Three Seconds by Roslund, Hellstrom Page B

when he was unsuccessful in his third attempt to turn on the lights he decided to take the small lift up to the fifth floor, getting out into a construction site. The flat was being totally renovated, so the tenants had been moved out. He stood on the brown paper and listened to nothing until he was certain that he was alone, then opened the locked door with STENBERG written on the letter box, went in to the two rooms and kitchen and checked over the furniture that was protected by transparent plastic sheeting. This was how he operated. A couple of the biggest private landlords in the city gave him the keys and work schedules for flats that were empty and being renovated. This was number five. Wilson had used it for just under a month; he’d met several different infiltrators here. He would keep it until the renovation was finished and the tenants had moved back in.
    He pulled back the plastic from the kitchen window, opened it and looked out over the communal gardens at the back, with carefully raked gravel paths and some new outdoor furniture over by the two swings and short slide. Paula would be there in a minute. He’d come out of the back door of the house opposite that had an entrance at Vulcanusgatan15. Always in an empty flat, always with a communal garden at the back that could be accessed from another address.
    Erik Wilson closed the window and taped the plastic back against the glass, just as the door below opened and Paula hurried along the gravel path.
    __________
    Ewert Grens impatiently clutched the folder that contained Nils Krantz’s photographs of a dead man. Ten minutes earlier, he had sent one of them to a fax machine in the crime operations unit in Copenhagen, a photograph of a head that had been washed, but still had skin, before the autopsy. There were three other pictures in the folder and he studied them while he waited. One taken from the front, one from the left side, one from the right. A considerable amount of his working day was taken up looking at pictures of death and he had learnt that it was often difficult to distinguish whether someone was asleep or actually dead. This time it was fairly obvious as there were three great holes in the head. If he hadn’t been to the scene or been handed a photograph by someone from forensics or received it by fax from a colleague somewhere else, he usually started by looking for the shiny steel stand that the head always rests on, and if he found it, it was a photograph from an autopsy. He looked at the pictures again and wondered what he would look like, what a person studying the photo of his head on a steel stand would think.
     
    ‘Grens.’
    The phone finally rang and he put the folder down on the desk.
    ‘Jacob Andersen, Copenhagen.’
    ‘Well?’
    ‘The photograph you faxed.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘It’s probably him.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘One of my informers.’
    ‘
Who?
’
    ‘I can’t say. Not yet. Not before I’m absolutely certain. I don’t want to disclose an informer unnecessarily. You know how it works.’
    Ewert Grens knew how it worked and didn’t like it. The need to protect the identity of covert human intelligence sources had increasedas they had become more numerous, and sometimes was more important than the need for the police to provide each other with correct information. Nowadays, when each and every policeman could call themselves a handler and had the right to make their own CHIS contacts, the secrecy was more often a hindrance than a help.
    ‘What do you need?’
    ‘Everything you’ve got.’
    ‘Dental impressions. Fingerprints. We’re waiting for the DNA.’
    ‘Send it.’
    ‘I’ll do that straight away. And I assume that you’ll call again in a few minutes.’
    The head on the steel stand.
    Grens stroked his finger over the smooth photographic paper.
    An infiltrator. From Copenhagen. One of two people who spoke Swedish in a flat when a Polish mafia execution took place.
    Who was the other one?
    __________
    Piet