Anders Roslund: Three Seconds

They put on their white coats and transparent shoe covers and went in. Ewert had insisted on waiting for the elevator that was slow down and slow up, so he'd be there soon.

A long hallway, a bedroom with nothing in it but a narrow bed, a kitchen with nice cupboards painted in a shade of green, and a study with an abandoned desk and empty shelves.

And one more room.

They looked at each other, and went in.

The sitting room really only had one piece of furniture. A large, rectangular oak dining table with six matching chairs. Four of them were by the table, the fifth had been pushed back at an angle, as if the person sitting there had gotten up suddenly. The sixth was lying on the floor. The heavy chair had for some reason fallen and they went over to establish why.

The dark patch on the carpet was the first thing they saw.

A large, brownish stain with uneven edges. They guessed about forty, maybe fifty centimeters in diameter.

Then they saw the head.

It was in the middle of the stain, on top of it, as if it were floating. The man looked relatively young-it was hard to tell as his face was mangled, but his body was strong, and his clothes were not the sort that older men often wear: black boots, black jeans, a white T-shirt, lots of silver around his neck, wrists, and fingers.

Sven Sundkvist tried to concentrate on the gun in his right hand.

If he only looked at it for long enough, if he blanked everything else out, he might avoid the ugliness of death that he would never understand.

It was shiny and black, nine-millimeter caliber and a make that he didn't often see at crime scenes: Radom, a Polish weapon. He bent down closer to it, thereby distancing himself from the life that had spilled out onto the expensive carpet and left a large dark stain. It seemed that the ejector was stuck in the discharge position and he could clearly see the bullet casing in the chamber. He studied the barrel, the butt, the grip safety, looking for something to fix his eyes on, anything but death.

Nils Krantz was standing farther away, flanked by two younger colleagues. Three forensic technicians who together would scour every nook and cranny in the room. One of them had a video camera in his hand and was filming something on the white wallpaper. Sven took a step away from the head, and looked at what the camera was focused on: a small discolored parch of something, something harmless and sufficiently far away from the lifeless eyes.

"The victim has one entrance wound from one shot to the head."

Nils Krantz had sneaked up behind his filming colleague and was now close to Sven Sundkvist's ear.

"But two exit wounds."

Sven turned away from the wallpaper and discoloring and looked askance at the older forensic scientist.

"The entrance wound is larger than both exit wounds because of the contact gas pressure."

Sven heard what Krantz was saying, but he didn't understand and chose not to ask. He didn't need to know and instead followed the finger that was pointing at the discoloring on the wallpaper.

"By the way, what we're just filming and what you're looking at right now comes from the victim, brain tissue."

Sven Sundkvist took a deep breath. He had wanted to avoid death and had therefore chosen to focus on the discoloring on the wallpaper, but he had only found more death, as real as it ever could be. He lowered his eyes and heard Ewert come in to the room.

"Sven?"

"Yes?"

"Perhaps you should go down and talk to our colleagues who took the call? And maybe some neighbors? The people who aren't here."

Sven looked at his boss with gratitude, hurried away from the dark stains on the carpet and discoloring on the wallpaper, while Ewert Grens hunkered down to get closer to the dead body.

The balance of power had been redistributed and restored. But it would happen again. And he had to win every time.

Carry on acting. Or die.

He stood between Mariusz and Jerzy at Hoffmann Security's round kitchen table, emptying 2,750 capsules of amphetamine The latest delivery from the factory in Siedlce. Their white medical-gloved fingers first picked off the brown rubber that was there to protect the mule's stomach in case of any leaks, then cut open the capsule with a knife and poured the powder into large glass bowls where it was mixed with grape sugar. One part amphetamine from eastern Poland to two parts grape sugar from the supermarket on the corner. Twenty-seven kilos of pure drugs transformed into eighty-one kilos that could be sold on the street.

Piet Hoffmann put a metal tin on some kitchen scales and filled it with exactly one thousand grams of cut amphetamine. A piece of tin foil was placed carefully over the powder and then something that resembled a sugar lump was put on the foil. He held a match to the methaldehyde pellet and when the white square started to burn, he closed the lid of the tin. The flames would then die when the oxygen ran out and one kilo of amphetamine would be vacuum-packed.

He repeated this operation, one tin at a time, eighty-one times. "Benzine?"

Jerzy opened the bottle of petroleum ether, splashed some of the colorless fluid on the tin lids and sides and then rubbed the metal surfaces with cotton wool. He lit another match and a bluish flame flared that he then smothered with a rag after ten seconds.

All the fingerprints had now been removed.

The bloodstains were smallest on the hall carpet, slightly bigger on the wall at the other end of the spacious sitting room, even bigger by the table, and largest by the overturned chair. They also got darker and deeper the closer to the body they were, and the most visible was the large patch on the carpet in which the lifeless head was floating.

Ewert Grens was sitting so close that if the body on the floor had started to whisper he would hear it. This death didn't feel like anything, it didn't even have a name.

"The entrance wound, Ewert, here."

Nils Krantz had crept around on all fours, filmed and photographed. He was one of the few experts Grens actually trusted and had proved often enough that he wasn't the kind of person who would take shortcuts just so he could get home an hour earlier to watch TV.

"Someone held the gun hard to his head. The gas pressure between the muzzle and the temple must have been enormous. You can see for yourself. Half the side's been blown off."

The skin on his face was already gray, his eyes empty, his mouth a straight line that would never talk again.

"I don't understand. One entrance wound. But two exit wounds?" Krantz held his hand near the hole that was as large as a tennis ball in the middle of the right side of the head.

"I've only seen this a couple of times in thirty-odd years. But it happens.

And the autopsy will confirm it-that it's only one shot. I'm sure of it."

He tugged at the sleeve of Grens's white overalls, his voice eager.

"One shot to the temple. The bullet was jacketed, half lead and half titanium, and it split when it hit one of the skull bones."

Krantz got up and stretched his arm in the air. It was an old flat and the ceiling was about three meters high. A few hairline cracks, but otherwise in good shape, except for where the forensic technician was pointing: a deep gash in the whitewash.

"We took half the bullet down from there."

Small pieces of plaster had fallen where careful fingers had dug out the hard metal.

Some way off there was a considerably larger tear in some soft wood. "And that is from the other half. The kitchen door was obviously closed."