computers."

"By who?"

"Someone who's authorized. An Ulrika Danielsson. Do you want her number?"

He tramped around the room again, drank some cold coffee that was trying to stick to the bottom of the cup.

He remained standing up for the next phone call.

"Ulrika Danielsson."

"Grens, City Police in Stockholm."

"How can I help you?"

"It's about an investigation. 721018-0010. A judgment that's nearly ten years old."

"Right?"

'And according to the register it was modified recently. Exactly eighteen days ago."

"I see."

"By you."

He could hear her silence.

"I wanted to know why."

She was nervous. He was sure of it. Long pauses, deep breaths. "I'm afraid I can't comment on that."

"You can't comment?"

"Confidentiality clause."

"Which damn confidentiality clause?"

"I'm afraid I can't say anymore."

Grens didn't raise his voice, he lowered it-sometimes it worked even better.

"I want to know why you changed it. And what you changed." "I said that I can't comment."

"Ulrika… can I call you that, by the way?"

He didn't wait for the answer.

"Ulrika, I am a detective superintendent. I'm investigating a murder. And you work for the national court administration. You can claim the confidentiality clause as much as you like for hacks. But not for me."

I

"Now, you're going to answer me. Or I'll just get back to you, Ulrika, in a couple of days. That's as long as it takes to get a court order."

Deep breaths. She couldn't contain them any longer.

"Wilson."

"Wilson?"

"Your colleague. You'll have to ask him."

It was no longer just a feeling.

Something wasn't right.

He lay down on the brown corduroy sofa. Half an hour had passed and he had really tried, he had closed his eyes and relaxed and was even less likely to fall asleep than when he started.

I don't understand.

A prisoner in a workshop window kept getting in the way.

Why did you want to die?

A face in profile.

If you could hear, which Sterner is sure of if what we found in the church tower and what is now lying on my desk is a working transmitter, why the hell did you dodge your own death twice and then choose to face it the third time?

A person who had made sure he was visible the whole time.

Had you decided but didn't dare?

Where then did you get the courage to stand still and die?

And why did you make sure that after the shot you would be blown into a thousand pieces?

"Are you sleeping?"

Someone had knocked on the door and Hermansson popped her head round.

"Not really."

He sat up, happy to see her; he often was. She sat down beside him on the sofa, a file on her lap.

"I've finished the report about Västmannagatan 79. I'm pretty sure that he'll still recommend that it's scaled down. We don't seem to be getting any farther."

Grens sighed. "It feels… it feels very odd. If we close this… my third unsolved murder here."

"Third?"

"One at the start of the eighties, a body that was cut up into small pieces and found in the water near Kastellholmen by some fishermen pulling in a net. And then one a couple of winters ago, the woman in the hospital service passage, the one who was dragged from the tunnel system, her face covered in big holes from rat bites."

He tapped the file. "Is it me who's getting worse, Hermansson? Or is it reality that's getting more complicated?"

Hermansson looked at her boss and smiled.

"Ewen?"

"Yes?"

"And exactly how long have you worked here?"

"You know that."

"How long?"

"Since… before you were born. Thirty-five years."

"And how many murders have you investigated?"

"The exact number, I assume?"

"Yes."

"Two hundred and thirteen."

"Two hundred and thirteen."

"Including this one."

She smiled again.

"Thirty-five years. Two hundred and thirteen murders. Of which three are unsolved!'

He didn't answer. It wasn't a question.

"One every twelve years, Ewert. I don't know how you measure things like that. But I'd say that's not too bad."

He glanced at her. Thought what he had often thought about. He knew already. If he had had a son, a daughter.

Kind of like her.

"There was something else?"

She opened the file and took out a plastic sleeve that was at the back. "Two more things."

She pulled out two pieces of paper from the awkward plastic.

"You asked me to get a record of all outgoing phone calls from Aspsås prison between eight forty-five and nine forty-five in the morning and one thirty and two thirty in the afternoon."

Near columns of numbers to the left and first name and last name to the right.

"Thirty-two calls. Even though restrictions had been placed on outgoing calls from the prison."

Hermansson ran down the long column of numbers with her finger.

"I've cleared thirty of them. Eleven calls from staff to their family who were worried or to say that they would be home late. Eight calls to us, the police, to Aspsås district or City. Three calls to the Prison and Probation Service in Norrkoping. Four calls to inmates' families who were due to visit, to arrange new times. And…"

She looked at the detective superintendent.

"… four calls to the major newspapers' hotlines."

Grens shook his head.

"About the same frequency as usual. The hotline calls, I guess that was our colleagues?"

Hermansson laughed briefly.

"According to the chancellor of justice that question qualifies as investigation of sources. And that, I believe, Ewert, is a crime that carries a prison sentence.

"Colleagues, in other words."

She continued.

"I've crossed them all out. So I have thirty qualified explanations." She moved her finger to the numbers at the bottom.

"That leaves two phone calls. One in the morning, at nine twenty-three, and one in the afternoon at twelve minutes past two. Calls from Aspsås prison to a contract phone registered at the Ericsson offices in Vastberga."

The next plastic sleeve, handwritten notes from a note pad.

"I followed the number up. According to Ericsson's HR department, the phone is used by one of their employees called Zofia Hoffmann."

Grens spluttered.

"Hoffmann."

"Married to a Piet Hoffmann."

She turned over the piece of paper. More handwriting.

"I checked the personal details I was given. Zofia Hoffmann is registered as living in Stockrosvägen in Enskede. According to her employer, the company's correct name is evidently Ericsson Enterprise AB. She disappeared from the workplace yesterday just before lunch."

"While the hostage drama was ongoing."

"Yes."

"Between phone calls."

^" Yes.

Ewert Grens got up out of the soft sofa and stretched his aching back while Hermansson took out another piece of paper.

"According to the tax authorities, Zofia and Piet Hoffmann have two children together. The two boys have attended a nursery school at an address in Enskededalen every weekday for the past three years and are collected by either their mother or father at around five o'clock. But yesterday, a couple of hours before her husband was shot to death by us, and exactly twenty minutes after she left work, Zofia Hoffmann picked up the boys considerably earlier than normal without notifying any of the staff. She seemed tense-two of the nursery school teachers described her as that, she didn't meet their eye, didn't seem to hear their questions."

Mariana Hermansson studied the older man who bent down to touch the floor, then up and leaned back; his large body and an exercise that he had no doubt learned in a strict gym half a century ago.

"I sent a patrol car around to their house, a detached house built in the fifties, a few minutes' drive south of the city. We looked in through two closed windows, rang the doorbell, saw that the doors were locked, looked through the letter box and could see today's newspaper and yesterday's post. Nothing. Nothing, Ewert, to indicate that anyone in the family had been there since yesterday morning."

Twice more. He bent forward and then leaned back.

"Issue an arrest warrant."

An arrest warrant was issued for Zofia Hoffmann thirty minutes ago." Ewert Grens nodded briefly; it might have been praise.

"He phoned her. He warned her. He protected her from the consequences of his own death."

She had stepped out into the corridor and closed the door when she stopped, turned round and opened it again.

"There was one more thing."

Grens was still standing in the middle of the floor.

"Yes?"

"Can I come in?"

"You've never asked for permission before."

It felt ominous.

She had been on her way to tell him all morning and had still managed to leave his office without having spoken about why she really came.

"I know something that may hold the key. And that you should have known yesterday, but I didn't get to you in time."

She wasn't used to being out of control, of not being sure that she was doing the right thing.

"I was on my way to tell you. I ran through the prison corridors and drove as fast as I could toward the church."

It was a feeling she didn't like. Not anytime, and certainly not here, with Ewert.

"I tried to call but your phone was switched off. I knew that every minute, second counted. I could hear you and the sniper talking on the car radio. Your order. The sound of the gun being fired."

"Hermansson?"

"Yes?"

"Get to the point."

She looked at him. She was nervous. It was a long time since she had felt like this in here.

"You asked me to talk to Oscarsson. I did. The circumstances surrounding Hoffmann, Ewert-someone was giving Oscarsson orders, someone was telling him what to do."

She had learned to read his face.

She knew what it meant when the color started to rise in his cheeks and the vein on his temple started to throb.

"The night before you went there, Oscarsson was ordered to let a lawyer visit one of the prisoners in the same unit as Hoffmann, and then to prevent you or anyone else from questioning him or meeting him. He was ordered to move him back to the unit where he came from, despite the fact that prisoners who have been threatened are never moved back, and, in contravention of the prison service's own regulations, that the gates should be kept shut, even if Hoffmann demanded that they be opened."

"Hermansson, what the hell-"

"Ewert, let me finish. I had the information but I didn't get to you in time. And after… the explosion, it didn't seem relevant to talk about it just then."

He put his hand on her shoulder. Something he had never done before. "Hermansson. I'm furious, but not at you. You did the right thing. But I do want to know who."

"Who?"

"Who made the orders?"

"I don't know."

"Don't know!"

"He wouldn't tell me."

Ewert Grens almost ran across the room to the desk and the shelves behind. A hole with edges of dust. It wasn't there. The music that had given him comfort and strength for all these years. It was at times like this he had needed it most, when anger tipped over into rage, starting somewhere in his belly, burning its way to every part of his body, and it would stay there until he knew who had made him into a useful idiot, who had let him shoot.

"With that information, I wouldn't have ordered the sniper to fire." He looked at his young colleague.

"If I had known what I know now… Hoffmann would never have died."

The brown plastic cup would soon be full of strong, black, bitter coffee. The machine rattled as it normally did, mostly toward the end, reluctant to give up the last drops. Chief Superintendent Göransson drank the coffee while he was out in the corridor. He saw Mariana Hermansson coming out of Grens's office, a file under her arm. He knew what their meeting had been about, they were doing exactly what they should, filing the reports required following a lethal shooting at Aspsås.

I did not participate.

He crushed the cup, the hot liquid running down the back of his hand.

I jumped ship.

Göransson drank some more of the bitterness, emptied the cup. He greeted Sven Sundkvist, who was passing. He also had a couple of files under his arm, on his way to the office that Hermansson had just left, to Ewert Grens.

He noticed the flushed cheeks, the pulsing vein by his temple.

Sven knew Ewert Grens better than anyone else in the building, he had had to face his boss's anger and learn to deal with it, so now when the shouting and the kicking of trash cans took over he no longer saw or heard it, it had nothing to do with him. Only Ewert could chase his own demons.

"You don't look happy."

"Drop by Hermansson when you're done here. She'll explain. I can't face it right now."

Sven looked at the man in the middle of the floor. They had met earlier that morning. This boiling rage hadn't been there then.

Something had happened.

"What do you know about Wilson?"

"Erik?"

"Are there any other Wilsons on the goddamn corridor?"

Another kind of anger. Clear, tangible. Ewert could be angry about most things, a difficult, irritated anger that was such a frequent caller that it never got through. But this anger was serious, it demanded space and he tried not to downplay it.

I must go to Hermansson afterwards.

"I don't know him. Even though we've been here almost the same length of time. It just turned out that way. But… he seems like a nice enough guy. Why?"

"I just heard his name today in the wrong circumstances."

"What do you mean?"

"We'll talk about that later too."

Sven didn't ask anymore questions. He knew he wouldn't get any answers yet.

"I've got the first report on Hoffmann Security AB. You interested?" "You know I am."

He put two pieces of paper down on Ewert's desk.

"I want you to have a look. Come over here."

Ewert stood beside Sven.

"A close company with annual reports and normal articles of association. I can look into that more, if you want, take a really good look at the figures."

He pointed at the second piece of paper.

"But this, I want you to have a look at this, right now."

A drawing of four squares stacked on top of each other.

"The ownership structure, Ewert. This is interesting. A board that consists of three people. Piet Hoffmann, Zofia Hoffmann, and a Polish citizen, Stanislaw Rosloniec."

A Polish citizen.

