Three Seconds by Roslund, Hellstrom Page A

asleep despite the two old ladies in the seats in front who chatted incessantly, and the man in the seat beside him who coughed loudly every five minutes. As the taxi approached the city and the policeheadquarters at Kronoberg, he asked the driver to stop first at Västmannagatan 79, the address he had been given by Paula. Wilson showed his ID to the security guard at the door of the fourth floor flat, with blue and white tape criss-crossed over the doorway and a sign that said it was a secured crime scene, and then walked on his own through the abandoned rooms that not even a day earlier had witnessed a man being killed. He started by the large, dark patch on the carpet under the table in the sitting room. A life had seeped away just here. An overturned chair was lying by the edge of the patch, the stain of death. He peered at a hole in the ceiling and another hole in the closed kitchen door, obvious damage from the split bullet. Then he stood for a while by the pins and flags which marked the discolouring on the sitting room wall, and which was interesting in terms of the angle and force of the shot. That was what he had come for. To analyse the blood splashes. That was what he needed for the next meeting, that and Paula’s version. Erik Wilson concentrated on the funnel-shaped area that the guys from forensics had marked out with two pieces of string, one end of which had no flags and no blood and no brain tissue. He studied and memorised it until he was certain of exactly where the two people who were important to him had been at the moment the shot was fired; where the person who fired had stood and where the person who
hadn’t
fired must have been standing.
    There was a pleasant breeze blowing on Sankt Eriksbron as he looked out over the boats, trains, cars – that was what he liked so much about walking, being able to pause for a while, to look.
    He had heard Paula’s version of events and the tension last night on his mobile phone, and now that he had had the opportunity to study the flat in peace and quiet, it looked like what he said was true. He knew that Paula was capable and that if the choice had been between life and death, Paula had both the strength and the ability to kill. It could easily have been him who fired the shot, but Wilson was now certain that that was not the case. Paula had sounded more and more harassed and frightened with every phone call, and after nine years working together as handler and infiltrator the close contact had developed into trust, and Erik Wilson had learnt to hear when he was telling the truth.
    He stopped in front of the door to Sankt Eriksplan 17, brittle glass in an old wooden frame, so close to the heavy traffic of the main road.He looked around, a face passed by but didn’t notice, he checked again, then went in.
    He had left the marks and splashes of blood in Västmannagatan, then taken the waiting taxi to Kronoberg and finally an office in the homicide unit. According to the Duty Management System, a detective had already been assigned to the case. Ewert Grens, assisted by Sven Sundkvist and Mariana Hermansson. Grens and Wilson had worked together in the same unit for a number of years, but he didn’t really know the strange detective superintendent. He had tried to make contact for a long time, without any response whatsoever and had then just given up, decided that he did not need an old man in his life who had once been the best, but now just listened to Siw Malmkvist and was bitter. Erik Wilson stayed in front of the computer. He switched from the DMS to the Crime Reporting system and searched for Västmannagatan 79, and found three hits in the past ten years. He called up the most recent entry, dealing in stolen goods, one ton of refined copper that was sold by a man with a Finnish name in one of the flats on the ground floor.
    Erik Wilson closed the door to Sankt Eriksplan 17 and paused in the silence, away from the traffic frenzy. The stairwell was dark and