‘Yes,’ she said with a cold glare, ‘I did. The tart. How would that surprise anyone?’

‘What happened then?’

‘She wanted money, of course.’

‘Did she get it?’

‘Not from me!’ She dropped the flirtation and replaced it with profound disgust. ‘But her father gave her ten thousand kroner and asked her to stop contacting him.’

‘And you? Did you hear from her?’

She shook her head. The eyes said it was just as well.

‘Who was the father of the child? Do you know?’

‘Oh, I suppose it was that little nobody who burned down his father’s lumber yard.’

‘Bjarne Thøgersen, you mean? The one who was convicted of the murders?’

‘Probably. I really don’t remember his name any more.’

‘I see!’ He was certain she was lying. Whisky or not, a person didn’t just forget something like that. ‘Kimmie lived here for a while. You say it wasn’t easy for you?’

She gazed at him in disbelief. ‘I hope you don’t think I put up with that meat market for very long. No, during that time I preferred living on the coast.’

‘The coast?’

‘Costa del Sol, you know. Fuengirola. Lovely roof terrace right above the promenade. Delightful place. Do you know Fuengirola, Mr Mørck?’

He nodded. No doubt she went there on account of her arthritis, but otherwise it was where the maladjusted semi-wealthy with skeletons in their closet went. If she had said Marbella, he would have better understood. She must have been able to afford it.

‘Is there still anything of Kimmie’s left in the house?’ he asked.

At that moment something inside her fell apart. She simply sat there, silently emptying her glass at her own leisurely pace, and when it was empty, so, too, was her head.

‘I think Kassandra needs to rest now,’ said the housekeeper, who’d been hovering in the background.

Carl held up his hand to cut her off. He’d begun to grow suspicious.

‘May I see Kimmie’s room, Mrs Lassen? I understand that it was left exactly as it had been.’

It was a wild shot from the hip. The kind of question an experienced policeman has lying in the box labelled ‘Worth a try’. A question that was always introduced with the phrase: ‘I understand that …’

In a tight spot it was always a good way to begin.

The housekeeper got two minutes to lay the queen of the house in her gilded bed, then Carl started looking around. Kimmie’s childhood home or not, it wasn’t fit for raising children. Not a single corner to play in. There were too many knick-knacks, too many Japanese and Chinese vases. If a person happened to wave his arms, he risked a seven-digit insurance claim. It had a very uncomfortable atmosphere, which Carl was certain hadn’t changed over the years. A children’s prison, that’s how he saw it.

‘Yes,’ the housekeeper said on their way up to the third floor. ‘Of course Kassandra just lives here; the house actually belongs to the daughter. So everything on this floor is exactly how it was when she lived here.’

So Kassandra Lassen lived in this house at Kimmie’s mercy. If Kimmie rejoined society, Kassandra’s refuge here would probably be a thing of the past. What a switch of fates. The rich woman lived on the streets and the poor woman enjoyed the high life. That was the reason Kassandra Lassen stayed in Fuengirola and not Marbella. It wasn’t of her own free will.

‘It’s a mess, I should warn you,’ the housekeeper said, opening the door. ‘We choose to keep it this way. That way the daughter won’t be able to return and accuse Kassandra of prying, and I think that’s a smart move.’

He nodded from the end of the red-carpeted hallway. Where did one find such blindly loyal servants these days? She didn’t even speak with an accent.

‘Did you know Kimmie?’

‘God, no. Do I look as though I could have been here since 1995?’ She laughed heartily.

But in fact she did.

It was practically a separate flat. He had expected a few rooms, but not this veritable facsimile of a loft apartment in Paris’s Latin Quarter. There was even a French balcony. The small-paned bay windows set into the sloping walls were filthy, but otherwise quite charming. If the housekeeper thought this place was a mess, she would collapse if she saw Jesper’s room.

Dirty clothes were scattered about the floor, but other than that, nothing. Not even a piece of paper on the desk or anything in front of the television on the coffee table to suggest that a young woman had once lived here.

‘You can have a look around, but I would actually like to see your police badge first, Mr Mørck. That’s standard procedure, is it not?’ asked the housekeeper.

He nodded and fished around in all his pockets. What a meddlesome little busybody. At last he found a tattered business card that had been in his pocket for a hundred years. ‘I’m sorry, but my badge is back at headquarters. My apologies. You see, I’m the head of the department, so I don’t leave the office that often. But here, please, my card. So you can see who I am.’

She read the number and the address and felt the card, as if she were an expert in forgeries. ‘Just a moment,’ she said and lifted the receiver of a Bang & Olufsen telephone on the desk.

She introduced herself as Charlotte Nielsen and asked if anyone knew of a deputy detective superintendent by the name of Carl Mørck. Then she shuffled her feet for a moment as the call was transferred.

She inquired again, and then asked for a description of what this Mørck looked like.

She laughed briefly, scrutinizing him, then hung up with a smile on her lips.

What the hell was so funny? he wondered. Ten to one she’d talked to Rose.

She didn’t elaborate on the reason for her chuckle, but exited the room and left him alone with all his unanswered questions in a young girl’s abandoned flat that seemingly had nothing to tell.

He inspected everything a number of times, and just as many times the housekeeper appeared in the doorway. She had taken on the role of guard, and she believed she could do that best by watching him as one eyes a hungry mosquito sitting on one’s hand. But nothing bit her. Carl had neither made a mess nor put anything in his pocket.

Apparently Kimmie had been in a rush to leave. She had vacated the flat in a fast, yet thorough, fashion. Things she didn’t want others to see had no doubt been deposited in the rubbish bins by the house’s cobblestone driveway, which he could see from the balcony.

The same was true of her clothes. There were small piles on the chair beside her bed, but no underwear. Shoes were scattered about in the corners of the room, but no dirty socks. She had considered what was OK to leave behind, and what was too intimate. And that was precisely what characterized the search: nothing intimate remained.

Even decorations on the walls, which normally could give an indication of attitude or taste, were missing. There was no toothbrush in the small marble bathroom. No tampons in the chest or cotton swabs in the wastebasket next to the toilet. Not the slightest trace of anything in the toilet bowl or the sink.

Kimmie had left the place so clinically devoid of personality that all he could tell was that it had once been occupied by a female. But she could just as well have been a spinster in the Salvation Army as a hip, upper-class girl from the expensive end of the postal codes.

He gently lifted the bed sheets and tried sniffing out her scent. He raised her blotting pad to see if she’d forgotten a little note beneath it. He fished around the bottom of the empty wastebasket, looked in the back of the kitchen drawers, put his head in the hollow space under the sloping roof. Nothing.

‘It’ll be dark soon,’ said Charlotte, the housekeeper, implying that he should consider finding another place to play police officer.

‘Is there an attic or anything else above here?’ he asked hopefully. ‘A hatch or some stairs I can’t see from here?’