Read Online Three Dog Night by Elsebeth Egholm - Free Book Online

warning.
    She unlocked the door and went inside.
    It was clean and there was a smell that reminded her of something. At first she thought it was the boat: they had painted it a couple of years ago, just before it put to sea after the winter. She didn’t remember the details, only the sense of companionship. Erik and her together, sharing a project for once and enjoying it – or she was, at least.
    She moved noiselessly through the house. Wooden floors. White walls and white furniture. Austere. There were landscape paintings on the walls. Several were pale winter scenes in blue and white shades and she recognised her surroundings: the cliff, the sea, the lane. She walked up to one of them. Sniffed it. The smell came from them. It was fresh paint. She looked at the initials: PAB. Then she found an easel and paints in another room which apparently served as a studio. Several more paintings were leaning against the wall. She flicked through them. Many of them were part of a series. Just as the ones in the living room had a winter theme, these had a recurring subject: a big, burning tree. Here she noticed the initials were of an older vintage.
    She tried to draw some conclusions about the occupant of the house as she moved from room to room, but she kept finding new things that contradicted what she had just deduced. The paintings suggested he might be a cultivated man behind the brusque exterior. But then she looked at his music collection: dreadful canned music, rap, hip-hop; black men wearing layers of gold jewellery, probably with previous for drug dealing and violence, graced several of the CD covers. The same went for his DVD collection: brain-dead action movies and – God help us – a pile of porn. No sophistication there.
    She scanned the bookcase, expecting more of the same. But apart from books about dog training and wildlife, she would not have predicted what she found. The majority of the space was given to classics and they looked as if they had been read: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Steinbeck, Flaubert, Dumas, Hugo, Cervantes and several others. Robinson Crusoe was so worn and dog-eared it was falling apart. Danish writers were present, too: Johannes V. Jensen, Karen Blixen, Martin A. Hansen, I.P. Jacobsen. She recognised the names, of course, and might well have read some of them at school, but she wasn’t much of a reader herself.
    She went into the kitchen, expecting his culinary interests to match his literary predilections, but didn’t find very much – just expensive dog food from the vet, some bags of porridge oats, a large supply of baked beans, tinned tomatoes and pasta, as well as eggs, milk, bacon and white bread in the fridge. And the remains of a beef joint.
    She found the bedroom. It was cold and reminded her of a monastic cell; there was no linen on the bed. She went upstairs, which was one big room. On the floor lay a mattress, a sleeping bag and two thick fleeces. Apart from that there was an old sofa and a small coffee table with a lamp on it. The French doors led out to a balcony overlooking a partial view of the cliff and the town. It was from here she first heard the sound and saw the car coming down the lane, struggling to get through the snow.
    She wanted to make a quick exit, but froze. She heard the car engine being turned off. Then a window was smashed. She stood very still while someone started trashing the ground floor. She heard things being pushed over, items splintering, books falling off shelves and landing on the wooden floor with a thud. There was nowhere to hide and she had no weapons within reach. Yes, she did. The lamp on the table. She yanked it out of the socket and pulled off the shade. The base was ceramic. As heavy as lead.
    Then she heard the sound of boots on the stairs.

13
    K IR FOLLOWED THE line from the red buoy and dived seven metres down to the bottom of GrenÃ¥ Harbour, right next to the wharf. Visibility was zero. Even when she held a