“If they did, it was never made public,” she replied. “And that’s another reason I want to talk to the police. I have to know who I’m dealing with here, and why she’s so eager to talk to me.”

“Who is this he she refers to?” Aagaard pointed to the letter in front of her. “The man you supposedly have in common?”

Heloise shrugged.

“It must be the lawyer,” Bøttger said. “Somehow you must have crossed his path.”

“I really don’t see how I could have.”

“Could you have used him as a source once? Or maybe you met him on a night out a long time ago and forgot all about it?” he suggested.

Heloise raised an eyebrow. “Met him on a night out?”

“Yeah, what do I know? It could have happened.”

“No, it really couldn’t!”

Again, there was silence around the table.

It was Aagaard who broke it. “She uses the same closing line in both letters. She writes: ‘While I am denied your presence, Heloise, give me at least through your words some sweet semblance of yourself.’ ”

Heloise nodded and placed the letters alongside each other so that Bøttger could see the similarity.

“It’s a strangely pretentious way of expressing oneself,” Aagaard said. “What does it even mean?”

“I’ve no idea. After the first letter, I tried Googling the sentence to see if I got any hits. I didn’t, so I came up with my own home-baked analysis instead,” Heloise said, opening her notebook. She showed them what she had written:

I am denied your presence = I’m on the run and can’t meet you face to face. Give me through your words = write my story! A sweet semblance of yourself = you’re a journalist, which makes you objective.

“But I really can’t be sure.” She closed the notebook. “It’s not my most insightful work, so your guess is as good as mine.”

“ ‘A sweet semblance.’ Sweet?” Bøttger said. “What an odd thing to write.”

Aagaard zoned out of the conversation for a moment and gazed into the distance. Then she said, “If what she’s really saying is that you must be objective and write the story, then by definition she’s also saying that what we think we know isn’t true.”

“You’re not saying you believe she might be innocent, are you?” Heloise asked.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that. I’m just saying that you have to start at the beginning, as if you were new to the case. For instance, which sources were the old coverage based on?”

“Lots of sources.”

“Such as?”

“Such as Anna Kiel’s mother, friends and colleagues of both Christoffer Mossing and Anna Kiel, representatives of the Mossing family, a couple of her old teachers. It’s a long list.”