THE HARD SPRAY from the shower head stung Heloise’s skin. She quickly lathered herself, rinsed, and five minutes later she was in her bathrobe, seated at the breakfast table with a towel around her hair and all the day’s newspapers in front of her.
Martin sat in the chair beside her in a freshly ironed shirt and suit. Neat and clean, swathed in a cloud of fashionable aftershave that smelled like a surprising blend of leather and cedar. Heloise alternated between loving and hating the scent. This morning it didn’t bother her.
He folded up the copy of Politiken he had been reading and leaned against her.
“Have a good day.”
“Are you leaving already?” Heloise asked and kissed him.
“Yes, I’ve got to go.” He drank the rest of his coffee and stood up. “The prime minister just announced that he’s holding a press conference in an hour and a half, and we don’t know yet what he’s planning to talk about. So I need to go gather the troops before it starts.”
He put on his camel hair coat and buttoned it.
“I’ll see you later, right?”
“Yeah.” Heloise smiled.
After Martin left, she threw on a pair of faded jeans and a gray striped sweater and sat down at her desk in front of the living room window. From the little penthouse apartment, she had an unobstructed view of the Marble Church’s big, verdigris dome. Today it looked like an enormous soft ice cream cone that had been dipped in white chocolate. All of Copenhagen was a dazzling white, all the roofs and branches beautifully covered with snow.
She created a new document on her computer and drummed her fingers a little on the desk as she thought. Then she took out her phone and called Morten Munk in Demokratisk Dagblad’s Research Department.
He answered the call with a theatrical, “You may speak!”
“Hi, it’s me,” she said. “Are you up for some work?”
“Why do you think I’m here?”
They usually bantered like this. Heloise could hardly remember a conversation with Munk that hadn’t begun with an exchange like this.
“Well, Milady?” he said. “To what do I owe this honor?”
She could hear that he was eating something as he spoke, and his voice sounded strained and a bit winded. Munk’s New Year’s resolution had been to go on a diet this year, but it did not appear to be in effect now, two months later. He wasn’t yet over thirty, and Heloise was afraid that he wasn’t going to make it to his next birthday if he didn’t turn things around.
“Lukas Bjerre,” she said. “The missing kid.”
“What about him?”
“Could you please gather everything that’s been published about the case and send it to me? All the details that have been made public, personal data, status of the investigation, and so on.”
“Are you prepping a Britney?” Munk asked.
A Britney was newspaper slang for a prewritten obituary that you kept in a drawer, just in case. The procedure, which journalists used to call a Keith Richards, had been named in the years when Britney Spears had seemed to be on the verge of dying of an overdose or suicide. It was basically about being three steps ahead—good old common sense. But it still always felt a little morbid to write a commemorative piece in honor of someone who was still breathing.
“Yes, just a short one,” Heloise said. “But most of all, I just want to get up to speed on the case.”
“You don’t sound that enthusiastic,” Munk commented.
“It’s commissioned work.”
“Isn’t everything in the end?”
He had a point, Heloise thought, feeling annoyed. She hung up and found the picture she had taken of the barn door in Schäfer’s case file. She transferred it onto the computer so she could enlarge it. Her internet was acting up and the file took a long time to upload, so the picture gradually resolved in small, pixilated pieces like an unfinished puzzle.
When it was finally there on her screen and in focus in front of her, she had that same strange feeling of déjà vu that she had had at Schäfer’s house.
She was certain that she had been there, that she had recently stood in front of that barn, and that she had had the same thought she was thinking now: that the old, dilapidated façade looked like a cagey, eerie face.
She picked up her phone again to send the picture to Munk and opened her photo library. She scrolled too far back in the archive and came to a halt when she saw the series of pictures she had taken at the summer house in Rørvig.
There were photos of Martin swimming naked and laughing hysterically in the middle of winter in the blue-black Kattegat Sea. Photos of sand dunes and rice pudding pancakes, and one of a little fallow deer that had appeared in the yard early one morning.
But it was the pictures Heloise had taken on her walks alone in the orchard that made her stop. She had seen many beaten-up old houses in the woods on those walks and remembered one in particular: a dilapidated cabin that she had thought was the sort of place kids would be afraid of. A place that would send their imaginations into overdrive, coming up with monsters, witches, and beasts.
Heloise, on the other hand, had tried to imagine what it would be like to live in such an isolated place, in peace and quiet—free from the outside world. She had walked around the property and had taken only one photo of the main house. But hadn’t there been a barn around the back? Was that where she had seen the face on the barn?
She typed in the number for the reception desk at Demokratisk Dagblad and waited as it rang.
“Hi, this is Heloise Kaldan,” she said. “Is there a car available this morning?”