Three Seconds

something?’
    ‘I want to know what you’ve done.’
    ‘She no longer exists.’
    Hermansson went over to the empty shelf, ran a finger along the dusty lines left by the cassettes, the cassette player, speakers, and a black and white photo of the singer that had stood there all these years.
    She wiped off a dust ball, hid it in her hand.
    ‘
She
doesn’t exist?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Who?
    ‘Her.’
    ‘Who? Anni? Or Siw Malmkvist?’
    Ewert finally turned around and looked at her.
    ‘Did you want something, Hermansson?’
    He was still sitting on the floor, leaning against the boxes and wall. He had been grieving for nearly a year and a half now, lurching between a breakdown and madness. It had been an awful time, and she had told him to go to hell more than once and just as many times apologised afterwards. On a couple of occasions she had almost given up, resigned and walked away from this difficult man’s bitterness that seemed to have no end. She had gradually come to believe that one day he would capitulate, go to pieces completely, lie down and never get up again. But his face now, in the midst of all the suffering, had something purposeful about it, a determination that had not been there before.
    Some cardboard boxes, a gaping hole on a bookshelf, things like that could spark unexpected relief.
    ‘Yes, I did want something. We’ve just had a call-out. Västmannagatan 79.’
    He was listening, she knew that, he was listening to her in that intense way that she had nearly forgotten.
    ‘An execution.’

Piet Hoffmann looked out of one of the beautiful apartment’s big windows. It was a different flat in a different part of the centre of Stockholm, but they were similar, three carefully renovated rooms, high ceilings and light-coloured walls. Only there was no prospective buyer lying on the wooden floor here, with a gaping hole in one temple and two in the other.
     
    Down on the wide pavement, groups of well-dressed people were making their way, full of anticipation, into a matinee performance at the large theatre; breathless and slightly hammy actors going in and out of doors onto the stage, proclaiming their lines.
    Sometimes he longed for that kind of life, just everyday, normal people doing normal things together.
    He left the dressed up, excited people and the window with a view of both Vasagatan and Kungsbron, and crossed the largest room in the flat, his room, his office with its antique desk and two locked gun cabinets and an open fire that was very effective. He heard the last mule spewing up in the kitchen – she had been at it for a long time now, she wasn’t used to it: it took a couple of trips before you were. Jerzy and Mariusz were standing by the sink with yellow rubber gloves on, picking out the bits of brown rubber that the young woman threw up, along with the milk and something else, in the two buckets on the floor in front of her. She was the fifteenth and final mule. They had emptied the first one in Västmannagatan, and had been forced to empty the rest here. Piet Hoffmann didn’t like it. This flat was his protection, his cover, he didn’t want it to be linked with either drugs or Poles. But they didn’t have time. Everything had gone wrong. A person had been shot through the head. He studied Mariusz; the man with the shaved head and expensive suit had killed someone only a couple of hours ago, but showed nothing. Maybe he couldn’t, maybe he was being professional. Hoffmann wasn’t frightened of him, and he wasn’t frightened of Jerzy, but he respected the fact that they had no limits; if he had made them nervous,suspicious of his loyalty, the shot that had been fired could just as easily have been aimed at him.
    Anger chased frustration chased dread and he struggled to stand still with all the turmoil inside him.
    He had been there and he hadn’t been able to prevent it.
    To prevent it would have meant death for him.
    So another person had died instead.
    The young woman in front of him was done. He didn’t know her, they had never met. He knew that she was called Irina and she came from Gda ń sk, that she was twenty-two and a student and was prepared to take a risk that was far greater than she imagined and that was enough. She was a perfect mule. Just the sort they were looking for. Of course there were others, junkies from the suburbs of larger cities who flocked in their thousands, willing to use their bodies as containers for less than she was paid, but they had