Postcard killers

Chapter 100

"Sorry, Dessie, so sorry," Nils Thorsen said, shaking the rain from his oilskin coat and sitting down opposite her. "That took ages, didn't it. I apologize."

He ordered a fresh beer at once, sneaking a look to see how she was taking his absence.

"Was it a Polaroid picture?" Dessie asked.

The reporter wiped his glasses on his sweater and put a copy of a blurry photograph in front of her.

The setting was unclear, and the focus al wrong. It was difficult to see what the picture was of, actual y.

Dessie squinted and looked closely at the shot.

It had been taken from a very low angle. She could make out the foot of a bed, but whatever was on top of it was unclear to her.

"Have they found the location where this was taken?" she asked. 133 "It's only a matter of time," Nils said. "It has to be a hotel room. Look at the painting in the background. No one would have anything that ugly in their own home."

"Are there… people on the bed?" Dessie asked.

Nils Thorsen put his glasses back on. His hands were trembling. The man was clearly frightened, and she understood that better than anyone.

"I don't know," he said.

She held the picture up to her face, shifted it around in the light. Bedding, some items of clothing, a handbag, and – Suddenly a foot came into focus. Then another. And another.

Instinctively she thrust the picture away from her eyes.

There were people there, two of them.

The evidence seemed to suggest that they were no longer alive.

"Do you real y think that's an imitation of a work of art?" the Dane asked.

"Impossible to say," Dessie muttered.

She pushed the terrible picture away and began to run through Denmark's most famous works of art in her mind.

The Little Mermaid, the statue in Copenhagen's harbor, was obviously the best known. But there were the artists of the Skagen School, the cubist Vilhelm Lundstrom, and plenty more.

She pushed the stray hairs away from her brow. A lot of the other photographs had been very easy to trace back to various artworks, usual y wel known ones.

This wasn't one of them, was it? Something had changed.

"I don't think it was the same photographer," she said to Nils Thorsen.

"So who took this picture?"