She skimmed the article, which was long and full of technical details about the company, scrolling down the page. At the bottom was a picture from ScanCope’s initial stock exchange listing. A man, whom Heloise assumed was Kenneth Vallø, was featured in the middle of the picture. If you ignored the wheelchair he was seated in, he didn’t look like a person with a physical disability. He was sitting in his chair as straight as a dancer from the Royal Danish Ballet. His torso looked healthy and muscular, and his eyes seemed powerful and confident. Several people stood around him, men in suits who were smiling and reaching out their hands to congratulate him, and just behind him—right there behind his left shoulder—stood Anna Kiel.

Heloise smiled when she saw her.

Anna was wearing her blond hair down, and it framed a narrow face with big blue eyes, a mouth with full lips, and a pretty little upturned nose that gave her a young, almost childish look, even though based on the date she must have been at least twenty-five when the picture was taken.

That was the only picture Heloise had come across in her research in which Anna Kiel didn’t look indifferent. Her mouth was curled into a smile. Her blue eyes twinkled, focused on Kenneth Vallø.

She looked proud, almost happy.

Okay, so she and Vallø hadn’t only been childhood friends. Their friendship had continued way into their adult lives. But could there have been more between them than that? Heloise wondered. Had they been in love?

Heloise called Morten Munk in research, and he answered after just one ring with a theatrical, “You may speak.”

“Hey, it’s me,” Heloise said. “I need the address of a guy.”

“Will any old guy do?”

“Ha-ha, very funny. His name is Kenneth Vallø, and he lives in Herlev. Can you find an address for me?”

“Give me a sec,” Munk said, and hung up without saying good-bye.

Heloise sat there with the car engine turned off until she received a text from Munk.

CHAPTER

21

THE HOUSE WAS an ordinary rich person’s house, the kind of house you lived in in Denmark’s bigger provincial towns if you had a job that paid well, like an orthodontist living by the Vejle Fjord or a lawyer in Sønderborg. Nice looking, neat, and expensive, at least compared to the other houses in the neighborhood. But it wasn’t the kind of house you normally lived in if you were worth three hundred million kroner or more, Heloise thought.