Murder on the Thirty-First Floor Read Online Free Page A

constables were emptying it of its passengers, shoving a collection of drunks into the building for a full body search. They were dealing very roughly with their charges, but Jensen knew it was more out of exhaustion than brutality.
    He passed through the search area and looked into the drunks’ naked, desperate faces.
    Despite the strict clampdown, public drunkenness was rising from year to year, and since the government had forced through a new law making alcohol abuse an offence in the home as well, the burden of police work had assumed almost superhuman proportions. Every evening between two and three thousand individuals were arrested, all more or less blind drunk; around half of them were women. Jensen recalled that back in his time as a patrol officer, they had thought three hundred drunks on a Saturday night was a lot.
    An ambulance had pulled up alongside the van, and behind it stood a young man in a cap and a white coat. It was the police doctor.
    ‘Five of them need to go to hospital and get their stomachs pumped,’ he said. ‘I daren’t keep them here. I can’t be held responsible if anything should happen to them.’
    Jensen nodded.
    ‘What a bloody mess it all is,’ said the police doctor. ‘They slap five thousand per cent duty on booze. Then they create living conditions that force people to drink themselves to death, and to crown it all they earn three hundred thousand a day in fines for drunkenness, in this city alone.’
    ‘You need to watch your tongue,’ said Inspector Jensen.

CHAPTER 5
    Inspector Jensen lived relatively centrally, in a housing area south of the city, and it took him less than an hour to drive home in his police car.
    In the city centre the streets were quite busy; the snack bars and cinemas were still open and the pavements were full of people strolling past the rows of lighted shop windows. The people’s faces looked white and tense, as though pained by the cold, corrosive light of the street lamps and advertising signs. There were occasional groups of young people gathered idly around popcorn stalls or in front of shop windows. Most were just standing there and did not seem to be talking to each other. Some of them cast indifferent glances at the police car.
    Youth crime, previously considered a serious problem, had decreased in the last ten years and had now been almost eradicated. There was less crime generally, in all categories; it was really only alcohol abuse that was on the rise. At several places in the shopping area, Jensen saw uniformed officers at work. Their white rubber truncheons glinted in the neon light as they pushed those they had arrested into the police vans.
    He drove down into the road tunnel by the Ministry of the Interior and came back up eight kilometres later in an industrial area empty of people, crossed a bridge and continued south down the motorway.
    He felt tired and had a dull, nagging pain in his diaphragm, on the right-hand side.
    The suburb where he lived comprised thirty-six eight-storey tower blocks, set out in four parallel lines. Between the rows of apartment blocks there were car parks, areas of grass, and play pavilions of transparent plastic for the children.
    Jensen pulled up in front of the seventh block in the third row, turned off the ignition and got out into the cold, clear, starry night. Although his watch showed it was only five past eleven, all the blocks were in darkness. He put a coin in the parking meter, turned the knob to set the red hour hand, and went up to his flat.
    He switched on the light and took off his outdoor clothes, shoes, tie and jacket. He unbuttoned his shirt and walked through from the hall, letting his eyes rest briefly on the impersonal furnishings, the large television set and the police training college photos hanging on the walls.
    Then he let down the blinds at the windows, took off his trousers and switched off the light. He went out into the kitchen and took the bottle from the