She removed her shoe covers and handed them to him.

“One last question,” he said. “If that’s okay?”

She nodded.

“Did Malthe ever wear makeup?”

“Makeup?” She looked at him in surprise. “You mean like me? Goth?”

Jeppe shrugged.

“Makeup?” She shook her head. “He would just never do that. Please, he’s a country boy from Hjørring.”

“POOR GIRL!” CLAUSEN approached Jeppe as he stood in the doorway, peeling off his latex gloves.

“Yes, I feel sorry for her.”

“We’re just about done, Kørner, so you can have the place to yourself in a moment. We haven’t found anything unusual—there are no traces of violence, nothing broken, no mess or blood anywhere. The place is clean and tidy, the plants have all been watered recently, and there’s food in the fridge. We’ve collected fingerprints from glasses and the remote control and packed up his hairbrush and toothbrush for DNA profiling. We’ll take his computer as well and look it over. I assume Saidani wants it when we’re done, right?”

“Right, Clausen. Have you found his cell phone?”

“Nope, no phone. But his wallet is here with his driver’s license and ATM card in it, so wherever he went, he wasn’t planning on driving a car or needing money. Unless he had cash on him.”

“Any smut?” Jeppe was referring to the usual sorts of pornography and sex toys that the police found in nine out of ten residences—usually hidden in an underwear drawer or a shoebox in the closet.

“No smut.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Jeppe walked past Clausen into the apartment. Two other technicians dressed in white were on their way out, their hands full of brown paper bags, headed back to the labs with their forensic specimens. He closed the door after them.

The apartment was furnished just the way he would expect for a young couple who had moved in relatively recently. White walls and furniture of the temporary, financially conscious kind. There were IKEA folding chairs stacked behind the kitchen door and a row of sneakers on the floor in the front hall. A framed poster hung on the wall with a retro drawing of a bike rider dressed in yellow. White melamine shelves contained books on pedagogy, etymological dictionaries, and a nice collection of Danish and European literature from this and the last century, all in alphabetical order.

On the wall over the kitchen table was a collage of travel photos, Malthe and Josephine in front of temples, rock formations, and sunsets.

Jeppe walked over. They were an unusual couple. Malthe looked sunburned and red-cheeked in most of the pictures, Josephine pale and heavily made-up. He looked like a skinny but healthy young man from North Jutland, she an autonomist antifa from Copenhagen’s Nordvest neighborhood. But they looked happy together.