Read Three Seconds for Free Online

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 fitted 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 colourless 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 grey, 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 metres high. A few hairline cracks, but otherwise in good nick, 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.’
    ‘I don’t know, Nils.’
    Ewert Grens was still sitting by the head that had too many holes.
    ‘The call-out said execution. But having looked … it could just as easily be suicide.’
    ‘Someone has tried to make it look like that.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    Krantz slid his foot closer to the hand that was holding a gun.
    ‘That looks staged. I think that someone shot him and
then
put the gun in his hand.’
    He disappeared out into the hall and came back immediately with a black case in his hand.
    ‘But I’ll check it. I’ll do a GSR test on the hand. Then we’ll know.’
    Ewert started to calculate, looked over at