‘NEW HEAVEN OG Syvende Disneyland – Sexomanisk Mickey Mouse’ by Jens Jørgen Thorsen was by no means an appealing painting. It actually looked like something Sleizner could have made himself at the age of four. A riot of bright colours, to all appearances randomly splattered across the canvas, except in one section where one could, with the application of considerable imagination, possibly discern a childish portrait of Mickey Mouse.
Thirty thousand Danish kronor he’d paid for it, convinced it would appreciate immensely. That was why he handled it ever so gingerly as he took it off the wall and placed it on the floor.
He searched the inside of the stretched canvas with both a torch and his fingers, but found neither hidden microphones nor anything else suspicious. He’d already checked the sofa cushions. And the potted plants, the lamps, the bookshelf and the bed. He’d even turned off all the lights and shone the torch at each and every mirror to make sure they hadn’t been swapped for transparent ones with hidden cameras rigged behind them.
But nowhere had he found anything to indicate that the flat was bugged, which was a good thing. As a matter of fact, he’d rolled strike after strike recently, not just managing to identify the Chinese fatso but also locating his place of residence and thereby stumbling across the Indian man who’d helped Dunja at the bank. In other words, he was so close he could almost taste the stale smell of her.
He should feel relieved and able to relax on the sofa with a glass of whisky and one of the latest films from The Club. But he was too wound up, and at the moment, his whole body was itching with frustration.
The pictures he’d found weren’t much to write home about. Grainy and in some cases completely blurry, taken in a flat, his flat. How the fuck had the miserable cunt managed it? He’d invested in both an alarm system and a top-of-the-range security door when he and Viveca moved into the flat five years ago. Now she’d moved back out and was living with some rich bloody swine out in Gentofte, and in a way he blamed Dunja for that, too.
And yet, she’d managed to get in somehow. He was in some of the pictures, buck naked, having just come out of the shower after a workout. Talk about intrusion and crossing the line, and how had he not noticed?
And it looked so bloody small in the pictures. It was fucking embarrassing. It was always like that after a workout, though he usually pulled on it in the shower to try to make it longer. Of course that was the moment she chose to take pictures. He was going to make her fucking eat it. She was going to goddam fucking suffer.
He walked over to the smoked-glass CD cabinet, picked an album by Sade and pushed the disc into the wall-mounted Bang & Olufsen player. If there was one thing that could make him calm down, it was Sade’s sensual vocals.
‘Smooth Operator’ was his absolute favourite from the album The Best of Sade. He didn’t care that it was a greatest hits album. People could look down their noses as much as they liked. He didn’t give a shit. His entire music collection consisted of greatest hits albums and to be perfectly honest, he’d never understood what was so wrong about cherry picking, about skipping the mediocre dross that was just filler anyway.
He sat down on the edge of the sofa, right in the acoustic sweet spot, and let Sade’s sexy groove fill the room while he focused on getting his breathing back to normal.
This was war and they were currently engaged in a game of cat and mouse where they were both trying to be the cat. That much was clear. But she’d crossed a line and now the ball was in his court.
He was going to scout her out and pin her down before announcing himself. And she was going to realize it was already too late. And that’s when the fun would begin. Just ending it as soon as he located her would feel as sloppy and undignified as a premature ejaculation. Much as he loathed her, she was still his favourite person to hate.
He wanted to draw it out and relish each successive step. He wanted to lull her into a false sense of security. Then, when he was truly ready, he’d pounce and enjoy seeing the shock in her eyes. Watching as it sank in that she was done for. That it didn’t matter how much she screamed for help because there was no Indian man and no Chinese fatso to rescue her.
But that was later. Right now, he needed to find out what she’d done to his flat, and how she’d been able to get in and sneak around even when he was home. He unlocked his phone to go through the pictures he’d found at the Indian man’s house one more time, but instead he lingered on one of Dunja walking through the lobby of Danske Bank in Malmö to cash her severance pay.
It was a picture of CCTV footage that had been both out of focus and grainy. But there she was, in her large trainers, ratty sweatpants and camouflage top. Along with the big earrings, the bright red lips and the shaved head, it was very different from what she’d looked like before. Gone were the bland, indecisive clothes, the timid eyes and the last few pounds of baby fat.
The slut had shed her skin and hideous though her new style was, he had to admit she looked tastier than ever. That made him both aroused and even more furious than before.
The phone suddenly vibrated in his hands, and he saw that he’d received a notification from his calendar app about a meeting on Wednesday afternoon. He clicked it and realized it was from that relentless IT bloke, Mikael Rønning. Security update of your mobile phone as agreed on Wednesday 27 June 2012 1–3 p.m. He had definitely not agreed to that.
If not for Sade’s soothing voice, he would have called that idiot up and yelled at him until he became a bed-wetter again. But as it was, he let it go and instead turned his attention to the pictures Dunja or her little Indian man had taken in his home, and as he did so, he suddenly noticed something he should have seen straight away.
Every picture was taken from more or less the same angle. Which was to say from the panorama windows, or, rather, from outside them. In other words, they hadn’t broken into his flat, they’d stood on the balcony and used the zoom. Granted, the balcony was bad enough, but it was still considerably better than having her snooping around his flat.
He chuckled and shook his head. Say what you want, she certainly knew how to keep a man on his toes. He was finally in a better mood. He’d thought he was going to have to crawl around on all fours all night, looking for hidden cameras. Suddenly, the night was young. Maybe he should do a quick workout at home, a few quick sets of push-ups, pull-ups and Turkish get-ups. Just to get the blood pumping before freshening up and heading over to The Club.
He turned Sade up and had already walked over to the exercise corner in front of the mirror wall when another message made his phone buzz. Hoping to be able to dismiss it as unimportant, he glanced at it while unrolling his gym mat and lining up his weights.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t something that could just be ignored. That was frustrating, to be sure, but at least it was also something that made him feel happier.
As the head of Copenhagen’s homicide unit, he obviously had access to all police databases and reports, as well as countless other documents by default. But since a year or two back, he’d made sure to implement a search function that allowed for the flagging of one or more search terms, and the moment any of them were inputted into a police or wider government database, he was notified by text.
It went without saying that his top two search terms at the moment were Dunja and Hougaard, closely followed by Qiang-Wei Hitomu Oisin. But none of those were in the message. Instead, it was two completely unrelated words that had become increasingly interesting to him since he’d saved the life of the man in question exactly one week ago during a police raid in Snekkersten.
He’d already received them once on Monday. That time, it had been about a visit to Helsingør Prison, which had immediately made him start contacting people and taking the necessary steps. Now, two days later, the same two words appeared again, and he wasn’t about to let them pass by unnoticed this time either.
Fabian and Risk.
The two words together.
That was all he needed.