Three Seconds

his fingers over the plastic and making it rustle.
    ‘Just a little while. Go back in to Rasmus. I’ll be there in a minute.’
    Wilson waited until the small feet had disappeared into the gloom of the hall.
    ‘You’ll be arrested tomorrow, Piet. After that, we’ll have no contact whatsoever. You won’t communicate with me or anyone else from the City Police. Until you’re ready and you tell us that you want out. It’s too dangerous. If anyone suspects that you’re working for us … you’re dead.’
    __________
    Erik Wilson walked down the corridor in Homicide. He was uneasy and slowed down outside Ewert Grens’s office, as he had done every time he went past in recent days, curious eyes peering into the empty office and the music that was no longer there. He wondered what the detective superintendent who was investigating the murder in Västmannagatan was up to, what he knew, how long it would take before he started asking the questions that no one could answer.
     
    Wilson sighed, it didn’t feel right, those children, they were so young. It was his job to encourage infiltrators to take big risks to get the information that the police depended on, but he wasn’t sure that Piet had fully understood what he had to lose. They had got too close, he genuinely cared about him.
    If anything happens, abort.
    If anyone discovers who you are, you have a new mission.
    To survive
.
    Wilson closed the door to his office and turned on his computer, which was not connected to the Internet for security reasons. He had explained to Piet, while the two boys pulled at their dad’s arms, that he would go back to FLETC and south Georgia in the meantime, to finish what he had been forced to interrupt a couple of days ago. He was not convinced that the man in front of him had actually been listening; he had said yes and he had nodded, but he was already on his way home to his last night of freedom for a long time. The computer screen was filled with an empty document and Erik Wilson started to write an intelligence report for the county commissioner, viaChief Superintendent Göransson, which would then be deleted from his own hard disk: a background report for the arrest of a wanted and violent criminal with three kilos of Polish amphetamine in his car boot, a report that would not be delivered until tomorrow, as it had not happened yet.
    __________
    He had waited on his own by the kitchen table for two hours.
     
    A beer, a sandwich, a crossword, but he hadn’t drunk, eaten or written anything.
    Hugo and Rasmus had gone to sleep upstairs a long time ago. They had had pancakes with strawberry jam and too much whipped cream first and then he had put them to bed and opened their windows and watched them fall asleep after only a few minutes.
    He heard them now, the steps that he knew so well.
    Through the garden, up the front steps and then the creak as the door opened and he felt a tightening in the pit of his stomach.
    ‘Hi.’
    She was so beautiful.
    ‘Hi.’
    ‘Are they asleep?’
    ‘Have been for a couple of hours.’
    ‘And how’s the temperature?’
    ‘It’ll be gone tomorrow.’
    She gave him a light kiss on the cheek and smiled, she didn’t notice that the world was about to fall to pieces.
    Another kiss, on the other side, twice, as always.
    She didn’t notice that the bloody floor was heaving.
    ‘We have to talk.’
    ‘Now?’
    ‘Now.’
    A slight sigh.
    ‘Can’t it wait?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Tomorrow? I’m so tired.’
    ‘By then it’ll be too late.’
    She went upstairs to change, soft trousers and the thick sweater with too-long sleeves, she was all he had ever wanted and she looked at himin silence as she curled up in the corner of the sofa and waited for him to start talking. He had thought of making food with a strong scent of either India or Thailand, opening a bottle of expensive red wine and then starting to tell her, gently, after a while. But he had realised that what was false and had to be explained became even falser when it was disguised by enjoyment and intimacy. He leant forward, hugged her – she smelt good, she smelt of Zofia.
    ‘I love you. I love Hugo. I love Rasmus. I love this house. I love knowing that there’s someone who calls me
my husband
and someone else who calls me
Daddy
. I didn’t know it was possible. I’ve got used to it, I’m completely dependent on it now.’
    She pulled herself into a ball even more and withdrew further into the corner of the sofa. She