The Killing - 01 - The Killing Read Free

undercover, she thought. And maybe had. She remembered the way Buchard spoke to him. Street thug. Cop. Meyer could play either.
    ‘I said . . .’
    ‘You should see me, Lund. Truly. Before you go. My gift to the Swedes.’
    He took the card from her fingers. Read it.
    ‘Theis Birk Larsen.’
    Sarah Lund turned one more circle and took in the yellow grass, the ditches and the woods.
    ‘I’ll drive,’ she said.
    Pernille perched above his big chest laughing like a child.
    Half-dressed on the kitchen floor in the middle of a working morning. That was Theis’s idea, like most things.
    ‘Get dressed,’ she ordered and rolled off him, rose to her feet. ‘Go to work, you beast.’
    He grinned like the tearaway teenager she still remembered. Then climbed back into his bright-red bib overalls. Forty-four, ginger hair turning grey, mutton-chop sideburns reaching down to his broad chin, face ready to switch from hot to cold then back to its usual immobile in an instant.
    Pernille was one year younger, a busy woman, still in shape after three children, enough to catch his eye as easily as she had twenty years before when they first met.
    She watched him clamber into his heavy uniform then looked around the little apartment.
    Nanna had been in her belly when they moved to Vesterbro. In her belly when they married. Here, in this bright, colourful room, pot plants in the window, photographs on the wall, full of the mess of family life, they raised her. From squawking baby to beautiful teen, joined, after too long an interval, by Emil and Anton, now seven and six.
    Their quarters stood above the busy depot of the Birk Larsen transport company. The place downstairs was more ordered than the cramped rooms in which they lived, five of them, forever in each other’s way. A jumbled mess of mementoes, drawings, toys and clutter.
    Pernille looked at the herbs on the window, the way the green light shone through them.
    Full of life.
    ‘Nanna’s going to need an apartment soon,’ she said, straightening her long chestnut hair. ‘We can put down a deposit, can’t we?’
    He grunted with laughter.
    ‘You choose your moments. She can choose hers. Let Nanna finish school first.’
    ‘Theis . . .’
    She wound herself back into his burly arms, looked into his face. Some people were scared of Theis Birk Larsen. Not her.
    ‘Maybe it won’t be needed,’ he said.
    His rough face creased in a crafty, teasing grin.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Secret.’
    ‘Tell me!’ Pernille cried and punched his chest with her clenched fist.
    ‘Then it wouldn’t be a secret.’
    He walked down the stairs into the depot. She followed.
    Trucks and men, pallets and shrink-wrapped goods, inventory lists and timetables.
    The floorboards always creaked. Maybe she’d cried out. They’d heard. She could see it in their grinning faces. Vagn Skærbæk, Theis’s oldest friend, who predated even her, tipped an imaginary hat.
    ‘Tell me!’ she ordered, taking his old black leather coat from the hook.
    Birk Larsen put on the jacket, pulled out the familiar black woollen cap, set it on his head. Red on the inside, black on the out. He seemed to live inside this uniform. It made him look like a truculent red-chested bull seal, happy with his territory, ready to fight off all intruders.
    A glance at the clipboard, a tick against a destination, then he called Vagn Skærbæk to the nearest van. Scarlet too, and like the uniforms it had the name Birk Larsen on the side. Like the red Christiania tricycle with the box on it that Skærbæk kept running eighteen years after they bought it to ferry Nanna round the city.
    Birk Larsen. Patriarch of a modest, happy dynasty. King of his small quarter in Vesterbro.
    One clap of his giant hands, barked orders. Then he left.
    Pernille Birk Larsen stood there till the men went back to work. There was a tax return to finish. Money to be paid and that was never welcome. Money to be hidden too. No one gave the government everything if they