Three Seconds

There’s nothing in the blood that can link your murderer to a specific place, country or even continent.’
    ‘Damn it, Nils, you just said—’
    ‘But there’s something else on the shirt.’
    He unfolded the shirt on the workbench with great care.
    ‘In several places. But here in particular, at the bottom of the right arm. Flower fragments.’
    Grens leant forward in an attempt to see something that could not be seen.
    ‘It’s Blossom. Polish Yellow.’
    They were finding it more and more often in raids. The smell of tulips. Chemical amphetamine from factories that used flower fertiliser instead of acetone.
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘Yes. The ingredients, smell and even the yellow colour, like saffron, a sulphate that gives off colour in running water.’
    ‘Poland. Again.’
    ‘And, I know exactly where it comes from.’
    Krantz folded the shirt with small movements, just as carefully as he had unfolded it.
    ‘I’ve analysed amphetamine with exactly this composition in connection with two other investigations in less than a month. We now know that it is manufactured in an amphetamine factory just outside Siedlce, a town about a hundred kilometres east of Warsaw.’
    __________
    The strong sunlight had become uncomfortably warm and made his jacket itch on his neck and his shoes feel too tight.
     
    It was fifteen minutes since the state secretary had left the room for a brief meeting in an even bigger room, and a decision that would mean all or nothing. Piet Hoffmann had a dry mouth and swallowed what should have been saliva, but now was anxiety and fear.
    Strange.
    A small-time dealer who had served a sentence in a locked cell in Österåker prison. A family man with a wife and two young boys whom he had come to love more than anything else in the world.
    He was someone else now.
    A man of thirty-five, sitting on the edge of a desk in a building that was the symbol of power, the state secretary’s phone in his agitated hand.
    ‘Hi.’
    ‘When are you coming back?’
    ‘Later on this evening. This meeting seems to be going on for ever. And I can’t leave. How are they?’
    ‘Do you care?’
    Her voice upset him. It was cold, hollow.
    ‘Hugo and Rasmus, how are they?’
    She didn’t answer. She stood there in front of him – he knew every expression, every gesture, her slim hand massaging her forehead, her feet fidgeting in oversized slippers. Any minute now she would decide whether or not she could bear to carry on being cross.
    ‘They’re a bit better. An hour ago their temperature was thirty-eight point five.’
    ‘I love you.’
    He put the phone down, looked at the people around the table and then at the clock. Nineteen minutes had passed. Bloody saliva, there wasn’t any, no matter how much he tried to swallow. He stretched and had started to walk towards his empty chair over at the far end of the table when the door opened.
    She was back. With a tall, well-built man, half a step behind her.
    ‘This is Pål Larsen, the director general.’
    She had made her decision.
    ‘He’s going to help us. With what happens next.’
    Piet Hoffmann heard what she was saying, and should perhaps have laughed or clapped his hands.
He’s going to help us. With what happens next
. She had made up her mind to overlook his presence which, legally,was tantamount to accomplice to murder. She was taking a risk. And deemed that it was one worth taking. He knew of at least two other occasions where she had granted a secret pardon to infiltrators who had been given a prison sentence. But he was fairly certain that she had never before chosen to overlook what she knew about an unsolved crime – solutions normally stopped at the level of the police.
    ‘I want to know what this is about.’
    The director general of the Swedish Prison and Probation Service made it quite clear that he had no intention of sitting down.
    ‘You are going to – now, how did we put it –
help
us position someone.’
    ‘And who are you?’
    ‘Erik Wilson, City Police.’
    ‘And you think that I should help you with a placement?’
    ‘Pål?’
    The state secretary smiled at the general director.
    ‘Me. You’re going to help me.’
    The well-built man in a tight suit said nothing, but his body language betrayed his frustration.
    ‘Your task is to position Paula – the man sitting next to me here – in Aspsås prison to serve a sentence he will be given once he has been arrested for the possession of three kilos of