He had sat in the interrogation rooms across from every single one of the assholes who had been charged in the case in recent weeks. He had looked them all dead in the eye and seen several of them sweat and tremble and blubber as the realities had hit them like a sledgehammer. A couple of them had seemed arrogant and overly self-confident, completely calm about the charges and the future imprisonment they appeared destined to face. The rest had been downright panic-stricken and more than willing to negotiate. Three of them had even sobbed during their interrogations. But none of them—not a single one of the eleven charged—had implicated Mossing in the case, no matter how much pressure Schäfer had applied. And he had definitely tightened the damn screws on those three crybabies. He’d threatened to release footage to the media and to send the video recordings to their children.

I guess you could call the movie Daddy’s Greatest Hits. I bet your daughter will cross you off her Christmas shopping list when she sees it! What’s her name again—Vivian? And I see here that she works for Save the Children. Ironic, isn’t it? No doubt she’ll be pretty peeved when she sees how you have been treating kids.

Several of the men charged had been more than willing to accept the maximum sentence in order to avoid causing their families any more pain. They had also volunteered the names of other sex offenders and been willing to testify against their buddies who were sitting in the other interrogation rooms.

But when the topic turned to Johannes Mossing, they closed up like clams.

Every single one of them.

Schäfer hadn’t been able to find anything that connected him to the case. There were no warehouses in Nordhavnen Harbor that belonged to Mossing, not now, not ever.

Schäfer had dragged Jonna Kiel in for questioning, but she had stubbornly insisted that she couldn’t remember anything from the late eighties until the midnineties. Sure, there had been a gambling problem, she conceded, but she had been drinking so heavily and smoking so much pot back then that her memory was as full of holes as Swiss cheese. She claimed she had never heard of Johannes Mossing and that she had no clue as to whether or not her daughter had been sexually abused.

Word of the arrests, which the press hadn’t yet gotten wind of, had obviously made its way to Vedbæk, and Johannes Mossing had gone underground. Schäfer had pounded on his front door several times this week with an angry fist. The first three times, Marcus Plessner, that dwarf of a lawyer who catered only to the rich, had opened the door and denied any knowledge of the old man’s whereabouts.