Amsinck Back From the Dead

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7391238-6-4
Verlag: Muswell Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 3, 376 Seiten

Reihe: A Jensen Thriller

'Immersive, atmospheric and chock-full of characters you want to spend time with. Hope there's more to come' Ambrose Perry. A missing person, a headless corpse, Jensen is on the case.June, and as Copenhagen swelters under record temperatures, a headless corpse surfaces in the murky harbour, landing a new case on the desk of DI Henrik Jungersen, just as his holiday is about to start.  Elsewhere in the city, Syrian refugee Aziz Almasi, driver to Esben Nørregaard MP has vanished. Fearing a link to shady contacts from his past. Nørregaard appeals to crime reporter Jensen to investigate. Could the body in the harbour be Aziz? Jensen turns to former lover Henrik for help. As events spiral dangerously out of control, they are thrown together once more in the pursuit of evil, in case more dangerous than they could ever have imagined. Winner of the Danish Crime Academy's Debut Prize for My Name is Jensen

Heidi Amsinck is a writer and journalist born in Copenhagen, now living in London. She has written many stories for BBC R4 and is the author of three other titles in the Jensen series: Out of the Dark, The Girl in the Photo and My Name is Jensen

Autoren/Hrsg.

Amsinck, Heidi

Leseproben

2

Wednesday 10:14

Editor-in-chief Margrethe Skov towered above the staff who had assembled in Dagbladet’s canteen, sitting, standing, leaning, some shaking their heads in disgust, others struggling to hide their relief at having avoided the shoulder tap of death.

This time around.

But for how much longer?

Someone had opened the windows wide, succeeding only in admitting the traffic noise of central Copenhagen. If anything, the outside air was making the room hotter. Jensen fanned herself with a copy of yesterday’s paper.

Margrethe was standing tall and broad-shouldered, hands at her waist like an overgrown Peter Pan, her eyes roaming the room behind thick lenses. Where her gaze fell, people looked away. ‘I know this isn’t what any of you were hoping to hear,’ she said. ‘But if we do nothing, we will all be without a job before the year is out. We have a chance to save Dagbladet by acting now. The ten colleagues affected have been informed, and I know you’ll all want to join me in thanking them for everything they have done for this important …’ She paused, searching for the appropriate word. ‘… Danish institution.’

There was a commotion at the back of the room, a scraping of chair legs and clogs on lino. Frank Buhl, Dagbladet’s chief crime reporter until this morning was on his feet. ‘You are sleeping with the enemy,’ he shouted, glaring at Margrethe, but jabbing his finger in the direction of the clean-shaven Swede standing behind her.

Hugo Persson, who appeared young enough to be Margrethe’s son, and too young, certainly, to be CEO of a giant venture capital fund, looked horrified at the implication. Someone ought to explain to him the concept of a metaphor, thought Jensen.

Margrethe had briefly introduced Persson at the start. The Swede had made an anaemic speech that no one had listened to, before Margrethe had taken back the reins, determined to be the one breaking the bad news to her staff. She held up her hands in a vain attempt to appease Frank. Her light blue shirt was darkened at the armpits. Beads of sweat were running down her temples.

Jensen lowered her gaze to her own scuffed trainers. No one knew yet that Margrethe had passed Frank’s role on to her, but some of her cannier colleagues would be guessing. Jensen felt their eyes stabbing into her back.

Her phone began to buzz noisily in her hand, startling her. It was Esben Nørregaard, member of parliament in the ruling party, the man who had given her the scoop that had launched her career. And his.

Not now Esben.

She declined the call.

Frank continued, tomato-faced in his lumberjack shirt, saggy jeans and braces. ‘How long have we two known each other, Margrethe Skov? And you couldn’t tell me to my face?’ He held up a letter, scrunched it into a ball, threw it on the floor and stamped on it.

His redundancy notice, Jensen assumed.

Did he have a family at home? She vaguely remembered him mentioning a grown-up daughter. At his age, he was unlikely to find another job. She couldn’t see him making the leap to corporate communications somehow, and where else was there to go for newspaper hacks put out to pasture? A freelance bureau, run with diminishing hope from a spare bedroom?

Margrethe had given Jensen an ultimatum: ‘Take the job or leave. Your choice. Either way, Frank is history.’

