Trophy

by Steffen Jacobsen

Genres: Traditional Mysteries; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

For Fans of Jo Nesbø, Stieg Larsson, and Henning Mankell, a Gripping Nordic Thriller That Was a Bestseller in Denmark After the death of her industrialist father, Elizabeth Caspersen finds a compromising DVD in his safe: it seems to show two people being hunted to their death in a gruesome, well-organized manhunt. Michael Sander, a private investigator and security consultant, is hired to find out who the victims are and why Caspersen was involved. Meanwhile, police investigator Lene Jensen is investigating the death of a decorated war veteran found hanged on his wedding night. Having recently come into money, the man appears to have been driven to suicide, but the question is, why? As the two cases begin to intertwine, Lene and Michael uncover a chilling secret: the existence of a hunting club formed by Denmark’s elite businessmen, where the targets are humans who are carefully selected and made to run for their lives. As their investigations take them into the darkest depths of humanity, uncovering crimes that reach further than they ever imagined, Lene and Michael must team up to overcome an opponent who outstrips them in resources and lethal danger—before they become the ones who are hunted.

Release date: July 4, 2017

Publisher: Arcade

Print pages: 378

Sample

Finnmark, northern Norway24 March 2011, 18.3570° 29´ 46.97˝ N 25° 43´ 57.34˝ E

When they found him, he was watching the sun go down behind the mountains west of Porsanger Fjord, knowing that he would never see it rise again. The cold chased the twilight across the water. A few steps in front of him, the plateau dropped steeply down to the sea. It was his only escape, but in the fading light and the state he was in, he knew he couldn’t make it down a hundred-metre-long wall with an overhang. This was the end and he chose to face it. He refused to be their quarry any longer.

He knew that the hunters had driven him towards this point all day: to the edge of nothing. He limped across loose granite scree, tossed aside the empty hunting rifle and sat down behind a boulder, polished by the wind into a comfortable curve that supported his back. Nearby a brook channelled meltwater away from the glaciers. It ran white, fast and smooth over the edge, hitting the shore of the fjord far below.

He could see headlights from the occasional vehicle on the other side of the fjord, less than fifteen kilometres away – and in another world. He tucked his hands under his armpits, rested his chin on his knees and inspected his hiking boot, which had been pierced by the client’s bullet several hours ago. His foot was still bleeding; he could see blood being forced through the bullet hole, but it no longer hurt very much. He pulled off the boot and gritted his teeth when he did the same with his sock, stiff with congealed blood. He wedged the boot under the boulder and covered it with gravel and pebbles. Perhaps one day someone would find it.

They were good boots. Like all of his equipment – the camouflage jacket and the hunting trousers, the fleece jumper, the thermal underwear and the compass. He also had a laminated map of Finnmark with headlands stretching out into the Barents Sea between Porsanger Fjord, Lakse Fjord and Tana Fjord.

The first stars and planets started to glow in the sky. He recognized Venus, but none of the others. Ingrid would know their names. The plants, animals and constellations were in her genes.

He pulled out his hands from his armpits, and although he wasn’t a man of faith, he folded them and said a prayer for his wife. Ingrid must have got away. She was faster on skis or on foot in the mountains than he had ever been, and he had managed to hold out so far. Until now.

They had embraced each other that afternoon when they heard the hunters’ whistles and realized that they had been found. He had kissed her cold lips and pushed her away, into the meltwater at the edge of the glacier. She hadn’t wanted to leave him but he pushed her again, hard, so she almost tripped. He would stay in full view on the ridge so that the hunters would come after him. She was to move along the glacier and then up into the terrain. If she ran for the rest of the day and through the night, she would reach Lakselv by dawn.

Ingrid had put on the skis and shot like an arrow down the snow-covered slope before disappearing between the dense pines where she would be hidden from view. She would outrun them.

He had seen his wife for the last time at the top of an elevation and at the same time spotted the hunters as they appeared over the next hilltop. The afternoon sun was behind them and the hunters cast long shadows. The ones at the front had caught sight of him, their whistles echoing once more through the lowlands.

*

His Norwegian wife had taught him to love the bleak landscape of northern Norway. They hadn’t been to the mountains since the birth of their twins two years ago, and they couldn’t wait any longer. When they saw a weather forecast for Finnmark that promised calm, cloudless days, he persuaded his mother to have the twins and booked two seats on the plane from Copenhagen to Oslo – and onwards from Oslo to Lakselv.

