Three Seconds

sorry?’
    ‘Not paperback or those flimsy bindings.’
    ‘Paper bindings? They’re cheaper for us to buy. And the content is the same.’
    ‘Hardbacks, please. It’s the way I read. Or rather, where I read.’
    Piet Hoffmann sat down on the librarian’s chair by the lending desk and waited. He had been here before and borrowed books that weren’t popular and were therefore kept in the store in the basement, as he had in several other libraries in the small communities close to the country’s high security prisons. He had borrowed books from Kumla public library, whose customers included the inmates of Kumla prison, and Södertälje public library, which had had customers from Hall prison for many years. And when prisoners inside the walls that were only a few hundred metres from the library ordered their books, they were always collected from here, Aspsås library, and what’s more, if they were titles from the store, the borrower could be certain to get precisely the book he had ordered.
    She was out of breath when she opened the heavy door up from the basement.
    ‘Steep stairs.’
    She smiled.
    ‘I guess I should perhaps jog a bit more.’
    Six books on the lending desk.
    ‘Are these OK?’
    Hardbacks. Big. Heavy.
    ‘Tulips and poetry.’
    ‘Excuse me?’
    ‘Perfect, just as I like them.’
    __________
    The square was windy, relatively sunny, nearly empty. An old lady with a zimmer frame laboured over the cobbles, a man of roughly the same age with plastic bags on the handlebars of his bike was rummaging in a rubbish bin with both hands, looking for empty bottles. Piet Hoffmann drove slowly out of the small town, which he would return to in ten days’ time, in handcuffs and a secure police van.
     
    ‘I still want to know how.’
    ‘We’ve already done this three times before.’
    A closed system with no escape.
    An exposed infiltrator, a grass, as hated in prison corridors as nonces, paedophiles or rapists, always at the bottom of the hierarchy that ruled in European prisons, which gave murderers and major drug dealers their status and power.
    ‘Officially, you will be pardoned. On humanitarian grounds. That doesn’t need to be explained in any more detail. Medical or humanitarian grounds are sufficient for a decision that the Ministry of Justice will then stamp as confidential.’
    If anything happened. Her promise was all that he had. That, and the things he had prepared himself.
    He looked at the clock on the dashboard. Eighteen hours to go.
    A few miles out of Stockholm, driving slightly too fast through sleepy suburbs, one of his two mobile phones rang. An irritated woman’s voice, one of the nursery teachers from Hagtornsgården.
    Both boys had a temperature.
    He drove towards Enskededalen, it was his turn today and the Calpol had stopped working.
    __________
    A wise woman, a couple of years younger than him, Hugo and Rasmus had always been safe with her.
     
    ‘I don’t understand it.’
    The same woman who had rung him only a couple of days ago about two sick little boys. Now she was sitting in front of him in theoffice, frowning at him while two warm children waited on a bench out in the playroom.
    ‘That you … both of you … it’s just not like you, after all these years, you, if anyone, just wouldn’t play that stupid Calpol trick. I just don’t understand.’
    ‘I’m not quite sure what you’re—’
    He had started to defend himself as he always did when someone accused him of something. But then stopped. This was not an interrogation, the nursery teacher was not the police and he was not suspected of a crime.
    ‘We have rules here. You know them. You both know them. Rules that say when a child is welcome and when he or she is not. This is a workplace, a workplace for adults, and for your children and other people’s children.’
    He was ashamed and didn’t answer.
    ‘And what’s more— Piet, it isn’t good for the children. It’s not good for Hugo, or Rasmus. You can see for yourself how they look. Being here when their little bodies are overheated … it could have other, more serious consequences. Do you understand that?’
    When a person crosses a boundary he promised never to cross.
    Who is he then?
    ‘I understand and it will never happen again.’
    They flopped on his shoulders as he carried them out to the car. They were hot and he kissed their foreheads.
    One more time. Just one more time.
    He explained to them what they had to do. They had to get