"I've run a check on Rosloniec. He lives in Warsaw, is not registered in any international criminal intelligence databases and-now it gets really interesting-is employed by a Polish company called Wojtek Security International."

Wojtek.

Ewert Grens searched Sven's pattern of squares but saw an airport in Denmark and a detective superintendent called Jacob Andersen.

Eighteen days ago.

They had sat in a meeting room at Kastrup police station and eaten greasy pastries and Andersen had spoken about a Danish informant who was supposed to buy amphetamines. In an apartment in Stockholm. With two Poles and their Swedish contact.

Swedish contact.

"Damn it „. hang on a minute, Sven!"

Grens pulled open one of his desk drawers and took out a CD player and the CD of the voice that Krantz had burned for him. Headphones on and three sentences he knew by heart.

A dead man. Vdstrnannagatan 79. Fourth floor.

He removed the headphones and put them on Sven's head.

"Listen."

Sven Sundkvist had analyzed the recording from Emergency Services on the ninth of May at 12:37:50 as many times as Ewert.

And now listen to this."

The voice had been stored in one of the computer's sound files. They had both encountered it when they were waiting in a churchyard twenty-four hours ago.

"He's a dead man in three minutes."

The one whispered dead and the other screamed dead, but when Ewert Grens and Sven Sundkvist listened carefully and compared the pronunciation of the d and the e and the a, it was obvious.

It was the same voice.

"It's him."

"It sure as hell is him, Sven! It was Hoffmann who was in the apartment! It was Hoffmann who raised the alarm!"

Grens was already on his way out of the room.

Wojtek is the Polish mafia.

Hoffmann Security AB is linked to Wojtek.

The car was parked on Bergsgatan and he hurried down the stairs, even though the elevator was empty.

So why did you raise the alarm?

So why did you shoot another member in solitary confinement and blow a third member up?

He turned out of Bergsgatan and drove down Hantverkargatan toward the city. He was going to visit the person whose death he was responsible for.

He stopped the car in a bus lane outside the door to Vasagatan 42. A couple of minutes, then Nils Krantz knocked on the window. "Anything in particular?"

"I don't know yet. It just feels right. An hour maybe, I have to think." "Here, keep them for the moment. I'll let you know if I need them." Krantz gave him a set of keys and Ewert Grens put it in the inner pocket of his jacket.

"By the way, Ewert…"

The forensic scientist had stopped a bit farther down the pavement.

"I've identified the two explosives. Pentyl and nitroglycerine. It was the pentyl that caused the actual explosion, the wave that forced out the window and the heat that ignited the diesel. And the nitroglycerine had been applied directly onto someone's skin-I don't know whose yet, though."

Grens went up the stairs of one of the many buildings in central Stockholm from the turn of the century, the first few years of the 1900s when the cityscape changed dramatically.

He stopped in front of a door on the first floor.

Hoffmann Security AB. Same old trick. A security firm as a front for the Eastern European mafia.

He opened the door with the keys that he'd got from Krantz.

A beautiful apartment, shining parquet floor, high ceilings, white walls. He looked out of the window with a view of Kungsbron and the Vasa theatre, an elderly couple on their way in to the evening performance, as he had often thought of doing himself, but never gotten around to.

You were sent up for a drug crime. But you weren't an amphetamine dealer. He walked down the hall and went into what must once have been the drawing room, but was now an office with two gun cabinets by an open fireplace.

You had links with Wojtek. But you were not a member of the mafia.

He sat down in the chair by the desk that he guessed Hoffmann must have sat in.

You were someone else.

He got up again and wandered around the apartment, looked in the two empty gun cabinets, touched the deactivated alarm, rinsed out some dirty glasses.

Who?

When he left Hoffmann Security AB, Grens had gone to look at the storage spaces that belonged to the apartment. He had opened a storeroom in the cellar with a strong smell of damp, and he had walked around in the loft with a fan heater whirring above his head while he looked for a storeroom that was more or less empty, except for a hammer and chisel that were lying on top of a pile of old tires.

It was late, and he should perhaps have driven the kilometer from the door on Vasagatan to his own flat on Sveavägen, but the anger and restlessness pushed back the tiredness-he wouldn't sleep tonight either.

The corridor of the homicide unit was waiting, abandoned. His colleagues would rather spend the first summer evenings with a glass of wine at one of the outside cafes on Kungsholmen followed by a slow walk home, than with twenty-four parallel investigations and unpaid overtime in a characterless office. He didn't feel left out, didn't miss it. He had chosen long ago not to take part and your own choice can never become ugly loneliness. This evening it would be a report on a shooting in a prison and tomorrow evening it would be a report on another shooting. There was always an investigation that was a trauma for the person who was shot, bat for the investigator generated a vicarious sense of belonging. Grens was almost at the coffee machine and two plastic cups of blackness when he stopped by his pigeonhole and saw a large padded envelope in the pile of unopened letters; too many damn reference lists and soulless mass mailings. He pulled it out and weighed it in his hand-not particularly heavy-turned it over without seeing any sender. His name and address were easy to read, a man's handwriting, he was sure of that, something square, unrhythmical, almost sharp about it, possibly in felt pen.

Ewert Grens put the envelope down in the middle of the desk and stared at it while he emptied the first cup. Sometimes you just get a feeling, impossible to explain. He opened a drawer and a bag with unused rubber gloves, put on a pair and opened the end of the envelope with his index finger. He peeped cautiously in. No letter, no accompanying text or paper.

He counted five things, took them out one at a time and placed them in a row in front of him, between the files of ongoing investigations.

Half a plastic cup of coffee more.

He started from the left. Three passports. Red with gold letters. EUROPEAN UNION, SWEDEN, PASSPORT. All Swedish, genuine, issued by the police authority in Stockholm.

The photographs had been taken in a normal photo booth.

A few centimeters in size, black and white, slightly blurred, small reflections in the shining eyes.

The same face three times. Different names, different ID numbers. The face of a dead person.

Pier Hoffmann.

Grens leaned back in his chair and looked over at the window and the light outside, dim street lights that guarded the straight, empty asphalt paths of the inner courtyard at Kronoberg.

If this is you.

He picked up the envelope, turned it around.

If this has come from you.

He held it closer, fingertips brushed lightly over the front. There were no stamps. But there was something that looked like a postmark in the top right-hand corner. He studied it for a long time. Difficult to read, half the letters had disappeared. FRANKFURT. He was more or less certain. And six numbers. 234212. Then a kind of symbol, maybe a bird, or a plane.

The rest was mainly streaks that had seen too much water.

Grens scoured his desk drawer and the telephone list that he found there in a plastic sleeve. Horst Bauer, Bundeskriminalamt, Wiesbaden. He liked the German detective superintendent with whom he had worked a few years ago on an investigation in connection with a busload of abandoned Romanian children. Bauer was at home and having dinner, but was friendly and helpful and while Ewert waited and his food got cold, made three phone calls to confirm that the envelope that had recently arrived in a pigeonhole at the City Police in Stockholm had probably been sent by a courier company with offices at Frankfurt am Main International Airport.

Grens thanked him and hung up.

One of the world's largest airports.

He gave a deep sigh.

If it's you. If this comes from you. You instructed someone to send it for you. After your death.

Two more objects on the desk. The first wasn't even a centimeter big. He held it in his clumsy rubber fingers. A receiver, a silver earpiece, electronic devices for listening to conversations that were caught by transmitters of the same size.

Dear God.

It wasn't even twelve hours since Sven had held such a transmitter in his hand, attached to a black wire and a solar cell painted in the same color. The church tower's fragile railing.

Fifteen hundred and three meters from the now blown-out workshop window.

Ewert Grens stretched up to the shelf behind the desk and the plastic bag that had not yet been recorded in any chain of custody list or delivered to forensics. He emptied the contents out of the bag, called one of the few numbers he knew by heart and put the receiver down on the desk so that the talking clock voice was close to the transmitter. He then left the room and closed the door while he held the silver receiver to his ear and listened to the clock striking at ten-second intervals.

It worked.

The receiver that he had just been sent in an envelope was set at exactly the same frequency as the transmitter they had found on the tower railing. One thing left. A CD.

Grens balanced the shiny disk on his hand. No text on either side, nothing to give away the content.

He pushed it into the narrow opening in the short end of his computer tower.

"Government Offices, Tuesday, tenth of May."

It was the same voice.

He had listened to it together with Sven only a couple of hours ago. The voice that had raised the alarm. The voice that had threatened. Hoffmann.

Grens swallowed the last drops in the plastic cup. A third?

Later. He read the numbers on the sound file. Seventy-eight minutes and thirty-four seconds.

When I've listened to this.

The third cup of coffee from the machine was on the desk.

Ewert Grens had gone to get it but didn't need it. The racing in his chest that was making him dizzy had nothing to do with caffeine.

A legal police operation had just become legitimized murder.

He listened again.

First of all, scraping sounds, someone walking, fabric rubbing against a microphone with every step. After eleven minutes and forty-seven seconds-he checked on the sound file timer-a couple of voices, muffled. The microphone had been low, leg height, and it was obvious that Hoffmann moved every now and then to get closer to the sound source, had slowly stretched out a leg toward the person talking, suddenly got up and stood right next to them.

"The document… I've read it. I assumed… I assumed that it concerned a… woman?"

The only voice he hadn't heard before.

A woman, forty, maybe fifty years old. A soft voice with harsh sentences, he was sure he would recognize it if he heard it again.

"Paula. That's my name, in here."

The clearest voice.

The person with the microphone.

Hoffmann. But he called himself Paula. A code name.

"We have to make him more dangerous… He will have committed some serious crimes. He'll be given a long sentence."

The third voice.

Quite a high voice, the sort that doesn't fit the face, a colleague from the same corridor, only a few doors down and someone who had just happened to be passing on one of the first days of the investigation and had wanted to know how it was going and to give some ideas that pointed in the wrong direction.

Ewert Grens slammed his hand down on the desk, hard.

Erik Wilson.

He hit the desk again, with both hands this time, swore loudly at the cold office walls that just stood there.

Two more voices.

The two he knew best, part of a hierarchical chain of command, links between a criminal and a government office.

"Paula doesn’t have time for Västmannagatan."

A sharp, nasal voice, a bit too loud.

The national police commissioner.

"You've dealt with similar cases before."

A deep, resonant voice, that didn't swallow its words, but held them, vowels that were prolonged.

Göransson.

Ewert Grens stopped the recording and in one go drank the coffee that was still too hot and burned its way down from his throat to his stomach. He didn't feel it-.warm, cold, he was shaking as he had been since he listened to it the first time and was about to go back out into the corridor and pour more of the heat into himself until he managed to feel something other than the throttling rage.

A meeting at Rosenbad.

He took a felt pen from the pen holder and drew a rectangle and five circles straight onto the blotter.

A meeting table with five heads.

One who was probably a state secretary from the Ministry of Justice. One who called himself Paula. One who functioned as Paula's handler. One who was the most senior police officer in the country. And one, he looked at the circle that represented Göransson, who was Ewert Grens's immediate line manager and Erik Wilson's line manager and responsible for both their workloads and had therefore known all along why there were no answers in the Västmannagatan 79 case.

"I am a useful idiot."

Ewert Grens picked up the vandalized blotter and threw it to the floor. "I am a bloody useful idiot."

He pressed play again, sentences that he had already heard.

"Paula. That's my name, in here."

You weren't the mafia. You were one of us. You were employed by us to pretend you were the mafia.

And I murdered you.

Sunday

The big clock on Kungsholms church struck half past midnight when Ewert Grens left his office and the police headquarters and drove the short distance to Rosenbad. It was a lovely, warm night, but he didn't notice. He knew what had happened at Västmannagatan 79. He knew why Pier Hoffmann had done time at Aspsås prison. And he suspected why the exact same people who had arranged for Hoffmann's prison sentence had suddenly been there, searching for a bureaucratic reason for killing him.

Piet Hoffmann was dangerous.

