Three Seconds (40 page)

    "Ågestam?"

    The prosecutor stopped, wondered whether he'd heard correctly. It was Grens's voice and it sounded almost friendly, perhaps even apologetic.

    "Do you know what this is?"

    Ewert Grens unfolded the piece of paper and put it down on the table in front of the sofa.

    A map.

    "North Cemetery."

    "Have you been there?"

    "What do you mean?"

    "Have you? Been there?"

    Strange questions. The closest they had ever come to a conversation. "Two of my relatives are buried there."

    Ågestam had never seen this arrogant bastard so… small. Grens played with the map of one of Sweden's largest cemeteries and struggled for words. "Then you'll know… I wondered… is it nice there?"

      The door to the cell at the end of the corridor in the voluntary isolation unit was open. The prisoner from G2 had been escorted there through the underground tunnel by four members of the prison riot squad and after that he had demanded to phone the police, and then proceeded to make their lives hell. He had kept ringing the bell and demanding to be moved again, had shouted about solitary confinement and hit the walls, overturned the wardrobe, smashed the chair and pissed all over the floor until it ran our under the door into the corridor. He had been terrified but seemed to hold himself together, scared but in control. He knew what he was saying and why and he didn't go to pieces and collapse-the prisoner called Piet Hoffmann would only be quiet when he knew that someone was listening. Lennart Oscarsson had been standing in his office looking out over the prison yard and town hall in the distance when he had been informed of the disturbance involving a prisoner in the voluntary isolation unit in Block C and had decided to go there himself, to meet someone he didn't know but who had haunted him since a late phone call the night before.

    "In there?"

    He had seen him before. The cleaner in the administration block. He had seemed taller then, more straight-backed, eyes that were curious and alert. The person sitting on the bunk with his knees pulled up under his chin and his back pressed hard to the wall was someone else.

    Only death, or fleeing from it, could change someone so quickly. "Is there a problem, Hoffmann?"

    The prisoner who couldn't be questioned tried to look more together than he actually was.

    "I don't know. What d'you think? Or did you come here to get your trash emptied?"

    "I think it would seem so. And that it's you that's causing it. The problem."
The order to grant a lawyer access to your unit.

    "You asked for voluntary isolation. You refused to say why. And now you've got it, voluntary isolation."

The order that you must not be questioned.

    "So… what's your problem?"

    "I want to be put in the hole."

    "You want what?"

    "The hole. Solitary confinement."

I see you.

You're sitting there in the clothes we've issued.

But I don't understand who you are.

    "Solitary confinement? Exactly… what exactly are you talking about, Hoffmann?"

    "I don't want to have any contact with the other prisoners."

    "Are you being threatened?"

    "No contact. That's all I'm saying."

    Piet Hoffmann looked out through the open door. Prisoners who moved around freely represented death just as much here as in any other unit. They had been moved away from others but not from each other.

    "That's not the way it works. Hoffmann, solitary confinement is our decision. It's not something that individual prisoners can decide. You've been moved here on your request, in accordance with Paragraph eighteen. That's our duty. We are under obligation to do that if you request it. But the hole, solitary confinement, has a completely different set of regulations and conditions. Paragraph fifty is not something you can request, it's not voluntary, it is a decision that is enforced. By a principal officer in your unit. Or by me."

    They were walking around out
there,
and they knew. He wouldn't survive the week here.

    "Enforced?" "Yes."

    "And how the fuck is that decision made?"

    "If you're a danger to someone
else.
Or to yourself."

    With walls that locked you in there was nowhere to hide.

    "A danger?" "Yes."

    "In what way?"

    "Violence. Toward fellow prisoners. Or one of us, one of the staff."

    They were waiting for him.

    They whispered
stuka.

    He moved closer to the chief warden and looked into a face that crumpled with pain-he had hit him hard.

     He sat on the hard concrete floor. He
^'
d heard talk of solitary confinement cells that were called the hole or the cage, he'd heard tales of people who excelled in violence in the world outside but who had broken after a few days in solitary confinement and were taken to the hospital unit in a fetal position, or those who had quietly hanged themselves with a sheet. A person couldn't be farther removed from life, from what was natural.

    He was sitting on the floor as there wasn't a chair. A heavy metal bed and a cement toilet bowl that was solidly attached to the floor. That was it.

    He had hit the chief warden in the middle of the face with his fist. The top of the cheek, eye, and nose. Oscarsson had fallen from the chair onto the floor, bleeding but conscious. The guards had rushed in, the governor held his hands in front of his face to protect himself against anything else, and Piet Hoffmann had voluntarily stretched his arms and legs for them to carry him out. The four guards each struggled with a part of his body while the prisoners lined the corridor and watched.

