During their short walk to the bench, Karen shared what little she knows about Luna’s disappearance. That there were no signs of a struggle in the house, that Luna’s phone seems to be turned off, according to the circumspectly approached operator. That it wouldn’t be the first time Luna has decided to take a few days away from everything without telling the people around her.

But also that they weren’t quite done with the album, that Luna had been the one who insisted on swapping out a song, thereby making one or two more days in the studio necessary.

‘Hopefully, we’ll hear from her today, so I can join your team and do something useful instead,’ Karen says. ‘OK, your turn. What have you found out?’

*

The whole thing had started in October the previous year, when two women were found brutally assaulted and raped. The first one in a shrubbery next to the footpath by the bus stop in Moerbeck town centre. Sandrine Broe was spotted by a passer-by who saw her wandering around, dazed and terrified, with blood streaming down her bare legs.

The second woman, Loa Marklund, was found unconscious in a bike room in the basement of Karpvej 22, also in Moerbeck. But her injuries had been so severe she died on the way to the hospital.

In neither case had there been intercourse. In both cases the perpetrator had, instead, forced a broken glass bottle into his victim’s vagina.

When a third woman, twenty-seven-year-old Greta Hansen, was raped and assaulted on her way home from a nightshift at Thysted Hospital, the media had turned up the heat. Not least because the rapist had left deprived Moerbeck and struck in the middle-class area of Odinswalla. That Greta’s husband, Finn Hansen, worked for the Nya Dagbladet newspaper hadn’t made things easier. Not for the police, who lacked both eyewitness accounts and DNA, nor for Finn Hansen himself who, in his desperation had ended up punching a colleague in the face. After that incident, no journalist had exhibited the poor tact of turning up unannounced at the Hansens’ door again.

For the five months that followed, the perpetrator had lain low. Until yesterday, when Anita Kollbar was assaulted with a broken glass bottle. This time in Lindby – another well-to-do middle-class neighbourhood.

The perpetrator had likely worn disposable latex gloves; traces of powder had been found on Loa Marklund’s clothes, but no DNA.

*

That’s what Karen knows already. Now, Karl Björken fills her in on what little they’ve learnt since.

‘No, we haven’t been able to talk to her yet,’ he says, gazing out at the horizon. ‘According to her doctors, she’s probably going to make a full recovery, physically speaking, but psychologically, things are dicier. She has been kept unconscious most of the time so far.’