officer seems to have a connection to Vesterbro. Which means it could be one of the colleagues I’m working with right now. I absolutely cannot tell them what I’ve found out in case it is one of them.”
“A police officer! I don’t believe it for a second!” Andersson cleared his throat a few times before he continued. “Irene. You . . . watch out. Don’t take any risks. If it really is like you say, it may be dangerous.”
His voice revealed sincere concern. Irene realized that she wasn’t going to be able to tell the whole truth about what she had been up to the previous night.
“I’ll take care of myself. Today I’m just making copies of the reports from the investigation into the murder of Carmen Østergaard and then I’m coming straight home.”
“Good. Call if anything comes up.”
“OK. Good-bye.”
When Irene opened the curtains, she could see, to her joy, that a pale sun was actually shining on the side of the house across the street. Encouraged by this, she went down into the hotel’s cafeteria and ate a delicious Danish breakfast. She discovered to her pleasure that their coffee actually tasted quite good.
Satisfied, she went up to the room and packed the rest of her things in her bag.
Peter Møller showed up just as she was in the process of checking out.
“Good morning! Everything OK?” he asked and fired off a sunny smile.
He reminded Irene of Fredrik Stridh. Both were types who always looked bright and fresh even if there was no way they could be. This was an enviable quality that she suffered a regrettable lack of. If she had only slept five hours, as she had the night before, that’s exactly how she looked in the morning. She carefully applied her makeup and gave Møller a wide smile in return. With any luck, he would buy it. If he thought that his colleague from Sweden looked a little worn-out early this morning, let him think she had plundered the minibar in her hotel room out of loneliness. None of the Danish colleagues would learn of her private reconnaissance work around midnight.
“Morning to you, too. All’s well?” she said.
Møller took her bag before she even had time to reach for it. With his other hand, he held the door open for her as usual. Polite and well mannered but difficult to get any real understanding of, thought Irene.
Maybe he was the officer? Resolutely she forced the idea away. She might become paranoid if she started thinking along those lines.
IT WAS time consuming to read the reports of the interrogations in Danish. Irene had to skim through the text and try to pick out the things that seemed important. There was a risk that she might miss something essential but she comforted herself with the fact that the copier was new and efficient. She was delighted when she found the witness reports on both the police officer and the doctor. Unfortunately, the interrogator hadn’t pushed very hard during these interrogations so the material was quite slim. One of the prostitutes had fallen into the hands of the policeman; the other had encountered the doctor.
Christine Ehlers, twenty-four years of age, a junkie and street prostitute since she was a teenager, stated that she had been threatened by a man about a week before Carmen Østergaard was murdered. He had picked her up in a car and driven her to the back lot of a house that was going to be demolished. She didn’t remember the make of the car, but described the car as being big and new. When he had stopped the car he had taken off his dark overcoat. Under it he was wearing a police uniform. He started to hit her in the face and called her a whore, a slut, and the like. He got a powerful stranglehold on her and she wasn’t getting any air. In a panic, she managed to knee him in the crotch. Apparently, it hit hard where it was supposed to, because he released his grip and Christine managed to run away.
Because she was under the influence of heroin at the time and in shock after the event, she couldn’t give a description of the assailant. The only things she remembered were that he seemed to be young and relatively tall and skinny. He had spoken Danish without an accent. Stubbornly, she maintained that he had been dressed in a police uniform, hat included. She didn’t remember if he had had