Three Seconds

concentrated and determined. Neither Ewert nor Sven had ever seen him laugh, he was simply someone who functioned far better with a microscope than a cocktail glass.
    ‘Follow me.’
    Krantz walked over to the part of the workshop that looked out over the prison yard, hunkered down in front of a wall with a hole about the size of a grapefruit, then turned and pointed straight across the room.
    ‘So, the bullet penetrated the window there. The window that you could see from the church tower, where Hoffmann chose to stand, fullyexposed, for the whole drama. We’re talking about fire and explosive ammunition and an initial velocity of eight hundred and thirty metres per second. That means three seconds from the shot being fired to hitting its target.’
    Nils Krantz had never witnessed a crime happening, he had never been in a place when it became a crime scene. But that was precisely what his work entailed, being there, getting others to be there later, at the exact time that it happened.
    ‘The projectile penetrated a window and a skull with massive impact. Then it flattened and the velocity slowed until it reached here, see the big hole, and met the next wall.’
    He closed his hand around a long metal pole in the middle of the hole that showed the angle of the trajectory – the shot had been fired from somewhere higher up.
    ‘The bullet when loaded is nearly ten centimetres long. But the part that is fired, the bit that remains if you discount the jacket, is three, maybe even three and a half centimetres, and this then hit and ripped through parts of the wall and continued out into the prison yard. And a projectile that slices through glass, human bone and a thick concrete wall in that order will totally flatten out and look more or less like an old eighteenth century coin.’
    Grens and Sundkvist looked at the crater in the wall. They had both listened to Jacobson talking about a sound like a whiplash, the force had been unimaginable.
    ‘It’s out there somewhere. We haven’t found it yet, but we will soon. I’ve got several police officers from Aspsås district on their hands and knees in the gravel looking.’
    Krantz walked over to the window where Hoffmann had stood. Red and white flags on the wall, the floor, the ceiling. More than Grens could remember from his visit during the night.
    ‘I’ve had to make a kind of system. Red for blood stains, white for remains. I’ve never worked with bodies that have been so totally blown apart.’
    Sven studied the small flags, tried to understand what they actually signified, moved closer – he who normally avoided unmistakeable death.
    ‘We’re talking about an explosion and fragments of dead people. But there’s something I don’t understand.’
    This time, Sven moved even closer. He wasn’t frightened, didn’t feelany discomfort, this wasn’t death, he couldn’t see it like that.
    ‘Human tissue. Thousands of bits. This type of projectile rips bodies apart. Into big bits. It doesn’t explode.’
    People broken down into particles that were only centimetres away from Sven, they stopped being people then.
    ‘So we’re looking for something else. Something that exploded. Something that blows things into smithereens, not big bits.’
    ‘Such as?’
    ‘An explosive. I can’t think of any other explanation.’
    Ewert Grens saw the red and white flags, shards of glass, soot that blanketed everything.
    ‘Explosive. What kind?’
    Krantz made an irritation gesture with his arms.
    ‘TNT. Nitroglycerine. C4. Semtex. Pentyl. Octogen. Dynamex. Or something else.
I don’t know, Grens
. We’re still looking. But what I do know … it was definitely close to the bodies, maybe even directly on the skin.’
    He nodded at the flags.
    ‘Well … you understand.’
    Red for blood stains, white for remains
.
    ‘We also know that it was an explosive that generates extreme heat.’
    ‘I see …’
    ‘Enough heat to ignite the diesel in the barrel.’
    ‘I can smell it.’
    The forensic scientist gave a gentle kick to the barrel standing below the hole that had been a window the day before.
    ‘It was the diesel that had been mixed with petrol that caused all that bloody awful smoke. You find barrels and cans of diesel oil in every workshop in every prison, fuel for the machines and any forklift trucks, and for cleaning the tools. But this barrel … it was standing very close to Hoffmann. And it had been moved there.’
    Nils Krantz shook his