Three Seconds

isn’t possible just to injure him. Once it’s fired, the shot will be lethal.’

The door was shut.
     
    Brown, maybe oak, several scratches around the lock, a set of keys that scraped the door a little each time a key was turned twice in the stiff barrel.
    Mariana Hermansson knocked lightly on the door.
    No footsteps, no voice – if anyone was in there they didn’t move, or say anything, it was someone who didn’t want to make contact.
    On Ewert’s order she had gone to look for the prison doctor on the other side of the large prison, inside the same walls, but several hundred metres away from the workshop and Hoffmann and the risk of more death. In Block C, through one of the hospital unit’s small windows, she had watched a prisoner coughing in bed while a man in a white coat explained to her that 0913 Hoffmann had never been in any of the beds, that the symptoms of an epidemic had never been identified and that barrier nursing care had therefore never been ordered.
    Ewert Grens had come up against a lie. The prison governor had prevented him from questioning an inmate. And right now that prisoner was holding a gun to a principal officer’s head.
    She knocked again, harder.
    She pressed the handle down.
    The door was unlocked.
    Lennart Oscarsson was sitting in a dark leather armchair, his elbows on the wide desk in front, his head in his hands. His breathing was laboured, deep and irregular, and she could see his forehead and cheeks shining in the 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 metres 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.
    ‘He’s called Martin. Did you know that? One of my best friends. No, more than that, my
closest
friend. The oldest employee at Aspsås. 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 being barrier nursed 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 desk top when he got up and walked over to a glass and gold-frame trolley 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 governor’s face, recoil operation: the shot hit the middle of the rectangular cupboard door.
    The