Fifty yards down the street the girl in the cap unlocked the front door of an apartment building. Jeppe put his foot in the doorway.

“I’ll come upstairs with you and say hi to your mother.”

She shrugged indifferently, but he could tell she didn’t like it. On the second floor a smiling woman with bleached-blond hair came out to meet them with a cat in her arms. She spoke only to the girls.

“Ah, there you are. Good, it’s bedtime.”

“I understand that Amina is spending the night?” Jeppe said, looking at her with concern.

She confirmed this with a nod.

“I’m a friend of her mother’s. I don’t know what rules your kids have, but Amina isn’t allowed out on the street late at night, certainly not with a bunch of teenagers drinking beer.”

“I hadn’t noticed how late it had gotten.” The woman nervously scratched the cat between its ears. “But they’re home now, right?”

She backed into the apartment and closed the door with a faint smile at Jeppe, who stood indecisively in the stairwell until he finally walked back down the stairs and out onto the street.

His springtime buzz had evaporated.

The boy lies on the concrete floor in the narrow passage between two walls. It is no more than a crack, just wide enough for a person to be able to stand in. Or lie down.

The daylight never makes it in, no plants grow here, and no one comes by. And yet. A scratching sound grows out of the darkness, blending with the sounds of the surf and the wind. A crow has found its way down into the depths. It hops cautiously closer and examines its prey.

The crow is an intelligent bird, one of the only birds able to use tools—digging food out with a stick, for example. Normally it lives primarily off grain and eggs from other birds’ nests, but that doesn’t mean it turns up its beak at some carrion. You could almost call it opportunistic. It cleans up nicely after the rest of us, making sure there aren’t any corpses lying around. Nature’s little garbagemen.

The crow hops warily closer, waiting. It’s used to being cautious, but the boy isn’t moving anymore. The bird approaches his face and looks at him, contemplating where it should slash its beak into the flesh and take a chunk.

TUESDAY, APRIL 16

CHAPTER 18

The Tuesday morning mood at Burmeistersgade was positively cheerful. There was no line for the bathroom, and Meriem chatted happily at breakfast. Jeppe tried not to ponder too much on whether the household peace was due to the fact that Amina wasn’t home. Sara smiled at him as she poured their coffee, and he felt a sense of peace spread from the pit of his stomach all the way to his earlobes.

“Did you sleep well?”