Death of a Nightingale by Lene Kaaberbøl

you expect them to be lying down. Michael Vestergaard wasn’t.
    “We couldn’t get him out of the seat without damaging him too much,” the coroner said apologetically to Heide. “It was easiest to cut the bolts and bring the lot.”
    Michael Vestergaard sat straight up in his car’s front seat, which had been cut free and then secured inside the white Ford Transit. It had been sixteen degrees below zero the previous night, and the chill was immediately evident. Vestergaard’s once-white Hugo Boss shirt now created a dark armor of ice and frozen reddish-brown blood across his chest. The head lolled backward and to one side, and the lower part of his cheek was stuck to his shoulder, frozen solid. His well-trimmed hair was white with frost.
    “Isn’t he unusually … frozen?” asked Søren. “Of course, blood freezes, but—”
    “Blood, waste and other bodily secretions. But it also looks as if water was poured over him,” said Heide. “Possibly to wake him from a faint or as a form of torture in itself. They weren’t exactly gentlewith him.”
    Søren suddenly had a flashback to a POW exercise in the distant days of his youth. The abrupt cooling, the short sensation of drowning when you inhaled water instead of air. It wasn’t quite as cruel and systematic as waterboarding, but in the right—or perhaps the wrong—hands, a simple bucket was a pretty effective instrument of torture. With the current chill factor, it could also be a murder weapon, but Vestergaard had not lived long enough to die of cold.
    “His hands?” said Søren. “Is it okay if Lieutenant Babko has a closer look at them?”
    “Be my guest,” said Heide in English.
    Babko apparently understood the ironic English phrase, because he climbed into the hearse with Søren.
    The frozen body curved in a way that somehow contradicted the backward-lolling head, as if two opposing forces had been at work at the moment of death. Automatically, Søren’s mind began to replay the scene. He sensed the threat that made Vestergaard crouch forward, cradling his ruined hands against his stomach. Then the grabbing of his hair, the head that was wrenched backward, the knife slicing through tendons and arteries and throat cartilage. What Natasha had not managed a year and a half ago was now completed in one abrupt slash without hesitation or failed attempts.
    “The hands,” he said in Russian to Babko. “Is it the same sort of damage as to Pavel Doroshenko’s?”
    Both hands were swollen, blue-black and bloody, and on the left, especially, there were several obvious breaks. The cold and the stiffness of death had frozen the damaged fingers into a position that looked more like some marine life-form than a human hand—a meat-colored starfish, maybe, or a shattered coral formation. The outermost joints of the little and ring fingers were bent all the way back. On the middle finger, the tip was simply missing, and you couldsee the bone sticking out through the tissue.
    With a careful, plastic-gloved finger, Babko bent the shirt’s frozen cuff back to get a better look at Vestergaard’s wrist. “There,” he said. “You can see the mark.”
    There was a deep, dirty groove along the cuff edge. Thinner than a rope, thought Søren, perhaps a cable or a wire of some sort.
    “Method is same,” said Babko in English so Heide and the technicians could understand him. “Same, Doroshenko.”
    “Punishment or interrogation?” asked Søren, first in Russian and then in Danish.
    Heide tilted her head a bit as she thought about it. “That hurt,” she said. “If it was to make him talk, he was either very tough—or he couldn’t give them what they wanted because he didn’t know.”
    “Poor devil,” said the technician.
    Søren didn’t say anything. Instead, he studied the shattered hands one last time. He had read the reports from the trial against Natasha, including the doctor’s testimony that described in detail what Vestergaard had done to his