Piet Hoffmann knew the truth about a murder that was less important than continued infiltration.

When Grens identified Hoffmann's name on the periphery of the investigation and wanted to question him, he became even more dangerous.

They had burned him.

But he had survived an attack, taken hostages, and positioned himself where he was visible in a workshop window.

You recorded the meeting. You sent it to me. The man who had to decide on your death.

Ewert Grens parked on Fredsgatan close to the dark building from where Sweden was governed. He would soon make his way in there. He had just listened to a meeting that had been recorded in one of its many senior offices twenty-one days ago.

He got out his mobile phone and dialed Sven Sundkvist's number. Three rings. Someone coughed and struggled to find strength.

"Hello?"

"Sven, it's me. I want-"

"Ewert, I'm asleep. I've been asleep since eight. We missed out on last night, remember?"

"You're not going to get much more sleep tonight either. You're going to go to the USA, to south Georgia. Your plane leaves Arlanda in two and half hours. You'll arrive-"

"Ewert."

Sven had pulled himself up, his voice was stronger-it was probably easier to talk when your chest and airways were free of pillows and duvets. "What are you talking about?"

"I want you to get up and get dressed, Sven. You're going to meet Erik Wilson and you're going to get him to confirm that a meeting I've now listened to actually rook place. I'll call you in a couple of hours. By that time, you'll be sitting in a taxi and you'll have listened to the sound file that I've forwarded to your computer. You'll understand exactly what this is all about."

Grens cut the engine and got out of the car.

The doors to power were made of glass and had opened automatically whenever he had been there during the day. Now they remained closed and he had to press a bell to wake the security guard one floor up.

"Yes?"

"Detective Superintendent Grens, City Police. I'm here to look at some of your surveillance camera footage."

"Now?"

"Do you have anything else to do?"

Some rustling papers near the microphone made the speaker crackle. "Did you say Grens?"

"You can see me in the camera. And now you can see the ID that I'm holding up."

"No one said you were coming. I want to see it again properly when you're in here with me. Then I'll decide whether you can stay or whether I'd rather you came back tomorrow."

Ewert Grens accelerated, the E18 north of Roslagstull was almost empty and right now he didn't give a damn about signs that limited the speed to seventy kilometers an hour.

He had first checked the security company's signing-in book.

The state secretary of the Ministry of Justice had had a total of four visitors on the tenth of May. They had arrived separately within twenty-five minutes of each other. First the national police commissioner, then Göransson, a bit later Erik Wilson, and finally, in handwriting that was difficult to read, Grens and the security man were eventually convinced that the visitor who had signed in at 15:36 was Pier Hoffmann.

He passed Danderyd, Taby, Vallentuna… for the third time in twenty-four hours he was approaching the small town of Aspsås, but he wasn't going to the prison or the church, he was going to a terraced house and a man he would not leave until he had answered the one question that Grens had come to ask.

With the signing-in book in his hand, Ewert Grens had demanded to see footage from two of the cameras that watched over the Government Offices and every person passing in or out. He had identified them one by one. First when they signed in, the camera was above the security desk in the entrance to Rosenbad and they stood there, all four of them, without looking up. Then a camera at face level in a corridor on the second floor opposite the door to the state secretary's office. He had seen the national police commissioner and Göransson knock on the door and go in, within a couple of minutes of each other. Wilson had arrived twenty minutes later and Hoffmann had sauntered down the corridor about seven minutes after that. He had known exactly where the camera was and twigged it early, looked into it for a bit too long, looked into the lens aware that his presence had been documented.

Piet Hoffmann had knocked on the door just like all the others but had not been let in immediately like them. He was instructed to stay in the corridor, to hold out his arms while Göransson frisked him. Grens found it hard to stand still when he realized that the loud noise he had heard about nine minutes into the recording was the chief superintendent's hand knocking the microphone.

He was speeding and slammed his foot on the brake when the turn to Aspsås emerged from the dark.

A couple more kilometers; he wasn't laughing yet, but he was smiling.

Sunday was only a few hours old. He didn't have much time but he would manage, still more than twenty-four hours left until Monday morning, when the security company's report of the weekend's surveillance tapes was passed on to the Government Offices' security department.

He had heard the voices, and now he had seen pictures as well.

He would shortly confirm the connection between three of the meeting participants and the orders that a prison chief warden had been given before and during a hostage drama that ended in death.

A terraced house on a terraced house road in a terraced house area.

Ewert Grens parked the car in front of a mailbox with the number fifteen on it and then sat there and looked at the silence. He had never liked places like this. People who lived too close to each other and tried to look alike. In his big apartment in Sveagatan, he had someone walking on his ceiling and someone else standing under his floor and others who drank glasses of water on the other side of the kitchen wall, but he didn't see them, didn't know them; he heard them sometimes but he didn't know what they were wearing, what kind of car they had, didn't have to meet them in their dressing gown with the newspaper under their arm and didn't need to think about whether their plum tree was hanging a little too low over the fence.

He could hardly stand himself.

So how the hell was he going to stand the smell of barbecued meat and the sound of footballs on wooden doors?

He would ask Sven later, when this was all over, how you do it, how you talk to people you're not interested in.

He opened the door and got out into an almost balmy spring night. A couple of hundred meters away stood the high wall, a sharp line against the sky that refused to go dark and would continue to do so until yet another summer had turned into early autumn.

Square slabs in a well-trimmed lawn. He walked up to the door and looked at the windows that were lit both downstairs and up: probably the kitchen, probably the bedroom. Lennart Oscarsson lived the other side of his life only a few minutes' walk from his workplace. Grens was sure that being able to cope with living in a terraced house was somehow connected CO not needing to separate one reality from the other.

His intention was to surprise. He hadn't phoned to say he was coming, had hoped to meet someone who had just been asleep and therefore didn't have the energy to protest.

It wasn't like that.

"You?"

He remembered Hermansson's description of a person on the edge. "What do you want?"

Oscarsson was wearing the prison uniform.

"So you're still working?"

"Sorry?"

"Your clothes."

Oscarsson sighed.

"In that case I'm not alone. Unless you've come here in the middle of the night to have some tea and help me with the crossword?"

"Will you let me in? Or do you want to stand out here and talk?"

Pine floors, pine stairs, plain walls. He guessed that the prison chief warden had done up the hall by himself. The kitchen felt older: cupboards and counters from the eighties, pastel colors that you couldn't buy anymore.

"Do you live here on your own?"

"These days."

Ewert Grens knew only too well how a home sometimes refuses to be changed and a person who has moved out somehow seems to stay in the colors and furniture.

"Thirsty?"

"No."

"Then I'll have a drink myself."

Lennart Oscarsson opened the fridge, neat and well stocked, vegetables at the bottom, the beer bottle that he was now holding in his hand from the top shelf.

"You nearly lost a good friend yesterday."

The warden sat down and took a swig without answering.

"I went to see him this morning. Danderyd hospital. He's shaken." "I know. I've spoken to him as well. Twice."

"How does it feel?"

"Feel?"

"To know that you're to blame."

The guilt. Grens knew everything about that too.

"It's half past one in the morning. I'm still in my uniform in my own kitchen. And you wonder how it feels?"

"Because that's right, isn't it? You're to blame?"

Oscarsson threw up his hands.

"Grens, I know what you're after."

Ewert Grens looked at another man who wasn't going to get to bed tonight either.

"You spoke to one of my colleagues about thirty-six hours ago. You admitted that you had made at least four decisions that had forced Hoffmann to act as he did."

Lennart Oscarsson was red in the face.

"I know what you're after!"

"Who?"

The chief warden jumped up, poured out what was left in the bottle, then threw it against the wall and waited until the last shard of glass was still. He unbuttoned his uniform jacket, put it on the now empty kitchen table, fetched big scissors from the cutlery drawer. With great care he straightened out one of the sleeves, stroked the material with the back of his hand until he was sure it was flat and then started to cut, quite a large piece, five, maybe six centimeters wide.

"Who gave you the orders?"

He held the first piece of material in his hand, felt the frayed edge. He smiled, Grens was convinced of it, an almost shy smile.

"Oscarsson, who?"

He cut as he had done before, straight, considerate lines, the rectangular pieces neatly on top of the first.

"Stefan Lygis. A prisoner you were responsible for. A prisoner who is now dead."

"It wasn't my fault."

"Pawel Murawski. Piet Hoffmann. Two other prisoners you were responsible for. Two other prisoners who are now dead."

"It wasn't my fault."

"Martin Jacobson. A-"

"All right, that's enough."

"Martin Jacobson, a prison warden who-"

"For Christ's sake, Grens, that's enough!"

The first arm was ready. Pieces of material stacked in a small pile. Oscarsson pulled out the next one, shook it lightly, a crease more or less in the middle, hand backwards and forward across it until it disappeared.

"Pål Larsen."

He cut again, faster now.

"General Director Pål Larsen ordered me."

Grens remembered, about half an hour into the recording, a trouser leg scraping against the microphone as it stretched, and the sound of a teaspoon against porcelain when someone had taken a sip from a coffee cup.

"I appointed you. And that means that you decide what happens in the Prison and Probation Service."

A short pause while the state secretary left the room to get the head of the Prison and Probation Service who had been sitting waiting outside in the corridor.

"You decide what you and I agree that you should decide."

The general director had been given an order. The general director had passed that order on. From the real sender.

Ewert Grens looked at a bare-torsoed man who was cutting to pieces the uniform that he had longed for all his adult life, and he hurried out of the kitchen that would never change color and the home that was even lonelier than his own.

"Do you know what I'm going to do with these?"

Lennart Oscarsson stood in the open doorway as Grens got into his car. The recently shredded pieces in his raised hands, he dropped a couple and they fell slowly to the ground.

"Wash the car, Grens. You know, you always need clean bits when you're polishing, and this, this is damn expensive material."

He dialed the number as the car rolled out of the silent rows of terraced houses. He looked at the church and the square church tower, at the prison and the workshop that could be seen behind the high wall.

Not even thirty-six hours had passed. It would haunt him For the rest of his life.

"Hello?"

Göransson had been awake.

"Difficulties sleeping?"

"What do you want, Ewert?"

"You and me to have a meeting. In about half an hour."

"I don't think so."

"A meeting. In your office. In your capacity as CHIS controller." "Tomorrow."

Grens looked at the sign in his rearview mirror; it was hard to read in the dark but he knew what the town he had just left was called.

He hoped it would be a while before he had to return.

"Paula."

"Excuse me?"

"That's what we're going to talk about."

He waited, there was a long silence.

"Paula who?"

He didn't answer. The forest transformed slowly into high-rise blocks-he was getting close to Stockholm.

"Grens, answer me. Paula who?"

Ewert Grens just held his handset for a while, then hung up.

The corridor was empty. The coffee machine hummed, hidden by the dark. He settled on one of the chairs outside Göransson's office.

His boss would soon be there. Grens was convinced of it.

He drank the vending machine coffee.

Wilson was Hoffmann's handler. A handler records the informant's work in a logbook. The logbook is kept in a safe by the CHIS controller. Göransson.

"Grens."

The chief superintendent opened the door to his office. Ewert Grens looked at the clock and smiled. Exactly half an hour since their conversation. He was shown into an office that was considerably larger than his own and sat down in a leather armchair, wriggled a bit.

Göransson was nervous.

He was trying hard to pretend the opposite, but Grens recognized the breathing, the pitch, the slightly exaggerated movements.

"The logbook, Göransson. I want to see it."

"I don't understand."

Grens was furious but hadn't thought of showing it.

He didn't shout, he didn't threaten.

Not yet.

"Give me the logbook. The whole file."

Göransson was sitting on the edge of the desk. He waved at two walls of shelves, files on every shelf.

"Which goddamn file?"

"The file of the person I murdered."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"The snitch file."

"What do you want it for?"

I am going to nail you, you bastard. I've got a day to do it.

"You know."