There they had dined at the almost empty Porsanger Vertshus. It was early in the season and the hostess had been delighted to see them. Afterwards they had shared a bottle of good red wine in their room, made love under cold duvets and slept a heavy and carefree slumber.

The next morning they had walked north along the east shore of Porsanger Fjord, hitched a lift with a truck going to Väkkärä, and then headed into the mountains. Their plan was to hike thirty kilometres north-north-east to Kjæsvatnet, pitch their tent, do a bit of fishing, take a few pictures … just have a couple of days to themselves before returning to Lakselv.

They had walked under the spring sun, inhaling the scents which the thousands of lakes and moors, whose black ice cracked under their boots, released in the spring. He had caught a couple of winter-dopey trout in Kjæsvatnet and the fish lay heavy, cold and firm in his hands. He wrapped them in moss inside his creel and Ingrid lit a campfire. The frost made the trees creak, but they snuggled up in their sleeping bags close to the fire, leaning against the trunks of a small copse of birch while they ate.

Later that night he was woken up by the low, steady sound of a helicopter far away in the east, but thought nothing of it. They often heard helicopters fly patients to the hospitals in Kirkenes or Hammerfest, or taking supplies or crew to the oilfields in the North Sea. The county covered almost 18,000 square miles and was practically uninhabited, except for the two of them, a few windswept villages along the coast, the nomadic Sami and their reindeer.

He had fallen asleep again and had no clear recollection of waking up. From then on, everything was brief, disjointed fragments: a glimpse of a cold, starry night as their tent was cut from its frame above them; Ingrid’s short cry; a blue crackling flash. Pain and darkness. He couldn’t move a muscle, yet he could feel himself being lifted up in his sleeping bag and carried away under the stars.

Later he realized that they had been incapacitated with an electric stun gun. Just like in the movies.

The silhouette of the helicopter blacked out the sky above them. They were put on the floor inside it, and the aircraft wobbled as the men embarked.

Weightlessness. Transport.

Their kidnappers had not said one word, not to each other, not to Ingrid or to him. A few minutes later one of them leaned forwards with a syringe in his hand and stuck the needle through Ingrid’s sleeping bag into her thigh, and her semi-conscious whimpering stopped.

He had seen droplets of a clear liquid being forced out of a second syringe. Then the man had kneeled down by his head and found his arm inside the sleeping bag.

*

He regained consciousness after swimming towards a glowing rectangle, and found himself sitting naked on a concrete floor, shivering from the cold and looking at an empty window frame, which was brighter than the surrounding wall. His body must have woken up before his mind because he had managed to stay balanced on his buttocks and heels. His hands were blue and swollen under the tight cable-tie around his wrists. A steel wire connected the cable-tie to a ring in the floor.

Stone slabs lay piled to the rafters at one end of the room and he guessed that they must be in one of the many abandoned slate quarries in the region.

He heard a sigh, a scraping of nails on concrete next to him, and rolled onto his side so that his face would be the first thing Ingrid saw.

They were pressed against each other, as much as the wires allowed, when the door was opened. Two dark figures appeared with the low morning sun behind them. Slate crunched beneath their boots as they crossed the hall; they ignored his furious questions in Danish, English and Norwegian. When he started swearing at them, a gun was put to Ingrid’s head.

The bigger of the two men pulled him by the hair to a sitting positionand took out their passports from his jacket pocket. In English, but with a Scandinavian accent, the man had checked their age and asked about their weight, if they were on any kind of medication, and if they knew what their oxygen uptake was.

He had briefly let himself be fooled by the man’s calm, conversational tone. As his accomplice’s gun was removed from Ingrid’s head, he gathered a blob of saliva in his mouth and spat at his interrogator’s boot.

The man didn’t move. Not one word was exchanged between the two of them, but the heel of his partner’s boot landed with a sharp crack on Ingrid’s foot. She screamed, and as he threw himself away, against the wires, he received a kick to his stomach.

The man resumed his questions – and got his answers. The padlocks were unlocked, the cable-ties around their ankles cut, and they were pulled to their feet and led outside.

Ingrid had to be supported, but he insisted on walking unaided.

Four more men were standing in the yard between the quarry buildings: black ski masks, camouflage jackets and trousers, to blend in with the icy grey, black and dark green colours of the mountains.

