Free Death of a Nightingale by Lene Kaaberbøl Page B

tapping heel. A dark tie and a white shirt lent a bit of formality to the jeans getup and the ’70s hippie suede jacket that hung over the chair back behind him. He must be around thirty, Søren estimated, young but no kid.
    “What’s his name?”
    “Symon Babko, police lieutenant in some subdivision of the criminal police.”
    Søren just nodded and elected not to tell the young assistant criminal policeman that this “subdivision” could swallow the entire Danish police force more than once without even noticing.
    Even though it wasn’t said very loudly, the Ukrainian policeman must nonetheless have picked out his name through the ambient noise of chair scraping and cafeteria talk. He raised his head—what a chin, Søren thought; there was a warrior-like determination to that chin—and looked directly at Søren.
    “Dobry den,” said Søren, holding out his hand and presentinghimself. “Søren Kirkegard, PET.”
    “Hello,” said Babko.
    He had unusually large hands, Søren noticed. They looked out of proportion to his thin, knobby wrists. As if someone had attached an inadequately thin handle to a spade.
    “I’m sorry. I speak only Russian, not Ukrainian,” said Søren.
    Babko laughed. It was an amazing volcano eruption of a laugh that started far down in his skinny middle, moved up through his entire body and made his shoulders shake before finally rolling out across the cafeteria landscape with such power that conversations around them ceased.
    “My friend,” he said, with laughter still in his voice, “when you have sat in a chair for almost twenty-four hours without being able to say anything but ‘Hello,’ ‘Thank you,’ and ‘Where is the toilet?’ there suddenly is not as much difference between Ukrainian and Russian as there usually is. We will no doubt understand each other.”
    T HEY BORROWED AN office on the second floor with a view of the parking lot.
    “It was down there,” Symon Babko said, pointing. “Down there she got away.”
    “Natasha Dmytrenko?”
    “Who is really called Natasha Doroshenko,” said Babko. He pushed a worn file folder toward Søren. “She was questioned in two thousand and seven in connection with the killing of her husband, Pavel Doroshenko. Immediately afterward, she disappeared. There is, therefore, a request for detention.”
    Søren opened the folder. Natasha Doroshenko looked like a frightened teenager in the photo that was glued to the first page of the detention order, but that was the way she looked, he remembered,in most of the photos that accompanied the Danish case files he had had the chance to skim. He attempted to speed-read to get an overview but had to accept that his linguistic proficiency wasn’t quite sufficient. The Ukrainian differences from the Russian he was used to teased his eyes, similar to the way Norwegian or Swedish forced him to read more slowly. It would take a while to digest the material, and right now it was more important to engage with the man who sat across from him.
    “Tell me,” he said instead.
    “In Ukraine, she is still wanted in that connection. She hasn’t been found guilty. Not yet. But she’s wanted. So when we learned that she had been recognized in Denmark, we were naturally interested.”
    Søren nodded. “Are murder cases normally handled by GUBOZ?” he asked neutrally.
    “At first it was a simple murder case under the jurisdiction of the criminal police. I wasn’t attached until a week ago when the extradition case started.” Babko looked closely at Søren. There was a subtext here, Søren sensed, but he wasn’t sure that he could read it.
    “So you have formally requested her extradition?” he asked.
    “Yes. But even before the extradition got properly underway, Colonel Savchuk had successfully requested an interview. The Danish officials were apparently very forthcoming.”
    That searching gaze again. Søren was annoyed that he was clearly missing something, but he sensed that a direct