Jounas Smeed gets up so quickly his office chair tips over and hits the wall behind him. The news that it was definitely Gundar Freske’s DNA on the bottle that made mincemeat of Anita Kollbar’s nether regions had come in just thirty minutes earlier. The warrant to arrest Freske minutes after that.

And now this.

He can’t take it in.

He hears Robbert Klaak take a deep breath and when he replies, his tone is defensive, bordering on defiant.

‘It’s like I told you, Freske must have scarpered. He’s certainly not here, anyway.’

‘And you’re in the flat now?’

‘Yes, what did you think? That we just hung around outside when he didn’t open the door? We’ve gone in and there’s no one here.’

‘So he could be bloody anywhere right now?’

‘I guess so. But he can’t have been gone long. Carlos says he saw him in the kitchen window overlooking the park about an hour before we went in. Hour and a half, tops.’

‘But how the fuck . . . ?’

*

And just like he wasted time asking the head of the surveillance team that had kept a watch on Freske’s home for almost two days pointless and accusatory questions, he himself is forced to give an account of the botched operation to Head of Police Viggo Haugen.

Unlike Robbert Klaak, however, Jounas Smeed understands the importance of keeping his tone respectful when speaking to his superiors. I’m either a better actor, or just a bigger coward, he thinks and steels himself for what he knows is coming once he rips the plaster off and says what needs to be said:

‘We’ve lost Freske.’

Instead of jumping out of his chair, not a natural choice for a man so short and round, Head of Police Viggo Haugen reacts by leaning back and opening his eyes wide while his face darkens.

‘Lost? How the fuck is that possible? Didn’t you put a car outside?’

‘Two, actually. One on Karpvej and one in the back where the park is. Freske must have gone through the basement and out on Trossvej. He probably knew he was being watched.’

‘How? I thought I made myself clear about you people being discreet.’

You did, Smeed agrees inwardly. Both the Head of Police and the prosecutor had been worried about the risk of Freske making real on his threat to report them for harassment. That was why they had ordered a stakeout while awaiting the DNA results.

‘And we were,’ he says. ‘Unmarked cars. Different ones every day, and not directly outside, but still with an unobstructed view.’

‘Unobstructed view? You really think this indicates an unobstructed view?’