"What I know, Ewert, is that there is only one copy of it, and it's in my safe, which only I have the code to, and there's a reason for that."

Göransson gave a light kick to the safe, which was green and stood against the wall behind his desk.

As no unauthorized persons can see it."

Grens breathed slowly. He had been about to strike out, balled fist that was halfway to Göransson's face when he caught it, the desire was so strong.

He released his cramping fingers, held them out, an exaggerated gesture perhaps.

"The file, Göransson. And I'll need a pen."

Göransson looked at the hand in front of him, the gnarled fingers. An Ewert Grens who shouts, who threatens, I can deal with that. "Can I have it?"

"'What?"

"The pen."

But the loud whispering.

"And a piece of paper."

"Ewert?"

"A piece of paper."

The gnarled fingers pointing at him.

He gave them a notebook and a pen, a red felt tip.

"You got a name from me half an hour ago. I know that that name is in the informant file. I want to see it."

He knows.

Ewert Grens held the notebook against the armrest of the leather chair and wrote something. Handwriting that was normally difficult to read. But nor now. Five carefully written letters in red felt tip.

Grens knows.

Göransson went over to the safe, maybe his hands were shaking, maybe that was why it took so long to set the six digits, to open the heavy door, to take out a black, rectangular file.

`Are all the meetings between your handler and this Hoffmann recorded here?"

“ Yes .”

“And this is the only copy?"

"It's the copy that I keep as CHIS controller. The only one."

"Destroy it."

He put the black folder down in front of him on the desk and looked through the code names of criminals who were recruited to work as informants for the Swedish police. He had gotten halfway when he stopped.

I knew it was wrong and I said so.

"Grens?"

"Yes?"

I left her room.

"It's here. The name you're looking for."

Ewert Grens had already got up and was standing behind his boss, reading over his shoulder, tightly written pages.

First the code name. Then the date. Then a summary of that day's short meeting in a flat that could be entered from two different addresses.

Page after page, meeting after meeting.

"You know what I want."

I got out.

You can't have it.

"Give me the envelope, Göransson. Give it to me."

With every logbook came an envelope with the informant's real name, sealed by the handler on the first day of the operation, a wax seal, red and shiny.

"Open it."

I can walk out of this with my head held high.

"I can't do that."

"Now, Göransson."

Grens clutched the envelope in his hand, read the name that he had heard spoken for the first time only days ago, on a recording of a meeting in an office in the Government Offices.

Five letters.

The same name that he had just written on a note pad.

P-a-u-l-a.

He reached over for Göransson's letter opener, broke the seal and opened the brown envelope.

He knew it already.

But still the damned thumping in his chest.

Ewert Grens pulled out the piece of paper and read the name that he knew would be there. Confirmation that the person he had ordered to be shot really had worked for the city police.

Piet Hoffmann.

Piet.

Paula.

The Swedish code name system, first letter of a man's name became the first letter of a woman's name. The informant file was full of snitches called Maria, Lena, Birgitta.

'And now I want the secret intelligence report. About what actually happened at Västmannagatan 79."

The whispering again.

Göransson looked at the colleague he had never liked.

He knows.

"You can't have it."

"Where do you keep the secret intelligence report? What actually happened at Västmannagatan 79? That those of us investigating were not to know?"

"It's not here."

"Where?"

"There's only one copy."

" Jesus , Göransson, where?"

He knows.

"The county police commissioner has it. Our most senior officer."

He limped badly, it wasn't the pain-it was years since he'd bothered about that-this was just how he walked, left foot light on the floor, right foot heavy on the floor, left leg light on the floor. But with anger as his motor, he thumped his right leg down harder on the surface and the monotonous sound was quickly carried by the walls in the unlit corridor. The elevator down four floors, right toward the escalator, through the canteen, elevator five floors up. Then that sound again, someone limping down the last stretch of corridor who stopped outside the door of the county police commissioner's office.

He stood still, listened.

He pressed down the handle.

It was locked.

Ewert Grens had stopped in his travels three times: first at the data support office and one of the Coke-drinking young men to collect a CD with a surprisingly simple and accessible program that could open all code words on all computers in two minutes; then at the small kitchen opposite the vending machine for a towel; and finally the maintenance office opposite the stores for a hammer and a screwdriver.

He wound the towel around the hammer several times, positioned the screwdriver in the gap between the upper door hinge and the pin, looked around in the dark one more time and came down hard on the screwdriver with the hammer until the pin was loose. He moved the screwdriver down to the lower hinge and the next pin, until the hammer blows released it. From there it was easy to separate the two hinges, to carefully rock the screwdriver back and forth between the door and the doorframe, to push the door back until the lock barrel slid out of its fixture.

He lifted the door and put it to one side.

It was lighter than he had imagined.

He had forced other doors during raids-a heart attack on the other side, scared children on their own-in order to avoid waiting for a locksmith who might never come.

But he had never broken into a senior police officer's room before.

The laptop was on the desk, just like his own. He started it, waited while the CD program identified and replaced the code words and then searched the documents as he had learned to do.

A couple of minutes was all he needed.

Ewert Grens re-hung the door on its hinges, coaxed the pins back in, checked that there were no scratches or splinters on the doorframe, and then walked away with the computer in a briefcase.

The alarm clock behind the telephone didn't work. It had stopped at a quarter to four. Grens focused on the white clock while he phoned the talking clock for the second time that night.

Three forty-five and thirty seconds. Precisely. It was working. The night was receding without him having noticed.

He was sweaty. He unwound the towel from the hammer and wiped his forehead and neck. Walking through the building, forcing open a door, more exercise than he was used to.

He sat down at the computer that had until recently been on another desk, searched for the file he had started to read earlier.

Västmannagatan 79.

The secret intelligence report. The actual events.

He reached over for a thin file at the back of the desk, leafed through it. The same incident. But not the truth. The incomplete information that he and Sven and Hermansson and Ågestam had had access to, which therefore had resulted in the investigation being downgraded.

He continued to search the documents on the computer. He went back exactly one year. Three hundred two secret intelligence reports recounting how an informant's work to uncover one crime had given rise to another. He recognized several of them. Other investigations that had collapsed despite the fact that the knowledge was already in-house.

He hadn't slept the night before, he wouldn't sleep tonight; the anger that could not be released filled him instead, forcing out tiredness. There was no room.

I was a useful idiot.

I carried out legitimate murder.

1 have carried the guilt all my adult life and I deserved it, but no bastard is going to force me to carry it for anyone else.

I don't know Hoffmann. I'm not interested in him.

But this, this god awful guilt that I have no intention of taking on, I know that.

He pulled the telephone over, remembered the number that he often dialed at this time of night. The voice was weak, as always when someone has just woken up.

"Hello?"

"Anita?"

"Who…"

"It's Ewen."

An exasperated sigh from a dark bedroom upstairs in a terraced house somewhere in Gustaysberg.

"Sven's not here. He's spending the night on an plane, on the way to the USA. Because you sent him there a couple of hours ago."

"I know."

"So don't call here again tonight."

"I know."

"Goodnight, Ewert."

"I always phone Sven. So you'll have to take it. You see… I'm so damn angry.”

Her slow breathing, he could hear it.

"Ewert?"

"Yes?"

"Phone someone else. Someone who gets paid for it. I have to sleep."

She hung up. He stared at the unfamiliar laptop sitting on his desk that stared back at him, at his concealed rage.

Sven was on an plane somewhere over the Atlantic.

Hermansson. It didn't feel right to call her, a young woman and an old man in the middle of the night.

Grens lifted the plastic pocket on the blotter, ran his finger down the long list. He found what he was looking for and punched in the number of the one person he had absolutely no desire to talk to.

Eight rings.

He put the phone down, waited for exactly one minute, then called again.

Someone answered immediately. Someone snatched the phone from its cradle.

"Is that you, Grens?"

"So you were awake?"

"I am now. What the hell do you want?"

Ewert Grens loathed him. Inflexible, hierarchical. Qualities he despised, but actually ones he needed now

"Ågestam?"

"Yes?"

"I need your help."

Lars Ågestam yawned, stretched, collapsed in a heap.

"Go to bed, Grens."

"Your help. Now."

"Simple answer. The same one you get every time you wake me and my family up at this time. Call the duty officer."

He hung up. Ewert Grens didn't wait this time, rang back straight away. "Grens! Don't you… bloody dare, you-"

"Hundreds of cases. In the last year alone. Witnesses and evidence and interviews that… that disappeared."

Lars Ågestam cleared his throat.

"What are you talking about?"

"We have to meet."

Someone said something in the background. Sounded like Ågestam's wife. Grens tried to remember what she looked like. They had met, he remembered that but not her face, one of the kind that lack definition. "Grens, are you drunk?"

"Hundreds. You've been involved in several yourself."

"Of course. We can meet. Tomorrow."

"Now, Ågestam! I don't have much time. Monday morning. By then… then it's too late. And what I need to tell you… it's as much for your sake. don't you understand how bizarre it feels to say that? To you?"

The female voice in the background again. Grens could hear it, but not what it said. Ågestam whispered when he spoke again.

"I'm listening."

"It's not something I can say over the phone."

"But I'm listening!"

"We have to meet. You'll understand why."

The public prosecutor sighed.

"Come here then."

"To you?"

"To my house."

He had passed Åkeshov metro station and drove into an area of detached houses from the forties, the educated middle class. It was going to be a beautiful day, you could tell from the sun growing in the distance. He stopped the car in front of a garden with large apple trees at the end of a sleeping street. He had been here once before, about five years ago. The newly appointed prosecutor had received a number of threats during the trial of a young father accused of murder and Grens had not taken it very seriously until the yellow house had black paint, you're dead, you bastard, sprayed from the kitchen to the sitting room.

Two big cups on the table.

A pot of freshly brewed tea between them.

"Black, isn't it?"

"Black."

Grens drank the whole cup and Ågestam filled it again.

"Nearly as good as the stuff from the machine in the corridor." "It's quarter past four in the morning. What do you want?"

The briefcase was already on the table. Grens opened it and pulled out three files.

"Do you recognize these?"

Lars Ågestam nodded.

"Yes."

"Three investigations that we've worked on together over the past year."

Ewert Grens pointed to them, one at a time.

"Serious drug offense, parking lot in Regeringsgatan. Tried and acquitted.

Firearms offense, pathway under Liljeholm bridge. Tried and acquitted.

Attempted kidnapping, Magnus Ladulåsgatan. Tried and acquitted."

"Can you keep your voice down? My wife. My children. They're asleep." Ågestam waved his hand at the ceiling, the floor above.

"Have you got children? You didn't the last time."

"Well, I do now."

Grens lowered his voice.

"Do you remember them?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"You know why. I didn't get approval. Lack of evidence."

Grens put the files to one side, replaced them with a laptop that had until recently been on a high ranking officer's desk behind a locked door. He searched through the documents, as before, turned the screen toward the prosecutor.

"I want you to read."

Lars Ågestam picked up the teacup, lifted it to his mouth and there it remained. He couldn't get it any farther, his fingers frozen.

"What is this?"

He looked at Ewert Grens.

"Grens? What is this?"

"What is it? The same addresses. The same times. But a different truth." "I don't understand."

"This one? Serious drug offense, parking lot, Regeringsgatan. But what actually happened. Described in a secret intelligence report written by a policeman who wasn't part of the investigation."

Ewert Grens looked on the computer again.

"Two more. Read."

His neck was red. Hand through his hair.

"And this one?"

"This one? Firearms offense, pathway under Liljeholm bridge. And this one? Attempted kidnapping, Magnus Ladulåsgatan. Also what actually happened. Also described in a secret intelligence report written by police who weren't part of the investigation."

The prosecutor stood up.

"Grens, I-"

'And this is just three of three hundred and two cases from last year. They're all there. The truth we were never told. Crimes that were swept under the carpet so that other crimes could be solved. An official investigation, the sort that you and I deal with. And another that exists only here, in secret intelligence reports for police management."

