Angel Maker: An Unputdownable Scandinavian Crime Thriller With A Chilling Twist (DI Jamie Johansson Book 1)

It was late by the time Jamie got back to the hotel. One of the uniformed officers had driven her. Wiik and Hallberg had both offered, the former practically insisting, but Jamie had told them she wanted to get back, and they both needed to lock down the scene and wait for CSTs.

She reached her room and looked around. The hotel was clean, but basic. After all, no one was covering her expenses here. Jamie was purely there by choice. Allowed to assist on the case by the goodwill of the SPA. She wasn’t being paid. It wasn’t her duty.

And yet she’d gone charging into a house. Into the jaws of death. And for what? To solve a twenty-five-year-old case that she had no doubt would have been well handled by the dour Anders Wiik and the plucky Julia Hallberg.

Jamie sat on the bed and rested her elbows on her knees, hanging her head between them. Her duffle bag sat on the chair in the corner of the room, open, the two changes of clothes she’d now brought already dirty. She was in her second pair of jeans, and now they needed a wash, too. How long did she intend to be here? And when she was done – whatever ‘done’ meant – where did she intend to go? Back to the Met? Back to Scotland and to Graeme? She checked her phone then. He still hadn’t texted or called. But then again, she hadn’t even thought about him. What that said about her, she didn’t know.

She could have died tonight, and the person who seemed to care the most was a man she’d known all of three days. And one she didn’t even particularly like.

Jamie sat up now and then flopped backwards onto the bed, reaching into the pocket of her coat.

Her fingers closed around the thin red notebook and she pulled it out, flipping past the notes to the final few filled-in pages.

When she hit the blank space that marked her father’s death, she stopped and backtracked to the entries addressed to her.

The last things her father ever wrote, in the last notebook he ever wrote in.

Jamie clenched her jaw to stop it from quivering, turned the pages until she got to the next entry, and then read.