His smile was disarming, his explanation so straightforward that Anette felt a sense of relief spread through her body. Mads hadn’t even worked here a year, and the family probably hadn’t taken this boat out all winter. It was more than likely that Henrik Dreyer-Hoff was talking about Mads’s predecessor.

“When were the search and rescue crews out here looking for Oscar?”

“Saturday and Sunday. And I do rounds morning and night, every single day. He’s not here.”

Anette regarded the empty harbor, the grassy embankments, and the fort itself, its contours already obscured by the twilight.

“But maybe he has been here and left behind some trace that you haven’t discovered. How do you usually check the place?”

“I just start at one end with a flashlight. It can take anywhere from twenty minutes if I’m tired to an hour and a half if I really do a thorough job. It’s called an inspection round.”

“Let’s do one together. We’ll look in all the nooks and crannies, even the places you don’t normally check. We know from his father that Oscar loved to explore the casements.” Anette reached into her pocket and pressed a piece of nicotine gum out of the blister pack, a recent purchase that embarrassed her. She stuffed it into her mouth and chewed it tentatively. Substitutes like this weren’t normally her thing.

“Sure you wouldn’t rather have one of these?” Mads asked, showing her his lit cigarette.

“Hey, don’t tempt me. I’m trying to stay the course.” She laughed, then clapped her hands together. “Where do we start?”

“First we need flashlights. Come on!” He walked up the dock, heading for one of the red buildings, the commander’s residence. Anette swallowed the unpleasant taste of nicotine and peppermint and followed him.

Inside, the residence had high ceilings and old-fashioned decor, with solid wood furniture and sea chests. In the gathering twilight, the rooms seemed strangely abandoned, as if time had come to a halt and no one really lived here. Mads disappeared into a storage room, and Anette waited in the entry hall.

“Let me just find a couple that work. It’ll take me only a sec.”

“Fine, fine.”

Anette eyed a collection of yellowed black-and-white photos stuck on the wall over a chest of drawers and walked over for a closer look. Soldiers at dining tables and in smiling groups, all of them long since dead and buried. Next to the chest of drawers there was an open door into a room that looked like a kind of workshop with a workbench and shelves along the walls. She poked her nose in.

On the shelves taxidermied birds stood close, many of them with their wings spread as if in flight. Seagulls, swans, eiders, and crows with glossy feathers and dead eyes.