Three Seconds

going to fill it with amphetamine, it was important that the surfaces were even, and there was space for fifteen grams in this book, as it was particularly thick.
    The first ninety pages were still intact and he put them back where they should be, over the hole, glued them to the spine and the loose front board and then pressed Lord Byron’s classic hard against the desk with both hands until he was certain that every page was glued in place.
    ‘What are you doing, Daddy?’
    Hugo’s face peered at him from behind his elbow, close to the recently prepared book.
    ‘Nothing. Just reading a bit. Why don’t you watch the film?’
    ‘It’s finished.’
    He stroked Hugo’s cheek and got up; there were two more films, Winnie the Pooh had to eat more honey and get more scoldings from Rabbit before he was finished with everything.
    Piet Hoffmann prepared
The Odyssey
,
My Life’s Writings
and
French Landscape
in the same way. In two weeks’ time, an inmate serving time at Aspsås prison who was interested in literature would be able to borrow as many as four books, containing a total of forty-two grams of amphetamine.
    Two books left.
    With a new razor blade, he cut a rectangular hole in the left hand margin of
Nineteenth Century Stockholm
and
The Marionettes
. In the first, he put the pieces of what a reader, who knew how, might be able to reassemble into a miniature revolver; the hardest piece was the cylinder loaded with six bullets, which was wider than he thought, but he managed to press it down carefully into the cavity by taking off some of the Rizla papers. A gun with the power to kill if the bullet hit its target. He had seen one for the first time six months ago in Ś winouj ś ie, when a wired mule had tried to throw up two thousand five hundred grams of heroin in the toilets at the ferry terminal, before even boarding the boat. Mariusz had opened the door to see the mule lying on the floor with a plastic bag to his mouth and he hadn’t said a word, just moved in sufficiently close and aimed the short barrel at one of his eyes and killed him with one bullet. In the second hole, in the last book, he put a detonator the size of a large nail and a receiver the size of a penny – the kind that you put in your ear to receive and listen to sounds from two transmitters that are attached with Blu-Tack to the railings on a church tower balcony.
    Two nine-metre pieces of pentyl fuse and a plastic envelope with twenty-four centilitres of nitroglycerine were still left on the desk. He took a furtive glance over at two small backs that were watching a cartoon about a fat bear, they laughed suddenly, a jar of honey had got stuck on Pooh’s head. Hoffmann went out into the kitchen, opened another tub of ice cream and put it down on the table between them, stroked Rasmus on the cheek.
    It was going to be hardest to hide the pentyl fuse and plastic sleeve with nitroglycerine without anything showing.
    He chose the largest book,
Nineteenth Century Stockholm
, twenty-two centimetres long and fifteen centimetres wide. He cut open the front and back of the library cover and pulled out the porous paper-like filling and replaced it with the explosive and fuse, glued it up again, tidied the edges and then leafed through all six books to make sure thatthe hinges were properly glued and it wasn’t possible to see any of the rectangular holes.
    ‘What’s that?’
    Hugo’s face popped up over the top of the desk again. The second film had finished.
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘What
is
that, Daddy?’
    He pointed at the shiny metal tin full of 30 per cent amphetamine.
    ‘That? Oh … just grape sugar.’
    Hugo stood there, he was in no hurry.
    ‘Don’t you want to watch the rest? There’s another video.’
    ‘I will in a minute. There’s two letters there, Daddy. Who are they to?’
    Inquisitive eyes had spotted the two envelopes that were lying high up in the open gun cabinet.
    ‘I’m not going to send them.’
    ‘But they’ve got names on.’
    ‘I’ll finish them later.’
    ‘What do they say?’
    ‘Shall I put the video on now?’
    ‘That’s Mummy’s name. On the white one. It looks like it. And the one on the brown one starts with an E, I can see that too.’
    ‘Ewert. His name’s Ewert. But I don’t think he’ll get it.’
    The ninth part of Winnie the Pooh was about Piglet’s birthday and an outing with Christopher Robin. Hugo sat down beside Rasmus again and Piet Hoffmann checked the contents of the brown