The metal had sharp edges and was practically impossible to hold on to, slippery as it was from the damp night air. But it didn’t take Fabian long to get high enough to heave himself over the wooden railing and on to the damp terrace floor.

He could hear the security guard calling his colleagues on his radio, but instead of pausing to try to decipher his Danish, he crawled past some reclining chairs and over to the terrace door, which was ajar.

He entered a bedroom where a suggestive groove he recognized but couldn’t place was streaming out of hidden speakers somewhere in the ceiling. Apart from that, the room was furnished with a sofa, a handful of armchairs and a dressing table, dominated by a large four-poster bed in the middle of the floor. It was impossible to say exactly how many people were in it. Fabian estimated about ten men and women, all naked and so entangled he couldn’t tell which arms, legs, heads and genitals belonged to whom.

To avoid drawing unwanted attention, Fabian quickly pulled off his wet clothes and dumped them on the floor behind the sofa. Then he continued towards the bed where everyone was being sucked or penetrated, or climaxing. Like one great body that was too busy pleasuring itself to notice him.

Fabian, for his part, felt nothing. If anything, he was turned off by the moaning, sweaty bodies slapping against each other as though they were in the middle of a porno shoot where the cameras were off and the director had long since gone home.

He walked around the bed to study it from all angles, leaning in over the pile of naked skin, pierced genitals and spread legs. Once he was sure Eric Jacobsén wasn’t there, he left the room.

In the hallway outside, the walls were lined with framed photographs of what looked like a completely normal Danish nuclear family with three blond children of different ages. Peder and Lykke Madsen were the names of the two adults residing at the address. Were they throwing the party or was Peder on a business trip somewhere sufficiently far away for Lykke to invite some friends over? And the children, where were they? Some posh boarding school on Jutland?

One of the doors opened and two women, whose slim bodies were out of proportion with their enormous breasts, came out together with a dark-skinned man, all three dripping from the shower he could still hear running.

Fabian entered the bathroom, made sure no one else was in there and grabbed a dressing gown he found folded on a shelf before pressing on.