Three Seconds

harsh ceiling light; it could be sweat, it could be tears. He hadn't even noticed her coming into his office, that she was now standing only a few meters from him.

'Mariana Hermansson, City Police.'

He jumped.

'I'd like to ask a few questions, about Hoffmann.'

He looked at her.

'He is a dead man.'

She chose to stay where she was.

'He said that.'

His eyes were evasive-she tried to catch them, but couldn't, they were always somewhere else.

'He is a dead man. He said that!'

She didn't know what she had expected. But it wasn't this. Someone who was on the verge.

'His name is Martin. Did you know that? One of my best friends. No, more than that, my closest friend. The oldest employee at Aspsas. Forty years. He's been here forty years! And now… now he's going to die.' She pursued the darting eyes.

'Yesterday, Ewert Grens, a detective superintendent who is in fact leading the operation right now from the church tower, was here. He came to question one of the prisoners. Piet Hoffmann.'

The square monitor.

'If Martin dies…'

The mouth that moved so slowly.

'If he dies…'

He is a dead man.

'I don't know if-'

'You said that it wasn't possible. That Hoffmann was ill. That he was in isolation in the hospital unit.'

'-I don't know that I could bear that.'

Lennart Oscarsson hadn't heard her.

'I have just been to Block C. I spoke to Nycander. Hoffmann was never there.'

The mouth.

'You lied.'

Moving.

'You lied. Why?'

When it moves slowly on that monitor, it looks like it's talking about death.

'Oscarsson! Listen to me! A person is lying dead on the floor in one of the corridors in Block B. Two other people have exactly nine minutes left to live. We need to make a decision. We need your answer!'

'Would you like a cup of coffee?'

'Why did you lie? What is this all about?'

'Or tea?'

'Who is Hoffmann?'

'I've got green and red and normal tea in bags. The sort that you dunk.'

Large drops of sweat fell from the governor's face onto the shiny desktop when he got up and walked over to a glass and gold-frame cart stacked with porcelain cups and saucers in the corner of the room.

'We need an answer. Why? Why did you lie?'

'It's important not to leave it in too long.'

He didn't look at her, didn't turn round despite the fact that she had raised her voice for the first time. He held one of the cups under the thermos and filled it with steaming water, then carefully dropped a bag with a picture of a red rosehip attached into the middle.

'About two minutes. No more.'

She was losing him.

'Would you like milk?'

They needed him.

'Sugar? Both perhaps?'

Hermansson put her hand under her jacket, angled her gun so that it slipped out of its holster, stretched out her arm in front of the chief warden's face, recoil operation: the shot hit the middle of the rectangular cupboard door.

The bullet went straight through, hitting the back wall, and they heard it falling to the floor among the black and brown shoes.

Lennart Oscarsson didn't move. The warm cup of tea still in one hand. She pointed to the wall clock behind the desk with the muzzle of her gun.

'Eight more minutes. Do you hear? I want to know why you lied. And I want to know who Hoffmann is, why he's standing in the workshop window with a revolver to the hostage's head.'

He looked at the gun, at the cupboard, at Hermansson.

'I was just lying on a… an unused bunk in Block K, searching the nice, newly painted white ceiling. Because… because I don't know who Hoffmann is. Because I don't know why he's standing there, daiming that he's going to shoot my best friend.'

His voice-she wasn't quite sure whether he was going to cry, or whether it was just the fragility of having given up.

'What I do know is… is that it's about something else… that there's other people involved.'

He swallowed, swallowed again.

'I was ordered to allow a lawyer to visit a client the evening before Grens was here. A prisoner in the same unit as Hoffmann. Stefan Lygas. He was one of the people who attacked him. And he was the one who… who was shot this morning. Lawyers, you might know, are often used as messengers when someone wants information to be spread inside… that's often the way it's done.'

'Ordered? By whom?'

Lennart Oscarsson gave a fleeting smile.

'I was ordered to prevent Grens-or any other police officer for that matter-from getting near Hoffmann. I stood there in reception, tried to look him in the eye, explain that the prisoner he wanted to see was in the hospital unit, that he would be there for three, maybe four days more.'

'By whom?'

Same smile, impotent.

'I was ordered to move Hoffmann. Back to the unit he'd come from. Even though a prisoner who's been threatened should never be moved back.'

Hermansson was shouting now.

'By whom?'

The smile.

'And I was given orders, just now, that if Hoffmann demands that the gates are opened for him and the hostages… that I mustn't let him out.' 'Oscarsson, I have to know who-'

'I want Martin to live.'

She looked at the face that wouldn't manage to hold on for much longer, then at the clock that was hanging on the wall.

Seven minutes left.

She turned around and ran out of the office, his voice following her down the corridor.

'Hermansson!'

She didn't stop.

'Hermansson!'

Words that ricocheted off the cold walls.

'Someone wants Hoffmann to die.'

His legs tied. His hands tied. His mouth gagged. His head covered.