Trophy by Steffen Jacobsen Page A

treated by a surgeon. I’m sure it was thoroughly cleaned, but it wasn’t stitched. It’s been allowed to heal right from the bottom, which would have taken a couple of months. I would estimate it to be a few years old.’
    Lene nodded. She could see that the forensic examiner had taken tissue samples from the edge of the scar.
    ‘So he wasn’t treated at a hospital or a Casualty department?’
    The doctor shook her head vehemently.
    ‘I’m absolutely sure that he wasn’t. If a surgeon had treated this injury, the first thing he would have done would have been to cut through the soft tissue and open the bullet trajectory in order to ensure there was no soil or textile fragments inside it.’
    Lene nodded again. Now, what was it Louise Andersen had said? Something about all the wars her husband had fought in without ever getting so much as a scratch?
    *
    Lene stopped for a moment outside the low building and looked towards Fælledparken. Small figures from a nursery were making their way across the grass as a jogger in tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie did stretches against a tree about a hundred metres away. She took deep breaths to get the stench out of her nose.
    Her mobile vibrated again.
    ‘Where are you?’ her boss demanded to know.
    ‘Outside the Institute of Forensic Medicine.’
    Lene started walking towards her car.
    ‘What have you found out?’
    Lene could visualize Charlotte Falster sitting in her office at the Rigspolitiet’s new headquarters in a dreary industrial estate in Glostrup, behind a big desk with a silver triptych frame displaying pictures of the senior civil servant to whom she was married and their good-looking and successful son and daughter. There were Impressionist posters on the walls, a Vibeke Klint rug lay on the floor, and an unflappable grey-bob hairstyle graced the chief superintendent’s head.
    She wasn’t, as Lene’s friends Pia and Marianne claimed, exclusively an irritating bureaucrat or a lousy boss. It was simultaneously more straightforward and more complicated than that: quite simply, the two of them didn’t get on, andhad both known it right from the start. Still, they tried to make the best of things, if only out of mutual professional respect.
    ‘Kim Andersen killed himself,’ Lene said. ‘There’s no doubt about it.’
    She unlocked her car. The energetic jogger in the hoodie had left the tree and was slowly running along the path, away from her.
    ‘And the handcuffs? How do you explain them?’ her superior said.
    ‘Someone handcuffed him after his death.’
    ‘To make us investigate the case?’
    ‘That would be my view.’
    ‘Any idea who it might be?’
    ‘The wife. There are no footprints in the grass other than his and hers. The dew had fallen and the soil was wet and soft.’
    There was silence at the other end of the line while her boss sifted through her thoughts. ‘Do you need help?’ she asked. ‘Jan is back at work after his football injury. You know that …’
    She didn’t complete the sentence, for which Lene was grateful. Yes, of course, each team ought to be made up of at least three staff: one to collate the information from the crime scene, one to read all the reports, and one to question witnesses. At this point, Charlotte Falster would usually start lecturing her about teamwork, synergies, facilitators,ownership, mutual evaluation and other meaningless business school terms, but mercifully she refrained from doing so.
    ‘It’s just a suicide,’ Lene said. ‘I’ll talk to the widow.’
    She heard a rustling of papers down the other end. Today’s newspapers, no doubt. Charlotte Falster’s relationship with the media was ambiguous. On the one hand, she performed well in print media or on television with her cool, reserved, articulate and well-schooled manner. On the other hand, she hated the fact that journalists, whom she universally regarded as a tribe of grotesque, puffed-up, self-important, lazy fools, wasted her resources