He looked into the man’s brown eyes.

‘You think you’re real heroes, don’t you?’ he said in Danish.

The man’s eyes narrowed and the corners of his eyes disappeared into his crow’s feet, but he made no reply.

The cable-ties around their wrists were cut and he held Ingrid close. She tried to cover herself with her hands.

Clothes, boots, equipment and food had been laid out on a table made up of doors resting on trestles. They were ordered to put on thermal underwear, T-shirts, fleece jumpers, socks, camouflage jackets and trousers. The leader encouraged them to eat as much as they could of the pasta, muesli and bread on the table. It would be their last meal.

They had been bought by a client who would hunt them across the mountains for the next twenty-four hours, the brown-eyed leader informed them. It wasn’t personal. The client didn’t know who they were and they didn’t know who the client was. Other candidates had been considered, but the client had chosen them.

Ingrid buried her face in her hands, doubled up and sobbed. She kept saying the names of the twins over and over again.

He sensed movement behind a window. There was someone behind the filthy, broken pane. The blurred oval of a face, half shaded by a broad-brimmed hat.

Then the man slipped to one side and out of sight.

They would be given a two-hour head start, the leader continued. Then, if they were found within the timeframe, they would be executed by the client in whichever way he preferred. He pointed to a white, freestanding rock a couple of hundred metres away. At the foot of the rock they would find two pairs of skis and a hunting rifle with three cartridges in the magazine. He could use it if he wanted to. Did he know how to handle a rifle?

He nodded.

Ingrid collapsed and he pulled her brusquely to her feet. He led her between the buildings, past the heaps of slate and out into the terrain.

The sun released its grip on the mountains in the east as they started running.

*

He saw the reflections from their headlamps in the wet rocks in the brook and his heart started beating fast and hard. His bladder emptied and the warmth spread down his thighs. He swore from shame, his desperate fears for Ingrid, the unreality of it all.

Then he got up and stepped out from behind his boulder, clearly visible against the light evening sky behind him.

The hunters emerged from the darkness and he screamed at them. One of them was limping and he wished that he had hit the bastard in his heart and not in his thigh. One light shone harsher and more brightly than the headlamps and he shielded his eyes with his hands. A camera light. The arseholes were filming him.

The hunters stopped twenty metres away from him and started clapping in unison – at first quietly, then with more force. He bent down, picked up a rock and hurled it at them, falling short. There were seven men in the hunting party. The red and green beams of their laser sights danced playfully up and down his body, criss-crossing his heart.

Then they began singing – and his brain switched off. He was standing with his back to the abyss in one of the most deserted and remote landscapes in the world while his executioners bellowed, stomped and clapped their way through Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’. The men raised their voices. Their boots slammed down on the rock. The semi-circle opened to make way for the client. He stumbled forwards with his hunting rifle in his hands; he seemed to be hesitating: he lowered the barrel – only to raise it again.

He tried finding the client’s eyes below the broad-brimmed hat, searching for a glimpse of humanity, but was blinded by the floodlight. He shielded his eyes against it with his hands and couldn’t see Ingrid anywhere among them. A wild hope opened his throat and he screamed out in wild, wordless triumph.

The client bent double and threw up. He rested the butt of his rifle against the rocks and leaned on the barrel. The leader barked something short and sharp to him and he nodded and wiped his mouth.

Then the leader turned to his prey and tossed an object through the air in a languid arc.

Instinct made him reach out to catch the heavy, black, closed sack and he looked briefly at the silent, motionless men before he opened the sack and lifted out its content.

*

His world imploded. A moment later Kasper Hansen was dead.

She didn’t move at all or say one word during the three minutes the footage lasted, but she never stopped crying. Without trying to hide it. Michael didn’t stir, either.

He sat in the darkest corner of the library with his laptop on his knees as he watched the execution of a young man on a mountain. He heard men sing and saw an object fly through the air: a black sack tied with white cord. The hunted man caught the sack, stuck his hand inside it, and pulled out an object, which his body concealed from view.

The recording equipment was first-rate – picture and sound both crystal clear – and the camera was steady as it zoomed in on the man’s ashen face. He limped as he ran out into the darkness, pressing something to his chest. The singing ceased – and half a second later the rifle rang out.

