“The price of sneakers like that is totally different now from when I was young,” Schäfer continued. “These days that kind of fashion statement will set you back most of a day’s pay.” He flipped through the case file. Then he looked up. “It doesn’t say in the paperwork here what you do for a living.”

Nothing.

“You had almost eight thousand kroner in cash on you when you were arrested.”

“So what?”

“Where did you get it?”

“The Tooth Fairy,” the man said, and smiled so that Schäfer had an unimpeded view of his broken front tooth.

“What do you do for a living?”

“This and that.”

“This and that? For whom?”

“For myself.”

“So, you’re self-employed?”

The man nodded as if he liked that title. “Self-employed … yeah.”

“So, what are you, uh, self-employed at?”

“I solve problems.”

“And was Heloise Kaldan a problem that needed solving? Was Ulrich Andersson?”

The man looked around the room as if he was bored.

“Did Johannes Mossing pay you to get rid of them?” Schäfer asked, leaning in across the table.

The man looked Schäfer in the eye. He smiled but didn’t say anything.

“What kind of shit is he messed up in? What is he hiding?” Schäfer continued. “If you give me Johannes Mossing—if you give me something with some meat on it, something I can use against him—then you’ll find that your time here with us will be significantly shorter and far more pleasant than it’s going to be if you don’t play along.”

Schäfer was bluffing. He didn’t have any authority to offer that kind of plea deal, and he had the clear sense that the man sitting across from him knew it.

“Johannes … who?” The man’s eyebrows almost met over the bridge of his nose as he regarded Schäfer skeptically.

He and Schäfer eyed each other for a long moment. Then the man broke into a laugh, a high, cackling laugh.

“Okay,” Schäfer said, nodding in agreement. “We’ll do this the hard way.”

The door behind Schäfer was flung open, and a short-legged man he recognized as criminal defense attorney Marcus Plessner steamrolled into the room. He was wearing a silvery-gray suit, which Schäfer guessed had been custom tailored, because as far as he knew there wasn’t an off-the-rack suit anywhere in the world that would fit a body with Plessner’s measurements. The man was every bit as wide as he was tall and deep, like a Rubik’s cube with feet.

His hairline had, surprisingly enough, moved farther down his forehead since Schäfer had seen him last. Implanted tufts of dark-brown hair now grew like watercress from his previously bare temples.

“Get away from my client,” he said, and walked over to stand on the opposite side of the table.