“Fridays Essie—Esmeralda, our youngest—has dance class. I picked her up and we got home a little after five, maybe five thirty.” Malin touched Henrik’s hand on her shoulder, as if she wanted him to remove it. He didn’t.

“Have you checked with your immediate family to see if they’ve heard from him?”

“We called my parents and my sister, but none of them know anything. That’s all our immediate family. Henrik’s parents are dead. But Oscar would never just stay away without letting us know.”

Anette sat back down next to Jeppe.

“Can you tell if he came home after school yesterday? Is his backpack here, for example? His computer?”

Malin shook her head.

“Neither is his cell phone.”

“What about his passport?” Anette continued. “Is that in its usual place?”

“I checked. All our passports are where they go in the drawer.” She pointed to a red lacquered secretary. “What are you planning to do to find him?”

“We’ll start searching for him immediately,” Jeppe assured her. “If he has his cell phone on him, we’ll find him right away. What you can do in the meantime is call everyone who has contact with Oscar on a regular basis and ask about him.”

Henrik’s eyes grew moist.

“Do you have a good recent photo of your son?” Jeppe asked.

“I’ll get one.” Malin freed herself from her husband’s grasp, got to her feet, and supported herself for a moment on the backrest, as if she were dizzy. Then she left the room.

“Would you mind if we took a peek at his bedroom?” Anette asked.

The father didn’t respond. Anette looked at Jeppe, who shrugged in a gesture she chose to interpret as approval, got up, and walked back down the long hallway, opening doors as she went. The first room looked like an office, furnished with heavy wooden furniture. In the next room sat a teenager wearing headphones. He had dark hair and long limbs: a handsome young man.

“Hi, I’m Anette from the police. You must be Victor.”

He pulled off his headphones and let them hang around his neck like a backward necklace. A heavy beat filled the room. Anette saw that his eyes were red from crying.

“I’m looking for your little brother’s room,” she explained over the noise of the drums.

“Just call me Vic, everyone else does.” The boy took out his phone from his pants pocket and pressed on the screen. The music stopped. “This is actually his room. I was just sitting here and…”

“I’m assuming you don’t know where your brother is?”

“If I did, I don’t really think you’d be here right now, do you?” Victor smiled apologetically and wiped a tear off his cheek. “Sorry, I’m not trying to act smart or anything. This whole thing is just… weird.”