First Kristian, then Bjarne. Then Torsten, Ditlev, Ulrik, Kassandra and her father.

Now, for the first time in many years, she stood in front of the house on Kirkevej, and everything looked exactly the same. The church bells up the hill no doubt still called the staid bourgeoisie to Sunday services, and the homes in the neighbourhood still towered unashamedly. The door of the house was still just as hard to open.

She recognized not only Kassandra’s preserved face when she opened the door, but also the attitude her presence always provoked in her stepmother.

Kimmie didn’t know how the hostility between them had begun. It had probably been back when Kassandra, in her misguided attempts at child-rearing, had locked Kimmie in dark wardrobes, bombarding her with torrents of cruel words, the half of which the little girl didn’t understand. That Kassandra herself had suffered in this insensitive household was arguably a mitigating factor when taking her behaviour into account. But it was no excuse. Kassandra was a devil.

‘I’m not letting you in,’ Kassandra hissed, trying to force the door closed. Exactly as she’d done the day after the miscarriage when Kimmie stood there, injured and in deep despair and need, with the bundle in her arms.

Back then she’d been told to go to hell, and it truly was hell that awaited her. Despite the horrible shape in which Kristian’s blows and the miscarriage had left her, she had been forced to walk the streets for days, hunched over, without anyone offering to help her, or even approach her.

People saw only her cracked lips and filthy hair. Edging away from the repulsive bundle in her hands and her sleeves stained brown by dried blood, they didn’t see a fever-ravaged fellow human in need. They didn’t see a person falling to pieces.

And she’d considered it her punishment. Her own purgatory that she had to endure to atone for all her terrible misdeeds.

It was a junkie from Vesterbro who saved her. Only Tine, that stick-thin waif, ignored the smell that rose from the bundle and the caked-on spittle that had accumulated in the corners of her mouth. She had seen far worse, and she took Kimmie to a room down an alley in Sydhavnen to another drug addict who once, at the dawn of time, had been a doctor.

It was his pills and D&C that got rid of the infection and staunched her bleeding. The price she paid was that she never bled again.

The following week – around the time the little parcel stopped reeking – Kimmie was ready to start a new life on the street.

The rest was history.

Entering the rooms where Kassandra’s thick perfume hung heavy, and all the lingering ghosts laughed at Kimmie as they had always done, was like being frozen in the middle of a nightmare.

Kassandra raised a cigarette to her lips. Her lipstick had long ago been sucked into dozens of earlier cigarettes. Her hands trembled slightly, but through the smoke her eyes followed Kimmie watchfully as she set her bag on the floor. It was obvious that Kassandra felt uncomfortable and her eyes would soon begin darting around. This was not a scenario she had planned for.

‘What do you want here?’ Kassandra asked. Precisely the same words as eleven years before. After the rape and the miscarriage.

‘Do you wish to keep on living in this house, Kassandra?’ Kimmie retorted.

Her stepmother tipped her head back, but otherwise remained still for a moment, thinking, her wrist limp, the blue smoke swirling around her greying hair.

‘Is that why you’ve come? To throw me out? Is that it?’

It was refreshing to watch her struggle to remain calm. This person who’d had the opportunity to take a little girl by the hand and lift her out of a cold mother’s shadow. This miserable, self-loathing, egocentric woman who’d dominated Kimmie’s life with emotional abuse and daily neglect. This woman who’d nurtured in Kimmie all that had led her to where she was today: mistrust, hatred, cold indifference and lack of empathy.

‘I have two questions that you’d be wise to answer nice and snappy, Kassandra.’

‘Then you’ll leave?’ She poured a glass of port from the carafe she’d no doubt made attempts at emptying before Kimmie arrived, and took a measured mouthful.

‘I’m not making any promises,’ Kimmie said.

‘What are your questions?’ Kassandra sucked the cigarette smoke so deeply into her lungs that nothing exited when she exhaled.

‘Where’s my mother?’

She tilted her head back, her mouth slightly open. ‘Oh my God. Is that your question?’ She turned abruptly to Kimmie. ‘Well, she’s dead, Kimmie. She’s been dead for thirty years, the poor thing. Didn’t we ever tell you?’ Once again she tilted her head back and made a few sounds that were supposed to express surprise. Then she turned again to Kimmie. This time her face was hard. Merciless. ‘Your father gave her money, and she drank it. Need I say more? Amazing that we never told you. But now that you know, does it make you happy?’

The word ‘happy’ permeated all the cells in Kimmie’s body. Happy?!

‘What about my father? Have you heard from him? Where is he?’

Kassandra knew that question was coming. She was repulsed. Just the word ‘father’ was enough. If anyone hated Willy K. Lassen, it was her.

‘I don’t understand why you want to know. For all you care, he could burn in hell, couldn’t he? Or do you just want to make sure he is? Because I can assure you, you daft girl, that your father is indeed burning in hell.’

‘Is he ill?’ she asked. Maybe what the policeman had told Tine was true.

‘Ill?’ Kassandra snuffed out her cigarette and stretched her arms with fingers spread and nails jagged. ‘He’s burning in hell with cancer in all his bones. I haven’t spoken to him, but I’ve heard from others that he’s suffering terribly.’ She pursed her lips and exhaled heavily as if she were expelling Satan himself. ‘He’s suffering terribly and will be dead by Christmas, and that’s fine with me, do you hear?’

She smoothed her dress a little and pulled her glass of port on the table towards her.

That meant Kimmie, her little one and Kassandra were the only ones left. Two cursed K’s and the tiny guardian angel.

Kimmie lifted her bag off the floor and put it on the table beside Kassandra’s carafe.

‘Tell me, were you the one who let Kristian in when I was expecting the little one here?’

Kassandra watched as Kimmie opened the bag a bit.

‘Dear God! Don’t tell me you have that hideous thing in that bag!’ She could tell from Kimmie’s face that indeed she did. ‘You’re sick in the head, Kimmie. Take it away.’

‘Why did you let Kristian into the house? Why did you let him come to me, Kassandra? You knew I was pregnant. I’d told you I wanted to be left alone.’

‘Why? I didn’t care one iota about you and your bastard child. What did you expect?’

‘And you just sat here in the living room while he beat me up. You must have heard it. You must have known how many times he punched me. Why didn’t you call the police?’

‘Because I knew you deserved it. Isn’t that right?’

‘I knew you deserved it,’ she’d said, and the voices began sounding off in Kimmie’s head.

Punches, dark rooms, derision, accusations – all of it making a racket in Kimmie’s head, and now it had to stop.

In one bound she leaped forward and seized Kassandra’s hairdo, forcing her head back so she could pour the rest of the port into her. The woman stared in confusion and surprise at the ceiling as the liquid drained into her windpipe and made her cough.

So she clamped Kassandra’s mouth shut and clutched her head in a headlock as her coughing fit and attempts to regurgitate grew stronger.

Kassandra grabbed Kimmie’s forearm and tried to shove it away, but life on the streets creates a sinewy strength that dwarfs that which an elderly woman gets from spending her days ordering people around. Her eyes grew desperate as her stomach contracted, driving gastric acid up to the mounting catastrophe about to take place somewhere between her windpipe and oesophagus.