“We’re going to need Oscar’s phone number, and Iben’s and her parents’.” Jeppe passed his notebook over the table to Malin. She stared at it for a second, perplexed, then slowly began writing, her trembling hands showing her fear of the worst imaginable.

“I think he’s been kidnapped.” Her voice shook. “Just the thought that he—”

“Where does Iben live?”

“On Fredericiagade,” Henrik replied, and looked at his wife. “Number sixty-four, isn’t it? With her dad. It takes about ten minutes to walk from here if you cut across the Citadel. Oscar usually does.”

Jeppe nodded to Anette, who got the notebook back from Malin, stood up, and walked over to the window to call the friend.

“What about the rest of the family? Were you home last night?”

“Yes,” Malin replied after a brief pause. “Well, Victor, our eldest, was out with some classmates, but Henrik and I were home with our daughter, Essie.”

“They left this for us.” Henrik carefully picked up a sheet of paper from the coffee table. Five typed lines glowing black on a white backdrop. “We didn’t see it until today. Then we knew something was seriously wrong, and we called the police right away.”

Jeppe pulled his sleeve down over his fingertips, took the piece of paper, and read it.

He looked around and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter’s work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.

THE KEEL SLICED lithely through the water, dividing the waves into an endless V behind the boat. Seagull cries accompanied the motor noise, and the sun played off the tops of the waves, turning the helmsman’s pupils into two little black dots. CopenHill, the combined incineration plant and recreational facility, sparkled in the morning light so that one would think there was actually snow on its manmade ski slope. There wasn’t, of course. It was spring, and the incineration plant’s recreational vision was far from ready, so the city’s downhill skiers still had to travel to real, snow-covered mountains for the time being.

Copenhagen’s port was quiet. Only harbor buses and garbage boats were out this early. In a few hours the water would be filled with Saturday canal tours, rental boats, and yachtsmen on their way out to fish, swim, and camp on the little islands in the Øresund strait, as well as yawls with beer-guzzling captains and sea kayaks paddled by clear-eyed rowers in windbreakers. By that time he would be gone.