Up on the third floor they’d rearranged everything again. Bloody police reform. Carl would soon need a GPS to find his way to the homicide chief’s office. He had been away for only three lousy weeks, and yet there were at least five new faces glaring at him as if he were an alien.

Who the hell were they?

‘I’ve got good news for you, Carl,’ Homicide Chief Marcus Jacobsen said as Carl’s eyes skated over the walls of his new office. The pale green surfaces reminded him of a cross between an operating room and a crisis-control centre in a Len Deighton thriller. From every angle, corpses with sallow, lost eyes stared down at him. Maps, diagrams and personnel schedules were arranged in a multicoloured confusion. It all seemed depressingly efficient.

‘Good news, you say. That doesn’t sound good,’ Carl replied, dropping into a seat opposite his boss.

‘Well, Carl, you’ll have visitors from Norway soon.’

Carl gazed up at him from under heavy eyelids.

‘I’m told a five-person delegation is coming from Oslo’s police directorate to have a peek at Department Q. Next Friday at 10 a.m. You remember, right?’ Marcus smiled, blinking. ‘I’ve been asked to tell you how much they’re looking forward to meeting you.’

That sure as hell made them the only ones.

‘With this visit in mind I’ve reinforced your team. Her name is Rose.’

At this Carl straightened up a little in his seat.

Afterwards he stood outside the homicide chief’s door trying to lower his arched brow. It’s said that bad news comes in clusters. Bloody right it does. At work for only five minutes and he’d already been informed that he’d have to serve as mentor for a new employee. Not to mention act as some kind of hand-holding guide for a herd of mountain apes, which he’d happily forgotten all about.

‘Where is this new girl who’s supposed to be joining me?’ he asked Mrs Sørensen, who sat behind the front desk.

The hag didn’t glance up from her keyboard.

He knocked lightly on the desk. As if that would help.

Then he felt a tap on his shoulder.

‘Here he is in the flesh, Rose,’ someone said behind him. ‘May I introduce you to Carl Mørck.’

Turning, he saw two surprisingly similar faces. Whoever invented black dye hadn’t lived in vain, he thought. They both had tousled, coal-black and ultra-short hair, with jet-black eyes and sombre, dark clothes. The resemblance was damned uncanny.

‘Blimey! What happened to you, Lis?’

The department’s most competent secretary slid a hand through her previously elegant blonde hair and flashed him a smile. ‘I know. Isn’t it pretty?’

He nodded slowly.

Carl shifted his attention to the other woman, who stood on mile-high heels. She gave him a smile that could have taken anyone down a peg. Once again he glanced at Lis, noting the striking likeness between the two women, and wondered whose image had inspired whom.

‘This is Rose. She’s been here for a few weeks, cheering us secretaries up with her infectious humour. Now I’ll entrust her to you. Take care of her, Carl.’

Carl stormed into Marcus’s office with his arguments at the ready, but after twenty minutes he realized he was fighting a losing battle. He managed to win a week’s reprieve and then he would have to welcome the girl down in Department Q. Right beside Carl’s office was the utility closet that housed lengths of traffic spikes and equipment they used to cordon off crime scenes. Marcus Jacobsen explained how it had already been cleaned and furnished. Rose Knudsen was his new colleague in Department Q, and that was final.

Whatever the homicide chief’s motives were, Carl didn’t like them.

‘She received top marks at the police academy, but she failed the driver’s test, and that means you’re done for, no matter how talented you are,’ Jacobsen said, spinning his swollen cigarette pack around for the fifteenth time. ‘Maybe she was also a little too thin-skinned to work in the field, but she was determined to join the police, so she learned how to be a secretary. And she’s been at Station City for the past year. Then the last few weeks she’s been Mrs Sørensen’s substitute, who of course is back now.’

‘Why didn’t you send her back to City, if I may ask?’

‘Why? Well, there was some internal hullabaloo. Nothing that relates to us.’

‘OK.’ The word ‘hullabaloo’ sounded ominous.

‘At any rate, Carl, you now have a secretary. And she’s a good one.’

He said that pretty much about everyone.

‘She seemed very, really nice, I think,’ said Assad under the fluorescent lights in Department Q, trying to make Carl feel better.

‘She started a hullabaloo down at City, I’ll have you know. That’s not so nice.’

‘Hulla … ? You’ll have to say that one more time, Carl.’

‘Forget it, Assad.’

His assistant nodded. Then he gulped a substance smelling of mint tea that he’d poured into his cup. ‘Listen to this, Carl. The case you put me on top of while you were away, I couldn’t get very far with. I looked here and there and all impossible places, but the case files have all gone missing during the moving mess upstairs.’

Carl looked up. Gone missing? No shit? But all right – something good had happened today, after all.

‘Yes, completely gone. But then I looked a little through the piles of folders and found this one. It’s very interesting.’

Assad handed him a pale green case file and stood as still as a pillar of salt, an expectant expression on his face.

‘Are you planning on standing there while I read?’

‘Yes, thanks,’ he said, setting his cup down on Carl’s desk.

As he opened the file, Carl puffed his cheeks with air and slowly exhaled.

The case was quite old. From the summer of 1987, to be exact. The year he and a mate had taken the train to the Copenhagen Carnival and a red-headed girl who couldn’t get the rhythm out of her loins had taught him how to samba – which, when they ended the evening on a blanket behind a bush in Rosenborg Castle Gardens, was heavenly. He had been twenty-odd years old then, and nothing was virgin territory after that.

It had been a good summer, 1987. The summer he was transferred from Vejle to the Antonigade Police Station.

The murders had to have been committed eight or ten weeks after the carnival, at roughly the same time as the redhead decided to throw her samba body across the next country bumpkin. Yes, it was precisely the period when Carl was making his first nightly rounds in Copenhagen’s narrow streets. Actually, it was odd that he didn’t recall anything about the case; it was certainly bizarre enough.

Two siblings, a girl and a boy aged seventeen and eighteen respectively, were found beaten to a pulp in a summer cottage not far from Dybesø, near Rørvig. The girl’s body was badly bruised and she had suffered terribly during the beating, as evidenced by the defensive wounds.

He scanned the text. No sexual assault, nothing stolen.

Then he read the autopsy report once more and riffled through the newspaper clippings. There were only a few, but the headlines were as large as they could get.

‘Beaten to death,’ wrote Berlingske Tidende, providing a description of the bodies that was unusually detailed for this old, highbrow newspaper.

They were found in the living room, by the fireplace, the girl in a bikini and her brother naked, a half-bottle of cognac gripped in his hand. He had been killed by a single blow to the back of his head, with a blunt object later identified as the claw hammer discovered in a tuft of heather somewhere between Flyndersø and Dybesø.

The motive was unknown, but suspicion quickly fell on a group of young boarding-school pupils who were staying at the lavish summer residence of one of their parents near Flyndersø. On numerous occasions they had been involved in skirmishes at the local nightclub, The Round, where a few locals got seriously hurt.