“But I think Kasper took it even harder,” he continued. “He had to go lie down on one of the couches in the cafeteria.”

“Kasper was with you in the crane operator’s room?”

Michael nodded.

“We’ll give him a chance to recover, then. Are you up for giving my colleague and me a tour? Show us the plant while we ask you some questions?”

“What do you want to see?” Michael asked, getting up willingly. He looked almost a little relieved to have something to do.

“We don’t really know, actually,” Jeppe said hesitantly. “But what we need to understand is how the body could end up in your claw, where it could have come from.”

“Then let’s start on the tipping floor. Follow me!”

He led them over to a stainless steel elevator, and after that down corridors and stairs, through the interior of the incineration plant. Jeppe and Anette followed, ducking quickly under pipes and wires to keep up. The body would be removed from the claw soon and transported to the Pathology Department. Because of the correlation between the body and the disappearance of Oscar, the autopsy would be performed right away instead of the following day, as was customary.

Michael walked out onto a platform that offered a view over the large, well-lit tipping floor. One entire wall of the space was open to the outside, and Jeppe could see the ramp that led the garbage trucks up from Kraftværksvej. A man dressed in a fluorescent yellow vest stood arguing with a group of drivers, whose trucks were parked around the tipping floor.

“I bet they’re grumpy because they can’t dump their trash and move on.” Michael pointed down along one wall of the vast room. “See the trench that runs along the wall? That’s where the trucks normally unload the trash. The silo is on the other side of that wall. You’ve seen that from the inside.”

“How does it work?” Jeppe asked, pulling out his notebook.

“The floor supervisor directs the truck to a bay, and then the driver backs into it until the load is over the trench. There’s a button in the driver’s cab that opens the rear and pushes the trash out so it falls down into the trench.”

Anette leaned over the railing and pointed to a garbage truck in the bay below them.

“Does that mean the garbageman doesn’t look at the trash at all?” she asked.

“We call them sanitation workers now, not garbagemen,” Michael responded, clearing his throat self-consciously. “But yeah, at this end of the process, he doesn’t see what he’s unloading. It just lands in the trench and ends up in the silo on the other side of the wall.”

“At this end of the process? What do you mean?”