The road curves gently, skirting the northern edge of Dunker. Karen catches a glimpse of the city lights before the view is blocked by the tall, barrack-like blocks of flats in Gaarda and Moerbeck. The photographs from the assault cases last autumn suddenly flash before her eyes. A series of rapes with sadistic undertones and one of the women died in the ambulance on the way to Thysted Hospital. No perpetrator has been arrested and no new attacks have been reported in the past two months, but the latter is probably just a matter of time. The bastard will no doubt be at it again as soon as spring arrives, she muses. Jounas Smeed had said what they all knew to be true, ‘Guys like this one usually manage to keep their cocks in their trousers so long as it’s freezing outside.’

She hadn’t been involved in that investigation. Instead, she’d almost died hunting down Susanne Smeed’s killer.

The memory of those events briefly threatens to overwhelm her before she can push down the feeling that she had been seconds and millimetres from death. Her good mood takes another knock when she spots the sign marking the Glitne exit. Maybe she should have called her friend Aylin again, not left it at one attempt the day before Christmas Eve, when she’d been put through to Aylin’s answerphone but hadn’t left a message. Instead, she’d sent a text saying, ‘Happy Christmas’ and ‘see you at Eirik and Kore’s on New Year’s’. She had deleted the last words ‘Say hi to Bo’ before sending the text. She doesn’t wish him a happy Christmas, or a happy anything else, for that matter. Bad enough that I have to see the bastard on New Year’s Eve, she grumbles to herself, that I’ll be forced to just sit there and keep up appearances while furtively studying Aylin for signs of the thing she so strenuously denies.

‘Of course he doesn’t hit me.’

Maybe that’s the truth. Maybe it isn’t.