with their Freedom of Information Act requests, interviews, enquiries and corrections.
‘I’ll handle the press,’ Lene hastened to add. ‘I’ll call a press briefing tomorrow. You were right. They’re really interested in this story. They’re buzzing around Holbæk like flies.’
‘Thank you,’ Charlotte Falster said, sounding as if she actually meant it. ‘Why don’t I issue a bland press release, and find a room at Holbæk Police Station. Is two o’clock tomorrow afternoon good for you?’
‘Of course it is,’ Lene said. ‘And thank you.’
She got into the car and pressed the speed dial on her mobile for Arne, the CSO, and asked him to compare the fingerprints from the handcuffs to those of Louise Andersen.
Then she wondered why it hadn’t even crossed her mind to tell Charlotte Falster about her night-time visit to Kim Andersen’s cottage, about the photograph of the invincible,young warriors in the desert, or about her feeling of being watched all the time. There was no easy answer. It was just the way it was. She didn’t want the chief superintendent looking over her shoulder.
*
The jogger in the hoodie walked over to a motorbike parked behind the Institute of Forensic Medicine, removed the chain from the helmet he had locked to the handlebars, retrieved a leather jacket and a pair of gloves from one of the panniers, and put the key in the ignition. He was in no hurry. He knew he could find Lene Jensen any time he wanted to: the previous night he had attached several hidden GPS senders to her old Citroën. The police superintendent was utterly predictable. As was her pretty, twenty-one-year-old daughter, Josefine.
*
The flat in Kong Georgs Vej was empty, and clean. Josefine had aired it after the popcorn, no underwear was drying on the shower rail in the bathroom, the floor had been vacuumed, and the kitchen gleamed and smelled fresh. Even the daughter’s room looked as if it had been visited by a Feng Shui consultant. Lene wandered around, slightly stunned, in her own home. It was as if her daughter had taken a quantum leap from being a messy and totally self-absorbed teenager to the headmistress of a domestic science college.
She would miss Josefine when she started travelling and when, in due course, she left home. She would even misstheir strange, black arguments, which flared up out of nothing and into which they both threw themselves with passion. Neither of them ever asked for mercy and they took no prisoners. They would rather die than admit that they might have been wrong until they reached the far corners of their irrational fog, happened to look at each other, hit the
fast rewind
button on the conversation as they heard themselves spout the most ridiculous rubbish – and collapsed in laughter.
She would miss all of it.
Lene slept for a couple of hours on the world’s best sofa in her living room and woke up deeply resenting her next task: a long, hard talk with the grieving young widow with the false tongue.
First, however, she had to go to Holbæk and talk to Kim Andersen’s doctor.
Chapter 11
The doctor’s surgery was located, very conveniently, above a chemist and below an eye specialist, in a white building in Holbæk’s high street. It was like travelling forty years back in time. The corners of the grey linoleum tiles in the waiting room curled up, and Lene inspected the worn furniture critically before sitting down on a sofa that looked as if it were made entirely of green sponge. She had introduced herself to an elderly, shapeless secretary in the front office, but wasn’t convinced that the woman had heard her.
While she waited, Lene watched a small boy in the play corner of the waiting room, with thick glasses and cotton-wool balls in his ears, try to press a square peg through a round hole in a wooden board while his mother read a women’s magazine. As the boy struggled, it struck Lene that this was how returning soldiers might feel: like a square peg
‘I’ll handle the press,’ Lene hastened to add. ‘I’ll call a press briefing tomorrow. You were right. They’re really interested in this story. They’re buzzing around Holbæk like flies.’
‘Thank you,’ Charlotte Falster said, sounding as if she actually meant it. ‘Why don’t I issue a bland press release, and find a room at Holbæk Police Station. Is two o’clock tomorrow afternoon good for you?’
‘Of course it is,’ Lene said. ‘And thank you.’
She got into the car and pressed the speed dial on her mobile for Arne, the CSO, and asked him to compare the fingerprints from the handcuffs to those of Louise Andersen.
Then she wondered why it hadn’t even crossed her mind to tell Charlotte Falster about her night-time visit to Kim Andersen’s cottage, about the photograph of the invincible,young warriors in the desert, or about her feeling of being watched all the time. There was no easy answer. It was just the way it was. She didn’t want the chief superintendent looking over her shoulder.
*
The jogger in the hoodie walked over to a motorbike parked behind the Institute of Forensic Medicine, removed the chain from the helmet he had locked to the handlebars, retrieved a leather jacket and a pair of gloves from one of the panniers, and put the key in the ignition. He was in no hurry. He knew he could find Lene Jensen any time he wanted to: the previous night he had attached several hidden GPS senders to her old Citroën. The police superintendent was utterly predictable. As was her pretty, twenty-one-year-old daughter, Josefine.
*
The flat in Kong Georgs Vej was empty, and clean. Josefine had aired it after the popcorn, no underwear was drying on the shower rail in the bathroom, the floor had been vacuumed, and the kitchen gleamed and smelled fresh. Even the daughter’s room looked as if it had been visited by a Feng Shui consultant. Lene wandered around, slightly stunned, in her own home. It was as if her daughter had taken a quantum leap from being a messy and totally self-absorbed teenager to the headmistress of a domestic science college.
She would miss Josefine when she started travelling and when, in due course, she left home. She would even misstheir strange, black arguments, which flared up out of nothing and into which they both threw themselves with passion. Neither of them ever asked for mercy and they took no prisoners. They would rather die than admit that they might have been wrong until they reached the far corners of their irrational fog, happened to look at each other, hit the
fast rewind
button on the conversation as they heard themselves spout the most ridiculous rubbish – and collapsed in laughter.
She would miss all of it.
Lene slept for a couple of hours on the world’s best sofa in her living room and woke up deeply resenting her next task: a long, hard talk with the grieving young widow with the false tongue.
First, however, she had to go to Holbæk and talk to Kim Andersen’s doctor.
Chapter 11
The doctor’s surgery was located, very conveniently, above a chemist and below an eye specialist, in a white building in Holbæk’s high street. It was like travelling forty years back in time. The corners of the grey linoleum tiles in the waiting room curled up, and Lene inspected the worn furniture critically before sitting down on a sofa that looked as if it were made entirely of green sponge. She had introduced herself to an elderly, shapeless secretary in the front office, but wasn’t convinced that the woman had heard her.
While she waited, Lene watched a small boy in the play corner of the waiting room, with thick glasses and cotton-wool balls in his ears, try to press a square peg through a round hole in a wooden board while his mother read a women’s magazine. As the boy struggled, it struck Lene that this was how returning soldiers might feel: like a square peg
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