“There hasn’t been any trace of her for several years,” Augustin continued. “Until we heard from a witness that she was in France, right?”

“Right.”

“So, she started writing letters to our young journalist—”

“Heloise is almost eight years older than you are,” Schäfer said.

“Yeah, but she’s still a knockout and love has no age limits. As I said, Anna Kiel writes letters to our young journalist, and we can see from the postmarks that she’s moving around in France: from Cannes north to Lyon, and where was the most recent letter sent from?”

“From Gare du Nord in Paris,” Schäfer said with a nod. He knew where she was heading.

“And that’s not far from where Heloise’s father is locked up.”

“Correct.”

“And Anna ends all the letters with a reference to a pair of lovers from the Middle Ages—”

“—whom Nick Kaldan wrote a whole book about.”

“Exactly!”

“In the second letter she sent …” Schäfer got up and pointed to the bulletin board, where it was hanging. “She writes, ‘I know so much about you. You know a lot less about me. But we are connected through him, I understand that now’ …”

“Yeah?”

“This whole time we’ve been assuming that she was referring to Mossing, but Heloise’s father is the link. It’s the father.”

Augustin nodded. “It has to be. And Anna Kiel seems to know obscure, simple childish things about Heloise, like her lucky number and her favorite flower.”

“And her middle name, which she never uses otherwise.”

“Right.”

“So maybe Anna has this information from him,” Schäfer said. “From Heloise’s father.”

“Maybe.”

“But then how are they connected, as Anna Kiel puts it?”

Augustin shrugged. “You don’t think that this guy, Nick Kaldan, abused her? Abused Anna, I mean?”

“Anna, Heloise—who knows? Maybe that’s why Heloise lied when I told her about that medieval reference on the phone last night.”

Augustin glanced over at the bulletin board and clasped her hands behind her head, thinking.

“But if that’s true, then why not just write, ‘Hey. Do you remember your dad, that bastard? He messed with me when I was a kid. Did he mess with you too? Why don’t we meet and reminisce?’ She doesn’t write that. Instead she tiptoes around, plagiarizing cryptic sentences from ancient love letters. Why?”

Schäfer chewed on his lower lip, and the office was silent for a long time as they both contemplated this.

“Why does she write to Heloise about Christoffer Mossing? What does he have to do with Nick Kaldan?” Schäfer asked. “How does it all fit together? If we assume that the connection between Heloise and Anna Kiel is Heloise’s dad, then how does Christoffer Mossing fit into the story?”

“Maybe that murder really was a coincidence, like we always thought,” Augustin suggested.