“What? We can’t just ignore it,” Dunja said, feeling the itch in her fingers as they longed to take over the wheel.
“We’re not ignoring it. Our shift is over, and we have to wash the car and finish our reports.”
“We do not.” Dunja grabbed the radio microphone. “Hi, Anna. Dunja Hougaard here. Magnus and I can get it.”
“Okay, perfect,” replied the female voice, at which Dunja reached across the control panel and turned on the siren.
“You’re not suggesting we run this red light,” Magnus said.
“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. Come on.” She opened her last bag of Djungelvrål candy, took out two pieces, and felt the immediate effect as the super-salty licorice raised her heart rate. “Anna, do you have any information about where on Stengade she is?”
Magnus shook his head and checked cautiously over both shoulders before making a U-turn and driving back toward Helsingør.
“No, but they called from that shop Damernes Magasin, which is right next to Slots Vin — you know, the wine shop that closed down,” replied the voice on the radio.
“Okay, thanks.” Dunja knew exactly where that was. She had read about the wine store in Helsingør Dagblad, where emotions ran high about what should be done with the rundown location that became more of an eyesore with each passing month. The store had been closed for several years now; its owner had taken over a different shop further down the mall. The problem was that the now eighty-year-old store owner controlled the whole building, and for some reason he wasn’t interested in selling or renting out the vacant space, which had become makeshift housing for the area’s homeless population.
“Okay, but what do you think about my suggestion?” asked Magnus.
“What suggestion?”
“Baron von Dy. I’ve heard it’s supposed to be really —”
“Can we please just focus on this instead? Here, turn on Bramstræde.” Dunja pointed as she unfastened her seatbelt.
“But it’s a pedestrian street. Shouldn’t we drive around?”
“No, I want to get there today.”
The squad car turned into the narrow alley, and before Magnus could park and switch off the siren, Dunja was out of the car and on her way to Stengade, where she made her way through all the tourists with their ice creams.
The closed wine store with its cracked grey facade was markedly different from the rest of its surroundings; each of the other shops tried hard to look inviting. The Slots Vin sign looked like it might fall down at any moment, and just behind the dirty windows, which were covered in old concert posters, were security grilles.
Dunja looked up at the second floor and found that the entire building was in the same miserable condition. If no one took action soon, it would have to be torn down. But she didn’t see any bloody women. Not in the windows, nor when she tried to peer into the filthy darkness through a gap between two torn posters.
“It’s totally quiet here,” Magnus said, looking around.
“It’s a little too quiet, if you ask me.” Dunja walked over to the door, between two picture windows, and tried the handle. It was locked, so she moved on to the door further to the left. A grey grille was down in front of it, but when she bent to test it, she found it could be raised by hand.
“Dunja, hold on a minute.” Magnus approached her. “If there was someone here, that grille wouldn’t be down, would it? Plus the car is in a bad spot.”
“Well, I’m going to take a look. You can wait in the car.” She vanished inside, leaving Magnus behind. Eventually he gave up with a sigh and followed her into the abandoned store.
The beam of her flashlight revealed a hallway that was crammed with empty wine crates, mattresses, and shopping carts, all full of blankets and other junk.
“How cosy,” Magnus said as he adjusted his belt and made sure that his baton, handcuffs, and pistol were in their proper spots.
“They haven’t gotten into the store, in any case.” Dunja aimed the flashlight at a security door on their immediate left; substantial marks on the doorframe bore witness to numerous attempted break-ins.
“So, listen, what do you say?”
“About what?” Dunja gingerly tested the rotting wooden stairs to see if they would hold.
“About tomorrow evening,” Magnus said, following her up to the second floor. “Because if that doesn’t work for you I could do Saturday instead. I’ve just heard it’s harder to get a table then.”
“Listen, Magnus, we’re not going to get a table anywhere.” At the top of the stairs, Dunja continued down a narrow hallway; the floor was covered in pigeon droppings and the wallpaper was peeling off the water-damaged walls. “First of all, I would never set foot in Baron von Dy.” She opened the first of several closed doors and peered into the room, which was full of broken furniture and shelves. “Second, it’s been closed for several years.” The next room was empty aside from a bed, a few mattresses, and an old stationary bike. “Third…” she went on, opening the next-to-last door.
That was as far as she got, because it turned out that the dim room was full of homeless people, who were either sitting against the walls or lying unconscious amid the chaos of sleeping bags and blankets. In the middle sat a man with unevenly spaced teeth; he was playing with an old lighter. Open, light, close…Next to him sat the bloody woman, whose eyes glowed white as if she were possessed; her pupils had vanished up under her eyelids in the rush from the empty syringe that was still hanging from her ulcerous arm.
“Here she is.” Dunja slid on a pair of protective gloves, squatted down, and pulled out the syringe. “Hello there, how are we feeling?” She took the woman’s face in her hands, hoping for a reaction. “Do you know her?” She turned to the man with the lighter.
“I’d like to get to know you. In your cunt,” the man said with a laugh.
