But late at night, the sounds of drug dealing creep like whispers between the park benches, seeping into stairwells and access balconies, to the people who know full well there’s another world out there. A world that will never be theirs.

Karen pulls over on Långskeppsvej and studies the park. The April light has finally faded into dusk, making the scene unevenly lit. Some sections of the park are bathed in the blueish light of street lamps that haven’t been smashed yet, others are plunged into impenetrable darkness.

The shrubbery where the rapist attacked his first victim, where a shocked and bloody Sandrine Broe wandered about for God knows how long before she was spotted by a passer-by, is less than sixty feet away. Another couple of hundred yards beyond that is the entrance to the bike room where Loa Marklund was killed.

Now, in the temporary stillness between children playing and drug dealers coming out, the only people in sight are a few dog owners patiently waiting for their evening walks to yield results. The silence is only broken by a handful of locals walking briskly from the bus stop down by the main road. Karen watches them disperse and disappear into various buildings. As she leans forward to peer up at their exteriors, she’s struck by a sudden insight.

He lives here.

He was on foot for Sandrine and Loa. Only needed his moped to cover the distance to Odinswalla and Lemdal.

She has no proof of that; he might just as easily have come from adjacent neighbourhood Gaarda. Or any other goddamn neighbourhood. On foot, on a bike, in a car, or on a moped.

Karen Eiken Hornby doesn’t put a lot of store in ‘intuition’ or ‘gut feelings’, at least not where police work is concerned. Annoyed with herself, she starts the car up and tries to dismiss the idea.

I’d bet anything he lives here.

Then she drives home. When she turns out the lights in her house in Langevik and sets her clock radio, she has just over five hours before she has to wake up.

Chapter 16

16

Sweat makes her top cling to her back when she sits down on the chair across from the doctor who is studying the papers in front of her with a slight frown. Karen knows exactly what she’s in for.

The firearms test first thing in the morning had gone well, better than expected, even. But the rest of the day had been hell. She had let herself be ushered from the mammography to blood tests, urine samples, blood pressure cuffs, electrodes, and that bloody stationary bike.