The Arc of the Swallow

by Sissel-Jo Gazan, Charlotte Barslund

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

Danish author S.J. Gazan established herself as an international talent to watch with her debut thriller novel, The Dinosaur Feather. In addition to being named “Crime Novel of the Decade” by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, NPR’s Maureen Corrigan called it her favorite mystery of 2013, and The Wall Street Journal ’s Tom Nolan placed it in his year-end top ten list. Now, Gazan’s much-anticipated follow-up is here, bringing back maverick policeman Søren Marhauge. The Arc of the Swallow evokes such literary mystery masterpieces as John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardner and Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, pitting a principled scientist against a profit-motivated conspiracy that leads to the upper reaches of corporations and government. Biology Ph.D. candidate Marie Skov is devastated when, on the same day as her mother’s death, her mentor Kristian Storm apparently kills himself. Storm had been facing academic dishonesty charges, as well as heated criticism of his research on a vaccine for African children—that suggested the vaccine was causing more harm than it was preventing. Skov is skeptical that the death was a suicide. She knows Storm’s research on the vaccine was sound, and learns that his on-site work in Guinea-Bissau was marred by intimidation, sabotaged data, and the suspicious death of another scientist. She also learns that in his final days, Storm felt he was being followed by a blue Ford with tinted windows. Soon afterwards, a blue Ford with tinted windows parks across from Skov’s home. The police have no interest in re-examining the official narrative. But Marhauge shares Skov’s desire for answers, and defies his superiors to help her investigate. They receive unlikely help from a Nobel Prize-winning rival of Storm’s, and find themselves on a perilous trail that leads to Big Pharma and the World Health Organization. Interwoven in this thrilling storyline are deeply-moving portraits of Skov’s troubled family and Marhauge’s tenuous relationship with his girlfriend, another biologist. The result is a complex page-turner that establishes S.J. Gazan (herself a biologist) as a world-class author at the beginning of a formidable career.

Release date: August 4, 2015

Publisher: Quercus

Print pages: 480

Sample

It was Thursday, 18 March 2010, and still dark on Skovvej in Humlebæk. Deputy Chief Superintendent Søren Marhauge was woken up by his girlfriend, Anna, talking to him. She was sitting, fully dressed, on the edge of their bed with her bag slung across her chest and her short, dark hair in damp disarray as if she had just stepped out of the shower.

‘Eh?’ he grunted, still half asleep.

The night before they had both been reading in bed, but Anna had switched off her light first. Søren had assumed that she must be asleep until her eyes snapped open and she announced that his light was bothering her. He had switched it off ostentatiously and a foul mood had descended on the bedroom. From then on Søren’s irritation had kept him wide awake while Anna had lain so still that it was obvious she was not asleep either.

Finally he had said, ‘Did you have to sound quite so pissed off?’ Whereupon Anna had launched into an angry tirade. He hadn’t bothered listening properly to what she had said. A few minutes later, he had pulled off the duvet, grabbed her wrist and stuck his tongue between her legs. That was how their arguments usually ended.

He must have fallen asleep straight afterwards, dammit. They never had time to savour their stellar moments.

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ Anna said, in the morning darkness. ‘Please would you take Lily to nursery today? The deadline for my funding application is in two weeks and I can’t get it out of my mind. I want to go to the faculty and write it up. Is that OK? I’ll cycle to the station and catch the train. Please would you also pick Lily up, cook dinner and put her to bed? I know it’s my turn, only I’d really like to be able to work late, with Anders T., if need be. So that we can crack that application. Do you mind?’

‘Don’t you ever draw breath?’ Søren muttered, and pulled the duvet over his head. ‘But, yes, I’ll take Lily to nursery. And pick her up. And cook dinner. And everything else.’

‘Thank you.’ Anna quickly hugged him through the duvet. ‘See you tonight. It’ll be late.’

Shortly afterwards he heard the front door slam.

*

Across the passage Anna’s daughter, Lily, was asleep in her natural-history bedroom. She had pictures of animals on the walls and, on the shelves, Plexiglas boxes with her findings: seven spotted eggshells, four feathers, thirty-two brown pine cones, moss dried out around the edges, piles of various leaves, a scrap of fur she had felt sorry for and three small rodent skeletons that were her prized possessions and displayed on cotton wool. When she grew up, Lily wanted to be a biologist, just like her mother.

