Her cell phone started vibrating again. This time it was a number she couldn’t dismiss. She let it ring three times before she answered in a weary voice.

“Kaldan speaking.”

“Hi, it’s me. Were you asleep?” Her editor, Karen Aagaard, sounded tense.

“No, why?”

“Your voice sounds a little rusty, that’s all.”

“I’m up.”

Heloise had been up most of last night and had finished off the bottle of white wine she and Gerda had opened yesterday. She had mulled over the story and examined it from all angles, reviewed every single detail in the course of events in an attempt to get to grips with it, but no matter how hard she’d tried, it had remained blurred, fuzzy. Or perhaps she just didn’t like what she was seeing? She was a journalist—a damn good one, too—and it just wasn’t like her to be so horribly wrong. She was furious with herself—and with him.

“I know I told you to take today off,” Karen Aagaard said, “but The Shovel wants to see you.”

Carl-Johan Scowl, aka The Shovel, was a greasy garden gnome of a man who worked as readers’ editor at Demokratisk Dagblad, taking his lead from the guidelines for good press ethics. He dealt with readers’ complaints about errors in the newspaper’s stories, and whenever he knocked on your door, you knew it would be a long day, maybe a long week, and possibly the end of your career.

“Again?” Heloise closed her eyes and let her head fall backward. She felt emotionally drained at the prospect of yet another exhausting review of the sequence of events. They had been over it three times already.

“Yes, you need to come in so that we can finish it off. There are still a few things he wants to go over before we can move on. Surely you’d like that too?”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Heloise said, and hung up.

She grabbed her black leather jacket, kicked aside a pile of junk mail on the doormat, and slammed the door behind her.

Demokratisk Dagblad’s offices were in a listed building in Store Strandstræde whose antiquated, regal expression and decor matched the paper’s conservative views. The vaulted ceilings were high, the walls decorated with handmade wallpaper, and the glass in the old casement windows was so thin that Heloise always froze her butt off during the winter months.

She parked her bicycle in front of the building and nodded to a couple of guys from the paper’s sales department who were smoking, sheltered from the rain on a café bench across the street. A black awning stretched out above them, filled to bursting with water, and drops of rain trickled down the big metal posts that held it up. Heloise watched the canvas, half expecting it to split above their heads.