Three Seconds

thoughts that carried Zofia with them, which had been worst around two in the morning, just before it started to get light. He had got up, like before, chin-ups, jumping with his feet together until the sweat poured from his forehead and down his chest.
    He should be relaxed. Wojtek had got their reports, three days in a row. He had stamped out and taken over. From this afternoon, he would be getting bigger deliveries and selling more.
    ‘Morning, Hoffmann.’
    ‘Morning.’
    But he couldn’t relax. Something was bothering him, something that demanded space and couldn’t be reasoned away.
    He was scared.
    The doors had been unlocked, his neighbours were moving around out there, he couldn’t see them but they were there, shouting and whispering. The sock between the door and the doorframe, the chair in front of the threshold, the pillow under the covers.
    Two minutes past seven. Eighteen minutes to go.
    He pressed himself against the wall.
    __________
    The older man at central security studied his police ID, typed something on a computer, sighed.
     
    ‘Questioning, you say?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Grens.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Piet Hoffmann?’
    ‘I’ve reserved a room. So it would be great if you could let me in. So I could get to it.’
    The older man was in no rush. He lifted the phone and punched in a number.
    ‘You’ll have to wait a moment. There’s something I need to check.’
    __________
    It took fourteen minutes.
     
    Then all hell let loose.
    The door was pulled open.
One second
. The chair was kicked over.
One second
. Stefan passed close to him on the right, a screwdriver in his fist.
    There’s a moment left, a beat, people always experience half a second in such different ways.
    There were probably four of them.
    He had seen this happen several times, even taken part himself twice.
    Someone ran in with a screwdriver, a table leg, a cut piece of metal. And straight behind, more hands to punch or kill. Two out in the corridor, always at a distance to keep watch.
    The pillow and sweatshirt under the covers, his two and half seconds were over, his protection, his escape.
    One blow.
    He wouldn’t manage more.
    One single blow, right elbow to the carotid receptors on the left side of the throat, a hard blow right there and Stefan’s blood pressure would rocket, he would collapse, faint.
    His heavy body fell to the floor, blocking the door for the next pair of balled fists, a sharp piece of metal from the workshop, Karol Tomasz hit out in the air with it in order to keep his balance. Piet Hoffmann squeezed out between the doorframe and a shoulder that still hadn’t quite fathomed where the person who was going to die was hiding. He ran out into the corridor between the two who were standing guard and on towards the closed door of the security office.
    They know
.
    He ran and looked round, they were standing there.
    They know
.
    He opened the door and went into the screws’ room and someone roared
stukatj
behind him and the principal prison officer shouted
get the hell out of here.
He probably didn’t shout anything himself, he couldn’t be certain but it didn’t feel like it, he stayed where he was in front of the closed door and whispered
I want to be put in isolation
, and when they didn’t react, he said a bit louder
I want a P18
and when none of the bloody staring guards moved at all, in spite of everything he did scream,
now, you fuckers
, presumably that’s what he did,
I need to be in isolation now
.
    __________
    Ewert Grens sat on a chair in the visiting room and looked at a roll of toilet paper on the floor by the bed and a mattress that was covered inplastic and stuck out over the end of the frame – fear and longing that for one hour every month was distilled down to two bodies holding each other tight. He moved over to the window, not much of a view: a couple of crude bars edged with barbed wire and further back, the lower part of a thick grey concrete wall. He sat down again, the restlessness that was always in him and never let him relax. He played with the black cassette recorder that stood in the middle of the table every time he came here to question people who hadn’t seen or heard anything; he remembered the faces as they came closer and lowered their voices, stared at the floor, full of hate, until he shut off. He wasn’t sure that any of the interviews he’d done in this room had ever really helped him to solve an investigation.
     
    There was a knock at the door and a man