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world was she going to get compensation for the rug and chair when she didn’t have the receipts for them any longer?
    When it finally sunk in for her that the young man upstairs had actually died while she was downstairs dusting, she needed to sit down to try to avoid hyperventilating.
    “Imagine, what if someone has killed him,” she whispered over and over.
    “I don’t think that is something you need worry about, unless, of course, you’ve heard something unusual. Has there been anyone on the stairs over the last few hours, or can you enter the bedroom from the back of the house?”
    She shook her head.
    “And you didn’t do it yourself, I assume?” continued Carl.
    Her eyes rolled as she began to hyperventilate again.
    “Right,” said Carl. “Then he must have cut his own wrists. He was certainly in a state where he could’ve done anything to himself.”
    She pursed her lips and pulled herself together, mumbling about all sorts. She’d reached the point where she realized that she might have been an accomplice to crime by renting to someone who grew magicmushrooms on the windowsill and who, on top of that, breathed mostly through a chillum.
    It was at this point Carl left her to the other two, went outside in the gleaming sunshine, and lit a smoke.
    *   *   *
    The search of Bjarke’s room, seizure of his computer and the knife he’d slit his wrists with, the collection of the technical data, and the postmortem and removal of the body down to the ambulance all happened so quickly that Carl was only on his fifth smoke when Birkedal stood with his investigator and a technician waving a scrap of paper in a plastic bag.
    Carl read the scrap containing just the words:
Sorry, Dad.
“Strange,” said Assad.
    Carl nodded. The message was so short and direct that it was moving in its own way. But why didn’t the note read
Sorry, Mom
? In contrast to her late ex-husband, she at least had the chance of getting the message.
    Carl looked at Rose. “How old was Bjarke?”
    “Thirty-five.”
    “So he was eighteen in 1997, at the time his dad became preoccupied with the case.”
    “Did you talk with June Habersaat?” interrupted Birkedal.
    “Well, it went so-so. She wasn’t exactly cooperative if you ask me,” said Carl.
    “Right, well then, I’ll give you the chance to try again.”
    “Really, how so?”
    “You could be the ones to drive down to her in Aakirkeby and inform her of her son’s death, couldn’t you? That would also give you the opportunity to ask her the questions you’re burning to ask and, in the meantime, it’ll give the rest of us more time to seal the room and prepare the body to be sent to forensics in Copenhagen.”
    Carl shook his head. Seal the apartment and send the body to the mortuary? How long would that take precisely?
    Ten minutes?

5
    Wanda Phinn had married an English cricket player who’d come to Jamaica to teach black people what he was best at: playing and winning innings. This Chris McCullum was steadier on his feet than most of the guys in whites, and armed with these skills had been tasked for six months with one mission: to get the Jamaican national team to score 10 percent better on their runs.
    For that reason, McCullum stood on parched grass in the baking sun from March to September sweating buckets more than ever before.
    During a training match he saw Wanda out of the corner of his eye running around the cinder track with long muscular legs, skin glistening, and thought he was seeing things.
    Wanda was very aware of what people thought they were witnessing. She’d had it banged into her since her figure had developed and she’d learned to move around the track like a leaping gazelle.
    “Are you Merlene Ottey?” McCullum asked her outright after the match.
    Wanda bared her white teeth and dark gums in a smile. It wasn’t the first time she’d been asked and it was flattering, even though Merlene Ottey was at least twenty years her senior, because