The Mountain King

Book : The Asker Series

by Anders de la Motte

Genres: Mystery; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

This atmospheric and sinister mystery, perfect for fans of the Nordic thrillers of Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larsson, follows an overachieving female inspector investigating the darkest side of humanity, from “one of Sweden’s most talented crime fiction authors” (Erik Axl Sund, author of The Crow Girl).

Criminal inspector Leonore Asker seems to have the leading position at Malmö’s Major Crime Division within reach. But things go awry when, in the middle of a high-profile kidnapping case, management relegates her to the so-called Department of Lost Souls—the unit for odd, cold cases banished to the basement of the police station.

Despite the humiliation, Asker is drawn into one of the more peculiar cases. Someone is placing small ominous figures in town and one of them seems to represent the missing woman from the kidnapping case. As Asker’s investigation takes her to abandoned buildings, she reaches out to a local architecture expert and together they explore the sinister recesses of the city and discover that an unusual kind of evil lurks in the shadows.

Release date: January 30, 2024

Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books

Print pages: 416

Sample

THE MOUNTAIN KING

One spring evening when he was eight years old he ran away.

One second he was playing with some older kids in the forest, the next he was gone.

All the locals desperately searched for him through the darkness, rain, and cold. Called his name time and again, their ever-hoarser voices echoing between the spruce crowns. But it was as though the earth had swallowed him up.

Then, just after dawn, when all hope was fading, he was found in a crevice in a rock face, burning up with fever and soaked to the skin.

He neither cried nor laughed at being rescued, just stared blankly into space. Couldn’t speak of what had happened to him. Didn’t recognize his own parents.

Or at least that was how it was told to him.

He doesn’t actually remember any of it, other than in the way one remembers an old fairy tale. A story you hear so often it almost feels real.

But only almost.

Events after the incident, however, feel all the clearer for it.

The scratchy hospital sheets, people in white with compassionate smiles and soft-spoken voices. The intense headaches, the fever dreams from which he would wake drenched with sweat, his heart pounding. Dreams of dark, damp places deep in the mountain; of steel doors and chains, icy terror and searing pain. It would take several weeks before his meningitis cleared and he was allowed to go home.

He felt like a stranger. Needed his mother’s help to find his own bedroom. Asked her at least a hundred times if he really lived there, after all.

It was only much later that he realized how it was all connected. The reason why he couldn’t remember any of his childhood before that night. Why his head was filled with twisted thoughts and dark desires.

He was a changeling.

Someone who had taken the place of the little boy who ran away.

A creature born of pain and fever dreams who outwardly resembled a human, but who in actual fact was a monster.

This is how his story begins.

 

FRIDAY

 

SMILLA

“There it is!”

He runs ahead of her through the thickets, and Smilla struggles to keep up. They have walked at least a mile from the almost impassable logging road where they parked the car. The forest around them is filled with funereal blue conifers, interrupted now and then by deciduous saplings in shimmering October golds. Here and there sprawling brambles with blood-red stems that latch onto clothes and stab the skin.

“Wait!” she cries.

The steep uphill slope and blanket of leaves make the ground slippery underfoot. She loses her footing, lands on her knees. The camera strap tugs at her neck. Her system camera is heavy, but it takes far and away the best photos in weak light.

She scrambles back to her feet. Brushes the wet leaves from her knees. He has already disappeared into the thicket.

What was it he saw?

“MM!” she calls out. It’s what he wants her to call him, though he has such a beautiful name. Malik Mansur. As soft as his eyes.

Officially he isn’t actually her boyfriend anymore. They broke up back at the start of summer, not that either of them lets on about that. Both tiptoe around the fact that she’ll be going back to Paris soon.

In summer, after she ended things, he got jealous, angry, wrote nasty messages. But now things are back to how they used to be. In most ways, at least.

MM has matured in these four months, grown more manly, exciting.

Even a little dangerous.

The sex is better, too. Much better.

Perhaps he has been seeing someone else?

She has seen small hints of it, but hasn’t wanted to ask.

It’s easier that way.

“Smilla!” His voice comes from inside the thickets.

She continues upward. Is more careful where she sets her feet.

The ground levels off at the top of the peak. There must be a hundred and fifty feet of rock beneath them, perhaps even more.

“Smilla!”

MM pops up right in front of her, his face glowing in that way she likes.

“There it is!”

The construction he is pointing at is so low and overgrown it’s almost invisible.

Like a grim concrete kiosk, only with wire cages where the windows should be. The cages are filled with densely packed rocks. They remind her of the garden walls at her summer house in Falsterbo. She raises her camera, reels off a few shots.

“Gabions,” says MM, patting one of the cages. “This bunker is the upper air inlet for the base, just like he said.” His voice is both tense and excited.

He pulls her around the side of the building.

In their time apart he has become even more obsessed with urban exploration. That probably has something to do with a university module that he is taking. The Architecture of Decay. Either way, he can’t stop talking about it—or his amazing teacher, Martin Hill.

