The morning traffic at the airport in Copenhagen was thick as fish scales. The check-in line at the Norwegian Air counter ran more than half the length of the departures hall, and Heloise was grateful that she had bought a premium ticket, which gave her access to faster check-in and the fast-track line through security. The last available ticket on the morning flight to Orly in Paris.

She was one of the first to board the plane, and she settled into seat 3A as the other passengers noisily made their way into the cabin with their carry-on luggage and toddlers.

Normally she wasn’t a big fan of flying. She had covered too many plane crashes in her days at the news desk, seen too many ripped-out airplane seats strewn across mountainsides and Ukrainian beet fields with stocking-clad feet sticking out from underneath, too many black, mushroom-shaped smoke plumes rising from the crash sites like ominous smoke signals from the dead.

She had once read that most plane crashes happened during the first three minutes after takeoff, and since then she hadn’t been able to relax until the plane had reached a certain cruising altitude and the seat belt signs had been turned off. And even then, even once the plane was well on its way toward its destination and the cabin crew had started handing out peanuts and beverages, she always felt a primal sense of worry.

Today she felt nothing.

Last night she had surrendered to her emotions and allowed herself to roll around without resistance in the sea foam from the wave that had broken. She had allowed the rage and the shame to recede into the background for a while and had opened the room inside herself that had been locked for years. She had told Martin about it and given herself permission to feel the grief as it was—sheer and brutal—and the emotions had nearly killed her.

But by the time Norwegian Flight DY3638 took off from Copenhagen Airport, her facade had been restored.

Numb on the outside, shattered on the inside.

When the plane broke through the cloud cover and the morning sky revealed itself, she took her computer out of her bag and started to write the first part of the story.

Erik Schäfer found a parking spot in front of Glyptotek Museum and walked from there over to police headquarters. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it.