Only one shot was fired and it was impossible to see whether the man was hit. Then the camera found his body on the narrow, stony shore below the cliff. The victim’s hand just about touched the water, but the object in the sack had disappeared. The light was turned off. Above the moonlit water he could see the starry night sky for a few seconds before the camera was also switched off.

Michael ejected the DVD from his computer, taking care to touch only the edge with his fingertips. Then he placed it on the keyboard and got up.

‘Do you have a lavatory I could use?’

She didn’t look at him. ‘Third door to the left … I’m sorry … I’m so sorry …’

The large house was cool, but sweat was breaking out between his shoulder blades. Michael walked down the passage with the high ceiling, locked the door to the bathroom behind him and splashed cold water on his face. His teeth chattered and his stomach churned, but he refused to throw up.

He had just seen a man hunted to his death, in sharp, natural colours, and he thought with a shudder about the indefinable, but chasm-deep difference between the most convincing Hollywood representations and the real thing.

However, it wasn’t the DVD that made him feel sick, though he didn’t doubt that the recording was genuine. It wasn’t the film. It was the song. It took him back to Grozny, the dead capital of Chechnya …

*

In September 2007 Michael and his regular partner on the job, Keith Mallory, had spent endless days in a rat-infested, partly collapsed church attic in a suburb of Grozny. Keith, who had a limp after a close encounter with a roadside bomb in Iraq, had been a major in a famous elite British regiment before becoming a senior consultant with S&W. He enjoyed literature, was Michael’s immediate superior, and they had become good friends.

The Brit said it was the strangest conflict he had ever seen. To the north, a few hundred metres from the church, rested and well-fed Russian forces waited passively, while to the south, Muslim rebels strolled around without a care in the world among the city ruins. A row of singing women swept the street between derelict and long-abandoned tenement houses. Everything was surreal and everyone seemed temporarily indifferent to each other. The people would appear to simply be enjoying the clear, warm late-summer weather and the lull between bouts of fighting.

Michael and Keith had reached a stalemate in their negotiations with the Fedayeen about a suitable ransom for a British Red Cross medical team whom the Chechens had abducted from a field hospital a couple of months earlier. S&W were negotiating on behalf of an international insurance company who counted the Red Cross among its clients. They had one suitcase full of used dollar bills for the hostage takers, and a smaller suitcase for the corrupt officer in the Russian Air Force who would arrange for a helicopter to pick them up when they needed to get the hostages and themselves across the border to Azerbaijan. They had a floor covered with a thick layer of dried pigeon droppings, a shortwave radio, plaster angels and icons that had been evacuated from the church space below, machine guns, ammunition, their kit, a roll of plastic bags which served as their latrine, plenty of water and astronaut food.

There was currently a few thousand dollars between offer and acceptance, but the issue had become a matter of pride, and was impeded by faltering chains of command.

‘He fishes ’cause he can’t fuck Lady Ashley,’ Michael remembered Keith saying a moment before the song began.

‘What?’

‘Jake Barnes, for Christ’s sake,’ Keith said, sounding tired as he pointed to Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the dog-eared paperback currently helping him pass the time.

‘Right.’

The former major sighed and put down the book. He was still hoping to persuade his young Danish colleague to read something other than weapons catalogues, ballistics tables and car magazines.

Then he tilted his head to one side. ‘Who’s singing, Mike?’

Michael had put his eye to the telescopic sight of the sniper rifle overlooking the Russian lines. Keith crawled under the low ceiling on his hands and knees and used his own binoculars.

Three hundred metres away a tank crew had grabbed a young Muslim mother and her daughter, who looked to be around seven. Spetnaz elite soldiers, easily recognizable in their blue-and-white striped T-shirts, jumped up and down on the tank and bounced and stomped their way through the old Queen classic ‘We Will Rock You’. The woman was thrown between the soldiers in front of the tank. They tore off one colourful embroidered piece of clothing after another. The daughter was sitting between the legs of a soldier on the turret, turning her face away. The soldier had forced the girl’s hands behind her back and put a gun to her neck while he tried to kiss her. By now the mother was naked, screaming, terrified.

Keith started pulling him away.

‘It’s not personal, Mike. It’s terror. Now get the hell away from that window!’

The first soldier raped the mother against the side of tank. His camouflage trousers lay bunched around his boots, and the back of the woman’s head bashed rhythmically against the armoured tank. Michael could see her limp arms and spread legs either side of the soldier’s pumping body. The soldier’s forearms and neck were tanned, while the rest of his body was white around his amateurish blue tattoos.