Ewert Grens looked at the man in a robe in front of him.

"Lars, you were involved in twenty-three of them. Cases where you prosecuted and were unsuccessful. You closed them because you didn't have all the information that was included in the real report, the secret one, the one that would have nailed the snitch."

Lars Ågestam didn't stir.

He said Lars.

It feels… weird, uninvited. It's only my name. But when Grens says it… it's almost uncomfortable.

He has never used my first name before.

I don't want him to do it ever again.

"The snitch?"

"The snitch. The informant. The covert human intelligence source. A criminal who commits crimes that we then overlook because he's helping us to deal with other crimes."

Ågestam had been holding the cup in front of his mouth throughout the whole conversation. He put it down now.

"Whose laptop?"

"You don't want to know."

"Whose?"

"The county police commissioner."

Lars Ågestam got up from the table, disappeared out of the kitchen and up the stairs with hurried steps.

Ewert Grens watched him.

I've got more.

Västmannagatan 79.

You'll get that as well. When we wrap all this up. In the next twenty-four hours.

Hurried steps down again. The prosecutor had a printer in his arms, linked it up to the laptop-they listened to three hundred two paper copies forming a pile, one at a time.

"You'll give it back?"

"Yes."

"Do you need help?"

"No."

"Sure?"

"The door's unlocked."

The sun had taken over the kitchen, the light which had a short while ago been aided by bright bulbs was now strong enough to stand alone and he didn't notice when Ågestam switched off the lights.

It was half past four, but the day had dawned.

"Lars:"

She was young and her hair was tangled. She had on a white robe and white slippers and she was very tired.

"I'm sorry. Did we wake you?"

"Why aren't you asleep?"

"This is Ewert Grens and-"

"I know who it is."

"I'll be up in a while. We just need to finish up here."

She sighed, she didn't weigh much, but her steps were heavier than even Grens's as she went back upstairs to the bedroom.

"Sorry, Ågestam."

"She'll go back to sleep."

"She's still upset, isn't she?"

"She believes you made an error of judgment. I do too."

"I apologized. Christ alive, it was five years ago now!"

"Grens?"

"Yes?"

"You're shouting again. Don't wake the children."

Lars Ågestam emptied both cups into the sink, the stuff that was viscous and bitter and stuck to the bottom of the cup.

"I don't need anymore tea."

He picked up the pile of three hundred two newly printed pages. "Doesn't matter what time it is. This… I'm not tired anymore, Grens, I'm… angry. If i need anything it's to calm down."

He opened one of the cupboards. On the top shelf, a bottle of Seagram's and suitably sized glasses.

"What do you think, Grens?"

Ågestam filled two glasses to the halfway mark.

"It's half past four in the morning."

"That's the way it goes, sometimes."

Another person.

Ewert Grens gave a weak smile as Ågestam downed half of it.

If he had had to guess, he would have guessed teetotaller ten out of ten times. Grens had a sip himself after a while. It was milder in taste than he had imagined, perfect for a kitchen, with pajamas and a robe.

"The truth we were never told, Ågestam."

He put a hand on the pile of papers.

"I'm not sitting here because I enjoy watching you wake up. And not for your tea, either, not even the whisky. I came here because I'm certain that we can resolve this together."

Lars Ågestam flicked through the secret intelligence reports that he had not known existed until now.

His neck was still red.

He still kept running his hands back and forth through his hair. "Three hundred and two."

He paused every now and then, read something, then continued leafing through, arbitrarily choosing which document to read next.

"Two versions. One official. And one for police management."

He waved at the pile in front of him and poured another glass of whisky.

"Do you realize, Grens? I could prosecute them all. I could prosecute every single police officer who has anything to do with this. For forging documents. For fake certificates. For provoking crimes. There's enough here to merit a separate police unit at Aspsås."

He downed the glass and laughed.

"And all these trials? What do you think, Grens? All these pleadings and interviews and judgments without the knowledge that the heads of the police authority were already party to!"

He threw the pile down on the table. Some pages fell on the floor; he stood up and stamped on them.

"You've just woken the children."

They hadn't heard her coming-she stood in the doorway, in the white robe but without the slippers.

"Lars, you've got to calm down."

"I can't."

"You're frightening them."

Ågestam kissed her on both cheeks. He was already on his way to the children's room.

"Grens?"

He turned on the bottom step of the stairs.

"I'm going to spend the whole day on this."

"Monday morning. Or two tapes will be missing."

"I'll get back to you by this evening at the latest."

"Monday morning. Then the wrong people will be finding out how damn close I am."

"By tonight at the latest. That's the best I can do. Is that okay?" "That's okay."

The prosecutor paused, laughed again.

"Grens, imagine! A separate police unit. A separate police unit at Aspsås!"

The coffee tasted different.

He had poured out the first cup after a couple of mouthfuls. A fresh one from the machine in the corridor had tasted the same. He was holding the third in his hand when he realized why.

It was like a film on his palate.

He had started the day with two whiskies in Ågestam's kitchen. He didn't normally do that. He didn't generally drink much spirits, it was years since he'd stopped drinking on his own.

Ewert Grens sat at his desk and felt strangely empty.

The First early birds had already come and passed his open door, but hadn't annoyed him, not even those who had tried to stop and say good morning.

He had released his anger.

He had driven from Ågestam, a few newspaper delivery boys, the odd cyclist, that was all-a city that was at its weariest just before five.

There had been plenty of room for guilt. The guilt that others had tried to lay on him. He had raged against it, tried to silence it when it sat beside him, chased it into the back seat. It had continued to nag him, forcing him to drive faster. He had been on his way to Göransson to offload it, then managed to control himself-he would confront them, but not yet, soon. He would meet the people who were truly responsible very soon. He had parked in Bergsgatan by the entrance to the police headquarters but had not gone directly to his office, he had taken the elevator up to Kronoberg remand and then on up to the roof and eight long, narrow cages. One hour of fresh air every day and twenty meters to move in, then jail. He had ordered the wardens on duty to call in two prisoners who, in ill-fitting prison clothes and separate cages, were standing looking out over the city and freedom, and then to leave their posts and go down two floors for an early morning coffee. Grens had waited until he was completely alone and then gone out into one of the small yards. He had looked at the sky through the criss-cross of bars and he had screamed, high above the sleeping buildings in the Stockholm dawn. For fifteen minutes he had held the stolen laptop with another reality in his hands and screamed louder than ever before, he had released his fury and it raced over the rooftops and evaporated somewhere above Vasastan, leaving him extremely hoarse, tired, almost spent.

The coffee still tasted odd. He put it to one side and sat down on the corduroy sofa, lay down after a while, closed his eyes while he searched for a face in the window of a prison workshop.

I don't get it.

Someone who chooses a life where each day is a potential death sentence. For the excitement? For some kind of romantic spy nonsense? For personal morals?

I'm not convinced. That sort of thing just sounds good.

For the money?

Ten thousand crappy kronor a month paid from reward money in order to avoid formal payrolls and to protect your identity?

Hardly.

Grens straightened the fabric on the arm of the sofa that was slightly too high; it was chafing his neck and made it difficult to relax.

I just don't get it.

You could commit whatever goddamn crime you wanted, you were outside the law, but only for as long as you were useful, until you became someone who could be spared.

You were an outlaw.

You knew it. You knew that's how it worked.

You had everything that I don't have, you had a wife, children, a home, you had something to lose.

And still you chose it.

I don't get it.

His neck was stiff. The slightly too-high sofa arm.

He had fallen asleep.

The face in the window of a prison workshop had disappeared, sleep had taken over; the kind that came after rage that was soft and had rocked him gently for nearly seven hours. He might have woken up once, he wasn't sure, but it felt like that, like the telephone had rung, like Sven had said that he was sitting in an airport outside New York waiting for the next flight to Jacksonville, that the sound file was interesting and that he had prepared himself on the plane, for a meeting with Wilson.

It was a long time since Ewert Grens had slept so well.

Despite the bright sunlight in the room, despite all the damnable noise.

He stretched. His back was as sore as it usually was after sleeping on the narrow sofa, his stiff leg ached when it reached the floor. He was slowly falling to bits, one day at a time. Fifty-nine-year-old men who exercised too little and ate too much generally did.

A cold shower in the changing room that he seldom used, two cinnamon buns and a bottle of banana-flavored drinking yogurt from the vending machine.

"Ewert?"

"Yes?"

"Is that your lunch?"

Hermansson had come out of her office farther down the corridor, she had heard him, the limping, it was just Grens lumbering around. "Breakfast, lunch, I don't know. Did you want something?"

She shook her head, they walked slowly, side by side.

"This morning, early… Ewert, was it your voice?"

"You live here in Kungsholmen?"

"Yes."

"Nearby?"

"I don't have far to go."

Grens nodded.

"Then it was probably me you heard."

"Where?"

"Up in the remand yards on the roof You get a good view from up there."

"I heard. And so did the rest of Stockholm."

Ewert Grens looked at her, smiled, something he didn't do often.

"It was a choice between that and firing a bullet through a wardrobe door. I understand that some prefer the latter."

They had come to his door. He stopped. It felt like she was going to come in.

"Did you want something, Hermansson?"

"Zofia Hoffmann."

"Yes?"

"I'm not getting anywhere. She's disappeared."

The banana-flavored yogurt was finished. He should have bought one more.

"I've checked with her work again. She hasn't been in touch since the hostage drama. The children's nursery, same story."

Mariana Hermansson tried to peer into his office. Grens closed the door a bit more. He didn't know why, she had come there several times a day since he employed her three years ago. But he had just been asleep there, nearly seven hours on the sofa-it was as if he didn't want her to know that.

"I've located her closest family. Not many of them. Her parents, an aunt, two uncles. All in the Stockholm area. She isn't there. The kids aren't there."

She looked at him.

"I've spoken to the three women who are described as her best friends. With neighbors, with a gardener who works for the family for a couple of hours every now and then, with several members of a choir where she sings a couple of times a week, with the oldest son's football coach and the youngest son's gymnastics teacher."

She shrugged.

"No one has seen them."

Hermansson waited for a response. She didn't get one.

"I've checked the hospitals, hotels, hostels. They aren't anywhere, Ewert. Zofia and the two boys, they can't be found anywhere."

Ewert Grens nodded.

"Wait here. I want to show you something."

He opened the door, closed it behind him, careful that she shouldn't see in or follow him.

You came to Aspsås prison as Wojtek's contact man in Sweden.

You were there to knock out the competition for them and then establish Wojtek and expand.

One single moment and you were someone else.

One single meeting with a lawyer, a messenger, and they knew who you really were.

You called her. You warned her.

Grens lifted up a padded envelope that was lying on his desk and was now emptied of three passports, a receiver, and a CD with a secret recording. He went back out to the corridor and Hermansson with it under his arm.

"She received two short phone calls from Hoffmann. We don't know what they were about and we haven't found anything to indicate that she was involved in any way. We have no reasonable grounds to suspect her of anything whatsoever."

Grens held up the envelope so that Hermansson could see it.

"We can't issue a warrant for her arrest abroad. Even though that is where she is."

He pointed at the postmark.

"I'm convinced that it was Zofia Hoffmann who sent this. Frankfurt am Main International Airport. Two hundred and sixty-five destinations, fourteen hundred flights, one hundred and fifty thousand passengers. Every day."

He started to head for the vending machine-he needed another yogurt, another cinnamon bun.

"She's well gone, Hermansson. And she knows. She knows that we have no grounds to get her or even look for her."

The sun was high.

It had been warm since early morning. He had fought with the damp sheets and a pillow drowned in sweat from his hairline, the temperature rising a couple of degrees every hour until now, just before lunch. The heat and the sharp light forced him to stop abruptly in front of the great gate until what was double had disappeared.

Erik Wilson sat quietly in the front seat of the rented car.

