They just needed a valid reason to get the search started. Maybe someone in her family could request it. He would have to check it out.

‘I have a new mobile, so I didn’t know whether I’d got the shot in the box,’ Assad explained. ‘When she ran away from me yesterday I just pressed the button. Reflexes, you know. I tried to get something up on the screen last night, but I did something wrong.’

Was that actually possible?

‘What do you say? Isn’t it fantastic, Carl?’

‘Rose!’ Carl shouted, twisting his head towards the corridor.

‘She’s not here. She’s out on Vigerslev Allé.’

‘Vigerslev Allé?’ Carl shook his head. ‘What’s she doing there?’

‘Didn’t you tell her to investigate whether or not the tabloid magazines had anything on Kimmie?’

Carl glanced at Assad’s dour-looking old aunts in the picture frames. Soon Assad would be looking like them, too.

‘When she gets back, give her the image so she can have it manipulated along with some of the old photos we have. It was good that you took that picture, Assad. Well done.’ He clapped his partner on the shoulder and hoped in return that Assad wouldn’t offer him any of that pistachio glop he was chewing on. ‘We have an appointment out at Vridsløselille State Prison in half an hour. Shall we get going?’

Already on Egon Olsens Vej, which was the new name of the street to the prison, Carl noticed his partner’s obvious discomfort. Not that he broke into a sweat or was reluctant. But he grew unusually quiet, and stared blindly at the front gate towers as if they were waiting to crush him.

Carl didn’t feel that way. For him Vridløselille was a convenient drawer into which some of the country’s worst arseholes could be shoved. If one combined the sentences the nearly two hundred and fifty inmates were serving, the total figure would be somewhere over two thousand years. A complete waste of life and energy, that’s what it was. It was pretty much the last place a person would want to draw a breath, but most of them damned well deserved to be there. That was still his firm conviction.

‘We need to head to the right,’ Carl said, after they’d arrived and gone through the formalities.

Assad hadn’t uttered a word the whole time and emptied his pockets without being asked, following instructions automatically. Apparently he knew the procedure.

Carl pointed across the courtyard at a grey building with a white sign that read VISITORS.

Here Bjarne Thøgersen awaited them, no doubt armed to the teeth with dodging tactics. In two or three years he’d be out. He wasn’t going to get himself into any trouble.

He looked better than Carl had expected. Eleven years in prison normally takes a thorough toll. Bitter lines at the corner of the mouth, unfocused eyes and a fundamental recognition of not being any use to anybody, which eventually settles in the body’s posture. Yet here was a man with clear, teasing eyes. Skinny for sure, and on guard, but unusually upbeat nonetheless.

He stood up and extended his hand to Carl. No questions or explanations. Someone had evidently told him what was in store. Carl noticed these things.

‘Deputy Detective Superintendent Mørck,’ he said anyway.

‘This is costing me ten kroner an hour,’ the man replied with a wry smile. ‘I hope it’s important.’

He didn’t greet Assad, but then again, Assad hadn’t encouraged it. He just pulled his chair back and sat down at a slight distance.

‘You spend time in the workshop?’ Carl glanced at his watch. Quarter to eleven. Yes, it was smack in the middle of the workday.

‘What’s this about?’ Thøgersen wanted to know, sitting down a trifle too slowly. Also a telltale sign. So he was a tad nervous, after all. Good.

‘I don’t hang out much with the other inmates,’ he continued, unsolicited. ‘So I can’t give you any information, if that’s what you’re here for. Otherwise I’d be happy to strike a little deal, if it could get me out sooner.’ He grinned briefly, trying to assess Carl’s low-key attitude.

‘Twenty years ago you killed two young people, Bjarne. You’ve confessed, so that part of the case we won’t need to discuss, but I do have a missing person you’re more than welcome to tell me about.’

Bjarne nodded, raising his eyebrows – a nice blend of a bit of goodwill with a pinch of surprise.

‘I’m talking about Kimmie. I’ve heard you two were good friends.’

‘That’s correct. We were at boarding school together, and we also dated at one point.’ He smiled. ‘A fucking awesome lady.’ He would say that about anyone after eleven years without having real sex. The guard had told him that Bjarne Thøgersen never had any visitors. Never. This was his first visit in years.

‘Let’s start at the beginning. Is that OK with you?’

He shrugged, glancing down for a moment. Of course it wasn’t.

‘Why was Kimmie expelled from boarding school? Do you recall?’

He put his head back and stared at the ceiling. ‘Something about her getting involved with one of the teachers. That wasn’t permitted.’

‘What happened to her afterwards?’

‘She rented an apartment in Næstved for a year. She worked at a grill bar.’ He laughed. ‘Her folks didn’t know anything about it. They thought she was still in school. But they found out, of course.’

‘She was sent to boarding school in Switzerland?’

‘Yes. She was there for four or five years. Not just boarding school, but also the university. What the hell was it called again?’ He shook his head. ‘Never mind. I can’t remember the bloody name. At any rate, she was studying to be a veterinarian. Hey, wait. It was Berne. The University of Berne.’

‘So she spoke very good French?’

‘No, German. Lectures were in German, she said.’

‘Did she finish her studies?’

‘No, not completely. I don’t know why, but she had to quit for some reason.’

Carl glanced at Assad, who jotted it down in his notebook.

‘And then what? Where did she live after that?’

‘She came home. Lived for a while in Ordrup with her parents – that is, with her father and stepmother. And then she moved in with me.’

‘We know she worked at a pet shop. Wasn’t that beneath her level of training?’

‘Why? She never finished her studies to become a vet.’

‘And you, what did you do for a living?’

‘I worked at my father’s lumber yard. That’s all in the report, you know that.’

‘Wasn’t there something in the report about you inheriting the lumber yard in 1995, and then it burned down shortly afterwards? After that you were unemployed, right?’

Apparently the man could also appear hurt. ‘The unloved child has many faces,’ as Kurt Jensen, his old colleague who now sat twiddling his thumbs in parliament, always said.

‘That’s utter rubbish,’ Bjarne protested. ‘I was never accused of starting that fire. And what would I have got out of it? My father’s business wasn’t insured.’

No, Carl thought. He should probably have checked that out first.

Carl sat for a while, staring at the walls. He’d sat in this room countless times before. These walls had lent an ear to tons of lies. Tons of tall tales and assurances no one believed.

‘How did she get along with her parents?’ he asked. ‘Do you know?’

Bjarne Thøgersen stretched, already calmer. They’d entered the small-talk zone. The conversation wasn’t about him, and he liked that. He felt safe.

‘Terribly,’ he said. ‘Her folks were a couple of arseholes. I don’t think her father was ever home. And the slag he was married to was a mean bitch.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Yeah, you know. The type of person who only cares about money. A gold-digger.’ He savoured the word. It wasn’t one that was regularly used in his world.

‘They argued?’

‘Yes. Kimmie said they fought like hell.’

‘What was Kimmie doing while you killed the two teenagers?’

The sudden shift back in the sequence of events caused the man’s eyes to freeze on Carl’s shirt collar. If there had been electrodes attached to Bjarne Thøgersen, all the gauges would be flipping out.