Three Seconds

had his appendix removed. See the scar here. A good cosmetic job. That, and the way in which the large intestine has been sewn up – both indicate that the operation was done in a Swedish hospital.’
    A muffled sound and the feeling that the ground was moving. Just before midnight, and a lorry had driven through the secured area, passing close to the window of the Solna institute of forensic medicine.
    Ludvig Errfors caught the question in Grens’s eyes.
    ‘Nothing to worry about. They unload a short distance away. No idea what, but it’s the same every evening.’
    The pathologist moved away from the table; it was important that Ewert Grens came closer.
    ‘The fillings, the appendix and what I would call a Northern European appearance. Ewert, he’s Swedish.’
    Grens studied the face that was a death mask of white, washed bone.
    We found traces of bile, amphetamine and rubber.
    But they didn’t come from you.
    We’ve confirmed a drug deal with the Polish mafia.
    But you’re Swedish.
    You weren’t a mule. You weren’t the seller.
    You were the buyer.
    ‘Any traces of drugs?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘No syringe marks, nothing in the blood, nothing in the urine.’
    You were the buyer, but didn’t use drugs yourself.
    He turned to Krantz.
    ‘The alarm call?’
    ‘What about it?’
    ‘Have you managed to analyse it yet?’
    Nils Krantz nodded. ‘I’ve just come back from Västmannagatan. I’ve got a theory. I went back to check it out. That sound you can hear just before the person who raised the alarm is about to finish with
fourth floor
? Right at the end of the brief call?’ He watched Grens, he remembered. ‘Well, I had a hunch that it was the compressor in the fridge in the kitchen. Same frequency. Same interval.’
    Ewert Grens’s hand brushed the dead man’s leg.
    ‘So the call was made from the kitchen?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And the voice? Did it sound Swedish to you?’
    ‘No accent whatsoever. Mälardal dialect.’
    ‘Then we have two Swedes. In a flat at the same time that the Polish mafia was concluding a drugs deal, which ended in assassination. One of them is lying here. The other one raised the alarm.’
    His hand moved towards the dead man’s leg again, as if he hoped that it would somehow move.
    ‘What were you doing there? What were you
both
doing there?’

He had been so scared. But he wasn’t going to die. He had met the Roof for the first time and it hadn’t meant death, so that meant he was further in. He didn’t know how or where, only that Paula was getting closer to the breakthrough he had risked his life for every day, every minute for the past three years.
     
    Piet Hoffmann sat beside the empty chair in the far-too-brightly-lit meeting room. Grzegorz Krzynówek had just left with his elegant suit and clean appearance and words that pretended to be something other than organised crime and money, and violence to get more money.
    The Deputy CEO no longer had tight lips when he spoke, nor strained to keep his back straight. He opened a bottle of Ż ubrówka and mixed it with apple juice: there was an intimacy and confidentiality associated with drinking vodka with the boss, so Hoffmann smiled at the piece of grass in the bottle which wasn’t particularly good, as that was polite and the custom, and at the former intelligence officer in front of him who had so meticulously transgressed his class and even swapped the ugly glasses from the kitchen table for two expensive, hand-blown tumblers, which his enormous hands were not quite sure how to hold.
    ‘
Na zdrowie
.’
    They looked each other in the eye and emptied their glasses, and the Deputy CEO poured another.
    ‘To the closed market.’
    He drank up and filled the glasses a third time.
    ‘We’re speaking plain language now.’
    ‘I prefer it.’
    A third glass was emptied.
    ‘The Swedish market. It’s time for it. Now.’
    Hoffmann found it hard to sit still. Wojtek already controlled the Norwegian market. The Danish market. The Finnish. He was starting to understand what this was all about. Why the boss had been sitting there. Why he himself was holding a glass of something that tasted like bison grass and apple juice.
    He had been heading here for so long.
    ‘There are about five thousand people in prison in Sweden. And nearly eighty per cent of them are big time consumers of amphetamines, heroin and alcohol, aren’t they?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Which was also the case ten years