Perhaps that’s where MM met this new friend he keeps talking about—though on that question he is much cagier.

Around the back of the concrete bunker the bedrock cleaves up through the earth. Forms giant outcrops with moss-dappled backs. Through the camera lens they look almost alive. Hunkering, waiting.

She shudders, thinks of how far they are from the car. How hard it would be to get back there

if anything were to happen.

She pats her jacket pocket. Her phone is there, just where she left it. But it isn’t on.

MM made sure they both turned their phones off together, all the way back at the gas station. He had promised his friend that they would.

Because this whole explore is super-secret, he said. Unique.

“Here, look!” MM points at the back wall of the bunker. A piece of the wall is jutting out, revealing a sliver of darkness in the opening.

“The door’s open, just like he promised.”

Smilla tries to share his excitement.

And yet she can’t shake her unease.

“What did you say your friend’s name was?” she asks.

“Who, Berg?”

“Berg? Is that actually his name?”

He shrugs.

“And you’ve only known each other a few months,” she goes on, “but he just happened to give you this incredible tip about the tunnel? The cave rain?”

MM doesn’t hear the question, either that or he just ignores it. He’s too busy inspecting the door. A blast door made of concrete, must be more than a foot thick. Almost melts into the wall.

The opening is narrow, and for a moment she hopes it will be too small for them to pass.

But as usual MM won’t be deterred. He pulls off his backpack and squeezes in.

“Come on, there’s space for you, too!”

She hesitates for a second or two.

Her computer at home is full of photos from other expeditions. Closed factories, abandoned houses, forgotten places just like this.

But no cave rain. That only occurs in a handful of underground sites, where the conditions are so special that the humidity forms visible droplets of moisture in the air. She would dearly love to get a shot of some cave rain, he knows that. Still, she hesitates.

They aren’t rookie urban explorers; they have phones, flashlights, and spare batteries to hand. Even so, something about this place—the forest, the elevation, the hunkering outcrops and heavy concrete door—makes her ill at ease.

And then that friend. Berg.

A perfectly normal Swedish surname.

Yet the word’s meanings all chime in her head.

Berg. Hill, mountain. Rock.

She glances back at the outcrops. They remind her of trolls from an old book of folktales. Primeval mountain creatures. Evil.

“Just get in!”

MM reaches out to her through the opening. His voice is impatient now, the face looming in the darkness tense.

Still, she hesitates. Wants above all to turn around and head back to the car. Turn on her phone

 and call someone—her mom, dad, sister, anyone—just to hear another voice. Tell them where she is. That she wants to go home, now—right now.

But then MM’s face lights up. He cracks that smile that she has missed for so long, the one that always makes her melt.

“Come on, Smilla,” he says softly.

She resists for another second.

Then takes his hand and lets him pull her through the gap in the door.

The space inside is small. Walls, floor, ceiling, everything in gray concrete.

On the inside of the concrete door sits a large handwheel in a rusty brown metal, to operate the lock mechanism. Something about the handwheel and lock bothers her, amplifies her unease.

MM doesn’t seem to notice.

“See?” he says excitedly, sweeping his flashlight around the walls. “No graffiti. That means basically no one can have been here. The bottom entrance is sealed—this is the only way in.”

Smilla gives a steely nod.

From a hole in the middle of the floor rises the frame of a gray caged ladder.

She shines her flashlight down the hole.

A damp waft of air hits her from below. Brings with it scents of water, stone, metal. The bedrock’s breath. She came across the expression once on an urban exploration forum somewhere, and at the time she found the thought beautiful. As if the mountain itself were a living being. But now, as the smell hits her from the depths, that prospect feels less appealing. A few feet below, her flashlight lights up a similar room with another hole in the floor, through which the ladder leads farther into the darkness.

“Come on.”

MM hangs his flashlight from a strap around his neck, takes hold of the top rung, and starts climbing down.

She pauses again. Glances back at the door. There’s something about that giant handwheel that she just can’t put her finger on. Something that deepens her anxiety.

But MM will soon be down in the next room, and she can’t let him go on alone.

She steps onto the ladder and follows him.

The rungs are cold and coarse, the metal speckled brown where the rust has eaten through its galvanized surface.

Her heart is beating ever faster.

MM hardly stops to look around the second room, just shines the flashlight around and then moves on. Rock walls now, no concrete. A little bigger than the bunker, but still completely bare. MM is already on his way down the ladder again, through the next hole in the floor and deeper into the darkness.

The mountain is silent; the only sounds to be heard are those of their movements and panting breath.

A third room, slightly bigger still. Nothing in here causes MM to stop, either. The bedrock’s breath is getting all the sharper. Her camera smacks into the ladder, and she has to slide it around to her back.

“MM, hold up!”

He stops short, just a few feet below her.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, can we just take a breather? We’re going so fast! Hardly have a chance to look around.”

