“I’ll just call PC and brief her on the backpack.” Jeppe put the phone to his ear. “We need to start a door-to-door around the dock, ring doorbells and stop passersby. Someone may have seen Oscar and his kidnapper in the harbor.”

“Tell her I say hi!”

Anette unlocked the car and opened the driver’s-side door. Before she got in, she gazed back down at the dock. Mads Teigen was still standing by the boat holding her business card, looking after her.

THE SCENT OF risotto Milanese spread through the apartment on Peblinge Dossering. Esther de Laurenti had sautéed onions and rice and stirred in white wine and stock, and now the dish was simmering over a low flame while she sat at her computer. In a few minutes she would finish it off with butter and Parmesan, but until then she could fit in a little work.

The idea for her book had finally fallen into place around New Year’s, when she read an old article online about funerals and was reminded of the legendary Danish anthropologist Margrethe Dybris. Esther had met her once or twice at the university but had never gotten to know her. Dybris had traveled through Southeast Asia in the 1960s and ’70s, researching death rituals, taking pictures of the locals, and exhibiting her photos afterward.

Esther had checked out one of the anthropologist’s scientific articles from the main library and was sold. Margrethe Dybris, who unfortunately passed away in 2017, seemed like an exceptional person. She had never married; instead she had traveled alone to some of the most primitive corners of the planet at a time when most women were chained to their stoves and children. She had later adopted two of her own, settled down as a single mother on Bornholm, and continued her research.

Esther ended up borrowing everything she could find about Margrethe’s field trips to graveyards, about mummified corpses and death masks. She read the material with a growing admiration and also indignation.

Why hadn’t anyone ever written a biography of Margrethe Dybris? Such a remarkable pioneer who had lived and breathed feminism, long before the concept had been divided into waves and watered down.

Esther had done only a few weeks of research before realizing that that was the book she would write. Margrethe’s book.

Now she was studying up and gathering information for a biography of the anthropologist and her life’s work, confident that the writing would come once she had thoroughly researched the topic and inspiration truly struck. She was in a good phase, leaving pages of notes and ideas all over the apartment.