How does that man always manage to ruin my mood? Karen wonders and drops into her office chair. She’d been in a wonderful mood.

She checks her watch. Twenty to nine. A quick skim of the latest reports is all she has time for before the morning meeting. She’s going to have to make up for lost time and read up on the details of the investigation as she goes along.

But at least I’m back in the game, she thinks to herself and clicks the icon that opens the Police Authority’s information and reporting platform. She manages to log in without a hitch. Maybe it’s true what the IT guys claimed the other day, that the system’s ‘teething problems’, which have had every police officer in the country tearing out their hair over the past twelve months, are now a thing of the past. Who would have thought? she muses.

*

At one minute to nine, when Karen Eiken Hornby takes a seat on one of the chairs around the long table in the largest of the unit’s conference rooms, the effects of her meeting with Jounas Smeed have already faded and what awaits her on Friday has been pleasantly suppressed. She’s in a terrific mood again.

Fifteen minutes later, she feels physically sick.

Some of the pictures she has seen before, but the sight of them now makes the revulsion she was prepared to feel morph into an odd buzzing noise. A bubbling, rank feeling her body wants to get rid of. Not so much because of what the images show; she has seen the aftermath of brutal violence before. Many times. It’s the searing hatred the perpetrator must have felt, which radiates from the big screen. A loathing so powerful her body instinctively reacts by producing the same toxin.

She swallows hard and takes a few deep breaths. Fixes her eyes on Karl Björken, who continues to talk through the buzzing.

A total of ten people are seated around the large conference table. In addition to Detective Inspectors Karl Björken, Karen Eiken Hornby, and Evald Johannisen, Detective Sergeant Cornelis Loots and Detective Constable Astrid Nielsen, PC Sara Inguldsen, Head of Forensics Sören Larsen, Coroner Kneought Brodal, and Prosecutor Dineke Vegen are present. And Jounas Smeed, who quietly slipped in twenty minutes into the meeting.

Karl Björken is going over the basic facts of the case, which seems to bore Kneought Brodal, who by turns glances at his watch, checks his phone, and stifles yet another yawn. His third.

‘Since Karen has just joined the team and Sara is new to the group, I appreciate that even you, Kneought, are able to endure listening to this brief summary without nodding off,’ Björken says and closes the presentation.

The coroner makes no answer, but looks even grumpier, if that’s possible.