Three Seconds

underpants and socks were all eaten by the yellow flames. Next, a pile of Jerzy’s and Mariusz’s clothes. The flames were red and intense now, and he stood naked in front of the fire, enjoying the warmth until they died down sufficiently for him to close the bathroom door and shower away this awful day.
    A person had had half his head blown off.
    A person who probably had the same job as him, but had a less solid background.
    He turned on the shower and the hot water pummelled his skin, testing his pain threshold, but if he persevered, his body would eventually go numb and be filled with a strange calm.
    He’d been doing this for too long; he sometimes forgot who he was and it frightened him when his life as someone else encroached on his life as a husband and father, and day-to-day reality in a house in a neighbourhood where people cut their grass and weeded their flowerbeds.
    Hugo and Rasmus.
    He had promised to pick them up just after four. He turned off the water and took a clean towel from the shelf by the mirror. It was nearly half past four. He hurried back into the office, checked that the fire had died down, opened the wardrobe and picked out a white shirt, a grey jacket and worn jeans.
    You have sixty seconds to leave and lock the flat.
    He jumped and realised that he would never get used to the electronic voice that spoke to him from the coded lock on the front door, as soon as he had punched in the correct six digits.
    The alarm will be activated in fifty seconds.
    He should contact Warsaw immediately, he should have done it already, but had waited on purpose, he wanted to know that the delivery was secure first.
    The alarm will be activated in forty seconds.
    He locked the front door of Hoffmann Security AB and closed the wrought-iron gate. A security firm. That was how the organisation worked. That was how all branches of the Eastern European mafia worked. Piet Hoffmann remembered his visit to St Petersburg a year ago, a city with eight hundred security firms, established by ex-KGB men and intelligence agents, different fronts for the same business.
    He was halfway down the stairs when one of his two phones rang.
    The mobile phone that only one person knew about.
    ‘Wait a minute.’
    He had parked the car just down Vasagatan. He opened the door and got in, then carried on the conversation without the risk of being overheard.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘You need my help.’
    ‘I needed it yesterday.’
    ‘I’ve booked a return flight and will be back in Stockholm tomorrow. Meet you at number five at eleven. And I think you should make a trip yourself, before then. For the sake of your credibility.’

The gaping holes in the dead man’s head seemed even larger from a distance.
     
    Ewert Grens had followed Nils Krantz into the kitchen, but turned round again after a while to look at the man who was lying by an overturned chair and had
one
entrance wound in his right temple and
two
exit wounds in his left. He had been investigating murders for as long as the man on the floor had been alive and had learnt one truth – each death is unique, with its own story, its own sequence of events, its own consequences. Every time he was faced with something he had not seen before, and he knew even before he looked into the empty eyes that they were looking in a direction that he couldn’t follow.
    He wondered where this particular death had ended, what these eyes had seen and were looking towards.
    ‘Do you want to know or not?’
    Krantz had been squatting on the kitchen floor for a bit too long.
    ‘Otherwise I’ve got plenty else to be getting on with.’
    His hand was close to a crack in the marble floor. Ewert Grens nodded, I’m listening.
    ‘That spot there, can you see it?’
    Grens looked at something that was whitish with uneven edges.
    ‘Bits of stomach lining. And it’s definitely no more than twelve hours old. There are several similar spots in this area.’
    The forensic scientist drew a circle with his hand in the air around himself.
    ‘All with the same content. Food remains and bile. But also something far more interesting. Bits of rubber.’
    When Grens looked closer, he could see the white spots with uneven edges in at least three places.
    ‘The rubber is partly corroded, probably by stomach acids.’
    Krantz looked up.
    ‘And traces of rubber in vomit, we know what that means.’
    Ewert Grens gave a loud sigh.
    Rubber meant human containers. Human containers meant drugs. A dead man in