She surveyed the pile of junk mail that had accumulated in her hallway during the week. She bent down to pick it up and was flicking through it to see if there were any bills hidden in the inferno of special offers and pointless local news when she heard the newspaper guy reach the fifth floor and stop outside her front door. Her letter box was pushed open, and a supermarket promotion was shoved into her hallway, where it landed softly on the dirty welcome mat.

Heloise was expecting to hear the man’s footfalls disappear quickly downstairs, but nothing happened. She remained by her front door, listening for several seconds.

Nothing.

She dumped the junk mail in her arms and quickly opened the door.

On the top step outside, a small, middle-aged man was trying on one of the mint-green Nike Air trainers Heloise had stepped out of after going running at the Citadel two days earlier. He froze midmotion, as if he thought he’d avoid detection if he sat perfectly still.

“Erm …” Heloise said, smiling awkwardly. She felt embarrassed for the guy. She gathered the top of her bathrobe tightly across her chest and said, “Would you mind leaving those where you found them?”

The man nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

He put down the trainers carefully, picked up his own down-at-heel shoes, and made his way down the stairs in stockinged feet.

Heloise waited in the stairwell until she could hear the front door close behind him at street level. She shook her head, smiling, and was on her way into her apartment when her eye caught the junk mail she had just dropped.

The colorful leaflets were scattered across the floor like confetti catapulted from a party popper. The corner of a pale-blue envelope was sticking out from under a Sephora catalog.

Even before she had picked it up, Heloise knew who the letter was from.

“When did you get these?” Karen Aagaard pointed to the two letters in front of her on the table in the conference room.

Heloise had set up an early-morning meeting with her editor and Mogens Bøttger. So far, Aagaard had been the only one to arrive.

“The first letter was sent to me here at the paper. I found it in my pigeonhole yesterday. I don’t know how long it’s been there. A couple of days, maybe? A week? I can see from the postmark that it was sent from Cannes one and a half weeks ago, and the second letter was posted five days ago from Lyon,” Heloise said. “It must have been delivered to my home on Saturday. Only I didn’t notice it until today. It was mixed in with junk mail in my hallway.”

They heard a single, hard knock on the door, and Mogens Bøttger entered the room. He was carrying a cupholder tray with three cups bearing the logo from the café across the street.