Schäfer regularly received emails and phone calls from members of the public who thought they had valuable information to contribute. It was rare, however, for someone to turn up in person, and even rarer for them to have information about a case that old.

“All right, get an officer to take her up to the second floor and put her in interview room one.”

He hung up and stood.

“Who was that?” Augustin asked, nodding to draw his attention to the button on his trousers, which he had discreetly opened under his desk to make room for his stomach while he ate his lunch.

“That was my wife,” Schäfer replied. He pulled in his stomach and buttoned his pants. “She’s just had sex with the gardener, so she thought I deserved an Indian head massage. The massage therapist is making her way up the stairs as we speak.”

CHAPTER

3

FINE, ALMOST SILENT September rain descended upon Copenhagen for the fifth day in a row. The summer, which was long over, had been grayer than usual, and it was starting to feel like the four seasons had been replaced by one long, muddy autumn.

Heloise Kaldan was closing her kitchen window, where water was dripping onto the windowsill, when her cell phone started buzzing.

It had been ringing off the hook all weekend. This time she didn’t recognize the number. She rejected the call and popped a dark-green capsule in the Nespresso machine, and immediately it started spluttering out a pitch-black lungo.

From her living room she had a view of the huge, verdigris dome of the Marble Church. The old attic apartment on the corner of Olfert Fischers Gade had been neither spacious nor appealing when she had bought it. It hadn’t even had a real bathroom, and the old kitchen, which was now Heloise’s favorite room, had been downright disgusting. But from the small living room balcony, she had a clear view of the Marble Church, and that was one of the few criteria she had insisted on from the estate agent: she’d have to be able to see the dome from at least one window in the apartment.

As a child, she had seen her father every other weekend, and the dome had been their special place. Every other Saturday they had first gone to get hot chocolate and cream cakes at Conditori La Glace, where he had charmed all the waitresses, and then strolled down Bredgade toward the church, where they had made their way up the winding stairs with familiar ease and crossed the squeaky floorboards in the loft under the roof before sitting down on one of the benches in the cupola at the top.