Then she wiped the blood from her neck and moved into the forest shadows on the far side of the fence.

The vegetation was mixed. She remembered that from their previous hunt. Evergreens in clusters, small clearings with newly planted deciduous trees and long stretches of birch, brambles, beech and scattered oaks.

It smelled strongly of rotting leaves. Over a decade spent in the asphalt jungle made one extra sensitive to these kinds of scents.

The voices now demanded that she hurry up and finish the job. And that the confrontation be on her terms. But Kimmie didn’t listen. She knew she had time enough. When Torsten, Ulrik and Ditlev played these gory games, they never finished until they were satiated. And that didn’t happen quickly.

‘I’m walking along the edge of the forest and the firebreak,’ she said aloud, so the voices would back off. ‘It’s a longer route, but we’ll still reach the estate.’

That was how she came to see the dark-skinned men standing around, facing the woods and waiting, and how she saw the cage with the enraged animal. It was how she noticed the leather leggings the men wore over their trousers, all the way up to the groin.

It was why she ducked back into the forest to see how things would develop.

She was in the land of the hunter.

41

He ran with his head angled backwards, catching glimpses of the ground beneath him in flickering alternation between dry leaves and treacherous branches. Far behind him he could hear Assad’s enraged protests, until finally everything grew quiet.

He slowed down. Struggled with the gaffer tape on his back, his nostrils dry from gasping for breath. He craned his neck to try to see.

He had to get the tape removed from his eyes. Before anything else. In a short while they would be coming at him from every direction. The hunters from up by the estate, the beaters from God knows where. He turned his body all the way round and saw only trees and more trees through the narrow slit in the tape. Then he ran again for a few seconds before a low-hanging branch knocked him on the head and flung him backwards.

‘Damn it,’ he muttered. God fucking damn it.

He stood up with difficulty and felt around for a branch on the tree, which was broken at shoulder height. Then he moved up to the trunk, positioned himself so the branch stump got under the gaffer tape right next to his nostril, and forced his body steadily downward. This caused the tape to tighten around his neck, but it didn’t get it away from his eyes. The tape was stuck too tightly to his eyelids.

He pulled his head downward again, trying to keep his eyes closed, but could feel how his eyelids once more stuck to the tape, turning the whites of his eyes outward.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’ he cursed, and began swinging his head from side to side as the branch scratched one of his eyelids.

Then he heard the beaters’ cries for the first time. They weren’t as far away as he’d hoped. Maybe only a few hundred yards; inside these woods it was hard to judge. He raised his head, watched the stump release the gaffer tape, and noticed he could now see more or less freely with the one eye.

The dense forest spread out before him. The light fell unevenly and, truth be told, he had no idea which direction he was facing. That alone made him realize it could soon be all over for Carl Mørck.

The initial shots came after Carl had got past the first clearing, and now the beaters were so close that he was forced to lie on the ground. As far as he could tell, the firebreak was just ahead and behind that were the paths through the state forest. He was no more than seven or eight hundred yards, as the crow flies, from where his car was parked, but what use was that when he didn’t know what direction it was in?

He saw birds flap their wings and scatter above the treetops, heard the underbrush shifting. The beaters were shouting and knocking pieces of wood together. Animals fled.

If they have dogs with them, they’ll have no trouble at all finding me, he thought, dropping his eyes to a pile of leaves that the wind had swept into a heap, caught by a couple of forked branches on the ground.

When the first roe deer leaped, the shock of it made him jerk involuntarily and he rolled instinctively towards the cluster of leaves, twisting and turning and burrowing his body down into the heap.

Breathe calmly and slowly now, he told himself, resting in the humus-scented pile. Damn, he hoped Torsten Florin hadn’t given his beaters mobiles so he could warn them that they were approaching an escaped policeman who absolutely mustn’t get away. How he wished Florin hadn’t! But was that likely? That a man like him would fail to take such precautions? Hardly. Of course the beaters had to know who and what they were chasing.

It was while he was under the pile of leaves that he noticed how his wound had reopened, how the seeping blood was making his shirt cling to his body. If there were dogs, they would sniff him out in an instant. And if he lay like that for very long, he would bleed to death.

So how the hell could he help Assad? And if against all the odds he survived and Assad died, how could he ever look at himself in the mirror again? He simply wouldn’t be able to. He’d lost a partner before. He had let down a partner before. That was a fact.

He breathed deeply. He couldn’t let it happen again. Even if he burned in hell. Even if he landed in jail. Even if it cost him his life.

He blew the leaves away from his eyes and heard a kind of hissing sound that slowly grew louder, turning into a huffing and a muted barking. He felt his pulse rise and the wound in his shoulder throb harder. If this was a dog, it was all over now.

Further away, the beaters’ determined steps grew louder. They were laughing and shouting; they knew exactly what they were doing.

Then the brittle, crunching noises the animal was making in the underbrush stopped, and he suddenly knew it was standing there, looking at him.

He blew a few more leaves from his eyes and found himself gazing directly into the distended muzzle of a fox. Its eyes were bloodshot and there was froth ringing its mouth. Panting as though it were deathly ill, and quaking in every muscle as if it were freezing.

It hissed when it saw him blinking there among the leaves and hissed again when he held his breath. Bared its teeth in a demented growl and slunk towards him with its head lowered.

Suddenly it stiffened. Raised its head and looked back as if sensing danger. Then it turned again towards Carl, and suddenly, as if the animal possessed the capacity for reflective thought, it crawled along the ground towards him and settled at his feet, digging itself under the leaves with its dripping snout.

There it lay, breathing shallowly and waiting. Completely hidden by leaves. Exactly like him.

A flock of partridges was gathered in a shimmering ray of light a little way off, and when it took flight, frightened by the beaters’ rumbling through the woods, there was a volley of gunfire. Every single round fired sent shivers through Carl as the fox trembled at his feet.

He watched the hunters’ dogs fetch the birds, and soon after he saw the hunters themselves, like silhouettes against the leafless thicket.

There were nine or ten of them, all wearing laced-up boots and plus fours. As they came closer, he recognized several of them as members of society’s elite. Should I stand up and identify myself? he wondered for a moment, before catching sight of their host and his two friends, both of whom were holding loaded crossbows. If Florin, Dybbøl Jensen or Pram spotted him, they would shoot first without hesitation. They would claim it was an accident. They would get the others in the hunting party to go along with the story. Their camaraderie was tight, he knew. They would remove the tape from him and make it look like an accident.