She hung up and looked around.

The rain had stopped.

She started walking toward Bredgade, toward the sound of car tires racing over still-wet asphalt, as she tried to suppress the tiny nagging sensation that had begun to take shape somewhere deep within her.

CHAPTER

27

A SMALL GROUP OF Asian teenage girls with Playmobil haircuts and DSLR cameras lit up the high-ceilinged room every time they took a picture. They whispered to each other, and every now and then they broke the silence with discreet giggles, holding their hands over their mouths and looking very naughty. They lacked only pigtails and pleated skirts, Heloise thought.

She recognized two regulars, each sitting on their own side of the aisle with their faces bowed and that particularly radiant look of suffering reserved for people whose souls were in agony.

Apart from them, the Marble Church was empty.

The attendant at the entrance to the dome was the same as when Heloise was a child. Bobo was his name, and Heloise had always thought that sounded like something right out of Lord of the Rings. He looked like it too, and hadn’t changed since their first encounter: he was a pale, human version of a contented raisin with a milk-white toupee.

Every Christmas she brought him a nice bottle of port, and that was why he always turned a blind eye at times like this when she showed up outside the church dome’s visiting hours. He’d let her slip behind the heavy oak door unnoticed by the other churchgoers.

She smiled at him as she passed the desk where he always sat, and he returned her greeting with a warm, conspiratorial look.

“It’s wet up there this evening,” he said.

Heloise nodded and continued past him.

She knew the way like she knew the lines of her own face, knew exactly which steps creaked, where the stairs were uneven, and how many steps she needed to take to cross the attic space above the dome’s twelve apostle paintings.

And then, as she stepped out onto the narrow walkway that ran around the tower, Copenhagen revealed itself below her. Glinting in the gathering twilight, familiar. And safe.

She wiped off the seat with her jacket sleeve and sat down on the bench, from which she had a view of Amalienborg Palace and the Opera House. Normally at this time of day, she would have chosen the opposite side of the dome to watch the sun sink behind the city’s roofs, but with the western sky still overcast, the sky was prettiest in the opposite direction.

She sat for a long time, watching the airplane traffic over the Amager skyline. The incoming aircraft weren’t spaced very far apart. One by one, the planes lined up like pearls on a string in the lavender-blue evening sky, headed for the tarmac at Kastrup.