Three Seconds

hadn’t yet bloomed.
    ‘I think so, they certainly look like tulips. We get a lot of flowers nowadays. The whole of Aspsås works here. Or supplies us with something. And all the study visits. It wasn’t long ago that everyone looked down on the prison service. Now it’s bloody non-stop, and every arrangement or incident fills the news bulletins and front pages.’
    He looked with pride at the flowers that he had somehow just complained about.
    ‘They’ll open soon. It usually takes a couple of days.’
    Piet Hoffmann nodded and then left, the principal prison officer a few metres in front, as before.
    Tomorrow.
    They would bloom tomorrow.
    __________
    Ewert Grens removed two empty plastic cups and a half-eaten almond slice from the small wooden table, then sat down and sank into the softness of the corduroy sofa while he waited for Sven and Hermansson to sit down on either side.
     
    The handwritten, single sheet of paper from a notepad was stained brown in one corner where some coffee had spilled, and had grease marks in another from stray almond-slice crumbs.
    A list of seven names.
    People who were on the periphery of the preliminary investigation and who they had three days to investigate and who perhaps meant the difference between the case staying live or being scaled down – between a solved and an unsolved murder.
    He divided them into three columns.
    Drugs, thugs, Wojtek.
    Sven was going to concentrate on the first column, on the known drug dealers who lived or operated in the vicinity of Västmannagatan 79: Jorge Hernandez on the second floor of the same building; JormaRantala in the block where a bloody shirt was found wrapped in a plastic bag in the rubbish container.
    Hermansson chose the second column: Jan du Tobit and Nicholas Barlow, two international hitmen who according to the Swedish Security Service were in Stockholm or the surrounding area at the time of the murder.
    Ewert Grens was going to look after the last three names: three men who had previously worked with Wojtek International AB. A certain Maciej Bosacki, Piet Hoffmann and Karl Lager. Each one the owner of a Swedish security firm, which – entirely legally – had been contracted for bodyguard services by Wojtek’s head office when Polish officials were on state visits, the official business that any well-functioning and untouchable mafia organisation is dependent on, a visible shell that both hides and hints at their business. Grens was one of the people in the Stockholm police who knew most about organised crime from the other side of the Baltic, and in this room, the only one who knew how to investigate whether any of the three could be linked to the other Wojtek, the unofficial organisation, the real one, the one that was capable of carrying out assassinations in Swedish flats.
    __________
    No one questioned him any more.
     
    No bastard sat too close or stared at him while he ate his meat and two veg. By lunch on the second day he was already someone but they didn’t have a clue that very soon he would also be the one who decided everything, thanks to the power of drugs, and in two days he would control all supplies and sales and surpass even murderers in the prison hierarchy. Anyone who had killed someone was the most highly appreciated inside, got the most respect, then the big-time drug dealers and bank robbers and, at the bottom of the pile, paedos and rapists. But even the murderers bowed to whoever controlled the drugs and supplied the syringes.
    Piet Hoffmann had followed close behind the principal prison officer in order to learn his new cleaning duties and had then waited on his bunk in his cell until the other men in the unit had come back from the workshop and classrooms for food that tasted of nothing. He had had eye contact with both Stefan and Karol Tomasz several times – theywere impatient and waiting for instructions so he mouthed
wieczorem
at them until they understood.
    This evening.
    This evening they would knock out the three main dealers.
    He offered to clear the table and wash up while the others smoked rollies with no filter out in the gravel yard or played stud poker for thousand-kronor toothpicks. Alone in the kitchen, there was no one who saw him wiping down the sink and worktop and stuffing two spoons and a knife into the front pockets of his trousers at the same time.
    He walked over to the aquarium, the screws’ glass box, knocked on the pane and got an irritated flick of the wrist back. He