Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1
The ocean closed over his head, and he sank to the bottom, away from the light at the surface. A kelp plant caressed his arms, inviting him deeper. He was tempted to just let go, exhale one last time, and fall, let his body dissolve into motes dancing in the sea’s vertical rays of sunlight and surrender to the mermaids of the bottomless blue.

But the gray waters of Snekkersten Marina were far from the bottomless blue. Jeppe Kørner pushed off from the bottom and stretched his arms up toward the light. Seconds later, he broke the surface and inhaled.

“I was starting to think you would never come back up.”

Jeppe shook the water out of his ears and squinted up at the figure on the dock. Above the surface the world was warm and bright. He swam to the ladder and searched with his feet for the slippery bottom rung, then he looked down one last time. The cool depths of the sea always stirred a longing in him, some kind of death wish perhaps.

“I don’t understand how you can stay in so long. Ten seconds and I’m freezing.” Johannes Ledmark shivered in his bathrobe and held a towel out to Jeppe. “Let’s hit the sauna and warm up before the senior crowd arrives. I can’t stand the sight of all those varicose veins.”

He winked as if to take the sting out of his harsh remark and headed for the sauna. Jeppe dried himself and stuck his feet into the slightly too small sandals Johannes had found for him to use.

Johannes, renowned actor and one of Jeppe’s oldest friends, was renting the ground floor of an old brick house by the harbor in Snekkersten for the summer while he looked for a new place to live. His repeated attempts to save the marriage with his husband of twelve years had failed, and the inner-city condo they owned together was now for sale. Meanwhile Johannes was licking his wounds far from the prying eyes of the public in the old fishing village of Snekkersten, north of Copenhagen. The run-down house was leaky and the yard overgrown, but Johannes seemed to thrive in the makeshift chaos overlooking the waters of the Øresund. He had even begun attacking the yard with a hedge trimmer and loppers, stubbornly insisting that mowing the lawn and weeding the patio felt meditative.

“Ha, I think we lucked out. The sauna’s empty.”

Johannes held the door of the little black-painted building on the breakwater open for Jeppe. They made themselves comfortable on the sauna’s wooden benches and let the oven’s dry heat rise up through the wood and bring the life back into their cold bodies. The early spring weather had been unusually sunny and warm for Denmark, but there was still a bite to the air, and the water temperature hadn’t crept up above the midforties.

“Would you look at us, all grown up, winter bathers in the sauna,” Johannes said with a chuckle. “We’re just a pastrami sandwich and a senior pass to the Louisiana Museum away from turning into our parents.”

“What’s wrong with pastrami?” Jeppe asked, squeezing the salt water out of his short hair with his hands to stop the chilly trickle down his back. “I’m afraid we turned into our parents a long time ago. You just haven’t noticed yet, because the guys you pick up are half your age.”

“Oh, would you stop?” Johannes snapped a rolled-up towel at Jeppe’s arm, and Jeppe responded by punching him on the shoulder. They rubbed their bruises, laughing.

“Besides, my young boyfriends keep me fit. Look, I’ve never been hotter than now!” Johannes smiled enigmatically. “Youthful, and only ever lonely on Sundays. How about you? You practically have a wife and kids now. How’s that going?”

Jeppe looked down at his feet, which pearled with beads of seawater and sweat. Indeed, he had got in Sara what he might call a package deal, one that he had never pictured himself signing up for, and he often found himself walking the very fine line between love and irritation.

“We haven’t moved in together yet,” Jeppe said. “It’s not so easy when there are kids involved.”

“On the other hand, it’s a way to have kids.” Johannes tipped his head to the side and dried his ears on the towel. “That is something you’ve always wanted, after all.”

Jeppe shrugged. He had lived through three failed rounds of fertility treatments with his ex-wife before they decided to split and she had a baby with someone else. Since then he had pretty much given up on the idea of becoming a parent.

“When you don’t have kids yourself, the whole thing can be a little overwhelming,” Jeppe admitted.

“Honestly,” Johannes said, eyeing him skeptically. “Can you ever really learn to love someone else’s children?”

Jeppe pictured eleven-year-old Amina, who had awakened the household that morning—along with most of the neighbors—by playing K-pop at concert volume and throwing a temper tantrum when Sara turned the music down.

“They’re both great girls.”

“I’ll take that as a no.” Johannes laughed. “I figured as much, but I get it. Most kids are just as unbearable as their parents.”

“Wait,” Jeppe protested. “That’s not what I mean. I’m very fond of Sara’s kids, we just need to get used to one another. They need ample time to adjust to Mom having a boyfriend, who is not their father…” He felt a wave of heat rise up his spine and hit his cheeks, turning them a glossy red. “Say, shouldn’t we be talking about your divorce instead? How’s it going with divvying up the assets? Are your lawyers on speaking terms?”

“Okay, okay, you win.” Johannes raised his hands in the air, like a white flag of surrender. “Let’s go have some breakfast. I got croissants from the good bakery.”

“First we need to go back into the water.” Jeppe stood up, a drip of sweat falling from his chin to the floor. “Just a quick dip.”

“No way! I’ll die if I have to go into that freezing ocean again.”

“A little dying won’t kill you. Come on, old friend!” Jeppe pulled Johannes out of the sauna and pushed him down the breakwater toward the swimming dock. He was already longing for the cold darkness below the surface. Jeppe hung the bathrobe over the railing and was on his way to the swim ladder when he heard his phone ringing. He walked back and plucked it from the pocket of his robe to see who was calling. The wind raised goose bumps on the bare skin of his arms. It was the police commissioner.