Lily was five years old and the apple of Søren’s eye. In the evening her soft, tiny hand would stroke the velvety patch at the top of his ears while he read aloud to her from natural-history books for children. With her other hand, she would point to the illustrations and explain to him how to tell the seagulls apart.

Lily and Søren had lived in the same house for a year now and everything in the garden was rosy. When he fetched her from nursery, Søren could pick out the colour of her snowsuit in a sea of other snowsuits at a distance of thirty metres. The children would flock around his legs when he opened the gate and he would reach down into the crowd, lift her up and she would hug him as hard as she could. ‘My Søren,’ she would say, as if he had rescued her from a frothing sea.

Lily called Søren Søren. After all, he wasn’t her real dad: that was another man. Who was an idiot.

‘You’re jealous,’ Anna would invariably remark, when Thomas, Lily’s biological father, came to fetch Lily. Søren had stopped trying to deny it. Thomas was a doctor at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm and would say, ‘Hello, hello,’ when he turned up, as if visiting Lily was merely an extension of his rounds. What Anna had ever seen in him was beyond Søren. She had told Søren about her previous relationship and how Thomas, shortly after Lily’s first Christmas, had dropped the happy-family project like a rotten plum and moved to Sweden, but Søren had never learned exactly what had gone wrong. Anna had only said that Thomas had got cold feet. It turned out family life wasn’t his thing after all.

For a long time after Søren and Anna had got together, Thomas had not been a part of their life and Søren had been overjoyed. Several of his colleagues at Bellahøj Police Station had stepfamilies and they said it could be tricky. Not only in practical terms when it came to planning holidays, but also emotionally. Whose rules applied and who was in charge? And when new children arrived, the situation became extra complicated. Søren used to think he had been lucky with his package. When he had met Anna, Lily had been barely three; she hadn’t seen her father for the last two years and winning her heart had been easy. However, shortly after Anna and Lily had moved into Søren’s house in Humlebæk, Thomas was back on the scene. He was still living in Stockholm, now with his new wife and their baby, and would visit Copenhagen every three months where he would spend a long Saturday with Lily.

A very long Saturday.

Every time Thomas pulled up in front of the house, Søren would go outside and make small talk while Anna helped Lily get dressed. Lily would then, ignoring Søren, make a beeline for Thomas, shouting, ‘Hi, Daddy,’ and although Søren had noticed that Thomas never featured in Lily’s drawings, he still had to bite his tongue as she dashed right past him with her SpongeBob SquarePants rucksack on her back and her greasy cuddly toy, Bloppen, dangling from her right hand and threw herself into the arms of her real dad. Søren never looked at Thomas when Lily hugged him; instead, he would stare at the hunched profile of the beech trees at the bottom of the garden where the woods began. Even so, he knew that Thomas was gloating.

*

Until recently Søren had been the youngest superintendent in Danish police history, but then he was promoted and became the youngest but most frustrated deputy chief superintendent in Danish police history. He was still working for Copenhagen Police at the Violent Crimes Unit at Bellahøj Police Station, but with an extra rhombus on his lapel, a bigger office and a pile of paperwork with which now, only six months into his promotion, he was thoroughly fed up. The first few months he had swum in the fast lane to catch up with the workload, but now he had admitted to himself that it could not be done and had begun to slow down. Perhaps a little more than he should. He still spent a lot of time in his office and worked longer hours than he needed to on the days it was Anna’s turn to pick Lily up, but his mind had started to wander. He would think about Anna and stare out of the window. He would look at the photograph of Lily on his desk and at the drawing on the wall she had done for him.

He Googled a recipe for pork meatloaf and decided that, from now on, he would cook only dishes inspired by the animal kingdom when he and Lily had dinner alone: mock turtle soup, bird’s nest soup, butterfly cakes, spaghetti worms with tomato sauce. Internal reports, budget compliance meetings, job interviews and salary negotiations held no attraction for him. What made it all worse was that he had feared this was exactly what promotion would mean: drowning in a sea of mind-numbing paperwork. But Henrik Tejsner, his friend and junior colleague, had assured him that a higher rank would bring more freedom. And now that Søren had Lily, he wanted greater flexibility at work.

But it just wasn’t true.

