“Man in silo, that’s what we call it. We’ve never pressed it before, not even in training.” Kasper drank his tea with an apologetic smile. “I got to work around eight a.m., changed my clothes, and went into the crane control room. I had some error codes in the sorting program that I needed to check out. But I hadn’t been there for very long before I saw”—he gulped and then cleared his throat—“before I saw the leg in the claw… and well, then Michael hit the switch.”

“Were you surprised?”

Kasper stared at him incredulously.

“What the hell do you mean by that? Did I expect to find human remains at work, or what? Yes, absolutely, I was surprised. Shocked!”

Jeppe nodded as he made notes.

“That’s right. You did have to go to the hospital.”

“Why do you make it sound like there’s something wrong with me? I was in shock! I came home, took a sleeping pill, and slept for twenty-four hours. That’s how upset I was.” Kasper got up, fetched a container from the kitchen table, and stirred two spoonfuls of sugar into his tea.

“At that time, did you know whose body it was?”

“No.”

Jeppe turned the page. The paper rustled momentarily in the silence between them.

“But as we later discovered, the body belonged to Malthe Sæther, your daughter’s Danish teacher. How well did you know him?”

“Not at all, I would say. Perhaps I’ve exchanged a total of three sentences with him over all of last year at some parent-teacher meeting. Iben is a big kid, I don’t get too involved in her schooling.”

Jeppe jotted that down. He could sense Kasper trying to read what he wrote as if it made him feel insecure.

“Hey, I get how it looks: my daughter’s teacher turns up dead in the silo…”

“You found him,” Jeppe clarified.

“But it was a coincidence! Everything that gets thrown in the trash anywhere in Copenhagen comes to the incinerator. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“What does your job actually involve, specifically?”

Kasper raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I’m a process engineer. We’re a team of three engineers working together on research tasks. I didn’t know the police took interest in that kind of thing.”

Jeppe smiled.

“Do you normally sit with the crane operator?”

“Only if there’s something wrong with the claw’s control system. Normally I sit with my coworkers in an office on the sixth floor.”

“And do what? Just generally speaking.”