    He had survived the attack. He had survived voluntary isolation. He had managed to get here, as much protection as you could get in a closed prison, but he shrank just as he had before,
I
am
alone, no one knows yet,
he curled up on the hard surface, freezing then sweating then freezing again. He was still lying there when one of the guards opened the square hatch in the door to ask if he wanted his hour out in the fresh air-an hour a day in a cake slice-shaped cage with blue sky high above the metal mesh-but he shook his head. He didn't want to leave the cell, didn't want to expose himself to anyone.

     Lennart Oscarsson closed the door to the voluntary isolation unit and went slowly down the stairs, one at a time, to the ground floor of Block C. One hand to his cheek, his fingertips touching the swelling. It was tender and particularly swollen along the zygomatic bone, and there was a taste of blood on his tongue and in his throat. Give it about an hour, then the area around his eye would turn blue. The chief warden felt physical pain every second from a face that would take a long time to heal, but it meant nothing. It was the other pain, the one from the inside that he felt-all his working life he had lived with men who had no place in real society and he had been proud that he could read difficult people better than anyone, his professional knowledge, the only thing he felt was worth anything anymore.

    This punch, he hadn't seen it coming.

    He hadn't understood the desperation, hadn't anticipated the force of Hoffmann's fear.

    The riot squad had carried him down to where the bastard belonged, and he would stay there for a long time in the shirtiest of shitty cells. Lennart Oscarsson would file a report that afternoon, and a long sentence would become even longer. It didn't help. He felt his tender cheek with his fingers. It didn't change anything, didn't ease his frustration at having misread a prisoner.

    The iron bed, the cement toilet. No matter how long he waited, the cell was never going to be more than that. The dirty walls that had once been white, the ceiling that had never been painted, the floor that was so cold. He rang the bell again, kept his finger on the button long enough to irritate them. One of the guards would break in the end and hurry over to tell the prisoner who had assaulted the chief warden to stop ringing the bell or to look forward to days in a straitjacket.

    He was cold again.

    They knew. He was a snitch, he had a death threat. They would manage to get in here too. It was just a matter of time, as not even a carefully locked cell door could protect him. Wojtek had money and anyone could be bought when death was involved.

    The square hatch was some way up the door. It scraped and whined when it was opened.

Staring eyes.

    "You want something?"

Who are you?

    "I want to make a phone call."

Guard?

    'And why should we let you phone?"

Or one of them?

    "I want to call the police."

    The eye came closer, laughed.

    "You want to call the police? And do what? Report that you've just assaulted a prison warden? Those of us who work here don't have much time for that sort of thing."

    "None of your fucking business why and you know that. You know that you can't refuse me a phone call to the police."

    The eye was silent. The hatch was closed. Steps disappeared.

    Piet Hoffmann got up from the cold floor and threw himself over the button on the wall, held it in he guessed for about five minutes.

    Suddenly the door was pulled open. Three blue uniforms. The staring eyes that he now was convinced belonged to a guard. Beside him, another one, the same kind. Behind them, a third, with enough stripes for him to be a principal officer, an older man, in his sixties.

    He was the one who spoke.

    "My name is Martin Jacobson. I'm the principal officer here. Boss in this unit. What's the problem?"

    "I've asked to make a phone call. To the police. It's my damn right."

    The principal officer studied him-a prisoner in oversize clothes who was sweating and found it difficult to stand still-then looked at the guard with the staring eyes.

    "Roll in the phone."

    "But-"

    "I don't care why he's here. Let him phone."

    He crouched on the edge of the iron bed with the telephone receiver in his hand.

    He had asked for the city police every time he got through. More rings this time-he had counted twenty for both Erik Wilson and Göransson. Neither of them had answered.

    He sat locked in a cell that had nothing other than an iron bed and a cement toilet bowl. He had no contact with the world outside or the other prisoners. None of the guards outside his cell door had any idea that he was there on behalf of the Swedish police.

    He was stuck. He couldn't get out. He was alone in a prison where he had been condemned to death by his fellow prisoners.

    He undressed himself and stood there shivering. He waved his arms around and started to sweat. He held his breath until the pressure in his chest was more than pain.

    He lay face down on the floor, wanting to feel something, anything, that wasn't fear.

    Piet Hoffmann knew as soon as the door into the corridor opened and then shut again.

    He didn't need to see, he just knew-they were there.

    The heavy steps of someone moving slowly. He hurried over to the cell door, put his ear to the cold metal, listened. A new prisoner being escorted by several wardens.

    Then he heard it, a voice he recognized.

"Stukatj."