All Søren had got more of was trivial problems. For example, before Christmas he had wasted six weeks on the officially required procedure to get to the bottom of an incident where one officer had accused another of making racist comments in the lavatories during a staff party, and as soon as that case had been resolved, Søren had been told to draft a circular clarifying management guidelines for the use of private mobile telephones during working hours. He had wanted to scream. And, to top it all, someone had recently managed to nick eighty grams of confiscated cocaine from the evidence room in the basement under Bellahøj Police Station, which meant that Søren was forced to spend three long weeks investigating internal security measures, supervised by a surly civil servant from the National Police Force. But any number of people could have nicked that bag. The cleaners, an outsider, the police commissioner himself – what did Søren know? Well, one thing he did know was that he was desperate to be working an investigation hands-on again; he longed to knit backwards.

Besides, Søren suspected Henrik of having talked up the job of deputy chief superintendent purely so that Henrik himself would be considered for superintendent if Søren was promoted. And that was exactly what had happened. Three weeks after Søren’s promotion, Henrik had been appointed superintendent at the Violent Crimes Unit.

*

Søren had met Anna during his investigation of ‘the campus murders’, as the media had dubbed the bizarre killings, first, of Anna’s supervisor at the Institute of Biology and then, shortly afterwards, her best friend Johannes. Søren had fallen head over heels in love with her and not cared that it was unprofessional. Unfortunately, his feelings didn’t appear to have been reciprocated in the slightest. When everyone of interest had been interviewed, the police report filed and the trial finished, Søren had risked emailing Anna, tentatively suggesting dinner. She had replied with an email consisting of just two letters:

No.

He had stared at the screen in amazement and concluded that she had a rare talent for antagonism. The only problem was that he couldn’t stop thinking about her. After another three weeks, and Henrik’s advice to ‘forget about that drama queen’, he decided to lay siege to her. He started inventing all sorts of excuses, both plausible and implausible, to see her. At lunchtime he would turn up with sandwiches at the Museum of Natural History where Anna was now a PhD student. ‘I’ve already eaten,’ she would say suspiciously, as he munched away and tried to keep the conversation going by asking her about her research. He invited her to the cinema every day for a week and received seven refusals. He started doing his shopping at the Kvickly supermarket on Falkoner Allé, and when he bumped into Anna and Lily, he would exclaim, ‘Fancy meeting you here!’ and would then insist on giving them a lift home afterwards. But it was no use: Anna’s frostiness didn’t thaw. So Søren ratcheted up the charm another notch. When they ran into each other in Kvickly for the fourth time that week, and Søren made no attempt to hide that he had been standing behind a shelf of tinned food spying on them for some time, Anna gave him a resigned look, said, ‘Anyone would think you’d taken a second job as a shelf stacker,’ and agreed to go to the cinema with him – once. She had held up her hand and shown him one finger.

Three cinema trips later they kissed on St Hans Torv and the following weekend they went to bed. Søren was delirious with happiness. He had never had sex like this before. Anna lunged at him, and when she had come, she rolled away from him, panting, demanding to be left alone. Søren was quite content to be put out to pasture for a while because, though the act itself had been too fierce and strange for intimacy, it beat peeping at her from behind a supermarket shelf. But after a couple of weeks, he began to long for her to open up and let him in.

It happened very suddenly. One night she didn’t roll away from him. Søren lay completely still for fear of breaking the spell and realised that Anna was listening carefully to his heart. She did that five dates in a row before she raised her hand and put it on his chest.

‘What is this?’ she said, in a low voice. ‘Just a bit of fun or are you serious? Because I can’t bear . . . to be that unhappy again.’ It was just as well that it was dark so that no one could see the huge smile on Søren’s face.

‘Anna, I’m very much in love with you,’ he said.

*

Just over two years had passed since then. Anna had bought a half-share in his house in Humlebæk, they had written wills in favour of each other, and Søren had named Anna as his beneficiary on his pension. Everyone would look at their life and say, ‘So, you won her over in the end, eh, Søren Marhauge?’

But Søren himself wasn’t quite so sure.

Anna was married to her academic career and would go off to the university at the drop of a hat. When she talked about her research, her eyes came alive. The biomechanics of vertebrates reached parts of Anna that Søren couldn’t. When she was at home, she tended to lie on the floor drawing pictures with Lily while they listened to audio books or she would read on the sofa or bake a cake. She was physically there, but she wasn’t present, at least not to him. He was starting to doubt that she really loved him.

The very thought was terrifying.

Lily was still so young. If he and Anna broke up, Lily would forget him while he would never be able to forget her. And the thought of Anna with another man . . . Anders T., for example. Anna’s fellow PhD student was in his late twenties and had an irritatingly casual manner, as if he had just parked his surfboard on the beach while he carried out some important research before trekking around Annapurna in a ripped T-shirt. Søren couldn’t think of a more ridiculous sport for a Dane than surfing.