HER SHOES SANK into the soft sand, immortalizing each point of contact between her rubber soles and Greve Beach in a trail of footprints. Anette Werner let the dogs run on ahead and enjoyed the feel of her body working, lungs pumping oxygen in and out. The ocean lay like a bluish-gray belt, sending in whiffs of seaweed-scented air with the surf and mixing it with the sharp smell of beach gorse. The morning sun already stood well above the horizon. Anette breathed hard and pondered how the things that make us feel happy and alive generally also involve pain. Like becoming a parent, for example. Having little Gudrun a year and nine months ago was hands down the hardest—sometimes even the most boring—thing she had ever attempted. Even so, she loved her daughter so much that she began missing her the very second she waved goodbye every morning at the day care.

The dogs started barking up ahead. She could see them by the water’s edge and sprinted the hundred or so yards to her three eager border collies, running so fast she could taste blood in her mouth by the time she reached them. The dogs were growling and jostling one another, alternately jumping up or lying down flat in the sand. Anette separated them and crouched down to see what they had found.

A dead bird lay in the coarse sand. She recognized the sharp black-and-white markings, the green on its neck, and the delicate orange on its breast, a male common eider. It was lying on its back with the head turned to one side, like an infant. Its plumage was pretty much intact, it almost looked like it was sleeping. But between its yellow legs, where the abdomen should have been, there was just a bloody hole. The bird was dead. Maybe it had been migrating from Saltholm, headed north for the summer and left behind by the flock.

The sun glistened on its glossy feathers, and Anette resisted an impulse to run her finger over the beautiful animal. It was just a dead bird after all, not so different from the chicken Svend had made for dinner the night before.

She called on her dogs, and they followed her obediently back to the car, antsy at having to leave the bird behind but too well trained to defy her. In the parking lot she cleaned off their paws and they gracefully leaped into the back of the car, already seeming to have forgotten their find. But as soon as Anette turned on the engine, they started whining and whimpering and kept it up all the way home, as if they had left a part of themselves behind on the beach.

At Holmeås 14, Svend stood in the front yard, greeting her with Gudrun in his arms. Even from a distance, Anette could see her daughter struggling to get down and go explore the world, ever impatient, only at rest when she was asleep. Just like her mother, Anette thought with pride. As she turned off the engine, Svend set their little girl down and let her toddle off into the bushes without looking back, her diapered butt swaying and those short arms sticking out, like a tightrope walker’s balance pole.

Anette let the dogs out of the car and went to kiss her husband. She put her hand up to the back of his head, prolonging the kiss.

“You’re all sweaty.” He gently pulled away from her embrace, caressed her cheek, and herded the dogs toward the front door. “But sexy!”

And as she peeled off her running clothes in front of the mirror, for the first time in their twenty-five-year-long relationship, she agreed with him. She had always had what her mother consistently called strong bones, maybe to protect Anette from the uncomfortable fact that she was fat. She had been the biggest girl in her class, the tallest with the broadest shoulders and the beefiest thighs. The one who won all the athletic disciplines and got picked first whenever they chose teams. Anette had never considered her size a problem, and Svend had never given her reason to think that he saw her as anything other than perfect, no matter how chubby she had been at times.

But now, looking in the mirror, she saw a new body. The nursing and many months of maternity leave had sucked off the excess pounds, with the result that at the age of forty-six she was in better shape than ever before. Still with meat on her bones, but firmer and stronger. And prettier. It surprised her how good it felt. In the shower, she allowed her hands to pay attention to the body they were lathering up for once, and felt a strong sense of well-being touching the firm skin over her abdomen. She dried off in front of the full-length mirror and dressed with her back half turned so she could appraise her butt. Having considered her body a tool for most of her life, rather than something decorative, there was something heady about feeling attractive.

“Your phone’s ringing!” Svend called from the kitchen, and Anette hurriedly pulled up her pants and ran to answer it.

Gudrun sat at the little dining table, now strapped into her high chair, throwing fruit yogurt at her father, who received the bombardment with a smile. He had always had a calm temperament, but since becoming a father, his patience had extended as a wad of chewing gum in the sun. Anette shuffled across the room, buttoning her pants, and grabbed the phone, which lay buzzing on the kitchen table next to Svend’s freshly baked sourdough rolls.

“Werner here!” She realized that she had managed to step in a glob of yogurt and cursed under her breath.

“Sorry to have to disturb your weekend, but we have a situation. Well, a possible situation anyway. I’ve just spoken with Kørner.” It was PC’s voice. Anette’s Saturday mood began to tank, plummeting down toward her mixed-berry-covered toes. The commissioner—who never went by anything other than “PC,” even though her name was Irene Dam—was deeply professional and would never have called on a Saturday if the “possible situation” wasn’t very likely real. Anette saw their planned family outing fade into uncertainty.

“What happened?”

“We have a missing young man, or to be more precise, a fifteen-year-old boy, Oscar Dreyer-Hoff. Last seen when he got out of school yesterday afternoon at a quarter to three. His parents thought he spent the night at a classmate’s house, but that turns out not to have been the case. They didn’t realize it until he didn’t come home this morning as agreed.”

“Why are we getting involved?” Anette asked, looking around for something to wipe her foot. “It’s pretty common for a fifteen-year-old to be missing for a day or two if he wants to go to a party his parents won’t let him attend or whatever. If we’re getting involved, there must be an indication of something fishy?”

“The family received a letter.”

Anette made eye contact with Svend. They had been through this so many times before that he knew instantly what the look meant. The family picnic was going to happen without her. He shrugged and gave her a smile of encouragement, before he hid behind his newspaper again and then suddenly popped his head out, causing Gudrun to burst out laughing.

“Was he kidnapped?” Anette asked.

“We don’t know for sure,” PC sighed. “But the family is… shall way say, prominent? They own that auction house, Nordhjem. And they have received threats before. We’ve had them on our radar for several years.”

Anette heard her daughter’s laughter fill the kitchen.

“I’m on my way.”