Read Online Three Seconds by Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström - Free Book Online Page B

start, there on the floor in the flat.
        "And this, Ewert, I want you to have a look at this, in particular."
        Ludvig Errfors was holding the dead man's right arm, a peculiar sensation when the muscles don't react, the fact that something that was so recently alive can become so rubbery.
        "You see that? The visible marks around the wrist. Someone held his hand post-mortem."
        Grens looked at Nils Krantz again who gave a satisfied nod. He had been right about that too. Someone had moved the arm after he'd died. Someone had tried to make it look like suicide.
        Ewert Grens left the brightly lit table in the middle of the room and opened one of the windows out in the corridor. It was dark outside, and the late evening was deepening into night.
        "No name. No history. I want more. I want to get closer to him."
        He looked at Krantz, then at Errfors. He waited. Until the pathologist cleared his throat.
        There was always more.
        "I've looked at a couple of the fillings in his teeth. Take this one here, in the middle of the lower jaw. About eight, maybe ten years old. Most probably Swedish. I can deduce that from the way the work has been done, the quality, a plastic material that is noticeably different to the ones that the greater part of Europe import from Taiwan. I had a body here last week, a Czech who had a root filling in his lower jaw, cement in all the canals, which was… well, far from what we would see as acceptable here."
        The pathologist moved his hands from the skinless face to the torso. "He's had his appendix removed. See the scar here. A good cosmetic job. That, and the way in which the large intestine has been sewn up-both indicate that the operation was done in a Swedish hospital."
        A muffled sound and the feeling that the ground was moving. Just before midnight, and a truck had driven through the secured area, passing close to the window of the Solna institute of forensic medicine.
        Ludvig Errfors caught the question in Grens's eyes.
        "Nothing to worry about. They unload a short distance away. No idea what, but it's the same every evening."
        The pathologist moved away from the table; it was important that Ewert Grens came closer.
        "The fillings, the appendix and what I would call a Northern European appearance. Ewert, he's Swedish."
        Grens studied the face that was a death mask of white, washed bone.
    We found traces of bile, amphetamine and rubber.
    But they didn't come from you.
    We've confirmed a drug deal with the Polish mafia.
    But you're Swedish.
    You weren't a mule. You weren't the seller.
    You were the buyer.
        "Any traces of drugs?"
        "No."
        "Are you sure?"
        "No syringe marks, nothing in the blood, nothing in the urine." You were the buyer, but didn't use drugs yourself.
        He turned to Krantz.
        "The alarm call?"
        "What about it?"
        "Have you managed to analyze it yet?"
        Nils Krantz nodded. "I've just come back from Västmannagatan. I've got a theory. I went back to check it out. That sound you can hear just before the person who raised the alarm is about to finish with fourth floor? Right at the end of the brief call?" He watched Grens, he remembered. "Well, I had a hunch that it was the compressor in the fridge in the kitchen, Same frequency. Same interval."
        Ewert Grens's hand brushed the dead man's leg.
        "So the call was made from the kitchen?"
        "Yes."
        "And the voice? Did it sound Swedish to you?"
        "No accent whatsoever. Malardal dialect."
        "Then we have two Swedes. In a flat at the same time that the Polish mafia was concluding a drug deal, which ended in assassination. One of them is lying here. The other one raised the alarm."
        His hand moved toward the dead man's leg again, as if he hoped that it would somehow move.
        "What were you doing there?