Read Online I'm Travelling Alone by Samuel Bjørk - Free Book Online Page B

been all that educational either, because he couldn’t recall anything from those lessons. Then he remembered something his grandfather had said once when they were out for a drive in the old red Volvo: that not everyone is suited to have children, that some people should never have become parents. It had struck a chord with him: perhaps it was the same with teachers? That some were not suited to it and that explained their sad faces every time they entered the classroom.
    His train of thought was interrupted by a rustling in the bushes in front of him. Suddenly, his brother appeared out of nowhere with a strange look on his face and a large wet stain on his trousers.
    ‘Torben? What’s wrong?’
    His brother looked at him with empty eyes.
    ‘There’s an angel hanging all alone in the forest.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’
    ‘There’s an angel hanging all alone in the forest.’
    Tobias put his arms around his brother and could feel how the little boy continued to tremble.
    ‘Are you making this up, Torben?’
    ‘No. She’s in there.’
    ‘Would you show me, please?’
    His brother looked up at him.
    ‘She doesn’t have any wings, but she’s definitely an angel.’
    ‘Show me,’ Tobias said gravely, and nudged his brother in front of him through the spruce.

Chapter 13
    Mia Krüger sat on the rock watching the sunset over Hitra for the last time.
    The seventeenth of April. One day to go. Tomorrow, she would rejoin Sigrid.
    She felt tired. Not tired in the sense that she needed sleep, but tired of everything. Of life. Of humanity. Of everything that had happened. She had found a kind of peace before Holger had shown her the photographs in the folder but, once he had left, it had crept over her again. This vile feeling.
    Evil.
    She took a swig from the bottle she had brought with her and pulled the knitted beanie further over her ears. It had grown colder now; spring had not come early, after all. It had only tricked everyone into thinking it was coming. Mia was pleased that she had the bottle to warm her up. This was not how she had imagined her last day. She had planned to cram as much as she could into her last twenty-four hours of life. The birds, the trees, the sea, the light. Have a day off from self-medicating so that she could feel things, be aware of herself, one last time. It had not worked out that way. After Holger had left her, her desire for sensory deprivation had only increased. She had drunk more. Taken more pills. Woken up without realizing that she had been asleep. Fallen asleep without realizing she had been awake. She had promised herself not to care too much about the contents of the file. Stupid, obviously – when had she ever been able to distance herself from anything in these cases? Her job. Well, it might be a job for other people, but not for Mia Krüger. Each case affected her far too deeply. They reached right inside her soul, as if it were her own story, as if she were the victim. Kidnapped, raped, beaten with iron bars, burned with cigarettes, killed by a drug overdose, only six years old, hanged from a tree with a skipping rope.
    Why wasn’t Pauline Olsen’s name on the schoolbooks?
    When everything else had been planned down to the last detail?
    Sod it.
    She had tried blanking out the image of the little girl hanging from the tree, but she could not get it out of her head. Everything seemed so staged. So theatrical. Almost like a game. A kind of message. But who for? For whoever found her? The police? She had trawled through her memories to discover if the name Toni had cropped up in any case she had been involved with, but had found nothing. This was exactly the kind of thing Mia used to be so brilliant at, but she no longer seemed to be able to function. And yet there was something here, something she could not quite put her finger on, and it irritated her. Mia watched the sun sink into the sea and tried to concentrate. A message? For the police? An old case? A cold