Four other men were queuing up.

The man on the turret had pushed his gun into the girl’s mouth while he unbuttoned his flies.

For the second time Keith had grabbed his arm hard. Michael knew that he could send a bullet through the rapist’s bobbing head from the church attic without hitting the mother.

But it meant losing the Red Cross team.

He had already slammed a cartridge into the chamber when Keith wrenched the weapon out of his hands. Then Keith Mallory had put on the headset, even though the radio was dead, and Michael crawled into the furthest, darkest corner of the attic and pressed his hands over his ears.

*

When he returned to the library, Elizabeth Caspersen was twisting a handkerchief hard between her fingers. He sat down on the armchair beside her, folded his hands in his lap and suppressed a shudder.

‘What’s your reaction to the film?’ she asked him.

‘I think the recording is real,’ he said, looking down at his hands. ‘What I’m saying is, I think someone filmed a crime. My guess is that the DVD must be some kind of hunting trophy.’

‘Oh, God.’

She looked at the ceiling, and fresh tears rolled down her face.

‘I presume that’s what you thought as well,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’

She stared at the handkerchief, wound around a finger.

‘Yes, only I was hoping … I don’t know what I was hoping. Yes, I was hoping that you’d say that it was staged, that it was a movie … Just a really weird movie.’

‘Where did you find it?’

She got up and walked over to a Venetian mirror, swung it out from the wall and pointed to a white steel door with a keypad.

‘My father’s lawyers are winding up his estate. We’ve emptied the safe deposit boxes in town; all that remained was his private safe.’

‘Did you know the code?’ he asked, wondering why the DVD had been kept in Caspersen’s private safe. In his view it belonged in a nuclear-proof underground bunker.

‘The undertaker. My father had the code tattooed on the inside of his upper arm.’

She blew her nose.

Michael frowned. ‘Really? If he went for a swim, anyone with a telephoto lens or good pair binoculars could –’

‘Only if they also knew that the numbers must be multiplied by eleven and divided by three then followed by his date of birth,’ she said.

‘Okay.’

He still thought it was too obvious: like having the dog’s name as the password for your computer.

‘What happened to his body?’

‘He had asked to be cremated.’

‘Was there an autopsy?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing. They said he had a coronary.’

‘I see …’

He rose and inspected the safe. It was a recent Chubb ProGuard model. An excellent safe, designed to be impossible to open in under three hours, even by Chubb’s own engineers. The door was white, smooth and undamaged.

‘Have you shown the film to anyone else?’

‘Of course not! I can’t even begin to understand that my father could do a thing like this. Although in some ways … unsurprising, isn’t it?’

‘What is?’

The tears dripped slowly from her eyelashes.

‘How the super-rich … I know how easy it is to lose touch with reality when you lead a sheltered life, as my parents did at the end. Neither he nor my mother knew the price of a pint of milk.’

‘I don’t know if it’s typical. We can’t even be sure that it was your father.’

She stared at him. ‘But then why would he have it lying around? It must be him!’

‘I can see half a sideburn, part of an ear, a hat and a bit of a sleeve, and a wrist,’ he objected gently. ‘It could be anyone.’

‘He had a hat like that! I know it was him.’

‘All hunters have hats like that,’ Michael said.

She swung open the door of the safe, took a flat jeweller’s box from a shelf and flipped open the lid. The dark blue silk was embossed with the words ‘Cartier-Paris’ in gold.

‘It was in here.’

‘I wish you hadn’t touched it,’ he said.

She looked at him, then it sank in and she nearly flung the box aside.

‘Easy now,’ he said.

Michael took a clear plastic bag from his shoulder bag and she dropped the box into it.

‘And I’m supposed to be a lawyer,’ she said. ‘Of course, fingerprints. God help us.’

‘And hairs, fibres, cells, dandruff and so on,’ he said. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s like a doctor ignoring a tumour about to grow through their own skin. It’s a kind of blindness.’

‘You can say that again,’ she said.

‘What do you want me to do with the DVD?’

She hesitated.

‘I want you to find out if that really is my father. I want you to find out the identity of the man they killed. And I want you to find out who else was there. That’s why you’re here. I have to know if that young man had relatives who need my help.’

‘Financially?’