He had been here for five days, back in Glynco, Georgia, at a military base called FLETC, to continue the work that had been interrupted when Paula rang about a buyer in Västmannagatan who had paid with a Polish bullet to the head.

He started the car again, rolled slowly through the gate and past the guard who saluted. Three more weeks. Cooperation between the Swedish and European police and American police organizations was essential for the farther development of their CHIS work, and this was where they had the strongest tradition and knowledge, and as Paula was out of contact while he worked behind the walls of Aspsås, it was the perfect time to finish the course he had started in advanced infiltration.

The heat was incredible.

He still hadn't gotten used to it-normally it was easier, less invasive. At least that's what he remembered from previous visits.

Maybe it was the climate that had changed. Maybe it was he who had gotten older.

He liked driving along the wide, straight roads in this great country that was built around traffic. He accelerated when he reached the 1-95, sixty kilometers to Jacksonville and the other side of the state boundary, half an hour on a day like today.

He had been woken by the phone call.

It was still dawn, sharp sunlight and the birds with their piercing song had come alive outside his window.

Sven Sundkvist had been sitting in a bar eating breakfast at Newark Liberty International Airport.

He had explained that he would continue his journey in a few hours.

He said that he was on his way south because he needed immediate assistance with an investigation.

Erik Wilson had asked what it was about-they seldom talked to each other when they met in the corridors of the police headquarters in Kungsholmen, why should they do so here, seven thousand kilometers away? Sundkvist hadn't answered, and instead had repeatedly asked when and where until Wilson had suggested the only lunch restaurant that he knew, somewhere where you could sit without being seen, without being heard.

It was a pleasant place on the corner of San Marco Boulevard and Philips Street, quiet in spite of every table being taken and dark in spite of the sun blasting on the roofs, walls, and windows. Sven Sundkvist looked around. Men dressed in suits and ties who glanced at each other on the sly as they gave their best arguments accompanied by grilled fish; negotiations that involved European wine and mobile phones on the white tablecloth. Waiters who were invisible, but were by the table the moment a plate was empty or a napkin fell to the floor. The smell of food blended with candles and the scent of red and yellow roses.

He had been traveling for seventeen hours. Ewert had phoned just as Anita had turned off the light and snuggled up to him, her soft shoulder and breasts against his back, the first deep breaths on his neck as thoughts slowly evaporated and could not be caught no matter how hard he tried. Anita had avoided saying anything when he packed his bag and avoided looking at him when he tried to catch her eye. He understood her. Ewert Grens had for so long been part of their bedroom, someone who lived in his own time bubble and therefore didn't realize that others had their own too. Sven didn't have the strength to talk to him about it, to put down limits, but understood that Anita had to do just that sometimes in order to cope.

The taxi from the airport was one of the ones without air conditioning and the heat had been as unexpected as it was forceful. He had traveled in clothes made for the Swedish spring and landed in a place near Florida's beaches with full summer heat. He walked toward the entrance of the restaurant and drank some mineral water that tasted of chemical additives. They had had offices on the same corridor for ten years and had worked together on several investigations, but all the same, he didn't know him. Erik Wilson was not someone you went out and had a beer with or maybe it was Sven you didn't do that with, or maybe they were just too different. Sven, who loved his life in a terraced house with Anita and Jonas, Wilson who scorned it. Now they were going to meet, tolerate each other, one asking for information and one with no intention of giving it.

He was tall, considerably taller than Sven, and even taller when he stood on his toes to scan all the guests in the restaurant. He seemed satisfied and sat down at the table at the back of the exclusive premises.

"I'm a bit late."

"I'm glad you're here."

The waiter appeared from nowhere, a glass of mineral water for each of them, two slices of lemon.

I've got one minute.

When he realizes why I'm here, one minute more to convince him he should stay.

Sven moved the white candle and silver candlestick and put a laptop down between them. He opened a program that contained several sound files, pressed a symbol that looked like a long dash, a couple of sentences, exactly seven seconds.

"We have to make him more dangerous. He will have committed some serious crimes. He'll be given a long sentence."

Erik Wilson's face.

It showed nothing.

Sven tried to catch his eye. If he was surprised to hear his own voice, if he felt uncomfortable, it didn't show, not even in his eyes.

Another snippet, a single sentence, five seconds.

"He'll only be able to operate freely from his cell if he gets respect."

"Do you want to hear more? You see… it's quite a long, interesting meeting. And I… I've got all of it here."

Wilson's voice was still controlled when he rose, as were his eyes, emotions that must not be shown.

"Nice to meet you."

Now.

This was the minute.

He was already on his way out.

Sven opened the third sound file.

"Before I leave, I'd like you to summarize exactly what you are guaranteeing me.

"You perhaps think that you know what you are hearing?"

Erik Wilson was already walking away, he was halfway ro the door, that was why Sven almost shouted what he said next.

"I don't think you do. That's the voice of a dead man."

The guests in glossy suits hadn't understood what he said. But they had all stopped talking, put down their cutlery, looked at the person who had blemished their discretion.

"The voice of a man who two days ago stood in the window of a prison workshop window with a gun to a prison warden's head."

Wilson had reached the bar that was to the right of the door when he stopped.

"The voice of a man who was shot on the order of our colleague, Ewert Grens."

He turned around.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about Paula."

He looked at Sven, hesitated.

"Because that's what you call him, isn't it?"

A step forward.

A step away from the door.

"Sundkvist, why the hell-"

Sven lowered his voice, Wilson listened, he wasn't going anywhere.

"I'm saying that he was eliminated. That you and Grens were both involved. That you are an accessory to legitimate murder."

Ewert Grens got up, an empty plastic cup in the trash, a half-eaten cinnamon bun from the shelf behind his desk gone in two bites.

He was restless, time was running out. He prowled between the ugly sofa and the window with a view over the Kronoberg courtyard.

Sven should have started his meeting with Wilson by now. He should have started the interview, to demand answers.

Grens sighed.

Erik Wilson was crucial.

One of the voices was dead. Grens would wait for three of them, they would listen, but only when he wanted them to.

Wilson was the fifth voice.

The one that could confirm that the meeting really did take place, that the recording was genuine.

"Have you got a minute?"

A blond fringe, swept to one side, and a pair of round glasses leaned around the door.

Lars Ågestam had exchanged his pajamas and robe for a gray suit and gray tie.

"Well, have you?"

Grens nodded and Ågestam followed the large body that limped over the linoleum to the sofa and sat down where the fabric was worn and shiny. It had been a long night. Grens, whisky and the county commissioner's computer in his kitchen. They had for the first time spoken to each other without mutual loathing. Ewert Grens had even used his first name. Lars. Lars, he had said. They had just then, just there, been almost close and Grens had tried to show it.

Lars Ågestam leaned back in the sofa, folded.

He wasn't tense.

He hadn't prepared himself to meet someone threatening and insulting.

All previous visits to this room had felt like an attack, difficult and full of animosity, but with the music gone and the feeling from last night still lingering, he giggled suddenly because it struck him it had almost felt good to come in.

He had two files on the table in front of them and opened the first one that was on top.

"Secret intelligence reports. Three hundred and two in total. The copies I printed out last night."

He then lifted up the second file.

"Summaries of the preliminary investigations into the same cases. What you knew, what you could investigate. I've managed to go through a hundred of them. One hundred of the cases that were closed or where prosecution did not result in a conviction. I've used every minute I've had since we met at my place to find, analyze, and compare them with what actually happened. In other words, the information that some of your colleagues already had, that's reported here, in the secret intelligence reports."

Ågestam was talking about copies that were taken from a laptop that had been on the desk of one of the top ranking officers. Grens hoped that the door was still working as it should.

"Twenty-five of the cases ended in nolle prosequi-the prosecutor realized that there wasn't sufficient evidence to secure a verdict and the cases were dropped. In thirty-five cases, the accused was acquitted-the court disallowed the prosecutor to proceed."

Lars Ågestam's neck was turning flaming red as it normally did when he got agitated. Ewert Grens had witnessed it every time they faced each other with contempt. Only this time the anger was targeted at someone else and it was almost unsettling; disdain had been their only means of communication, where they felt secure-if they couldn't hide behind it, it felt awkward. Where did you start?

"If, and I'm quite sure about this, if the prosecution had had access to the facts that the police, your colleagues, Grens, already had and that were kept from us, if all the information in this damn file of secret intelligence reports hadn't been hidden on a computer in a commissioner's office, then all these cases, all of them, Grens, would have ended with a conviction."

Sven Sundkvist ordered some more mineral water, more lemon slices. He wasn't hot anymore, the exclusive restaurant was cool and the air was easy to breathe, but he was tense.

He had only had one minute.

He had gotten Wilson to stop, turn back, sit down again.

Now he had to get him to participate.

He looked at his colleague. His face was still expressionless. But not his eyes. There was an uneasiness in their depths. They didn't waver, Wilson was far too professional for that, but the voices in the recording had surprised him, disturbed him, demanded answers.

"This recording was in an envelope in Ewert Grens's pigeonhole." Sven nodded at the symbol on the screen that meant sound file.

"No sender. The day after Hoffmann's death. The pigeonholes, about as far from your office as mine, wouldn't you say?"

Wilson didn't sigh, didn't shake his head, didn't tense his jaw. But his eyes, the uneasiness was there again.

"The envelope contained a CD of the recording. But there was more. Three passports issued under different names, all with the same photograph, a rather grainy black-and-white picture of Hoffmann. And at the bottom of the envelope, an electronic receiver, the small silver metal kind that you put in your ear. We've been able to link it to a transmitter that was attached to a church tower in Aspsås. The spot chosen by the sniper who Grens eventually ordered to fire, as he was guaranteed to hit the target from there."

Erik Wilson should have grabbed the edge of the white tablecloth and pulled it from the table, turning the floor to broken glass and petals. He should have spat, cried, snapped.

He didn't. He sat as still as he could, hoping that nothing would show. Sundkvist had said they were accomplices to legitimate murder.

He had said that Paula was dead.

If it had been someone else he would have continued walking. If someone else had presented him with that goddamn recording he would have dismissed it as nonsense. But Sundkvist never bullshitted. He himself did. Grens did, most policemen did, most people he knew did. But not Sundkvist.

"Before I leave, I'd like you to summarise exactly what you are guaranteeing me.”

No one except Paula could have recorded that meeting or had the motive CO do so. He had chosen to let Grens and Sundkvist in on it. He had a reason.

They burned you.

"I want to show you some pictures as well."

Sven turned the screen toward Wilson, opened a new file.

A still, a frozen moment from one of Aspsås prison's many security cameras, a fuzzy frame around a fuzzy barred window.

"Aspsås workshop. Block B. The person you can see standing there, in profile, has eight and a half minutes left to live."

Wilson pulled the laptop over, angled the screen-he wanted to see that person, roughly in the middle of the window, part of a shoulder, part of a face.

He had met a man ten years younger. He himself had been ten years younger. If it had been today would he have recruited Hoffmann? Would Hoffmann have wanted to be recruited? Piet had done time in Österåker. A prison some way north of Stockholm with a whole host of small-time crooks. Piet had been one of them. His first sentence. The kind who would serve his twelve months, run around for a while, then be sentenced to twelve more.

But his roots, mother tongue, and personality could be used for more than just confirming statistics on reoffenders.

"This one? Five minutes left to live."

Sundkvist had changed the picture. Another security camera. It was closer, no frame, just the window, the face was clearer.

They had added a few pistols to the property seized in connection with the already registered judgment, probably some kind of Kalashnikov. They normally did. It had later been easy ro ask for a new potential danger classification and tighter restrictions, no leave, no contact with the outside world. Piet had been desperate, he had listened, after months with no human contact, touch or talk, he could have been recruited for anything.

"Three minutes. I think you can see in this picture. He's shouting. A camera inside the workshop."

A face that filled the picture.

It's him.

"He's a dead man. We've analyzed it. That's what he's shouting."