Open, light, close…
“Dunja, take it easy now,” Magnus said, holding his service weapon in both hands. “You never know — when they’re so high.”
“Put that away and let the station know we found her.” She slapped the woman’s cheeks lightly. “Hello! Time to wake up.”
The woman fought her way up through the haze and tried to focus her eyes on Dunja. “It wasn’t me…wasn’t me…”
“What wasn’t you? Tell me. What happened?”
Open, light, close…
“Not me…I didn’t do anything…” she said, and then she seemed to vanish back inside herself.
“What didn’t you do?”
“Hello, this is Rawn. We found her,” Magnus said into his radio as he left the room.
Dunja slapped the woman a few more times. “Come on, think back and tell me. Whose blood is that on your shirt?”
The woman looked down; it was as if she only now realized she was covered in blood.
Open, light, close…
“He was so nice…never hurt anyone…” The woman was about to break down. “I swear, he didn’t do anything to them…”
“To who? Did you witness someone hurt somebody?”
“When they left I tried to wake him up but there was only blood. Blood everywhere.”
Open, light, close…
“Who are ‘they’?” Dunja ran her hand over the woman’s hair. “Do you remember how many of them there were? Did you see their faces?”
The woman appeared to be sinking even further into herself.
Open, light, close…
“Hello, you have to talk to me,” Dunja said, trying to make eye contact. “Try to remember.”
“Happy…”
“What do you mean, happy? Do you mean —”
“Laughing…the whole time…like it was just a game. And yellow. Yellow and happy.”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
“I wanted to stop them, bu
t I didn’t dare. Too many of them…”
Open, light, close…
“Shouldn’t we take her in and question her at the station?” Magnus said as he came back into the room, his pistol in one hand.
The reaction was immediate. Within a few seconds, the woman had sprung to her feet and, in a single motion, grabbed Dunja’s pistol from its holster.
“Magnus, what the hell are you doing? Lower your weapon!”
Magnus appeared petrified, both hands desperately clutching the butt of his gun.
“Magnus!”
“Get out of here…both of you. Get out of here, or else…” The woman pointed the gun, going back and forth between Dunja and Magnus.
“Take it easy. That’s just my colleague. You don’t need to worry about him.” Dunja stood up, her hands in the air. “Neither of us wants to hurt you.”
“That’s exactly what they said to Jens.” The woman continued to brandish the gun at them. “I said get out!”
“Shoot her!” shouted the man with the lighter. “Just shoot her!”
“Just hold on,” Dunja said. “Jens? Who’s —”
“Right in the face,” the man interrupted. “Or the cunt! Shoot her in the cunt!”
Open, light, close…
“Listen, just cool it here.”
“Bang! Right in the cunt!”
“Cool it, I said!” Dunja fixed her eyes on the man, urging him to calm down. “And, Magnus, for Christ’s sake, lower your weapon!”
Open, light, close…
The shot missed Magnus and hit the wall behind him. Out of pure shock, he dropped his gun and it fell to the floor.
“You can just go to hell, you bastards!” the woman cried, grabbing Magnus’s service weapon on her way out of the room.
Dunja rushed after the woman into the hallway, and caught only a glimpse of her as she disappeared down the stairs. But by the time Dunja reached the pedestrian mall, the woman had been swallowed up by the hordes of people strolling around with their ice creams and enjoying the sunny spring weather.
8
Astrid Tuvesson had to struggle to keep her true feelings from shining through as Gert-Ove Bokander, district police chief for northwestern Skåne, squeezed his cholesterol-laden body into the visitor’s chair. To be sure, he was in the right. She had screwed up; there was no way around it. Not only had it been wrong and deeply unethical for her to get behind the wheel given her condition, it had also been extremely dangerous.
But this did not change her dislike of the man. Her insides began to seethe at his very presence. Not to mention his self-righteous smile, which revealed how much pleasure he was deriving from the situation at hand. He had finally found his chance to give her a slap on the wrist, to get her back for all the criticism she’d aimed at him in her years as chief of the Helsingborg crime squad.
Astrid tried to shake off the image of herself smashing that smile of his so far down among his double chins that it would never find its way back out. She took a deep breath and prepared herself to respond.
She had arrived at the office long before the others and had spent the past few hours mentally preparing herself for every possible — and impossible — question Bokander might ask. This time she was being forced to meekly push aside her conviction that she must always choose the truth, no matter how much it hurt. This time she was stuck in a patch of quicksand that had swallowed up her legs and was about to drag her down. The slightest wrong answer and she would be irretrievably lost.
“Well, this isn’t what I would call fun.” Bokander leaned back as the chair protested underneath him.
“No, it really isn’t,” Astrid replied, sticking to the plan she had set out for herself. “For my part, I honestly don’t understand why we have to sit here making a mountain out of a molehill. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has more important things to attend to.” Attack, then total denial.
