Three Seconds

on the corner of Vasagatan, which fronted onto Norra Bantorget. Two customers before him. He relaxed, lost himself in the red and yellow and blue flowers that all had names on small, square signs that he read and promptly forgot.
    ‘Tulips?’
    The young woman also had a name on a square badge that he had read several times and forgotten.
    ‘Maybe I should vary it a bit?’
    ‘Tulips always work well. In bud? From the cold room?’
    ‘As usual.’
    One of the few flower shops in Stockholm that had tulips in May, perhaps because there was one customer of about thirty-five, who regularly came in and bought large bunches if they had been stored at max five degrees and still hadn’t come out.
    ‘Three bunches? One red, and two yellow?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Twenty-five stems in each bunch? And the plain white cards?’
    ‘Please.’
    Rustling tissue paper round each bunch. With thanks for a successful partnership, Aspsås Business Association on the card in each of the yellow bunches, and I love you on the one for the red bunch.
    He paid and walked a couple of hundred metres down Vasagatan to a door with a plaque that said Hoffmann Security AB, first floor. He opened the door, turned off the alarm and walked straight across the kitchen to the sink where he had emptied fourteen mules of between fifteen hundred and two thousand grams of amphetamine each, the day before.
    There was a vase in one of the kitchen cupboards. He found it in the one above the extractor fan and filled the heavy crystal glass with water and the bunch of twenty-five red tulips. The other two bunches, fifty light-green stems with as yet unopened, yellow buds, lay lined up across the worktop.
    He turned the oven on to what he guessed was about fifty degrees. It was hard to distinguish exactly where one line changed to two on the old dial.
    The fridge went down from six to two degrees, and just to be sure, he put a thermometer on the top shelf, as the gauge that was incorporated inside the plastic door was too crude and in any case, difficult to read.
    Piet Hoffmann left the kitchen and the flat with an IKEA bag in his hand, went up the stairs two at a time to the loft and the shiny aluminium pipe, and knocked off the steel band in the way that he hadwhen Henryk had been with him in the morning. Eleven tins, one at a time, from the fan heater into the bag. Then he locked up again and went down with eleven kilos of cut amphetamine in his arms.
    I need three days to knock out the competition.
    He checked the oven. It was warm, fifty degrees. He opened the fridge, checked the thermometer on the top shelf, four degrees, like in the flower shop, but he had to get the temperature down to two.
    I want to know how you’re going to do it.
    First tin out of the IKEA bag. One thousand grams of amphetamine. More than enough for fifty tulips.
    With tulips and poetry.
    He had cleaned the sink meticulously, but he still found some remains from yesterday that had got stuck to the edges of the metal plughole. The unplanned shooting and mules who, in a panic, had to be emptied in the one place they must never be linked to. He turned on the tap and let the hot water run while he picked off the last bits of vomit and milk and brown rubber.
    The fire-proof gloves were in one of the drawers with the cutlery. He laid a tulip on each one and put them into the oven, with the round buds nearest to the door. He loved the moment when it happened. Spring and life encapsulated on the end of a green stem. The buds suddenly woke up in the warmth of the oven and revealed their true colour for the first time.
    He took them out when they were just a couple of centimetres open, he had to be careful not to wait too long, to lose himself in the beauty, colour and life.
    He put them down on the worktop and took out the box of condoms – no ribs and no lubricant and definitely no scent – and carefully poked half a condom down into each bud, then filled it with amphetamine, one tip of a knife at a time. Three grams in the small buds, four in the slight larger ones, pressed it down hard to get as much as possible in. Then he popped the two amphetamine-filled tulips on a serving dish in the humming freezer between the sink and the cooker.
    They had to lie there in minus eighteen degrees for ten minutes. Until the buds had closed again, gone back to sleep and hidden their glory. Only then would he move them from the freezer to a fridge regulated to two degrees and a long rest that would