The Serbian Dane Read Online Free PDF

the place himself. He had tried having someonecome in to clean, but they hadn’t done a good enough job. As an old navy man he liked things shipshape and Bristol fashion. He set store by a tidy apartment, ironed shirts, knife-edge creases and well-polished shoes, and the navy had taught him how to fend for himself. He slipped into a pair of freshly pressed Levis, a cream button-down shirt, a blue tie and a lightweight jacket to cover the gun in the holster at his hip.
    The rest of the apartment consisted of a comfortable living room, a bedroom and a box room in which Toftlund kept his books and a computer. The furniture was of pale wood and functional. There was a good view of the low housing in Albertslund and of Vestskoven. The wood was a hazy green in the morning sunlight. A band of smog and mist hung on the horizon.
    He took the car. He knew he shouldn’t. The alcohol was by no means out of his system yet, but he was running late and couldn’t face taking the train or the bus. Any fellow officer who might stop him would have to be incredibly dumb to breathalyse him once he’d shown his badge. Or rather: the new ID card that had replaced the old police badge. It just wasn’t done, not unless he was actually involved in an accident. And he was too good a driver for that. Besides which, he loved his blue BMW. It was his one indulgence. A nippy little number, which might have gobbled up all his savings but made driving a sheer delight every day. Cars were few and far between on the road out to Bellahøj Police Station, where a modern concrete building is home to G division, the Danish Security Intelligence Service.
    Why had Vuldom’s secretary called him in, he wondered. He had put in for these two days’ leave ages ago, and he had loads of time off owing to him. He hoped he wasn’t going to have to baby sit the Crown Prince. He simply couldn’t face that again. He’d done his fair share: sitting nursing a mineral water and watching those kids whooping it up. Not that there was anything wrong with that, really. He’d been no saint either as a teenager. And it was a different story now. The Crown Prince was a frogman himself. He was one of the gang. Per took his hat off to him for that. He had gone through the same admission and training process as the rest of them, the hardest thing he had ever done. But looking after Frederik would be a pretty boring assignment, even if it was also a damned important one. For one thing, because he was the Crown Prince, but also because of all the flaming reporters who were always on his tail.
    But he didn’t like having to face Vuldom when he had a hangover. Despite the shower and deodorant, he knew the stale reek of the pub was seeping out of every pore. He had hardly slept at all. Now he was sweating out the rest of the booze. Vuldom was a formidable boss, a formidable woman. Per had nothing against female bosses. He had no time for the canteen game in which the guys had fun playing with her name. Calling the boss ‘Vulva’ was not his idea of a joke. As long as a boss was competent and fair, he didn’t care whether they were male or female, gay or lesbian. That was their own bloody business. And besides, he belonged to a generation that had spent its entire childhood and youth being cared for by women. The men had been strangely invisible until he joined the navy. Women had run the crèche, kindergarten, school and youth club, and he had never really known his father, who had remarried and moved to Jutland when Per was three. Per had been brought up by his mother. A succession of different men had shared their apartment, but his mother had always worn the trousers.
    Maybe that was why he couldn’t face being tied down to one woman, he thought, as he eased the BMW into a parking space next to the long low building. For most of his life women had been deciding things for him. Now he wanted to make his own decisions. But there was no getting away from it: within a few years,