“You call this making a mountain out of a molehill? We’re just sitting here, having a little chat. Surely this doesn’t seem unusual, even to you, considering what happened.”
“What happened was I tried to stop an extremely dangerous speeder. And that’s it.”
“It hasn’t occurred to you that your careless actions might have contributed to the situation spiralling out of control, that you might have made him drive even faster?”
“I’m sorry, but how exactly were my actions ‘careless’? He was the one who ran into me. Not the other way around. I just happened to be there, so I intervened. If I hadn’t, there’s no way of knowing how things might have ended or how many people might have lost their lives.”
“But there was a death as a result.”
“If you’re talking about Peter Brise’s death, all I can say is that there is a great deal of uncertainty surrounding that. Which is why I don’t have time to sit here with you discussing all of this, no matter how much I might want to.”
Bokander sighed so heavily that Braids’s autopsy report moved several centimetres across the desk. “Astrid, it’s no secret what you and I think of each other. We’ve had our differences of opinion, and we probably always will. But this has nothing to do with that. This has to do with the fact that one of the officers on the scene has filed a report that claims you were acting as if you were under the influence of alcohol.”
“I had just been involved in a dramatic car chase and a rollover accident.”
“Yes, thanks for that; I hear it’s not going to be cheap to repair the fountain.”
“You’d call that a fountain? Anyway, of course I’m sure I was dazed and a little upset. Is that so strange? Is it hard to understand?” Astrid snorted and shook her head, just as she’d practised. “Like I would get behind the wheel if I’d been drinking.”
“And yet you refused the Breathalyzer.”
“Yes, I did, and maybe that was a little stupid. I was just so darn frazzled. And to be honest, at the time I saw no reason why I should take orders from a uniform who was obviously trying to mess with me instead of devoting his attention to what really mattered.”
Bokander laced his sausage fingers together and tilted his head to the side. “Astrid. How are you, really?”
“How am I?”
“Yes, how are you feeling?”
“Fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Maybe because you just went through a divorce, and from what I understand it was a little messy. That kind of thing could drive anyone to drink.”
“You’re right about that, and it’s just as tragic every time it happens.” She met his gaze; her own didn’t waver in the least.
Bokander studied her, and she could see the gears in his brain turning as he tried to figure out how to move forward. There was no doubt that he was fully aware of the situation. But that didn’t change the fact that this was all an act. A dance they had to perform. Without a number from the Breathalyzer and a follow-up blood test, he had no proof…
“All right,” Bokander said, then paused. The corners of his mouth turned down and vanished somewhere among his many chins. “I’m going to be nice and let it go this time.”
9
Fabian had put it off as long as he could. It felt like what he was about to say was absolutely forbidden and would put him at risk of a public flogging. But in the end he saw no other option but to toss out the question and confront the rest of the team regarding how they were going to handle Astrid Tuvesson’s increasing problem with alcohol.
The team’s reaction was tentative. Cliff and Molander responded with a shrug of the shoulders, pursed lips, and evasive glances. Still, Fabian continued onto the ever-thinner ice, voicing his opinion that her unpredictable absences were becoming untenable, especially considering that they now found themselves faced with an investigation that would require an obvious leader. He also felt that they had a certain responsibility toward their colleagu
e. Who else would say enough was enough and get her back on the right path?
In the end, the dam broke and the stories poured out of them. Lilja had been wondering the same thing and told them that Astrid had smelled of alcohol on Monday morning when they shared an elevator up to the unit. It turned out everyone had smelled liquor on her. Cliff had spotted a flask in her purse, and Molander said she had once called him up in the middle of the night but was so incoherent that he’d hung up.
Hugo Elvin was the only one who didn’t say anything. Then again, he almost never did unless it was something concrete about the case they were currently working. He liked to say that gossip should be punishable by a two-year sentence.
But gossip was the last thing Fabian was after. He tried to guide the discussion toward a plan for how they could help her without losing momentum in their investigation. But once Cliff got going on the stories of the previous day’s drunk driving, which had already spread like wildfire throughout the building, it became impossible to get a word in edgewise.
Only when the door opened and Astrid herself entered the room did they quiet down. She responded to their curious eyes with a smile and held up her hands apologetically.
“Sorry I’m late, but I was in a meeting with Bokander all morning. I understand if you started without me.”
“Wait, you’ve been here in the building all along?” Cliff looked almost disappointed.
“Yes, since five this morning. I came in to put a dent in the pile of work on my desk.”
“What was your meeting about?” Molander asked.
Tuvesson sighed and closed the door behind her. “I don’t really feel like getting into it all again. But the things you’ll do to avoid a bunch of loose talk…” She looked everyone in the eye, then filled a mug from the Thermos of coffee. “As you know, I’ve been off sick a few days, and…Well, I’m not going to try to hide the fact that I’ve had some problems with alcohol since Gunnar and I separated. But yesterday afternoon I felt strong enough to come in to work. And before you ask, I hadn’t had so much as a drop to drink. By the way, is that last one for me?” She pointed at the croissant.
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