‘What are you doing out here, Lars?’ Carl asked, as he looked across Avedøre Havnevej at the glowing windows of some flat buildings that stood behind half-defoliated trees not a hundred yards away. It was Rødovre High School, which he had practically just left. So the party for the school alumni was still going on.

Strange feeling. Just a few hours earlier he’d been over there, talking to Klavs Jeppesen, and now Aalbæk lay dead over here on the other side of the street. What the hell was going on?

Bjørn looked at him gloomily. ‘I assume you remember that one of headquarter’s trusted colleagues, now present, was very recently accused of having assaulted the deceased. So Marcus and I agreed that we ought to be out here to see what this was all about. But maybe you can tell us, Carl?’

That was a hell of a tone to take on a dark, cold September morning.

‘If you had put a tail on him as I’d asked, then we’d probably have known a little more, wouldn’t you say?’ Carl grumbled, as he tried to decipher what was up and what was down on the lump that had bored into the grass ten yards away.

‘It was those clowns over there who found him,’ Bjørn said. He pointed at a hedge surrounding the day-care centre and then at a mix of immigrant boys in tracksuits with stripes down the legs and pale Danish girls in ultra-tight jeans. Apparently not all of them thought it was real cool. ‘They’d just been planning to mess about on the day-care centre playground, or kindergarten or whatever the hell it is. But they didn’t make it that far.’

‘When did it happen?’ Carl asked the medical examiner, who’d already begun packing up his equipment.

‘Well, it’s fairly cold tonight, but he’s been lying in the lee of the building, so I would venture that it was between one and one and a half hours ago,’ he said with tired eyes, longing for his duvet and his wife’s warm posterior.

Carl turned to Bjørn. ‘I want you to know that yesterday evening I was right there, at Rødovre High. I spoke with a former boyfriend of Kimmie’s. It’s a coincidence, pure and simple, but put in the report that I mentioned it.’

Bjørn removed his hands from the pockets of his leather jacket and pushed his collar up. ‘Were you now?!’ He looked straight into his eyes. ‘Have you ever been up in his flat, Carl?’

‘No. I assure you I haven’t.’

‘You’re completely certain?’

Oh, come on, Carl thought, feeling his headache gloating in its hideout.

‘Oh, come on,’ he said, at the lack of anything better. ‘That’s simply too far-fetched. Have you been up in the flat?’

‘Samir and the boys from Glostrup Station are up there now.’

‘Samir?’

‘Samir Ghazi. Bak’s replacement. He’s from Rødovre Station.’

Samir Ghazi. It seemed Assad was getting a kindred spirit with whom he could share his syrupy soup-tea.

‘Did you come across a suicide note?’ Carl asked up in the flat, after he’d squeezed the calloused fist that every seasoned policeman in Zealand would recognize as Police Superintendent Antonsen’s. Just a few seconds in his vice-like grip and a person was never the same. One day Carl would tell him he could go easy on the hydraulics.

‘Suicide note? No, nothing like that. And you can kick my arse if there hasn’t been someone up here to lend a hand.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There sure as hell aren’t very many fingerprints in here. Nothing on the doorknob to the balcony. Nothing on the front row of glasses in the kitchen cupboards. Nothing on the edge of the coffee table. On the other hand, we’ve got a set of very clear prints on the balcony railing, presumably Aalbæk’s, but why the hell would he hold on to the railing if he’d already decided to jump?’

‘Second thoughts? It’s not unheard of.’

Antonsen chuckled. He did that every time he met detectives outside his own district. A highly conciliatory form of condescension if ever there was one.

‘There’s blood on the railing. Not much, just a bit. And I bet we’ll find bruising on his hands from a struggle when we go down and look in a moment. Yup, there’s something fishy here.’

He sent a couple of crime-scene techs to check the bathroom and pulled an agreeable-looking, dark man in front of Carl and Bjørn.

‘One of my best men, and now you’re nicking him from me. Look us both in the eye and say you’re not ashamed.’

‘Samir,’ the man said, introducing himself and extending his hand to Bjørn. So apparently the two hadn’t met before now.

‘All I’ll say is that if you don’t treat Samir right,’ Antonsen said, ‘you’ll have me to deal with.’ He gave his man a shoulder squeeze.

‘Carl Mørck,’ Carl said, and gave the man a handshake equal to Antonsen’s.

‘Yes, that’s him.’ Antonsen nodded, in response to the quizzical expression on Samir’s face. ‘The man who solved the Merete Lynggaard case, and who gave Aalbæk a few jabs, so they say.’ He laughed. Finn Aalbæk had clearly never been a favourite of the other districts, either.

‘The splinters here on the carpet don’t appear to have been there very long,’ one of the crime-scene techs said, pointing at some microscopic fragments in front of the balcony door. ‘They’re lying very nearly on top of everything else.’ He squatted in his white lab coat and observed the fragments at close range. Bizarre lot, these police techs. But clever. Give them credit where credit was due.

‘Could it be from a wooden bat or something?’ Samir asked.

Carl glanced round the flat and found nothing strange, apart from the fat wooden figurine standing beside the balcony door with a tea towel wrapped around its midriff. A nice, carved Hardy with bowler hat and the whole nine yards. The figurine’s partner, Laurel, was all the way over in a corner of the room and didn’t seem quite so active. Something didn’t seem right.

Carl bent over, removed the towel and tipped the figurine forward a little. It looked promising.

‘You’ll have to turn it over yourselves, but as far as I can see, this figurine’s back has seen better days.’

They gathered around it and measured the size of the bullet hole and the mass of the imploded wood.

‘A relatively small calibre. The projectile didn’t even exit the other side, it’s still in there,’ Antonsen said. The crime-scene techs nodded.

Carl agreed. Most likely a .22. But deadly enough, if that’s what the shooter intended.

‘Did any of the neighbours hear anything, like shouts, or shots?’ Carl asked, sniffing the bullet hole.

They shook their heads.

Strange, and yet not strange. The high-rise was in terrible condition, and mostly abandoned. Scarcely more than a few residents on the entire floor. Probably no one lived directly above or below, either. The days of this red box were numbered. Hardly a loss if the eyesore were to topple in the next storm.

‘It smells pretty fresh,’ Carl said, pulling his head away from the bullet hole. ‘Fired at a distance of a couple of yards, wouldn’t you say? And tonight.’

‘Absolutely,’ said the crime-scene tech.

Carl stepped on to the balcony and peered over the railing. Hell of a fall.

He stared out over the sea of lights in the low buildings across the street. There were faces in every window. There was no lack of curiosity, even on a pitch-black early morning.

Then Carl’s mobile rang.

She didn’t introduce herself and she didn’t have to.

‘You’ll think I’m kidding, Carl,’ Rose said. ‘But the night shift down in Svendborg has located the earring. The duty officer knew exactly where it was. Isn’t that fantastic?’

He looked at his watch. What was more fantastic was that she thought he was ready for news at this time of day.

‘You weren’t sleeping, were you?’ she asked, not waiting for a response. ‘I’m heading into headquarters now. They’re emailing an image of it.’

‘Can’t it wait until daybreak, or Monday even?’ His head was pounding again.