“At any rate,” Jeppe said, nodding, “we should have a look into the family’s—” He was about to say skeletons in the closet but stopped himself.

“Into the family bed!” Anette exclaimed, rolling her eyes.

Larsen looked back and forth between them and seemed to be considering whether they were somehow pulling his leg.

“So, Larsen, let’s hear it!” Jeppe gave him a smile of encouragement. “That’s the situation. What have you found out about the threatening letters?”

“Oh, so you do want to know?” Larsen opened his logo-adorned bag and pulled out a folder holding about ten sheets of paper that he spread out on the table. “A little under three years ago, a customer went to the police suspecting dirty tricks in Nordhjem’s auctions. The media picked up on the story, and a number of other customers came forward with their suspicions. It ended up turning into more than twenty individual cases. Because the story broke in the middle of a long business holiday it was able to simmer along for quite a while. You could definitely call it a shitstorm.”

He took a bite of cinnamon roll and wiped his mouth with a neatly folded paper napkin before continuing.

“That can’t have been fun for the family—the business is theirs, built from the ground up, not run by some venture capital firm. The couple founded the auction house just six years ago, so they’ve been quite successful in a short time. She came from the art world as a gallery owner, and he had been the manager of an electric company, and they maintained that division of labor. She’s the creative director, and he’s the administrative ditto, but they do overlap each other’s areas of responsibility. She mostly handles acquisitions, and he’s responsible for online sales and marketing and all the finances.”

Larsen raised the cinnamon roll to his mouth but changed his mind and set it back down again.

“The crisis hit three years ago. The accusations were about so-called shill bidding, which basically means making fake bids on an auction item to inflate the price. The bids come either from the seller or from an accomplice and are incredibly hard to uncover or prove.”

“But was it proven?”

“The state prosecutor for serious economic and international crime, SØIK, investigated the case and confirmed the suspicions that the auctions had involved widespread fraud. At one point the district attorney’s office became involved. They obtained a search warrant and raided Nordhjem’s offices. My contact says—off the record—that they were sure the family knew about the scam and may even have been involved. They certainly made plenty of money off the artificially inflated prices.”

Larsen found a document on letterhead from the Copenhagen district attorney’s office. The text had been heavily redacted, with a lot of sections blacked out.