Three Seconds

stain. It seemed that the ejector was stuck in the discharge position and he could clearly see the bullet casing in the chamber. He studied the barrel, the butt, the grip safety, looking for something to fix his eyes on, anything but death.
    Nils Krantz was standing further away, flanked by two younger colleagues. Three forensic technicians who together would scour every nook and cranny in the room. One of them had a video camera in his hand and was filming something on the white wallpaper. Sven took a step away from the head, and looked at what the camera was focused on: a small discoloured patch of something, something harmless and sufficiently far away from the lifeless eyes.
    ‘The victim has
one
entrance wound from
one
shot to the head.’
    Nils Krantz had sneaked up behind his filming colleague and was now close to Sven Sundkvist’s ear.
    ‘But
two
exit wounds.’
    Sven turned away from the wallpaper and discolouring and looked askance at the older forensic scientist.
    ‘The entrance wound is larger than both exit wounds because of the contact gas pressure.’
    Sven heard what Krantz was saying, but he didn’t understand and chose not to ask. He didn’t need to know and instead followed the finger that was pointing at the discolouring on the wallpaper.
    ‘By the way, what we’re just filming and what you’re looking at right now comes from the victim, brain tissue.’
    Sven Sundkvist took a deep breath. He had wanted to avoid death and had therefore chosen to focus on the discolouring on the wallpaper, but he had only found more death, as real as it ever could be. He lowered his eyes and heard Ewert come in to the room.
    ‘Sven?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Perhaps you should go down and talk to our colleagues who took the call? And maybe some neighbours? The people who aren’t
here.
’
    Sven looked at his boss with gratitude, hurried away from the dark stains on the carpet and discolouring on the wallpaper, while Ewert Grens hunkered down to get closer to the dead body.

The balance of power had been redistributed and restored. But it would happen again. And he had to win every time.
     
    Carry on acting. Or die
.
    He stood between Mariusz and Jerzy at Hoffmann Security’s round kitchen table, emptying two thousand, seven hundred and fifty capsules of amphetamine. The latest delivery from the factory in Siedlce. Their white medical-gloved fingers first picked off the brown rubber that was there to protect the mule’s stomach in case of any leaks, then cut open the capsule with a knife and poured the powder into large glass bowls where it was mixed with grape sugar. One part amphetamine from eastern Poland to two parts grape sugar from the supermarket on the corner. Twenty-seven kilos of pure drugs transformed into eighty-one kilos that could be sold on the street.
    Piet Hoffmann put a metal tin on some kitchen scales and filled it with exactly one thousand grams of cut amphetamine. A piece of tin foil was placed carefully over the powder and then something that resembled a sugar lump was put on the foil. He held a match to the methaldehyde pellet and when the white square started to burn, he fitted the lid of the tin. The flames would then die when the oxygen ran out and one kilo of amphetamine would be vacuum-packed.
    He repeated this operation, one tin at a time, eighty-one times.
    ‘Benzine?’
    Jerzy opened the bottle of petroleum ether, splashed some of the colourless fluid on the tin lids and sides and then rubbed the metal surfaces with cotton wool. He lit another match and a bluish flame flared that he then smothered with a rag after ten seconds.
    All the fingerprints had now been removed.

The bloodstains were smallest on the hall carpet, slightly bigger on the wall at the other end of the spacious sitting room, even bigger by the table, and largest by the overturned chair. They also got darker and deeper the closer to the body they were, and the most visible was the large patch on the carpet in which the lifeless head was floating.
     
    Ewert Grens was sitting so close that if the body on the floor had started to whisper he would hear it. This death didn’t feel like anything, it didn’t even have a name.
    ‘The entrance wound, Ewert, here.’
    Nils Krantz had crept around on all fours, filmed and photographed. He was one of the few experts Grens actually trusted and had proved often enough that he wasn’t the kind of person who would take shortcuts just so he could get home an hour earlier