Erik Wilson looked at the absurd picture. The distorted face. The open, desperate mouth.

He had built up Paula methodically.

A petty thief had been developed into one of the country's most dangerous criminals, document by document. Criminal record, the national court administration databases, the police criminal intelligence database. The myth of his potency enhanced by patrol after patrol who unknowingly responded on the basis of the available information. And when he was about to take that last step, right into Wojtek's nerve center, when the mission required even more respect, he had also provided it. Erik Wilson had copied a DSM-IV-TR statement, a psychopathic test that was carried out on one of Sweden's criminals with the highest security classification.

A document that had then been planted in the Prison and Probation Service records.

Piet Hoffmann suddenly had a chronic lack of conscience, was extremely aggressive and very dangerous in terms of other people's safety.

"My last picture."

Thick, black smoke, in the distance what might be a building, at the top, what might be blue sky.

"Two twenty-six p.m. When he died."

The square screen, he heard Sundkvist talking but continued to search in the dense blackness, tried to see the person who had just been standing there.

"There were five of you at that meeting, Erik. I need to know whether the recording that was left in an envelope in Grens's pigeonhole is genuine. If what can be heard here is exactly what was said. If three people who have never touched a trigger were accomplices to legitimate murder."

His neck was now red all the way up. His fringe had flopped and for a while stood out in every direction, he paced, frustrated, up and down in front of Grens's desk.

Lars Ågestam was almost hissing.

"This damned system, Grens. Criminals working for the police. Criminals' own crimes being covered up and downplayed. One crime is legitimized so that another one can be investigated. Policemen who lie and withhold the truth from other policemen. Damn it, Grens, in a democratic society."

During the night he had printed out three hundred two secret intelligence reports from the county police commissioner's laptop. So far he had managed to go through one hundred of them, comparing the truth with the city police investigations. Twenty-five had resulted in nolle prosequi, thirty-five in an acquittal.

"Judgments were given in the remaining forty cases, but I can tell you that the judgments were wrong due the lack of underlying information. The people who were tried were given sentences, but for the wrong crime. Grens, are you listening? In all cases!"

Ewert Grens looked at the prosecutor, suit and tie, a file in one hand, glasses in the other.

A bloody rotten system.

And there's more, Ågestam.

Soon we'll talk about the intelligence report you haven't seen yet, the one that is so hot off the press that it's in a separate file.

Västmannagatan 79.

An investigation that we closed when other policemen with offices on the same corridor had the answer we lacked, which meant that a person had to be burned and they needed a useful idiot to carry the can.

"Thank you. You've done a good job."

He held out his hand to the prosecutor he would never learn to like.

Lars Ågestam took it, shook for a bit too long perhaps, but it felt good, personal, on the same side for the first time, the long hours at night, each with a glass of whisky and Grens who had called him Lars on one occasion. He smiled.

Conscious spite and attempted insult, he didn't need to worry this time. He let go of his hand and had just started to head for the door with a strange joy in his heart when he suddenly turned around.

"Grens?"

"Yes?"

"That map you showed me when I was here last."

"Yes?"

"You asked about Haga. North Cemetery. If it was nice there."

It was lying on the desk. He had seen it as soon as he came in. A map of a resting place that had been used for more than two hundred years and was one of the largest in the country.

Grens kept it at hand. He was going to go there.

"Did you find what you were looking for?"

Ewert Grens was breathing heavily, rocking his great bulk.

"Well, did you?"

Grens turned round pointedly. He said nothing, just the labored breathing as he faced the pile of files on the desk.

"Hm, Ågestam?"

"Yes?"

He didn't look at the visitor who was about to leave, his voice was different, it was a bit too high and the young prosecutor had long since learned that that often meant discomfort.

"You seem to have misinterpreted something."

"Right?"

"You see, Ågestam, this is just work. I am not your damn buddy."

They had gotten their food, fish that wasn't salmon, the waiter's suggestion. I need to know whether the recording that was left in an envelope in Grens's pigeonhole is genuine. They had eaten without speaking, without even looking at each other. If what can be heard here is exactly what was said. The questions were there on the table beside the candlestick and pepper grinder, waiting for them. If three people who have never touched a trigger were accomplices to a legitimate murder.

"Sundkvist?"

Erik Wilson put his cutlery down on the empty plate, emptied his third glass of mineral water, lifted the napkin from his knee.

"Yes."

"You've come a long way for nothing."

He had decided.

"You see, in some way… it's like we're all in the same business."

"You went to see Grens the next day. You knew, Erik, but you said nothing."

"In the same business. The criminals. The people investigating the crime. And the informants make up the gray zone."

He wasn't going to say anything.

"And Sundkvist, this is the future. More informants. More covert human intelligence. It's a growth area. That's why I'm here."

"If you had talked to us then, Erik, we wouldn't have been sitting opposite each other today. On either side of a dead man."

"And that is why my European colleagues are here. We're here to learn. As it will continue to expand."

They had worked on the same corridor for so damn long.

Wilson had never before seen Sven Sundkvist lose control.

"I want you to listen bloody closely now, Erik!"

Sven grabbed the laptop, a plate on the white marble floor, a glass on the white tablecloth.

"I can fast forward or rewind to wherever you want. Here? See that? The exact moment that the bullet penetrates the reinforced glass."

A mouth shouting in a monitor.

"Or here? The exact moment the workshop explodes."

A face in profile in a window.

"Or here, maybe? I haven't shown you this one yet. The remnants. The flags on the wall. All that remains."

A person stopped breathing,

"You're responding the way you're supposed to respond, the way you've always responded: You protect your informant. But for Christ's sake, Erik, he's dead! There's nothing to protect anymore! Because you and your colleagues failed to do exactly that. That's why he's standing there in the window. That's why he dies exactly… there."

Erik Wilson reached out to the computer screen that was turned toward him, closed it with a snap, and pulled out the plug.

"I have worked as a handler as long as you have sat a few doors down. I have been responsible for informants all my working life. I have never not succeeded."

Sven Sundkvist opened the laptop and turned it back again.

"You can keep the cord. The battery's got plenty of juice."

He pointed to the screen.

"I don't understand, Erik. You've worked together for nine years. But when I show you that picture there… the exact moment he… there, do you see, exactly there he dies… you don't react."

Erik Wilson snorted.

"He wasn't my friend."

You trusted me.

"But I was his friend."

I trusted you.

"That's the way it works, Sundkvist. A handler pretends to be the informant's best friend. A handler has to play the role of the informant's best friend so goddamn well that the informant is willing to risk his life every day to get more information for his handler."

I miss you.

"So the guy you saw on the screen? You were right. I didn't react." Erik Wilson dropped his linen napkin on the table.

"Are you paying, Sundkvist?"

He started to leave. The tasteful restaurant around him, the lady on her own at the table to the left with a glass of red wine, two men to the right at a table full of papers and dessert plates.

"Västmannagatan 79."

Sven Sundkvist caught up with him, beside him.

"You knew everything, Erik. But you chose to say nothing. And contributed to the disappearance of someone associated with a murder. You manipulated police authority records and the national courts administration database. You placed-"

"Are you threatening me?"

Erik Wilson had stopped, red face, shoulders up.

He was showing something that was more than just nothing. "Are you, Sundkvist? Threatening me?"

"What do you think?"

"What do I think? You've tried to convince me by showing me evidence and tried to get me to feel something by showing me pictures of death. And now you're trying to threaten me with some kind of goddamn investigation? Sundkvist, you've used all the chapters in the interview book. What do I think? You're insulting me."

He continued on down the small step, past the table with four older men who were looking for their glasses and studying the menu and the empty serving carts and the two green climbers on a white wall.

One last look.

He stopped.

"But… the truth is that I don't like people who burn my best informant when I'm not there."

He looked at Sven Sundkvist.

"So… yes, that recording. The meeting you're talking about. It did happen. What you heard is genuine. Every single word."

Ewert Grens should perhaps have laughed. At least felt whatever it was that sometimes bubbles up in your belly, a delight that can't be heard.

The recording was genuine.

The meeting had taken place.

Sven had called from a restaurant in the center of Jacksonville as he watched Wilson walk to his car and start the journey back to south Georgia, after he had confirmed it all.

Grens didn't laugh. He had emptied himself that morning in a cage on a roof. He had screamed until the rage was released and let him sleep on a sofa. So now there was a space to be filled.

But not with more anger, that was no longer enough.

Not with satisfaction, even though he knew he was so close.

But hate.

Hoffmann had been burned. But survived. And taken hostages in order to continue surviving.

I carried out a legitimate murder.

Ewert Grens phoned a person he loathed for the second time. "I need your help again."

"Okay.”

"Can you come to my apartment tonight?"

"Your flat?"

"Corner of Odengatan and Sveavägen."

"Why?"

"As I said. I need your help."

Lars Ågestam scoffed.

"You want me to meet you? After work? Why should I want to do that?

After all… I'm not… now how did you put it… your buddy."

The secret intelligence report that was also on the laptop, but so fresh that it was in another file.

The one I didn't show you last night.

The one that I'm going to show you because I have no intention of carrying someone else's guilt.

"It's not social, it's work. Västmannagatan 79. The preliminary investigation you just scaled down."

"You're welcome to come to the Regional Public Prosecution Office tomorrow during the day."

"You can open it again. As I know what actually happened. But I need your help one more time, Ågestam. Tomorrow morning is too late. That is when the head of the Government Offices security realizes that something is missing and passes on that information. When the wrong people then have time to adapt their versions, manipulate the evidence, change reality yet again."

Grens coughed extensively close to the mouthpiece, as if he was uncertain as to how to continue.

"And I apologize. For that. I was perhaps… well, you know." "No, what?"

"Damn it, Ågestam!"

"What?"

"I was perhaps… I may have been a bit… churlish, a bit… well, unnecessarily harsh."

Lars Ågestam walked down the seven flights of stairs in the offices at Kungsbron. A pleasant evening, warm, he longed for heat, as he always did after eight months of bitter wind and unpredictable snow. He turned around, looked at the windows of the Regional Public Prosecution Office, all dark. Two late phone calls had been longer than he expected: one phone call home-he had explained that he had to stay late and several times promised that he would wash the glasses from last night which still smelled of alcohol before he went to bed-then one call with Sven Sundkvist. He had gotten hold of him somewhere that sounded like an airport. He had wanted more information about the part of the investigation that involved Poland and their trip there to a now defunct amphetamine factory.

"His flat?"

"Yes."

"You're going to Ewert Grens's flat?"

Sven Sundkvist hadn't said anything but didn't want to hang up-their conversation was already finished and Ågestam was impatient, wanted to get on his way.

"Yes. I'm going to Ewert Grens's flat."

"I'm sorry, Ågestam, but there's something I don't quite understand. I've known Ewert, I've been his closest colleague for nearly fourteen years. But I have never, never ever, Ågestam, been invited to his flat. It's… I don't know… so private, a strange kind of… protection. Once, five years ago, one time only, Ågestam, the day after the hostage drama in the morgue at Soder hospital, I forced my way into his home, against his will. But now you're saying that he asked you there? And you're quite sure about that?"

Lars Ågestam wandered slowly through the city, lots of people on the street despite the fact it was a Sunday and past nine o'clock-after winter's drought of warmth and company it was always harder to go home when life had just returned.

He hadn't realized that it might be more than just an investigation, more than just a question of working late. It really felt like something had changed last night in the kitchen at Åkeshov; the whisky and three hundred and two copies of secret intelligence reports resembled a kind of closeness. But Ewert Grens had soon killed that feeling, happy to hurt in the way that only he knew how. So if it was as extraordinary to be invited to his flat as Sven made out, maybe there had been a change, they were perhaps closer to tolerating each other.

He looked at the people around him again, those drinking beer in their coats and scarves in outside cafés, laughing, chatting, as people who get on well together do.

He sighed.

There had been no change, there never would be.

