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 order
ed 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 pep
per 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."
Three Seconds Page 41
