“Antisocial personality disorder,” Heloise repeated. She opened a notepad lying on the table and clicked a ballpoint pen. “What does that mean, specifically?”

“You can put that away,” Schäfer said, nodding at the pen. “What we’re discussing here is off the record.”

“Okay, off the record.” Heloise clapped her notepad closed again and pushed it aside. “What does antisocial personality disorder mean?”

“People who suffer from it become aggressive easily, and they treat other people with callous indifference. They react violently to their emotions and simply don’t understand that their actions have consequences. Nothing is their fault—it’s always someone else’s fault. In other words, they’re completely insane.”

“And you said that Anna’s school psychologist supported the diagnosis?”

“Psychologists, plural. She was expelled from a number of different schools. She threatened a math teacher at one of them. Called his wife at their home and said she was going to shoot him when he biked to school the next day. Apparently she wasn’t fond of algebra.”

“And at the next school?”

“At the next school, she hit a classmate in the face with a tennis racket during PE. He’d allegedly been peeping into the girls’ locker room while they were changing.” Schäfer finished his beer. “It cost him a broken nose.”

Heloise instinctively reached for the bridge of her nose.

“Well yeah, that does sound crazy,” she said. “Why didn’t she end up in a psychiatric ward or something like that?”

“Because she was only twelve years old at the time, and because the police weren’t involved. No one reported it. No one spoke up. Everything was dealt with in-house with a little guitar playing and sitting in a circle and talking about feelings.”

“Dealt with? It doesn’t sound like anything was dealt with.”

“Really, you think?”

“What about her parents? Where were they?”

“I didn’t get the impression that they took much of an interest in their daughter. The father took a job in Greenland when Anna was eight or nine, and then he hooked up with a hot young gal up there. He and the mother got divorced, and he had a new litter of kids. He completely vanished from Anna’s life after that.”

“And the mother? There was something about her owning a pub in Herlev?”

“Yes, the Lantern.”

“What’s she like?”

“Pretty lady, a philosophy professor.”

“Seriously?”

“No, not seriously. She’s a pub owner. Use your imagination.”

Heloise sat up straighter, somewhat baffled. On the one hand, she appreciated his dry, undiplomatic style. She had always preferred people who called it as they saw it. In her opinion, an honest insult was far preferable to a polite lie. At the same time, she was kind of stunned that a man in his position would label people so carelessly.