Three Seconds

the visitors' chairs. And if there are any unwashed glasses, take them with you.'

It was a big room with windows that faced the fence and prison yard, but the same feeling as in all the others: a joyless institution, no room for anything private here, not even a family photo in a silver frame or a diploma on the walls. With one exception. On the desk, two bunches of flowers in crystal vases.

'Tulips?'

The principal officer went over to the desk and the long green stems with equally green buds. He held the white greeting cards in his hand while he read the message on both of them out loud.

'With thanks for a successful partnership, Aspilis Business Association.'

The governor arranged one of the bunches on his desk, twenty-five yellow tulips that hadn't yet bloomed.

'I think so, they certainly look like tulips. We get a lot of flowers nowadays. The whole of Aspsas works here. Or supplies us with something. And all the study visits. It wasn't long ago that everyone looked down on the prison service. Now it's bloody nonstop, and every arrangement or incident fills the news bulletins and front pages.'

He looked with pride at the flowers that he had somehow just complained about.

'They'll open soon. It usually takes a couple of days.'

Piet Hoffmann nodded and then left, the principal prison officer a few meters in front, as before.

Tomorrow.

They would bloom tomorrow.

Ewen Grens removed two empty plastic cups and a half-eaten almond slice from the small wooden table, then sat down and sank into the softness of the corduroy sofa while he waited for Sven and Hermansson to sit down on either side.

The handwritten, single sheet of paper from a notepad was stained brown in one corner where some coffee had spilled, and had grease marks in another from stray almond-slice crumbs.

A list of seven names.

People who were on the periphery of the preliminary investigation and who they had three days to investigate and who perhaps meant the difference between the case staying live or being scaled down-between a solved and an unsolved murder.

He divided them into three columns.

Drugs, thugs, Wojtek.

Sven was going to concentrate on the first column, on the known drug dealers who lived or operated in the vicinity of Vastmannagatan 79: Jorge Hernandez on the second floor of the same building; Jorma Rantala in the block where a bloody shirt was found wrapped in a plastic bag in the garbage bin.

Hermansson chose the second column: Jan du Tobit and Nicholas Barlow, two international hitmen who according to the Swedish Security

Service were in Stockholm or the surrounding area at the time of the murder.

Ewert Grens was going to look after the last three names: three men who had previously worked with Wojtek International AB. A certain Maciej Bosacki, Piet Hoffmann, and Karl Lager. Each one the owner of a Swedish security firm, which-entirely legally-had been contracted for bodyguard services by Wojtek's head office when Polish officials were on state visits, the official business that any well-functioning and untouchable mafia organization is dependent on, a visible shell that both hides and hints at their business. Grens was one of the people in the Stockholm police who knew most about organized crime from the other side of the Baltic, and in this room, the only one who knew how to investigate whether any of the three could be linked to the other Wojtek, the unofficial organization, the real one, the one that was capable of carrying out assassinations in Swedish flats.

No one questioned him anymore.

No bastard sat too close or stared at him while he ate his meat and two veg. By lunch on the second day he was already someone but they didn't have a clue that very soon he would also be the one who decided everything, thanks to the power of drugs, and in two days he would control all supplies and sales and surpass even murderers in the prison hierarchy. Anyone who had killed someone was the most highly appreciated inside, got the most respect, then the big-time drug dealers and bank robbers and, at the bottom of the pile, pedophiles and rapists. But even the murderers bowed to whoever controlled the drugs and supplied the syringes.

Piet Hoffmann had followed close behind the principal prison officer in order to learn his new cleaning duties and had then waited on his bunk in his cell until the other men in the unit had come back from the workshop and classrooms for food that tasted of nothing. He had had eye contact with both Stefan and Karol Tomasz several times-they were impatient and waiting for instructions so he mouthed wieczorem at them until they understood.

This evening.

This evening they would knock out the three main dealers.

He offered to clear the table and wash up while the others smoked roll-your-owns with no filter out in the gravel yard or played stud poker for thousand-kronor toothpicks. Alone in the kitchen, there was no one who saw him wiping down the sink and worktop and stuffing two spoons and a knife into the front pockets of his trousers at the same time.

He walked over to the aquarium, the guards' glass box, knocked on the pane and got an irritated flick of the wrist back. He knocked again, a bit harder and a bit longer, making it clear that he had no intention of leaving.

'What the hell d'you want? It's lunchtime. Wasn't it you who was going to clean the kitchen?'

'Does it look like there's anything left to do out there?'

'That's not the point.'

Hoffmann shrugged, he wasn't going to pursue it.

'My books?'

'What about them?'

'I ordered them yesterday. Six of them.'

'Don't know anything about it.'

'Well, then it might make sense to have a look, eh?'

He was an older warden, not one of the ones who had dealt with him yesterday. He waved his arm around in irritation, but after a while went into the glass box and looked on the desk.

'These ones?'

Hardbacks, library covers. A label stuck on the front of each one: STORE in blue typed letters.

'That's them.'

The older guard glanced quickly at the author presentations on the back sleeve, leafed through some pages here and there without really concentrating and then handed them over.

'Nineteenth Century Stockholm. The Marionettes. What the hell is all that?' 'Poetry.'

'A bit gay, eh?'

'Maybe you should try reading some.'

'Listen here, you prick, I don't read faggot books.'

Piet Hoffmann closed his cell door enough so that no one could see, but nor so much that it would arouse suspicion. He put the six books on the small bedside table; titles that were seldom borrowed and which therefore had to be collected from the store in the basement of Aspsas library when the request from the large prison came through that morning, and that were then handed over to the driver of the library bus by an out-of-breath, single female librarian in her fifties.

The knife he had stolen from the kitchen had felt sharp enough when he had run his fingertips across the blade.

He pressed it hard down the hinge between the front board and the first page of Lord Byron's Don Juan. It loosened thread by thread and soon the front and the spine were hanging just as freely as they had thirteen days earlier when he had opened it at a desk on Vasagatan. He thumbed to page 90, took hold of all the pages and pulled them off in one go. In the left-hand margin of page 91, a hole that was fifteen centimeters long and one centimeter wide, with thin walls constructed of Rizla papers, three hundred pages deep. The contents lay there untouched, just as he had left them.

Yellowish-white, a little sticky, exactly fifteen grams.

Ten years earlier he had consumed most of what he smuggled in himself. Only occasionally when he had too much might he sell some on. On a couple of occasions he was so hard up that he used it as