Three Seconds

better. He gave them each a dose of Calpol.
    ‘I don’t want it.’
    ‘Just one more time.’
    ‘It’s yucky.’
    ‘I know. This is the last time. I promise.’
    He kissed them on the forehead again and started to drive in a direction that Hugo realised was not home.
    ‘Where are we going?’
    ‘To Daddy’s office. We’ll just be there for a little while. Then we’re done. Then we can go home.’
    A couple of minutes’ drive up the main road into the city via Skanstull and Söderleden; he switched lane in the tunnel underSödermalm and drove towards Hornsgatan and the road down to Mariatorget. He parked outside the video shop that was squeezed between the supermarket and bowling hall, rushed in, keeping his eyes on the back seat of the car through the window, and picked out three videos: twelve episodes of Winnie the Pooh. The children knew all the lines off by heart already, but it was one of the few he could cope with, the sound wasn’t as hysterical as most others: adults as cartoon characters shouting in falsettos, pretending to be children.
    The next time he stopped was right outside the door on Vasagatan. Hugo and Rasmus were still just as hot and tired and he wanted them to walk as little as possible. They had been with him to Hoffmann Security AB before, several times in fact, curious as children always are about where Mummy and Daddy work, but never when he was actually working – for them it was just a place where Daddy went while he waited for his children to finish playing at nursery.
    Half a litre of vanilla ice cream, two big glasses of Coke and twelve episodes of waddling Winnie the Pooh. He set them up in the spacious office in front of the TV screen with their backs to the desk and explained that he had to go up to the loft for a few minutes, but they didn’t hear him, they were busy watching something about Rabbit and Eeyore and a wooden cart that they wanted Pooh to sit in. Piet Hoffmann got three tins out of the fan heater, carried them down and put them on the floor, cleared his desk so he would have space to work.
    Six books that belonged to Aspsås library that were seldom asked for and therefore had a note stuck on the front page, STORE , in blue print.
    A plastic bag with a disassembled miniature revolver.
    Some pentyl fuse that had been cut into two nine-metre lengths.
    A plastic sleeve with four centilitres of nitroglycerine divided up into twenty-four pockets.
    A tin of 30 per cent amphetamine.
    He took a tube of glue from the drawer of the desk, a packet of razor blades and a packet of Rizla papers, thin with a sticky edge, generally used by people who like rolling their own cigarettes.
    Tulips
.
    And poetry
.
    He opened the first book. Lord Byron’s
Don Juan
. It was perfect. Five hundred and forty-six pages. Hardback. Eighteen centimetres long, twelve wide.
    He knew it would work. Over the past ten years, he had prepared a couple of hundred novels, poetry and essay collections to hold ten to fifteen grams of amphetamine, and been successful each time. Now, for the first time, he would borrow the modified books himself and empty them in a cell in Aspsås prison.
    ‘I need three days to knock out the competition. During that time I don’t want to have any contact and it’s my responsibility to take in enough gear.’
    He opened the front cover and with a razor blade cut through the hinge until it loosened and the spine of five hundred and forty-six pages of
Don Juan
was revealed, then he tidied up the loose ends with the blade. He flicked through to page 90, held all the pages together and with a strong hand ripped them off and put them down on the desk. Then he flicked to page 390 and ripped off the next thick pile.
    It was these pages, from 91 to 390, he was going to work with.
    With a pencil he drew a rectangle that was fifteen centimetres long and one centimetre wide in the left-hand margin of page 91. Then, with the razor blade, he cut along the lines, deeper and deeper, millimetre by millimetre until he had cut through the whole pile, three hundred pages. His hand worked the razor blade well and even the slightest unevenness and loose strip was shaved off. He lifted the middle section of the book, which now had a new hole that was fifteen centimetres long, one centimetre wide and three centimetres deep, back into place and glued it together. He felt the edges with his fingertips, there was still some unevenness, so he lined the walls with Rizla papers. If he was