Read Online Trophy by Steffen Jacobsen - Free Book Online

you off to?’ Josefine’s friend asked.
    ‘Holbæk.’ Lene scowled.
    ‘Well, it could be worse,’ Josefine said.
    ‘Really? Greenland?’
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘Christ.’
    Lene went into her bedroom and started hurling underwear, clothes and toiletries into a sports bag while she debated whether to pack her running shoes. She was in excellent physical shape. She did combat boxing two or three times a week in the Police Officers’ Athletics Club – mouthpiece, helmet; full contact – and she weighed the same as she did when she was twenty-five. She had never felt stronger, more supple, or been faster than she was right now. She opened the small steel cabinet built into the wall behind the wardrobe and went through the motions of unloading the service pistol that lived inside it; a grim looking 9-mmHeckler & Koch pistol with eighteen bullets in the magazine. She put it in her bag, added a belt holster and two magazines, and zipped up the bag.
    She was ready.

Chapter 6
    Lene turned off the sat nav when she spotted the patrol car at the end of the small forest track. Gærdesmuttevej was the name of the road; it sounded idyllic, and the white, half-timbered cottage with the thatched roof did indeed look cosy and inviting. A box van belonging to a local firm of carpenters, an ambulance, one of the police’s crime scene vans and a brand-new Alfa Romeo with a huge blue ribbon on the roof were parked in front of it. Next to the ambulance was a stretcher with a covered body and, next to that, two paramedics were waiting, watching her car.
    As she approached, she noticed the uniformed officer standing under a tree in the back garden and a CSO in white plastic coveralls squatting on his haunches next to the Alfa Romeo, taking samples from a substance that looked like vomit. He dropped something into a test tube.
    Lene parked her car on the verge of the dirt track. The garden bordered the woods and there was a long, waterlogged meadow behind the property. A roebuck raised its head and watched her for a moment before it carried on grazing.
    She held up her warrant card to the older ambulance man, who nodded to his younger colleague. The younger man pulled down the sheet to the dead man’s hips.
    Slim, well-built, muscular. His chest was hairless and the hairs across his stomach pointed down to his belly button in a black triangle. His head had rolled unnaturally far to the left. His cervical vertebrae must have snapped just below the skull, she thought. The rope was tied in a knot under his right ear and had left a deep, blue groove around his neck. Kim Andersen’s eyes were half closed and his mouth open. The body was lying partly on its side, partly on its back; the position was due to the cuffed hands at the small of his back. Lene bent over to study the handcuffs, which looked very similar to the ones she had in a drawer at her office. The CSOs had wrapped the victim’s hands in plastic bags and tied them with string to preserve nail scrapings and other forensic evidence.
    The dead man’s body was covered with a dozen tattoos.
Rege et Grege
, it said above a red heart near Kim Andersen’s left nipple. On the body’s left upper arm she found the motto
Dominus Providebit
. Under the crosshairs of a telescopic sight aimed at the head of a Taliban fighter, it said
RLG keeping hell busy
, and under another, empty crosshairs over Kim Andersen’s right nipple,
You can run, but you will only die tired
.
    Kim Andersen was wearing a pair of thick, pale blue uniform trousers with a broad white cavalry stripe.
    ‘The Royal Life Guards,’ said the younger of the ambulance crew.
    ‘Yes, I can see,’ she said. ‘Thanks for waiting. You can take him away now.’
    The body would be taken to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Copenhagen. Lene would go there tomorrow and with luck be presented with some findings by the forensic examiners. Apart from the obvious, of course.
    Red-and-white police tape had been stretched out between