Death Sentence Read Free Page B

age of twenty-six. He was in the habit of saying that his experiences in Iraq had aged him forty years, so technically he had reached retirement age.
    He kept his army haircut and usually wore camouflage clothes and army boots, possibly out of habit, but more I suspect because it was important to him to remind himself and those around him of his past.
    The mental calculations I had done on the way home were still buzzing around my head. I checked the stack of In the Red Zone that was on my desk. My publishers appeared to have short-changed me by one book on this occasion. At any rate, I’d given away four, but only twenty-five copies remained, including the one I had taken out on to the terrace earlier.
    These days I’m rather wary of handing out copies of a new novel until it has been reviewed, so it was unlikely I’d given one away and forgotten about it. In the past I had given away books when drunk, sometimes with preposterous dedications to entice the recipient into bed, but it was several years since I had last done that.
    I poured myself a whisky, which I knocked back before calling Verner. He wasn’t back from work yet, his wife said, so I asked her to get him to call me. For the first time since moving to the cottage, I was actually waiting for the telephone to ring.
    Which it did after another two whiskies.
    Verner had worked late to find out more about the Gilleleje murder. He got a bit annoyed when I told him I had been to the marina. He couldn’t see why I would want to do that; on the contrary, he said, I ought to stay away to avoid suspicion. But I had nothing to hide, and I reckon the real reason for his anger was that he thought I didn’t trust him. It was a poor start to the conversation, but after I made a couple of placatory remarks, he got to the point.
    ‘I’ve got some bad news for you,’ he began. ‘Turns out the dead woman wasn’t a redhead after all.’
    ‘And you call that bad news?’ I burst out. ‘That’s brilliant!’
    ‘Not really. She has short black hair, but when they found her, she was wearing a red wig.’ He waited a couple of seconds for the penny to drop. ‘The killer put her in that wig to make her look like the woman in your book.’
    I didn’t interrupt him again.
    Verner told me someone had reported seeing light in the water last night. A couple of divers were sent to investigate this morning and had discovered the body. The light originated from a powerful diving lamp aimed straight up at the surface and it had clearly been placed there to make sure she was found. No one appeared to have noticed any boats anchored in the area.
    The police believed the woman had been dead for thirty-six hours when they found her, and they established that she had been alive when she was immersed and would probably have been conscious for at least fifteen minutes before she suffocated to death. The cuts to the body were caused by a sharp knife or scalpel and inflicted underwater.
    In my book I had given the victim those cuts to attract small fish so she would feel them nibbling little chunks off her, but Verner told me there were very few bites to the body and they definitely hadn’t been inflicted while she was alive. Somehow I couldn’t help feeling annoyed about this difference.
    ‘Do you know who she was?’ I asked.
    ‘A local girl,’ Verner replied. ‘She worked in a bookshop in Gilleleje High Street. Mona something; I don’t remember her surname.’
    My heart skipped a beat.
    ‘Mona Weis?’ I said.
    Silence down the other end of the telephone.
    Then, ‘Yes … do you know her?’
    ‘You just told me she worked in a bookshop in Gilleleje. I’ve signed books there a couple of times and I’ve met her, that’s all.’
    ‘Hmm,’ Verner grunted. ‘And yet you can remember her surname?’
    To my ears his question was tinged with a certain amount of suspicion, but then again he is a copper.
    ‘It’s an interesting name,’ I replied. ‘Authors collect interesting