‘Don’t you think you lot have done enough in the past twenty-four hours to put the public’s confidence in the police in jeopardy?’ Dineke Vegen adds while Viggo Haugen seems lost for words for once.

Jounas Smeed, on the other hand, has no trouble finding his.

‘Why don’t you focus your energy on something that at least has the appearance of plausibility?’ he says. ‘Or maybe you’d like us to throw every crippled and slow-witted man we can find in the nick?’

‘Then who would run this place,’ Karen mutters quietly.

But not quietly enough.

Viggo Haugen frowns and shakes his head slowly.

‘I find this troubling, Eiken,’ he says. ‘Very troubling.’

*

Karl Björken keeps his mouth shut. Probably grateful the dunce’s cap has temporarily been passed to me, Karen grumbles inwardly.

She’d been given no opportunity to explain her reasoning once Freske’s name had come up.

Wrong time, terrible timing. She should definitely have kept her mouth shut.

Karl Björken says nothing while he and Karen leave the prosecutor’s office and walk down the hallway like two chastised schoolchildren. Karen doesn’t break the silence until the lift doors slowly slide shut behind them.

‘That went really well, don’t you think?’ she says.

Karl Björken makes no reply.

The fact that Martin Talliksen is hardly capable of raping women with broken glass bottles is, in other words, well established long before Sören Larsen calls from forensics the next day to tell them he has the results of the swab.

‘No match with the blood on the bottle. And this one contained chocolate milk, by the way, in case you were wondering.’

Chapter 30

30

Maybe it would have been better in the kitchen back home, after all, she thinks when she once again pushes open the door to the Hare and Crow and the smell of Arild Rasmussen’s new air purifier greets her from the bathroom.

No, she takes it back. What if Sigrid were to decide she wanted to spend the night at home for once. This is better. All things considered. Even the little voice in her head telling her she can still let the door swing shut, turn around, and drive away. Blame work.

The pub is still almost empty, but it’s bound to fill up before long. Worst-case scenario, they’ll have to take it outside, where the tables are further apart. Granted, it’s no longer particularly warm, but at least the rain seems to have stopped. This is a conversation that needs to be kept from more ears than just Sigrid’s. A conversation she has been forced into by her promise to Leo last night.

‘Not now,’ she’d said when he’d just came straight out and asked. ‘We can talk about it tomorrow.’

Or not at all.