It was an incredible sight.

Then Assad reached for a small, cotton bundle and yanked at its corner as the woman gasped and raised her hands to her head.

So did Assad when he saw what was inside.

A tiny mummified person with empty eye sockets. Its head completely black, its stiff fingers sticking out. Dressed in clothing scarcely bigger than a doll’s.

They saw her rush to the child’s corpse and made no move to stop her from snatching it up and clutching it tightly.

‘Little Mille, little Mille. Everything’s OK now. Mummy’s here and she will never leave you again,’ the woman sobbed. ‘We’ll always be together. You’ll get a little teddy, and we’ll play together every single day.’

Carl had never experienced that definitive, interconnected feeling people have when they hold their offspring in their arms immediately after birth. But he’d felt the absence of that feeling, at least theoretically. At a slight distance.

Now he looked at the woman and felt a sharp pang of regret and loss, so deep in his heart that it made him able to understand. And he raised his injured arm to his breast pocket, pulled out the small talisman – the teddy bear he had found in Kimmie’s metal box – and handed it to her.

She said nothing. Stood as if paralysed, staring at the toy animal. Slowly she opened her mouth and cocked her head. Stretched her lips as if she were about to cry, vacillating for an endless moment between a smile and tears.

At her side stood Assad, uncharacteristically disarmed and vulnerable. With a wrinkled brow and an inner stillness.

She reached cautiously for the teddy bear. As soon as she felt it in her hand, she loosened up, filled her lungs to capacity and threw back her head.

Carl wiped his nose, which had begun to drip, and tried to look away so he wouldn’t surrender to the tears. Glanced down the tracks to where a group of travellers was waiting for a train, and where Carl’s car was parked beside the whistle-stop’s shelter. He turned around and saw the train creeping towards them from the other side.

He focused again on the woman, who was now breathing calmly and hugging the teddy bear and the child’s corpse close to her.

‘Well,’ she said, exhaling a sigh capable of loosening decades of emotional knots, ‘now the voices are completely silent.’ She gave a short laugh as tears streamed down her cheeks. ‘The voices have ceased, they’re gone,’ she repeated, raising her eyes up to the sky. Suddenly she radiated a peacefulness Carl didn’t understand.

‘Oh, little Mille, now it’s just you and me. It has finally come to pass.’ A sense of release sent her spinning around and around, embracing the corpse in a dance without steps that seemed to make her levitate.

And when the train was ten yards away, Carl watched as her feet danced to the side and hit the edge of the platform.

Assad shouted a warning just as Carl raised his head and gazed directly into Kimmie’s eyes, which were full of gratitude, her mind now seemingly at peace.

‘Just you and me, my beloved, little girl,’ she said, stretching out the one arm.

A second later she was gone.

Only the frantic screeching of train brakes remained.

Epilogue

It was a twilight lit up by columns of blinking, blue lights coming from the train crossing and along the road heading towards the estate. The entire landscape was awash with this blueness and the air rang with the yowling sirens of fire engines and police vehicles. Police badges were everywhere, along with ambulances, a sea of journalists and cameras, and inquisitive locals standing on the fringes as people received crisis counselling. Down on the tracks themselves, crime-scene techs and paramedics were busy, all getting in each other’s way.

Carl was still dizzy, but his shoulder wound was no longer dripping blood; the medics had made sure of that. It was inside that he was bleeding. The lump in his throat was still large.

He sat on the wooden bench at the Duemose whistle-stop, leafing through Kimmie’s notebook. Her notes disclosed the gang’s deeds – they were mercilessly honest. The assault on the brother and sister in Rørvig. How they’d been selected at random. How they had humiliated the boy and undressed him after the fatal blow. The twin brothers whose fingers they’d chopped off. The couple that had vanished at sea. Kåre Bruno and Kyle Basset. Animals and people, one after another. Everything was there. Plus the fact that it was always Kimmie who had committed the murders. The methods were different, and she’d documented each one in detail. What was incredibly difficult for Carl to comprehend was that this was the same person who had saved his and Assad’s lives. The same woman who lay there, under the train, together with her dead child.

Carl lit a cigarette and read the final pages. They spoke of remorse. Not in Aalbæk’s case, but in Tine’s. That she hadn’t wanted to give her an overdose. There was a tone of tenderness in the ugliness of the words, a kind of presence and insight that was missing in her descriptions of all the other atrocious acts. She’d used words like ‘farewell’ and ‘Tine’s last, heavenly high’.

This notebook would send the media into a frenzy and stock values plunging, once those men’s complicity was revealed.

‘Take the notebook to headquarters and make copies immediately, OK, Assad?’

He nodded. The aftermath would be hectic, but short. With no one else other than this trio implicated, apart from the man who was already in prison, it was primarily a question of informing bereaved relatives and ensuring proper distribution of the no doubt enormous damages to be paid by the estates of Pram, Florin and Dybbøl Jensen.

He gave Assad a quick hug and waved off the crisis psychologist who had decided it was now Carl’s turn.

When the time came, he had his own crisis psychologist.

‘I’m driving to Roskilde now, so you go with the crime-scene techs back to headquarters, OK? I’ll see you tomorrow, Assad. Then we’ll talk about all of this, eh?’

Assad nodded again. He’d already resolved it all in his head.

At that moment things between them were good.

The house on Fasanvej in Roskilde seemed so dark. The blinds were shut and all was quiet. On the car radio they were reporting on both the violent events in Ejlstrup and the arrest of a dentist whom the police were convinced was behind the rubbish-bin assaults downtown. He had been arrested during an attempted attack on an undercover female officer on Nikolaj Plads near Store Kirkestræde. What the hell had the idiot been thinking?

Carl glanced at his watch and then again at the darkened house. Old people go to bed early, he knew, but it was only half past seven.

Then he nodded at the nameplates that read JENS-ARNOLD & YVETTE LARSEN and MARTHA JØRGENSEN and rang the doorbell.

His finger was still on the bell when the frail woman opened the door and attempted to shield herself against the cold with her thin kimono.

‘Yes?’ she said sleepily, looking up at him in confusion.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Yvette Larsen. It’s Carl Mørck. The policeman who came to visit you recently. You remember, don’t you?’

She smiled. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘That’s right, now I remember.’

‘I have some good news, I think. I would like to share it personally with Martha. We’ve found her children’s killers. Justice has been served, one could say.’

‘Oh,’ she said, placing a hand to her breast. ‘What a shame.’ Then she smiled an unusual smile. Not simply sad, but also apologetic.

‘I should have called, I’m very sorry. You could have saved yourself the long drive here. Martha is dead. She died the same night you were here. Though not because of your visit, of course. She simply didn’t have any more strength.’