Life and Limb Read Online Free PDF

evening, after the dinner at Varna Palace, she had dropped by the office to write the article about the stadium body. That was why she and Bo had slept half an hour longer this Monday morning. And because his hand had happened to brush against her left breast.
    â€˜Doc Martens,’ said Holger, whose brain cells did occasionally manage to produce something useful. ‘Originally an English phenomenon, I believe. Punks wore them a lot in the eighties. You hardly ever see them in Denmark any more.’
    â€˜But if you did see them, where would that be?’ Dicte asked, thinking she would Google Doc Martens herself once she had checked her e-mails and the post stacked up in her in-tray.
    â€˜The BZ movement, the squatters,’ Helle suggested. ‘The ones who had the demo for the youth centre. I think there were lots of them wearing those boots.’
    â€˜Skinheads, football fans,’ Holger added. ‘Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. The Gallagher brothers. Why? Has that got anything to do with the murder at the stadium?’
    Dicte gave that a wide berth.
    â€˜No, it’s just because Rose was talking about buying a pair. But for me they have “violence” written all over them.’
    â€˜Boots can’t do that all on their own,’ Helle opined.
    She and Holger started to go off on a tangent discussing violent crime while Dicte opened her mail thinking about football and Doc Martens. A football hooligan? Was this football violence that had got out of control?
    She recalled the girl’s film of the eyeless body. The woman had been beaten up, no question. Had she been kicked by the man with the heavy boots? Was it random, mindless violence for the sake of it? Or had this woman been picked out and, if so, for what reason?
    They would not get any further until the body had been identified – that much was certain. She hoped Wagner would impart some of the police findings when the time came. She hadn’t fed him the mobile phone for nothing.
    She half smiled at the computer screen. The rebel had come out in Bo when he had realised she was going to pass the phone on to Wagner.
    â€˜Have you gone mad?’ he’d said. ‘Pass on forensic evidence to the police? You just don’t do that.’
    He didn’t understand her thinking. Not always. He didn’t understand that she was fishing for something in return – something long term. In his world the police had been the brutal aggressors who had separated him and his sisters when their mother’s boozing got out of hand. In his world the police were the ones who had punctured the normality they’d had at home, however fragile. The everyday life in which Bo, as the eldest child, had been the one to go shopping, make packed lunches and clear away the bottles, and where the surface had been a messy, neglected but functioning home. The police were the foe: that was in Bo’s blood. It was as simple as that.
    She was no great fan of authority either, but the feeling was a hundred times worse in the younger man with whom she had lived for five years, her rebel with a cause. For the most part it had been easy to live with, but now and then it had led to ideological clashes that had been like a punch in the solar plexus.
    â€˜Coffee?’
    Talk of the devil. There he stood in the doorway, tall and lean with his hair down the back of his neck, gathered in a ponytail today. Was he her own private revolution against conformity and expectations of polite, short-haired men with knife-edge creases and clean nails? The thought crossed her mind – not for the first time – that her parents would have opposed the relationship. But her father was dead and her mother was far too wedded to Jehovah. There was no one to rebel against.
    â€˜I wouldn’t say no,’ came the response from Holger.
    Bo swaggered further into the room, wearing his cowboy boots.
    â€˜Great. That’s nice of you, Holger.