Trophy by Steffen Jacobsen Read Free Book Online

sounds which stopped him in his tracks.
    ‘Hello?’
    The moist bubbles were interrupted by an abrupt sneeze.
    ‘This is Michael Sander …’
    ‘Did you hear that?’ his wife asked him.
    ‘Heard what?’
    ‘Julie said,
Daddy, how are you?
’
    ‘She’s eighteen months old, Sara. It sounded like someone stepped on the hamster.’
    ‘No, she really did say it, Michael.’
    ‘I’ll take your word for it.’
    ‘Are you smoking?’
    ‘Not at the moment,’ he said.
    ‘What did she want?’
    Her voice darkened.
    ‘A job,’ he said, wiping the sweat from his brow. ‘I said yes.’
    ‘Any travelling involved?’ she asked.
    ‘I think so.’
    He put down his shoulder bag and looked at a shop window.
    ‘Will you be gone long?’ she continued.
    Michael pulled off his tie and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.
    ‘I think so. It’s complicated.’
    ‘Dangerous?’
    ‘Yes.’
    He heard her put down the toddler, whose big brother, aged four, shouted something to the dog.
    ‘You take care of yourself,’ she said.
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘I love you,’ she said.
    ‘I love you, Sara.’
    *
    The lobby at the Admiral Hotel had Wi-Fi, and Michael found a quiet corner and sent a long e-mail to the forensic lab in Berne. Then he wrapped the plastic bag with the cartridgecase from Flemming Caspersen’s hunting rifle in tinfoil, asked the porter for a large, padded envelope, and put the bags with the whisky glass, the cartridge case, the fountain pen and the jeweller’s box inside it. He asked the porter to FedEx everything to Switzerland as quickly as possible and put 500 kroner on the counter to stress the urgency. The porter smiled, promising to take care of everything immediately.
    In his room Michael opened the door to the small Juliet balcony and looked across Copenhagen harbour, the harbour entrances, Christianshavn, and further out at the calm surface of the Øresund. He took a long shower, put on one of the hotel bathrobes and set out his laptop, pen and a notebook on the desk.
    Michael dusted the DVD with iodine powder, carefully blew excess powder off the disc, and dotted circles and swirls from the fingerprints emerged. He lifted the prints from the disc with special tape and held it up against the light from the balcony door. The prints were small, uniform and oval; a woman’s prints, he presumed, and from a single individual, he felt certain of it.
    He would send the tape sections to the lab in Berne and ask them to compare them to the prints from Elizabeth Caspersen’s fountain pen.
    Afterwards he watched the film repeatedly, noting down various details he had missed the first time round. He isolated the only brief, distorted image of the client himself:seen from the right and diagonally from behind; half a broad-brimmed hunting hat with a feather in the hatband. Under the brim he could see part of an ear, a white, well-trimmed sideburn – exactly like on the magnate’s portrait in Hellerup – a greenish sleeve, a gloved hand and part of the butt of a rifle. Michael cut and pasted extracts from the film, added various degrees of brightness, resolution and contrast to them, but the result was at best ambiguous. The human ear is highly individual, but most of this man’s ear was hidden by his hat and jacket collar.
    He tried to work out if there was a wristwatch between the jacket sleeve and the glove, but concluded that there wasn’t. The weapon itself was impossible to identify. He examined the flash from the muzzle almost a dozen times, from the front and from behind. There was no doubt that it was a hunting rifle. The flash was longer and more yellow than that from a finely calibrated army carbine.
    Of the other hunters, he could see only twisted random shadows in the terrain when the beam from a torch headlamp or the camera light happened to find them. They appeared to have lined up in a semi-circle and there were six of them, besides the client, judging by the number of laser sights. The cameraman