Death Sentence Read Free

gaze towards the boats. ‘They came this morning. Loads of divers and police officers. At first, they told me to go away, but I kept slipping past them. They’ve given up trying to get rid of me now.’ He smiled and stuck out his chest.
    ‘And … the woman?’
    ‘She was completely white,’ he repeated. ‘There were chains around her and a stone.’
    ‘Did she have red hair?’
    Wide-eyed, he turned to look at me. ‘How did you know that?’
    I shrugged. ‘You just told me she was red as well.’
    He nodded. ‘She had red hair. But she was also red here and here.’ He made a cutting movement with his hand across his chest and then his throat. ‘And on her arms and legs.’
    I didn’t know what to say, or if I could even speak at all, so I turned to look at the boats. We stood like this for a couple of minutes until I cleared my throat and pointed to his binoculars.
    ‘That’s a very smart pair of binoculars you have there. Could I borrow them, please?’
    The boy nodded and lifted the binoculars over his head. ‘But I want them back if anything happens.’
    I put the binoculars to my eyes and zoomed in on the boats . In the rubber dinghy a man in a wetsuit was sitting down and holding a rope that trailed over the side and into the water. The dinghy was rocking precariously and every now and again he was forced to take one hand off the rope and grab hold of the gunwale for balance.
    Obviously I knew there wouldn’t be an outline of the body on the surface on the water, but I think I had expected something. At any rate, I felt disappointed. There should have been some evidence that a violent act had happened there, but the water revealed nothing, and only the boats and the buoys suggested the area was special.
    ‘What’s happening?’ the boy asked.
    ‘Nothing,’ I said and gave him back his binoculars.
    He lifted them to his eyes immediately to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.
    ‘Do you think there’s another one?’ His voice sounded hopeful.
    ‘There won’t be,’ I said and turned around to walk back to my car.
    ‘Are you a policeman or something?’ the boy called out, but I ignored him and carried on walking.
    As I passed the officers on the quay, they threw me a look filled with contempt.
    ‘Get a good eyeful, did you?’ one of them sneered as I passed them.
    I sympathized. Rubbernecking is tasteless, but I hadn’t come out of curiosity. At least, not the kind of curiosity that drives some people. I wasn’t here to get a rush of adrenaline at the sight of blood, bones, intestines and brain matter. Though they were my props when I depicted murder and mutilation in my books, my inspiration didn’t come from real-life accidents. Simply closing my eyes sufficed. The images my own brain could conjure up were more than enough.
    But, yes, I saw what I came to see in Gilleleje Marina.

3
    WHILE I DROVE back to the cottage, I tried to work out how many people had read In the Red Zone . My editor was the first person to read the script and I guessed that probably three or four other people at the publishing company, as well as a couple of bookclub editors, must have seen it. The book would be published in a few days; it had been printed, so the printers must have had access to it for a month or two. I had received thirty complimentary copies in the post and it was likely that several copies had been sent to reviewers and to bookshops as pre-orders. Of my thirty copies, I had sent one to Verner, given one to my neighbour, and sent one to my ex-wife and one to my parents.
    In total I estimated that somewhere between one and two hundred people had had access to the printed text of In the Red Zone , but both my publishers and the printers had the electronic version and that tends to appear in the strangest of places. I once received a printout of my sixth book, Nuclear Families , where the names of the victims had been replaced with mine and my family’s. I didn ’t take threats like that