“How the hell should I know? But I can remember the last sum I sent home from Greenland: thirty-eight thousand kroner. That was two months’ salary I had saved up for her and Anna to pay the mortgage with so they could spend the summer hanging out together.”

“Did she gamble away all the money then?”

“She already had, man.” He cleared his throat loudly and spit into his empty glass. “The money I sent went straight into the hole she had already dug.”

“Did she ever talk about a man named Johannes Mossing?”

“Who’s that?”

“That’s Christoffer Mossing’s dad.”

Frank shook his head. “I don’t remember her mentioning that name. We haven’t been together for more than twenty-two years.”

“And yet you can remember the exact amount of money you sent home back then?”

“Believe me, if you had saved up thirty-eight thousand kroner and given it to someone, you’d remember it too if they’d spent the money paying off a gambling debt.” He looked over at the bartender and waved for her to come over again. “But she didn’t, though.”

“She didn’t what?” Heloise looked puzzled.

“Pay off her debt. Not the whole debt, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“I cut off contact with her after that episode, but I heard stories from home about her owing more money, a lot more money. I don’t know how she was even able to rack up a debt like that—we didn’t have money like that, so she must have borrowed it from somewhere.”

When people couldn’t pay what they owed, they disappeared. People disappeared, Heloise. Do you understand what I’m telling you?

Heloise bit her lower lip. “All the money she owed back then … do you know how she managed to pay off the debt?”

Frank shook his head. “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

Heloise moved a little closer to him. “Frank, do you have any idea at all why Anna killed Christoffer Mossing?”

He shook his head again.

“Jonna said that she was crazy, mentally ill,” Heloise said. “Do you think that?”

He didn’t say anything.

“She also said that Anna was angry and withdrawn as a child …”

“No,” he said, and for a split second Heloise made out a softness in his inebriated eyes. “She was damned cute when she was little, always warm and loving.”

“Then what happened?”

He shrugged. “Like you said, I left. I have no idea what happened in Anna’s life after that.”

Heloise said good-bye to Frank Kiel and headed toward the exit as the bartender started magically transforming his newly acquired bill into a Bacardi shot.

Once she was standing in Kongens Nytorv out in front of the strip club, she called Schäfer, but it went straight to his voice mail. She left him a message and asked him to call her back as soon as possible.