Three Seconds

to watch TV.
    ‘Someone held the gun hard to his head. The gas pressure between the muzzle and the temple must have been enormous. You can see for yourself. Half the side’s been blown off.’
    The skin on his face was already grey, his eyes empty, his mouth a straight line that would never talk again.
    ‘I don’t understand. One entrance wound. But two exit wounds?’
    Krantz held his hand near the hole that was as large as a tennis ball in the middle of the right side of the head.
    ‘I’ve only seen this a couple of times in thirty-odd years. But it happens. And the autopsy will confirm it – that it’s only one shot. I’m sure of it.’
    He tugged at the sleeve of Grens’s white overalls, his voice eager.
    ‘One shot to the temple. The bullet was jacketed, half lead and half titanium, and it split when it hit one of the skull bones.’
    Krantz got up and stretched his arm in the air. It was an old flat and the ceiling was about three metres high. A few hairline cracks, but otherwise in good nick, except for where the forensic technician was pointing: a deep gash in the whitewash.
    ‘We took half the bullet down from there.’
    Small pieces of plaster had fallen where careful fingers had dug out the hard metal.
    Some way off, there was a considerably larger tear in some soft wood.
    ‘And that is from the other half. The kitchen door was obviously closed.’
    ‘I don’t know, Nils.’
    Ewert Grens was still sitting by the head that had too many holes.
    ‘The call-out said execution. But having looked … it could just as easily be suicide.’
    ‘Someone has tried to make it look like that.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    Krantz slid his foot closer to the hand that was holding a gun.
    ‘That looks staged. I think that someone shot him and
then
put the gun in his hand.’
    He disappeared out into the hall and came back immediately with a black case in his hand.
    ‘But I’ll check it. I’ll do a GSR test on the hand. Then we’ll know.’
    Ewert started to calculate, looked over at Hermansson; she was doing the same.
    One hour and forty-five minutes since the alarm was raised, they still had plenty of time. The body hadn’t yet started to attract enough foreign particles to make a residue test worthless.
    Krantz opened his case and looked for a round tube of fingerprint lifting tape. He pressed the tape against the victim’s hand several times, in particular the area between the index finger and thumb. Then he went out into the kitchen, to the microscope that had been set up on the worktop, put the fingerprint lifting tape on the glass plate and studied it through the ocular.
    A few seconds passed.
    ‘No gunshot residue.’
    ‘As you thought.’
    ‘So the hand that was holding the gun didn’t fire it.’
    He turned around.
    ‘This is murder, Ewert.’

He put his left hand to his right shoulder and pulled at the leather strap until the pressure on his shoulders was released and he could hold the holster with one hand. He opened it and pulled out a Radom with a nine-millimetre calibre. He did a recoil operation, put the last bullet in the magazine, so that fourteen were in place.
     
    Piet Hoffmann stood still for a while, his breathing so loud he could hear himself.
    He was alone in the room and the flat that looked out over Vasagatan and Kungsbron. The last mule had taken the train south a couple of hours ago, and Mariusz and Jerzy had just started their car and headed off in the same direction.
    A long day, but it was still only the afternoon and he had to stay awake for hours yet.
    The gun cabinets stood on the floor behind the desk. Two identical cabinets, a couple of metres high, about a metre wide, a smaller shelf on top and two rifles on a considerably larger shelf below. He put the gun on the top shelf in the first cabinet, and the full magazine in the same place in the second.
    He walked through the rooms that had functioned as offices for Hoffmann Security AB for two years now. One of Wojtek Security International’s many branches. He had visited most of them several times, and the ones furthest north in Helsinki, Copenhagen and Oslo more often.
    The fireplace with its dark tiles and white frame was beautiful, the sort that he knew Zofia wanted at home. He fished up a handful of small dry twigs from the bottom of the wood basket and lit them, then waited until the larger, thicker logs that he placed on top started to burn before taking his clothes off. The jacket, trousers, shirt,