Free Three Seconds by Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström Page A

nights when the wind swallowed any fragile sound. He had been pacing around his office with a strange sensation in his body, the first evening and night in the police headquarters without Siwan's voice anywhere in the dark. He had got so used to falling asleep to the past, and at this time of night had always listened to one of the cassettes he had recorded and mixed himself.
        There was nothing here now that even remotely resembled peace.
        He had never been bothered by all the night sounds that played outside his window before, and already he loathed the cars on Bergsgatan that accelerated as they approached the steep incline on Hantverkargatan. He closed the window and sat down with the sudden silence and the fax that he had just received from Klövje, from the Swedish section at Interpol. He read the interview, which he was reliably informed had been requested by the Swedish police, with a Polish citizen who had been the registered tenant of the flat in Västmannagatan 79 for the past two years. A man with a name that Ewert Grens didn't recognize and couldn't pronounce, forty-five years old, born in Gdansk, registered in the electoral roll for Warsaw. A man who had never been convicted or even suspected of any crime and who, according to the Polish policeman who had questioned him, had, without any doubt, been in Warsaw at the time when the incident in Stockholm took place.
    You're involved in some way.
        Ewert Grens held the printout in his hand.
    The door was locked when we got there.
        He got up and went out into the dark corridor.
    There were no signs of a break-in and no signs of violence. Two cups from the coffee machine. Someone had used a key to get in and out. A cheese sandwich wrapped in plastic and a banana-flavored yogurt from the vending machine. Someone who is linked to you.
        He stood there in the silence and dark, emptied one cup of coffee and ate half the yogurt, but left the sandwich in the bin. It was too dry, even for him.
        He felt safe here.
        The big, ugly police headquarters where colleagues were swallowed up or hidden away, the only place where he could bear to be, really-he always knew what to do here, he belonged; he could even sleep on the sofa if he wanted to and avoid the long nights on a balcony with a view of Sveavägen and a capital that never stopped.
        Ewert Grens went back to the only room in the homicide unit where the lights were still on, to the boxes of packed-away music, which he gave a light kick. He hadn't even gone to the funeral. He had paid for it, but hadn't taken part, and he kicked the boxes again, harder this time. He wished he had been there, maybe then she would be gone, truly gone.
        Klövje's fax was still lying on the desk. A Polish citizen who could in no way be linked to a dead body. Grens swore, marched across the room and kicked one of the boxes for the third time, his shoe leaving a small hole in the side. He hadn't gotten anywhere. He didn't know anything except that a couple of Swedes had been in the flat while the Polish mafia were completing a drug deal, and that one of them was now dead and the other had raised a whispered alarm from near a fridge in the kitchen-a Swedish voice with no accent, Krantz was certain of that.
    You were there and raised the alarm while someone was being murdered. Ewert Grens stood by the cardboard boxes, but didn't kick them again. You are either the murderer or a witness.
        He sat down, leaned back against the boxes, covering the recent hole.
    A murderer doesn't shoot someone, make it look like suicide, and then ring and raise the alarm.
        It felt good to sit with his back to the forbidden music, he was probably just going to stay there on the hard floor through the night, until morning. You're a witness.
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         He had been sitting by the window for two hours, watching the specks of light that were so tiny when they were far