‘In every way,’ she said. ‘How about you? Do you still want the job?’

He looked out of the window.

‘I’d like to take the job, even though it’s complicated and will require considerable outside assistance,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t say yes if I didn’t think I had a chance to work it out. The job doesn’t contravene my personal rules. Your father is dead and can’t be prosecuted.’

‘Not in this world,’ she muttered.

‘Quite. I’ll find out the victim’s identity and as far as the hunters are concerned, I’ll track them down, and when I do, they can be punished.’

‘If you can prove anything,’ the lawyer said. ‘Or make them confess.’

‘The latter might prove easier,’ he said. ‘My first impression is that they have military training. They use laser sights that are also available to civilians, but it seems unlikely that they would all come equipped with them if they were just a bunch of stir-crazy hunters on a quest to kill a random victim. You can also see the sleeve of the person standing next to the cameraman. That sleeve is from a military camouflage uniform. Then there are other, less specific factors … such as the song. I’m fairly certain that they’re soldiers, or ex-soldiers.’

‘Have you ever heard of hunting people as a sport? It’s insane. Sick.’

A safari with human prey? Michael had never heard of any such thing and previously he would have dismissed the suggestion as an urban myth, like the one about snuff movies on the Internet. Now he was faced with both, and he was sure that the film was real.

He also knew that some soldiers, despite remaining alive, never quite made it home. They had been different from the start, or the war had destroyed them. Some sought refuge in the wilderness as hermits; others found employment as consultants with security companies. In his career he had met several professional operators who had forgotten most things about this world.

‘I haven’t heard about it before,’ he said at last.

‘Do you have any idea where it might have taken place?’ she asked.

‘It’s an Arctic landscape,’ he said. ‘But that covers a multitude of sins, as you well know. It could be anywhere from Patagonia to Alaska, but the recording could also be from any mountainous region outside the Arctic. He’s screaming at them, but I can’t make out the individual words or the language.’

‘Can you get to the bottom of it?’ she asked, sounding despondent. ‘All of it?’

‘Yes, I believe so,’ Michael said.

‘How?’

‘I’ll examine the film on a series of digital photo programs. I have a hunch that I might be able to identify the crime scene from the constellations you can see just before they switch off the camera.’

Again she dried her eyes with the handkerchief and looked up at the vaulted ceiling.

‘Perhaps I should just go to the police.’

‘Perhaps.’ Michael smiled to encourage her. ‘But give me a couple of weeks first. I can’t exclude the possibility that it might be necessary or relevant to involve the police. They have some resources that I don’t. But they’re also bound by certain civilized rules which I’m not.’

‘Are you uncivilized?’

‘I can be fairly uncivilized.’

‘Fine. You have two weeks. What are you going to do with the jeweller’s box?’

‘Send it to a private forensic laboratory in Berne. If there are traces of anyone’s DNA on the box they’ll find it, and if there are fingerprints, apart from yours, they’ll find them too.’

‘You can’t send them the DVD,’ she said, sounding alarmed.

‘Of course not. But I can check myself whether there are any fingerprints other than yours on the disc. I’m no forensic expert, but I do have some iodine powder and a roll of tape.’

Elizabeth Caspersen nodded sceptically.

‘I had no idea that they even existed,’ she then said slowly. ‘Private forensic laboratories, I mean … but then again, I didn’t know that people like you existed either.

‘Money buys you anything you like in Switzerland,’ Michael said. ‘Which reminds me. You ought to get someone to go through your father’s private accounts. It would be interesting to know if he had transactions with Liechtenstein, the Channel Islands, the Cayman Islands or some other tax haven.’

She inflated her cheeks and let the air escape in a thin stream. ‘Of course. How far back do you want them to go?’

‘I’ll let you know as quickly as possible. May I see his guns, please?’

‘Of course.’

She made to get up, but sat down again.

‘I just don’t understand!’ she burst out. She pointed at the DVD. ‘How can anyone do that?’

‘You’re normal, Elizabeth. So, naturally, you don’t understand. I don’t understand it either, but I have hunted people – scum who deserved it. Anyone who lives a secluded life, like you say your father did, who only surrounds themselves with like-minded people, easily develops a sense of superiority and invulnerability. They no longer move in the ordinary, agreed reality, and they don’t feel that its laws apply to them.’

‘You mean billionaires?’

He flung out his hands. ‘Or politicians wh