The Tower Speaks
The arrest of the first parliamentarian happened quietly, which was itself a kind of violence — the violence of a career ending not with a bang but with a phone call at breakfast and two officers who waited politely while he finished his coffee. Katrine watched from a parked car across the street, her breath fogging the window, her satisfaction tempered by the knowledge that this was only the outermost layer of something much older and much deeper than one man's corruption.
The second name on the list belonged to a woman who had been dead for three years, which complicated matters in ways that Katrine found both frustrating and clarifying. Dead suspects cannot be interrogated, but they also cannot destroy evidence, and the storage unit in Frederiksberg that bore her name yielded forty years of correspondence that read like a parallel history of Danish intelligence — one conducted not in the sterile corridors of Kastellet but in restaurants, summer houses, and the private boxes of the Royal Danish Theatre.
Katrine returned to the Round Tower on the last day of the investigation, climbing the spiral ramp in the grey December light. The desk had been removed to evidence storage, but the room still held the particular emptiness of a place where something irreversible had occurred. She stood where Brandt had stood and looked out at Copenhagen — its orderly streets, its civilized