This wasn’t the first time he’d seen it: a corpse under a stairwell, pale and pathetically hunched over with wispy hair spread out across the remains of tinfoil and filth. An abused creature with a swollen face, resulting from a blow. Hardly more than twenty-five years old.

An overturned bottle of chocolate milk sailing around on a white plastic bag.

‘Overdose,’ the doctor said, pulling out his dictaphone. Of course they would have to do an autopsy, but the medical examiner was familiar with the situation. The needle was still hanging from the mistreated vein on her ankle.

‘Agreed,’ said the homicide chief. ‘But …’

He and Carl nodded to each other. Marcus had had the same thought. Overdose, sure. But how? A seasoned junkie like her?

‘You went to talk to her. When was that, Carl?’

Carl turned to Assad, who stood wearing his customary quiet smile. Strangely unaffected by the gloomy atmosphere in the stairwell.

‘On Tuesday, boss,’ Assad replied. He didn’t even need to peek at his notebook, it was almost frightening. ‘Tuesday afternoon, the 25th,’ he added. Soon he would say it was at 3.32 or 3.59 or something. If he hadn’t seen Assad bleed, Carl would have thought he was a robot.

‘That’s quite a while ago. A lot could have happened since then,’ the homicide chief said. He fell to one knee and cocked his head, eyes fixed on all the bruises on the woman’s face and throat.

Yes, she’d clearly got those after Carl’s meeting with her.

‘These injuries were not inflicted immediately before she died. Do we agree on that?’

‘A day before, I would say,’ the medical examiner said.

There were loud noises in the stairwell, and one of the men from Bak’s old unit came down the stairs with a person that one would definitely prefer not to count as a family member.

‘This is Viggo Hansen. He’s just told me something I think you’ll want to hear.’

The hefty man scowled at Assad and got a suitably haughty glance in return. ‘Does he have to be here?’ he said flat out, revealing a couple of tattooed forearms. A pair of anchors, a swastika and a KKK. Nice lad.

When he walked past Assad, he bumped his flabby belly into him, and Carl’s eyes opened wide. He bloody well hoped Assad wouldn’t react.

Assad nodded, absorbing it. Lucky for the sailor.

‘I saw that slut with another whore yesterday.’

He described her, and Carl retrieved his tattered laser print.

‘Was this her?’ he asked, contracting his nostrils. The rancid odour of sweat and piss was almost as strong as the stench of alcohol that reeked through the sot’s rotten teeth.

He rubbed his sleepy, unappealing eye sockets and nodded, making his double chins flap together. ‘She pounded away at the junkie there. Look at all the bruises. But I broke it up and kicked her out. She had a big mouth, the bitch,’ he said, vainly trying to straighten his posture.

What a clown. Why was he lying?

One of their colleagues arrived and whispered something in the homicide chief’s ear.

‘OK,’ Marcus Jacobsen said. Hands in his pockets, he stared at the idiot, the expression on his face suggesting he might pull out his handcuffs any second.

‘Viggo Hansen. You’re a familiar face, I hear. Over ten years in total behind bars for violence and sexual assaults on single women. You claim that you saw this woman beat the deceased. Knowing the police as well as you do, shouldn’t you be a little smarter than that?’

He breathed deeply. As if he were trying to spool back to a more appropriate starting point. As if he could just manage it.

‘Now tell us what really happened. You saw them standing here, talking, and that was it. OK. Anything else?’

He looked down at the floor, his humiliation palpable. Maybe Assad’s presence caused it. ‘No.’

‘What time was it?’

He shrugged. The alcohol had destroyed his sense of time. No doubt it had been years since he’d had one.

‘Have you been drinking the whole time since you saw them?’

‘Just for fun,’ he tried to smile. Not a pleasant sight.

‘Viggo admits that he swiped a few beers that were lying under the stairwell here,’ said the officer who’d brought him down from the flat. ‘Some beers and a bag of crisps.’

Things that poor Tine certainly never got much pleasure out of.

They asked him to stay home the rest of the day and try to hold back on the drinking. They didn’t get anything out of the rest of the building’s tenants.

The long and short of it was that Tine Karlsen had died. Probably alone, and with no one to miss her apart from a large, hungry rat named Lasso that she now and then called Kimmie. She was just another number in the statistics. If it weren’t for the police, she would already be forgotten in the morning.

The crime-scene techs turned the stiffened corpse over and found only a dark stain of urine beneath her.

‘I wonder what she could have told us,’ Carl mumbled.

Marcus nodded. ‘Yes, the incentive to find Kimmie Lassen has certainly not lessened now.’

It was just a question of whether this would make any difference.

He dropped Assad off at the explosion site, asking him to snoop around to find out if the investigation had led to any discoveries. Afterwards he was to go back to headquarters and see if he could help Rose with anything.

‘I’ll try the pet shop first, then I’ll drive out to Rødovre High School,’ he shouted, as Assad trudged determinedly towards the explosives experts and crime-scene techs who were still swarming about the terrain.

Nautilus Trading A/S stood like a pale green oasis among the other pre-war buildings on a little crooked street that was doubtless next in line to give way to unsellable luxury boxes. Large trees with bright yellow leaves planted in oak barrels stood outside, and posters showing exotic animals were pasted across the entire facade. A considerably larger business than he had imagined, and probably also much larger than back when Kimmie had worked there.

And naturally it was closed. Saturday peace had settled in.

He walked round the buildings and found a recess with an unlocked door. DELIVERIES, it read.

He opened it, walked about ten yards and found himself in a hellish, tropical humidity that immediately made his armpits drip.

‘Is anyone here?’ he called out in twenty-second intervals, on his wanderings through a land of aquariums and lizards. Then deeper into a paradise of birdsong arising from hundreds and hundreds of cages in a hall the size of an average supermarket.

He didn’t find a human being until he was in the fourth hall, among cages housing mammals big and small. It was a man focused on scrubbing an enclosure large enough to house a lion or two.

When Carl drew closer he scented the sharp undertone of a predator in the sickly sweet air. So maybe it was a lion’s cage.

‘Excuse me,’ Carl said softly, but apparently so heart-attack-inducing that the man in the cage dropped both his bucket and broom.

He stood there in a sea of soapy water, rubber gloves up to his elbows, and looked at Carl as if he had come to tear him to pieces.

‘Excuse me,’ Carl said again, now with his badge thrust out. ‘Carl Mørck, from Department Q at police headquarters. I ought to have called in advance, but I was in the neighbourhood.’

The man was most likely between sixty and sixty-five years old, with white hair and large crow’s feet around the eyes that had no doubt been chiselled there through the years by the delight he took in working with small, furry, baby animals. Just now, however, he seemed less than delighted.

‘Big cage to clean,’ Carl said, to soften him up. He felt the mirror-smooth steel bars.

‘Yes, but it has to be picture-perfect. It’s to be delivered to the firm’s owner tomorrow.’

Carl explained the nature of his errand in a backroom where the animals’ presence didn’t seem quite so intense.