‘I’ll get to that,’ Karen replies. ‘In addition to checking the passenger manifests of all relevant flight and ferry departures, I interviewed the people who had been in closest contact with Luna while she was here: the owners of KGB and the person selected to serve as her personal assistant. Because Luna grew up in Ravenby and both her parents are alive, I had also decided to contact them and her brother the next day if there was still no word from her. I made that decision despite knowing that Luna had, to the best of our knowledge, had no contact with her family in over twenty years.’

Karen takes a sip of water and glances over at Sören Larsen, who has closed his laptop and now seems to be giving her his full attention. He must have managed to transfer the pictures, she thinks and clears her throat before continuing.

‘But, in the end, I didn’t have to reach out to Luna’s family, and the reason for that is that she sent a text. In it, she explained that she had changed her mind about making more changes to the recordings and that she needed a few days of “stillness”, by herself. Completely in line with what her ex-husband had said, in other words.’

Astrid Nielsen opens her mouth again, but Karen pre-empts her.

‘We obviously checked, or, rather, asked Larsen’s crew to check, where the text had been sent from, and the answer was England. Harwich, to be specific. As you all know, the ferry company’s passenger lists are hardly paragons of completeness, so it seemed plausible. Everything pointed to her having taken the ferry over to the UK.’

‘And then back again,’ Larsen adds.

Karen grits her teeth as all heads swivel towards the Head of Forensics. This part is going to be harder to explain.

‘Her phone popped back up in Ravenby the next day,’ Larsen says. ‘One of our guys caught the signal. Pure chance, actually, since we had been told we could drop it,’ he adds with a wry smile in Karen’s direction. ‘Would you like me to start the slideshow now?’

He nods at his laptop.

‘In a minute, Sören. Anyway, as far as we were concerned, the case was closed. Or so we thought. Until a car crashed into the mountain south of Gaarda the other day. The man driving it was the person who had worked as Luna’s personal assistant while she was here. His name is Billy Formby, and he is currently in critical condition at Thysted.’

Karen looks out at her colleagues’ focused faces and decides to skip over the thing about Billy’s homophobic parents for now.