Grens had other reasons, Ågestam was sure of it, his own reasons, ones that he would never dream of sharing with a young public prosecutor he had decided to despise.

"Grens."

Still a lot of traffic on Sveavägen. He had to concentrate to hear the voice on the intercom.

"It's Ågestam, will you-"

"I'll open. Four flights up."

A thick reddish carpet on the floor, walls that were possibly marble, lights that were bright without being offensive. If he had lived in town, in a flat, he would have looked for an entrance like this.

He avoided the elevator, broad staircase all the way up, E AND A GRENS on the mailbox in a dark door.

"Come in."

The large detective superintendent with the thinning hair opened the door, same clothes as that afternoon and the night before, a gray jacket and even grayer trousers.

Ågestam looked around in wonder-the hall seemed endless. "It's big."

"I haven't spent much time here in the last few years. But still manage to find my way around."

Ewert Grens smiled. It looked unnatural. He had never experienced it before. His coarse face was normally tense, harassing the people it was facing; the smile, a different face that made Ågestam uncertain.

He walked down the long hall with rooms opening off it, counted at least six empty rooms that looked untouched, asleep. That was how Sven had described them, rooms that didn't want to wake up.

The kitchen was as spacious, as untouched.

He followed Grens through the first section and into the next, a small eating area, a gateleg table and six chairs.

"Do you live here on your own?"

"Sit yourself down."

A pile of blue files and a large notepad in the middle, two glasses that were still wet with a bottle of Seagram's between them.

He was prepared.

"A dram? Or are you driving?"

He had made an effort. Even the same kind of whisky.

"Here? With you in the vicinity? I wouldn't dare. You might have some dusty parking fine papers in your glove compartment."

Ewert Grens remembered a cold winter's night one and a half years ago. He had crawled around on his hands and knees, his creased suit trousers in the wet new snow and measured the distance between a car and Vasagatan.

Ågestam's car.

He smiled again, a smile that was almost unnerving.

"As I remember it, the parking fine was dismissed. By the prosecutor himself."

In a fury, he had fined Lars Ågestam for his eight-centimeter error in parking, weary of a public prosecutor who made things difficult when the search for a sixteen-year-old girl who had disappeared forced them down into the tunnels under Stockholm.

"You can pour me half a glass."

They both took a drink while Grens produced a document from one of the files and put it down in front of Ågestam.

"You got three hundred and two secret intelligence reports. About what actually happened, things the rest of us didn't know and so couldn't present in our official investigations."

Lars Ågestam nodded.

"That unit at Aspsås. For only police officers. When I charge Them all." "They were reports from last year. But this copy, this is still warm."

M pulls a gun

(Polish 9mm Radom)

from shoulder holster.

M cocks the gun and holds it to the buyer's head.

"Submitted to the county police commissioner, like all the others."

P orders M to calm down.

IA lowers the gun, takes a step

back, his weapon half-cocked.

Lars Ågestam was about to speak when Grens interrupted.

"I've spent… I'd guess… half my time working on Vastmannagaran since the alarm was raised. Sven Sundkvist and Mariana Hermansson as well. Nils Krantz estimates that he and three other colleagues spent a week searching the place with magnifying glasses and fingerprint lifting tape, Errfors says that he used as much time to analyze the body of a Danish citizen. A number of constables and detectives have guarded the crime scene, questioned neighbors and looked for bloody shirts in garbage cans for-if I'm conservative-twenty days."

He looked at the prosecutor.

"And you? How many hours have you put into this case?"

Ågestam shrugged.

"Hard to say… a week."

Suddenly the buyer shouts

"I'm the police."

M again aims the gun

at the buyer's head.

Ewert Grens snatched the intelligence report out of Ågestam's hands and waved it in front of him.

"Thirteen and a half working weeks. Five hundred and forty man-hours. When my colleagues and bosses who sit in the same corridor already had the answer. He even phoned, Ågestam, it says here, Hoffmann damn well rang himself and raised the alarm!"

Lars Ågestam reached out for the report.

"Can I have it back?"

He left the table, went into the other part of the kitchen and opened one of the wall cupboards, looking for something, opened another one.

"What's the purpose of all this?"

"I want to solve a murder."

"Do you not understand what I'm asking, Grens? What's the purpose of all this?"

He found what he was looking for, a glass, filled it with water. "I have no intention of carrying the guilt."

"Guilt?"

"You've got nothing to do with it, Ågestam. But that's the truth. I'm not going to carry the guilt anymore. That's why I'm going to make sure that the people responsible are going to carry it for me."

The public prosecutor looked at the report.

"And you can use the report to do that?"

"Yes. If I manage to finish this. Before tomorrow morning."

Lars Ågestam stood in the middle of the large kitchen. He could hear the traffic through the open window-it had slowed, fewer cars that drove faster, it was starting to get late.

"Can I wander around a bit? Here in the flat?"

"Feel free."

The hall seemed even longer than before, thick rugs on a parquet floor that was dark but not worn, brown wallpaper with a seventies design. He turned off and into the first and best door, into something that resembled a library, sat down in the leather armchair that seemed to protest while the sunken seat waited for its owner. The only room in the flat that didn't scream loneliness. He followed the shelves and rows of same-size books, turned on the standard lamp that was beautifully angled and that gave off a light that colored the printed pages yellow. He leaned back as he imagined the detective superintendent did, once more read the secret intelligence report that had been written by a policeman the day after the murder at Västmannagatan 79, whereas the investigation for which he and Grens were responsible had slowly led to nothing and closure.

M holds the gun harder to

the buyer's head and pulls the trigger.

The buyer falls to the floor, at a right angle to the chair.

Lars Ågestam reached for the lampshade and pulled it closer, he wanted to see properly, be sure, now that he had decided.

He wouldn't be going home tonight.

He would, in a while, go directly from here to the Regional Public Prosecution Office and reopen the preliminary investigation.

He stood up and was about to leave the room when he noticed two black-and-white photographs on the wall between two bookshelves: a woman and a man. They were young and full of anticipation, they were wearing police uniforms and their eyes were alive.

He had always wondered what he looked like, back then, when he was someone else.

"Have you decided?"

Grens was sitting where he had left him, among the blue files and empty glasses at an elegant kitchen table.

"Yes."

"If you prosecute, Ågestam, we're not just talking about normal policemen. I'll give you a commanding officer. And an even higher ranking officer. And a state secretary."

Lars Ågestam looked at the three pieces of letter-sized paper in his hand. "And you maintain that there's enough? I assume that I haven't seen everything."

A security camera in Rosenbad with five people on their way into one of the offices. A recording of five voices in a closed meeting.

You haven't seen everything.

"There's enough."

Ewert Grens smiled for the third time.

Lars Ågestam thought that it looked almost natural, he smiled fleetingly back.

"Haul them in. I'll have the arrest warrants sorted within three days."

He went down the stairs in the silent building.

It was years ago now, his painful leg on the stone stairs, but tonight he had walked past the elevator, his hand gripping the handrail. Two doors had greeted him with scurrying footsteps to doormats and peepholes as he passed, curious eyes that wanted to see him up on the fourth floor, he who never used the stairs suddenly doing so. At the bottom and the door nearest the entrance, a wall clock that chimed, he counted, twelve times.

Sveav5gen was almost empty and it was still warm, maybe they'd get a damned summer this year as well. He breathed in, one deep breath, slowly released the air.

Ewert Grens had invited another person into his home.

Ewert Grens hadn't immediately experienced a pain in his chest and asked him to leave.

He had never done that before, not since the accident-it had been her place and their shared home. He shrugged off the gentle breeze and started to walk west along Odengatan, just as empty, just as warm. He took off his jacket and undid the top buttons on his shirt.

Of all people, the well-groomed prosecutor whom he hated, whom he had met a few years ago and loathed.

He had even almost enjoyed it.

He slowed down by the kiosk on Odenplan, stood in the queue with the mobile kids sending text messages to other mobile kids, bought a hamburger and a drink that tasted of orange but had lost its bubbles. He had said no to the prosecutor's suggestion of finishing the evening with a beer in the lawyers' haunt at Frescati, only to regret it and wander restlessly from room to room until he was compelled to go out, just somewhere else, at least for a while.

Two rats at his feet, from a hole under the kiosk into the park with sleeping men on wooden benches. Four young women over there, short skirts and high-heeled shoes, running toward one of the buses that had just closed its doors and was pulling out.

He are his hamburger outside Gustav Vasa church, then turned right into a street he had visited several times in the past few weeks, blocks of flats that were on their way to bed. He looked at himself in the glass panes of the large front door, punched in the code which he now knew off by heart and took the elevator that creaked as it reached the fourth floor.

A new sign on the mailbox. The Polish name had been replaced. The brown wooden door was even older than his own. He looked at it, remembered the pool of blood under a head, small flags on the wall, the kitchen floor where Krantz had found traces of drugs.

It had started here.

The death that would force him to make a decision about more death.

Vanadisvagen, Gavlegatan, Solnabron, he carried on through the mild night, as if someone else was walking beside him and he was just following, he thought nothing, felt nothing, not until he stopped on Solna Kyrkvag in front of an opening in the fence that was called Gate 1 and was one of ten entrances to North Cemetery.

The expected edges in the inner pocket of his jacket.

He had let it lie at arm's length on his desk for months; then yesterday, without knowing why, he had taken it home with him. Now he was here, holding the map in his hand.

He wasn't even cold.

Despite the fact that he knew it was always cold in graveyards.

Ewert Grens followed the asphalt road that cut across large areas of green grass edged by birches, conifers, and trees he didn't know the names of A hundred and fifty acres, thirty thousand graves. He had avoided looking at them-rather the branches on the trees than the gray stones that marked loss-but was now looking at some older graves, those who were buried as titles, not people: a postal inspector, a stationmaster, a widow. He went on past large engraved stones that housed entire families who wanted always to be close, past other large stones that rose up stern and proud from the ground-slightly more important than the rest, even in death-to stare at him.

Twenty-nine years.

He had several times a day for most of his adult life lived through a few tainted moments-she falls out of the police van, he doesn't manage to stop in time, the back wheels roll over her head-and sometimes, if he had forgotten to think about it, if he realized that several hours had passed since the last time, he had been forced to think about it a bit longer and a bit more, mostly about the red that had been blood that poured from the head on his lap.

He couldn't do it anymore.

He looked at the trees and the graves and even the memorial garden over there, but it didn't help, no matter how much he reprimanded himself, he could not focus on the flickering in her eyes or the spasms in her legs.

What you're frightened of has already happened.

He looked around, suddenly in a rush.

He cut across the graves in an area that according to the signs was called Section I5B: beautiful, understated gravestones, people who had died with dignity and didn't need to make such a bloody fuss afterwards.

Section 16A. He lengthened his stride. Section 19E. He was out of breath, sweating.

A green watering can on a stand, he filled it with water from the tap close by, carried it with him as he hurried on and the asphalt changed to gravel.

Section 19B.

He attempted to stand still again.

He had never been here. He had tried, he had, but never managed. It had taken him one and a half years to walk a couple of kilometers.

The failing light made it hard to see more than two headstones in front.

He leaned forward so he could read more easily, each new sign marking a burial place.

Grave 601.

Grave 602.

He was shaking, finding it difficult to breathe. For a moment he was about to turn around.

Grave 603.

Some overturned earth, a temporary flowerbed with something green, a small white wooden cross, nothing more.

He lifted the watering can and watered the bush without flowers.

She's lying there.

The girl who holds his hand and forces him to walk close to her as they wander through the Stockholm dawn, the girl who struggles beside him on badly waxed skis through the snow-covered chestnut trees in Vasaparken, the girl who moves in with a young man to the flat on Sveavägen.

She is the one who is lying there.

Not the woman who sits in a wheelchair in a nursing home, the one who doesn't recognize me.

He didn't cry, he had already done that. He smiled. I didn't kill him.

I didn't kill you.

What I am frightened of has already happened.