Three Seconds

Roof again.
    These words. We’re using them for your sake.
    But why are you here? Why are you sitting next to me listening to all this that means everything and nothing?
    I’m not frightened any more.
    But I don’t understand.
    ‘I assume that this will not be repeated.’
    He didn’t answer. The Deputy CEO would have the last word. That was the way things worked and Piet Hoffmann knew what to do, how to play the game, otherwise, he also knew, the end was nigh. The instant he became Paula, he no longer existed – he would end up like the buyer ten hours ago, in a car on his way to a Warsaw back street with two Poles and a cocked gun to his head.
    He knew his role, his lines, his history, he wasn’t going to die. Dying was for other people.
    The Roof moved, not much, but gave a definite nod to the Deputy CEO.
    He looked satisfied. Hoffmann was approved.
    The Deputy CEO had hoped for that and counted on it. He got up, almost smiling. ‘We have plans to expand in the closed market. We’ve already invested and taken market shares in your neighbouring Nordic countries. Now we’re going to do the same in your country. In Sweden.’
    Piet Hoffmann looked at the Roof in silence, then at the Deputy CEO.
    The closed market
.
    The prisons.

The harsh light from the angle-poise lamps was reflected in both metal spoons. Nils Krantz lifted up one of them and filled it with a light blue powder and water before asking Ewert Grens to pull back the green sheet that covered the person on the table in the middle of the room.
     
    A naked man’s body.
    Pale complexion, well-built, and not particularly old.
    A face with no skin, a skull on top of an otherwise complete body.
    A strange sight. The bones had been cleaned so the observer could get as close as possible, the skin that was in the way of a clear answer had been scrubbed off.
    ‘Alginate. We use it. It works. There are more expensive brands, but we don’t waste them on autopsies.’
    The forensic scientist separated the lower jaw from the upper jaw and pushed the metal spoon with the light blue fluid against the teeth in the upper jaw and held it there until it hardened.
    ‘Photographs, fingerprints, DNA, dental imprints. I’m pleased with that.’
    He took a couple of steps back into the sterile room and nodded to Ludvig Errfors, the forensic pathologist.
    ‘Entrance wound.’
    Errfors pointed to the bare skull bone on the right temple.
    ‘The bullet went in through the
os temporale
and then lost speed just here.’
    He drew a line in the air with his finger from the large hole in the temple to the middle of the skull.
    ‘
Mandible
. The jaw bone. The trajectory shows clearly that the jacket of the bullet hit this hard bone and split into two smaller bullets with two exit wounds on the left side of the head. One through the mandible and one through the
os frontale.
’
    Grens looked at Krantz. The forensic scientist had been right from the start, there on the floor in the flat.
    ‘And this, Ewert, I want you to have a look at this, in particular.’
    Ludvig Errfors was holding the dead man’s right arm, a peculiar sensation when the muscles don’t react, the fact that something that was so recently alive can become so rubbery.
    ‘You see that? The visible marks around the wrist. Someone held his hand
post-mortem
.’
    Grens looked at Nils Krantz again who gave a satisfied nod. He had been right about that too. Someone had moved the arm after he’d died. Someone had tried to make it
look
like suicide.
    Ewert Grens left the brightly lit table in the middle of the room and opened one of the windows out in the corridor. It was dark outside, and the late evening was deepening into night.
    ‘No name. No history. I want more. I want to get closer to him.’
    He looked at Krantz, then at Errfors. He waited. Until the pathologist cleared his throat.
    There was always more.
    ‘I’ve looked at a couple of the fillings in his teeth. Take this one here, in the middle of the lower jaw. About eight, maybe ten years old. Most probably Swedish. I can deduce that from the way the work has been done, the quality, a plastic material that is noticeably different to the ones that the greater part of Europe import from Taiwan. I had a body here last week, a Czech who had a root filling in his lower jaw, cement in all the canals, which was … well, far from what we would see as acceptable here.’
    The pathologist moved his hands from the skinless face to the torso.
    ‘He’s