‘Well, he does spend a lot of time in Australia, actually,’ Anna had informed him.

*

To begin with, Søren had loved the way Anna threw herself into anything she did. She would lose herself completely in a book and, on the rare occasions that she ventured into the kitchen, she would go all out to cook some ambitious French dish that took hours, only to chuck the whole thing into the bin because some aspect of it had failed. Anna did everything at breakneck speed. In her he recognised himself as he used to be. Back when he, too, had been married to his work and his relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Vibe, had been a pleasing backdrop rather than taking centre stage in his life.

Søren was starting to realise that he was most definitely not the centre of Anna’s life. At the same time, he had stopped being quite so immersed in being a police officer, or at least in being a deputy chief superintendent. All he cared about was Anna and Lily. It troubled him.

Anna and he argued a lot. Frequently. Too frequently. They didn’t argue when Lily was awake, but there was constant high-voltage tension between them and it could explode in a split second. In the kitchen, when Lily was watching children’s television in the living room, Anna would snap at him because it was getting late. Søren had never hit a woman. He had barely had an argument with one. But Anna could rile him: when she started sulking and looked highly combustible, he couldn’t stop himself striking a metaphorical match and flicking it in her direction. An arsonist could not have hoped for greater success. Anna would spin around when he baited her, her eyes blazing with rage, and he would be overcome by a strong urge to put in her place. What he did do was grab her and half turn her towards him. ‘Bloody well relax, will you? There’s no need to get so pissed off over a little thing like that,’ he would hiss in her ear, so that Lily wouldn’t hear.

Anna would respond by unbuttoning her jeans and he would unzip his and enter her deeply, it took only ten seconds, and it was vitally important that they did not drown the adventures of Bamse and Kylling on the telly, so Søren had to keep all the noise in his head. Nothing more was said. As they buttoned themselves up afterwards, they looked at each other, placated.

The earth was smouldering.

Then, for a little while, the mood would be lighter. Anna would pour him a glass of wine, stroke his neck and call Lily, who would march into the kitchen with her doll’s pram and Ib, her furry caterpillar, and announce that she was hungry. They would eat and Ib would join them at the table in his jam-jar next to Lily’s plate. Søren could still smell Anna when he raised his fork to his mouth, and he had no idea what the hell was going on.

Søren never discussed Anna with anyone. He hadn’t discussed his ex-girlfriend, Vibe, with anyone either, not even when their relationship was breaking down and they had split up. Henrik always chided him for it. Henrik himself had been married for twenty years to Jeanette and, after a rocky patch when Henrik had had an affair, they had ironed out their differences; as a result, Søren now received regular updates on how ‘bloody brilliant it is that Jeanette has started having Brazilians’ and ‘The woman wants new tits now, would you believe it?’ Henrik had whispered the latter and looked terribly pleased with himself. Last year he had even announced that there was ‘an afterthought in the oven’, even though he and his wife already had two teenage girls who drove him crazy.

‘Why don’t we ever swap stories about the wimmin in our lives?’ Henrik asked, with a big, macho grin. But since Søren had already heard all the stories about Jeanette there were to know, he knew that Henrik was really asking why Søren never volunteered information about his relationship with Anna.

‘Anna is an ocean,’ Søren tried, one day, when he was still seething from last night’s row with her.

Henrik had looked at him for a long time, then said, ‘An ocean? What the hell are you on about, mate?’

Henrik had nicknamed Anna ‘Tiger Pussy’, and Søren knew that if he ever tried to explain his comparison Henrik would curl his hands into two claws, paw the air and say, ‘Miaow, those bitches!’

But Anna wasn’t a bitch. She was a force of nature.

*

Whenever Søren watched Thomas walk down the flagstone path holding Lily’s hand, he knew perfectly well why Thomas had dropped the Anna-and-Lily project. It took the courage of a lion to be with Anna, and Thomas was fundamentally a lightweight who could not cope with Anna’s sparring.

‘Don’t waste your breath, sweetheart,’ Anna would say, and hug him from behind as Søren gazed at the flagstone path in front of their house.

‘But I’m her dad,’ he mumbled.

‘Being a dad isn’t about being a sperm donor,’ Anna replied, ‘but about the next eighteen years. Of course you’re Lily’s dad.’

