Three Dog Night Read Online Free

variety of birds on the cliff all year round, and Peter thought he had seen most of them, but she was the most exotic of the lot.
    â€˜Poor guy. Who is he?’ she asked.
    He hesitated.
    â€˜No idea. You wouldn’t have a mobile on you, would you?’
    She put her hand into her pocket, found her mobile and passed it to him.
    He took it, brushing her hand, and felt a sudden urge to touch her, to stroke her cheek. Instead, however, he did the last thing in the world he wanted to do: he called the police.

4
    â€˜A ND SHE HASN’T been seen since?’
    Mark Bille Hansen, the new head of the East Jutland police force in the town of GrenÃ¥, had a headache. Not because he had overdone it on New Year’s Eve, but for a completely different reason he didn’t want to think about right now. He shook some pills into the palm of his hand as noiselessly as he could, letting the person on the line carry on talking.
    â€˜We had a party, which finished around two o’clock. She wanted to go home but there was no one to give her a lift, so she said she would walk.’
    Mark swallowed the pills dry. Wedging the telephone between his chin and his shoulder, he lined up a few items on his desk: blotting pad, pen, notepad, mobile. He placed his coffee cup in the corner, with a packet of V6 chewing gum next to it. An old newspaper flew into the waste-paper basket.
    â€˜How far did she have to walk? Where does she live and where was the party?’
    He made a note of the addresses while looking across his office. The furnishings were sparse, not to say austere. Nothing surplus to requirements. No ornaments. It suited him just fine.
    â€˜The others said she wasn’t wearing much. We’re afraid she might have frozen to death in this weather.’
    He could see why. A nineteen-year-old with champagne in her blood, dressed in scanty clothing, outside in minus thirteen, was close to a deliberate suicide mission in his mind.
    â€˜And you’ve spoken to her family?’
    â€˜I’ve just this minute spoken to Nina’s parents, yes. They’re too upset to call,’ said the man who had hosted the party. ‘Her father’s been driving around town for hours. Now they’re at home crossing their fingers that she’ll turn up.’
    Mark coughed discreetly as the pills slowly made their way down. Thank God he didn’t have children to worry about on top of everything else.
    â€˜Can someone bring us a photo? Or better still, e-mail us a photo that’s a good likeness and we’ll treat her as a missing person.’
    â€˜Is that all you do?’
    The man sounded disappointed, but also as if he hadn’t been expecting anything else from the police, who had been getting a bad press recently.
    â€˜We’ll get reinforcements and start a search.’
    Mark ended the conversation. What the hell did the idiot imagine? That the police would just let a young girl disappear in the snow without even trying to find her? He started organising the operation, called Århus and explained the situation. After that, he took his jacket and braced himself to visit the girl’s parents in Nørrevang.
    A cushy number, that was how it had been sold to him when the posting became a reality. In GrenÃ¥ he could recover in peace instead of rushing off in pursuit of dead bodies with the Copenhagen Homicide Squad. And he did have family in GrenÃ¥, as they had pointed out. They would undoubtedly be a great source of support to him, they said. Screw his bosses. They had failed to mention that it took half a day to travel to the hospital – to the kind of hospital he needed, anyway.
    He was leaning on the door handle when the telephone rang again.
    â€˜GrenÃ¥ Police. Bille Hansen speaking.’
    It was going to be a New Year’s Day he would never forget, he thought, as a man who introduced himself as Peter Boutrup informed him, calmly and concisely, that his dog had found