‘Yes, until we know more. Find out if there’s reason to suspect a crime. We’ll hold off on making it public, but you’ll have to find out as much as you can in the meantime. Talk to anyone she was in contact with, relatives, mobile phone traffic, ferries, flights, possible drug abuse, suicidal tendencies, and so on; you know the drill. Whatever you can do on your own. But be bloody discreet. We don’t want to stir things up for no reason.’

Nor do we want to be remembered as the idiots who waited too long, Karen thinks to herself. Out loud she says:

‘I’ll see what I can dig up, but I’m at least going to need someone with me to—’

Karen is interrupted by Jounas Smeed’s phone. She leans back and watches her boss listen to the person on the other end. Waits for him to finish the call to confirm that she will have the help of a colleague in her ‘discreet investigation’. But when she sees his jaw clench and his eyes flash with anger before he runs a hand across his forehead, she knows.

She sits in absolute silence at the edge of her seat, listening while Jounas Smeed asks the questions that confirm what she suspects.

‘Is she alive?’ she asks when he finally hangs up.

Chapter 5

5

Jounas Smeed glances impatiently at his watch when Cornelis Loots, the last person to arrive, closes the door to the CID’s largest conference room behind him.

It has been exactly two minutes since Smeed put the receiver down, opened the glass door to his office, and bellowed, ‘There’s been another attack. Everyone in four!’

‘All right,’ he says now and looks at the people gathered around the table. ‘It appears the Moerbeck Swine has come out of hibernation.’

No one points out that their internal nickname for the perpetrator no longer makes sense. The first couple of attacks happened in Moerbeck and the name stuck. The fact that he has since expanded his hunting grounds hasn’t changed it.

Everyone is quiet while the Head of Doggerland’s Criminal Investigation Division looks down at his laptop and then starts to share the preliminary facts of the case.

‘Just under half an hour ago, a call came in. A seemingly lifeless man had been discovered by a passer-by in a shrubbery next to the footpath around Lindby Lake up in Lemdal.’

No one asks why the person in question had gone rummaging through a shrubbery, they simply assume whoever found the body was a dog owner investigating what had drawn their mutt’s attention.

And no one asks why thirty minutes had passed from when the call came in to when the news reached the CID. They know they won’t have to wait long for the explanation, moronic as it may be.

That’s usually the way of it.