Søren had made this his one condition from the start of their relationship. Anna could date him as casually, as bizarrely as she wanted to and they could spend the night together when Lily was with Anna’s parents, but if he was to stay over when Lily was at home, different rules would apply. If he was to get to know Lily, there could be no restrictions. He wanted the right to love Lily, and she should have the right to risk loving him. It meant that if he and Anna were to go their separate ways, Søren would still be in Lily’s life.

A few months later, when Anna and Lily had moved in with him, Søren had fenced off the pond at the bottom of the garden that bordered the forest, fixed a padlock on the tool shed and put up jungle wallpaper in the bedroom that was to be Lily’s. He unscrewed the sign saying ‘Marhauge’ on the front door and replaced it with a new one.

‘Nor and Marhauge,’ Anna said contentedly. ‘It sounds like a karate chop. Highly effective.’

*

On the morning of 18 March, Søren was sitting in his office at Bellahøj Police Station waiting impatiently for information from the Institute of Forensic Medicine. The medical examiner, Bøje Knudsen, had promised to get back to him on Monday, but now it was Thursday. Søren knew Bøje was hard to track down – the man didn’t even carry a mobile phone – but he was usually quick to respond to emails. Now he was unresponsive on all channels and Søren knew why. A series of violent rapes in the Kødbyen district demanded all police resources. The victims were young female students, and one of them had turned out to be the goddaughter of the justice secretary, so the assaults received considerable attention from both politicians and the media. When one of the girls had died from her injuries over the weekend, the case had gone viral, and Station City in central Copenhagen had requested assistance from Bellahøj. Which they had got, of course. Everyone was rushed off their feet. But Søren was still stuck with an unfinished case involving a ninety-two-year-old woman who had been beaten up in her home by burglars looking for jewellery; she had since died in hospital. They had arrested the burglars and the case was straightforward. But the woman’s family called the police every day to find out when her body would be released for burial. What could Søren tell them? That Bøje was too busy to sign a piece of paper? It was unlike Bøje to treat ordinary Danes so insensitively. He hated snobbery. It had been one of the main reasons why he had opted for demotion, as he put it, and had quit his job as state pathologist last year and gone back to being a bog-standard medical examiner.

‘All I want,’ Bøje had said, when Søren had asked him, ‘is to wield my scalpel like I used to, where all bodies are equal. It’s back to basics for me.’

Søren had envied him, but it seemed that Bøje was just as snowed under now as when he had been the state pathologist. Søren decided that, unless Bøje called him very soon, he would have to swing by the Institute of Forensic Medicine himself.

Watching a hopeless morning briefing, in which Henrik had issued a frantic mess of contradictory orders as he distributed that day’s assignments, had done nothing to improve Søren’s mood. Henrik was stressed and clearly not just because he had had to lend officers to Station City. His forehead was glistening, he was irritable and, rather than spread calm and show leadership of his investigation team, he exuded anxiety. Henrik was actually a good police officer. He didn’t deliver big, insightful breakthroughs, but he was a solid team player and particularly handy in any situation that required some muscle. His language could make even a sailor blush and on the street he had ice in his veins. But promoting him to management had been a mistake.

After the campus murders, Henrik and Søren’s friendship had temporarily changed for the better. It had become serious, more forbearing, more Søren. But the respect Søren had developed for Henrik was dwindling, not least because Henrik was constantly sniping at him. When Søren was a superintendent, he had become famous all over Denmark for his investigative method of knitting backwards, a private metaphor that Søren had accidentally used in an interview in the Politiken newspaper. The expression had subsequently come into common use. Søren based his starting point on the impenetrability of the mystery, he had explained to the journalist, then worked his way backwards by unravelling what he saw. Eventually he would find himself back at the beginning and, in most cases, would know the identity of the killer. Since then he had come across the term in the newspapers several times. Young officers at the police academy were even taught the method, and he was proud of that, obviously. But it had also led to pranks at the station; for example, someone had recently stuck two crossed jumbo knitting needles on Søren’s office door. No offence had been intended, but Henrik regarded these innocent jokes as his carte blanche for constant teasing.

‘Time to put away your crochet hooks and other outdated investigative methods,’ he had quipped that very morning, ‘and knuckle down, boys and girls.’

Fortunately no one had thought it was funny.

