DETECTIVE SERGEANT ERIK Schäfer pushed open the door to the interview room with a filthy Ecco shoe the size of a brick. A plump, old woman was sitting with her handbag on her lap at the large laminate table. She nodded respectfully as he entered the room.

“Hello,” she said. “Are you Erik Schäfer?”

“I am.” He stuck out a callused hand to the woman, who shook it politely. “But I didn’t catch your name, Ms.…?”

“Do I have to tell you?”

Schäfer shrugged. “It might make things easier if I know who you are and what you’re doing here.”

“It’s my husband, you see,” she said. “He doesn’t want us to get involved. He’s a very private person, and he doesn’t want us getting mixed up in anything nasty. I haven’t told him that I’m here, and I don’t want him to know.”

“All right. Then let me start by asking what brought you here.” Schäfer took a seat opposite her.

“It’s that lawyer.”

“A lawyer?”

“Yes, that nice man who was murdered. Just north of Copenhagen.”

“Christoffer Mossing?”

“Yes, that’s the one. That was your case, wasn’t it?”

“Still is,” Schäfer said. “It’s been a few years, but the case is still open.”

“It was that spring my sister and brother-in-law visited us,” the woman began. “I remember we had been to Tisvildeleje Beach, and on the way back, the men wanted to buy pipe tobacco from that little shop next to the tourist office. We waited outside, my sister and I. The tabloids outside the shop were plastered with gory details of the murder. It must have been in the days immediately after.” Her gaze grew distant, and she appeared to have lost her train of thought.

“Yes, I’m afraid that his death was rather macabre, poor old Mossing,” Schäfer conceded. “But I’m failing to see where you’re going with this. Are you here to tell me something about him?”

“I remember the girl,” she said. “The one everyone said had done it. There was a big picture of her on the cover of one of the newspapers. It was used over and over in the weeks that followed, also on the TV news. It was a kind of holiday picture where she was standing in front of a scenic landscape. The Grand Canyon, I think it might have been. Do you remember it?”

Schäfer nodded.

The picture was in his case file one floor below where they were sitting, along with other pictures from the crime scene: one of Mossing’s waxy head, which after the attack had been barely attached to his body; photographs of the murder weapon; photos of all the blood.

An unbelievable amount of blood …