Jensen knew that the staff cull, the latest of many, was a condition of the Swedish mercy mission. The capital fund had deep pockets and vowed to safeguard the Dagbladet brand, but all the same the Swedes wanted things their way. The future was digital and mobile first, they said. Speculation was rife that they wanted to dispense with the printed edition of the newspaper altogether, though no one could quite bring themselves to believe that Margrethe would agree to that. Meanwhile, Dagbladet was getting a dedicated social media team. Its reporters would be expected to deliver across all platforms. ‘It’s the only way,’ Margrethe had said.

Jensen wasn’t going to argue. Everyone knew Dagbladet was years behind the curve and that its loyal print subscribers across the country were dying off, but why a rich Swedish investment fund would want to back a failing, leftist newspaper in Denmark was perplexing. Rumour had it that Margrethe and the Chairman of the Swedish fund went way back and that she had called in a favour. Jensen hadn’t managed to get at the truth.

Yet.

Her phone buzzed again.

Fuck’s sake, Esben, can’t you just wait a minute?

The woman sitting next to her, one of the last photographers left on the newspaper’s payroll, looked at Jensen angrily as though she had spoken out loud. Jensen felt herself blush. This wasn’t the time to attract attention.

‘And now you’re going to let Dagbladet, our Dagbladet, be written by uneducated, unpaid, jumped-up …’

Jensen glanced up and caught Frank’s eye. He faltered, unable or unwilling, despite his anger, to grasp the offensive noun that had been on the tip of his tongue a second ago.

When her phone buzzed again, Jensen felt as if the sound was being pumped out through giant speakers.

Call me now, Jensen, for the love of God!

Getting up, she mumbled an apology and pointed to her phone to show why she had to step away, realising too late that her gesture would only made things worse in the eyes of her colleagues.

She heard tutting behind her. Half-turning, she saw Henning Würtzen, Dagbladet’s ageing obituary writer, slumped on a chair in his beige suit with an unlit cigar in his mouth. He winked at her mischievously.

If the printed edition really was scrapped, how would Henning cope without being able to thumb through the pages, his fingers blackened by newsprint as he chronicled everything that happened to anyone who was anyone in Denmark? Jensen doubted he was even capable of using a laptop or smartphone.

Journalists of Frank Buhl’s generation had learned to adapt, but still there was a divide between them and the younger reporters who were digital natives. A decade, maybe two, and that divide would be gone. Would there be anything recognisable left by then of the news industry Jensen had joined as a teenager?

‘Take the job, Jensen. What good would it do if both of you were unemployed?’ Kristoffer had told her that morning as she had agonised over whether to refuse to step into Frank’s shoes on point of principle.

He was right, of course, as Kristoffer often was. In many ways, the two of them were similar people: both loners with few friends, both absorbed in their work and driven to succeed against the odds, neither of them close to their family. ‘I like having you around,’ he had told her. ‘You’re the only person who doesn’t want anything from me.’

She had hesitated before moving in, insisting on keeping the tiny flat in Christianshavn that she had rented from him in the spring. It had been an unnecessary precaution. Kristoffer had turned out to be great company and a good listener, so gradually she had moved most of her stuff into his cavernous waterside penthouse in Nordhavn.

He had humoured her as she had spent hours turning over the case of Carsten Vangede, the Nørrebro bar owner who had (allegedly) committed suicide after passing a USB with information on to her.

In case something happens to me.

Vangede had clearly thought his life was in danger, but the information on the USB had proved impossible to decipher. A bunch of invoices and documents and the address of a mystery property called Amaliekilde in Vedbæk, north of Copenhagen.

‘Makes no sense,’ Kristoffer had said. ‘Besides, are your readers really going to care about a paranoid old drunk who thought he had been cheated by his accountant?’

‘But what if his death wasn’t suicide? The pathologist I asked said he couldn’t be a hundred percent sure. What if he was killed because of what he had discovered?’

‘Come on, Jensen. Can’t you hear how far-fetched that sounds?’

She had passed the address of Amaliekilde to Ernst Brøgger, the source she had nicknamed Deep Throat, who had first encouraged her to investigate Vangede’s claims. He had reacted dramatically, telling her to drop the story at once. Brøgger had evaded her calls and emails since, and Jensen had nothing else to go on.

Carsten Vangede had been a bankrupt alcoholic, estranged from his own family. The only evidence of the accountant who had allegedly siphoned money from his bank account was a pair of glasses in a case bearing the name of an optician in Randers, who had refused point blank to talk to Jensen.

What was it Vangede had found and thought important enough to save on a memory stick? Only Brøgger could tell them, Jensen had concluded.

She leaped up the stairs to her...