Outside work, however, Henrik was nowhere near as cocky. Six months earlier, when he had been promoted to superintendent, he had started ringing Søren at all hours to discuss a rape case in north-west Copenhagen. The victim was a girl of the same age as Henrik’s younger daughter, who had been beaten so badly that she was now in a coma. The police had the rapist’s DNA, but as his profile was not in the DNA register and there was very little other evidence, the investigation was at a standstill. It was a hard case to take on as your first, especially because the media were following it closely. Henrik called Søren day and night to ask for advice. When the girl died shortly afterwards, the media went crazy. ‘Sometimes that’s just how it is,’ Søren assured Henrik. ‘You’ve done everything you can so now you have to move on and ignore the media frenzy. It won’t last.’ Søren told himself that his words had had some effect, but Henrik kept calling him. ‘Hi, it’s only me, Henrik,’ had long since become a standing joke in Søren’s house. Henrik was only calling to find out what Søren would have done about this and what Søren thought about that, and if Søren really had fallen foul of journalists all the time. And, as for the amount of paperwork, it was ridiculous. You might have warned me that life as a superintendent is a chronic state of stress. Just get on with it? Easy for you to say. Being senior management is a cushy number. ‘But what can I do about it?’ Henrik had said, sounding as if he felt sorry for himself when he called on Monday evening. He had been asked to send four of his twelve officers to Station City to assist.

‘While those amateurs are slacking at Station City and getting on the front page of Ekstra Bladet, I spend my whole day in front of a computer,’ Henrik complained. ‘Anyone would think I was a secretary, not a superintendent.’

‘Sometimes it’s just the way it is, Henrik. Some weeks it’s slow and steady, then all the criminals decide to strike at once, all hell breaks loose and your feet don’t touch the ground. It’s part of the job.’

‘I haven’t slept for four bloody nights,’ Henrik said. ‘When I finally get to bed, I can’t shut my brain down.’

But the next morning Henrik had shouted something sarcastic to Søren across the room when he turned up for work and their relationship had soured again.

Now the corridors at the back of Bellahøj Police Station where the Violent Crimes Unit was located had fallen silent. While Søren waited for the call from the Institute of Forensic Medicine, he drew a pie chart of his family life. He picked Lily up from nursery three times a week, no later than four o’clock so Anna could work late at the Institute of Biology, and he looked after her every Saturday when Anna would cycle to the university initially just for a couple of hours, but invariably she came back at seven in the evening. That made 19.5 hours a week. Then there was the one hour he had with Lily every morning, which made it 24.5 hours a week in total, plus sundry times when Anna would leave early or call home to let him know she would be late. He then started calculating how many hours he was with Anna. They rarely went to bed before midnight and, if he deducted putting Lily to bed, laundry and clearing up after dinner, that made it 3.5 hours a day, less the time they were in the same house, but doing different things; it meant that ‘net time with Anna’, as he wrote, equalled 12.5 hours per week. He stared at the number. Where was Anna during all those other hours? At the faculty, of course, where she was writing her PhD in ‘Terrestrial Movement and Biomechanics in Mammals and Dinosaurs’, which Søren had taught himself to reel off whenever someone asked him what his girlfriend did. But where exactly was she when she was there? Away with the fairies in her own head, completely immersed in her subject, lost to the world. Passionately lost to the world. Sitting next to Anders T. and his bulging biceps, one of which was tattooed with the poncy motto ‘carpe diem’ because, well, it would be, wouldn’t it?

And then there was Søren. With his greying temples and budding spare tyre. If he didn’t pull himself together soon, he would be summoned to Chief Superintendent Jørgensen’s office and asked to explain himself. What do you think you’re doing, Søren? Søren caught himself fantasising about the scenario. Finally he would have the chance to say it out loud: I don’t want to be senior management. I want to move down the ranks, please. I want to be a police officer again.

When Bøje finally called, it took him less than five minutes to give the green light to the old lady’s family. The body could be released. Bøje sounded pressured and hung up before Søren had had time to moan about the slow response time. The telephone rang again immediately. This time it was Henrik.

‘Tell me, did you drop your mobile down the bog? I’ve called you eight times. I want you to know it’s the last time I share a car with that tosser,’ he ranted.

It was Søren’s job to pair off the officers, and that morning he had put Henrik with one of the unit’s older men, Per Molstrup, partly to wind Henrik up because Molstrup wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Søren could hear Molstrup chuckle in the background.

‘He’s eaten pickled onions.’ Molstrup laughed even louder.

‘Anything else? I’m rather busy.’

‘Yeah, right,’ Henrik said. ‘He says he’s rather busy,’ Henrik announced to Molstrup in a stage whisper. Søren was about to hang up.

‘We’re outside the Institute of Biology and—’ Henrik said.

‘What are you doing there?’ Søren managed, before all his internal orga