“But we’re almost in the tunnel now. I can see the bottom.”

He doesn’t wait for a reply, just keeps on descending.

She has no choice but to follow him.

The caged ladder ends halfway between ceiling and floor in the fourth room, forcing them to carefully lower themselves down the final feet.

“They’ve sawn off the ladder,” says MM while helping her down. “Must be to stop people from getting into the tunnel.”

Smilla exhales deeply. They won’t get any farther, which comes as both a relief and a disappointment. She looks around. The fourth room is perhaps three times the size of the original bunker, and the jagged bedrock walls are dripping with moisture.

“Look.”

MM shines his flashlight at the hole in the floor through which the ladder should have continued.

Two shiny rails that she didn’t initially notice rise up a little way out of the hole. It takes Smilla a second or two to realize what they are: another ladder, a much newer one, made of aluminium.

Her unease is back.

“Wait!” she says again, but MM is already on his way down.

Is out of sight before she even reaches the ladder.

“MM, wait!” But he doesn’t listen.

The bedrock’s breath is now so intense and so moist that she has to wipe it off her skin with the back of her hand.

“Wow!” he calls out. “Hurry, you’ve got to see this.”

The aluminium ladder is perhaps fifteen feet long, and ends in a puddle of water on a floor of sharp crushed rock.

This space is bigger than the others. Stones and rusty, twisted metal lie strewn around the floor. At the end of the space is a doorway that leads to a passage through which the bedrock’s wet breath courses, hitting her on its way up through the hole in the ceiling.

MM is already through the passage. She can see his flashlight flitting around on the other side. 

His voice echoes excitedly:

“Come on, Smilla, hurry.”

The passage slopes down steeply, and with the gradient and rock floor she almost stumbles into the next space.

She gasps. All of a sudden it is as though her hesitancy and anxiety are no more.

“Well?” he says with another one of those smiles that she loves.

“It’s incredible,” she gushes.

The train tunnel that they had expected to find is in fact an enormous, oblong cave. It must be almost three hundred feet long, and ends in a massive stone gateway that looms on the edge of their flashlight beams.

The ceiling is at least thirty feet high. The walls are a mixture of concrete and raw bedrock, with slender rivulets of water weaving their way down. The floor is a shallow pool, its surface broken by railway tracks that rise a few inches out of the water at the end where Smilla and MM are standing, but disappear toward the gateway where the water is deeper.

Here and there, stones that have probably fallen from the ceiling and walls peer out from over the surface of the black pool. Along the right-hand side of the cave runs a loading bay with two rusty-brown steel doors leading off it. But it is neither the doors, the railway tracks, nor the gateway that have caught her attention—but the air.

The updraft from the passage through which they came is so strong that it sends cold, damp air whirling around the cave, forming small, but fully visible, droplets of water in the beams from their flashlights.

“Cave rain,” Smilla says in awe.

“Told you,” MM replies with a smirk. “Berg keeps his promises.”

Smilla puts her flashlight down on a ledge and starts taking photos.

“Shine your flashlight there,” she tells MM. “Get up on the loading bay.”

She takes photos, instructs him on where to point the flashlights.

After a while he tires of playing photographer’s assistant and starts inspecting the metal doors by the loading bay.

Smilla goes on taking photos. The light is weak, and she has to do some maneuvering with her flashlight and adjust her camera settings to get the images to come out the way she wants them.

She plans to enlarge them, maybe hang one on her bedroom wall in Paris.

A choked sound cuts her off.

It sounds like a cry.

She looks around for MM, but he isn’t there.

Only now does she notice that the left-hand steel door on the loading bay is open.

“MM?” Her voice echoes through the cave. “Malik?”

No reply. She shudders, not only from the cold.

The unease from before is back, twice as intense this time.

She stares at the open door, the darkness lurking just beyond the threshold.

And suddenly she realizes what it was that bothered her back up in the bunker.

The concrete door that they had crept through had a large handwheel on the inside.

But on the outside its surface was completely smooth.

Which means that whoever had opened it did so from the inside. Just a crack, just wide enough for someone to get inside. Like bait.

And that name.

Berg. Hill, mountain. Rock.

The flight impulse comes from nowhere, like an icy jolt to her body. Is magnified by the compact darkness there beyond the steel door, makes her heart start to pound.

She should get out of here, now.

Run back to the ladders and climb toward the light, as fast as she can.

Part of her wants nothing more.

But another, more pragmatic part tells her that MM could be hurt. That he could be lying there, just inside the door, in need of her help. That every second she spends wavering could be crucial.

“MM!” she cries again.

The echo hovers unanswered in the cave for a few seconds, then falls flat.

She takes out her phone and turns it on, which is obviously stupid. A reflex that costs her precious seconds, only to confirm that she has no signal down here in the belly of the mountain.

She takes a deep breath, puts her phone away, and collects herself.

Then slowly makes her way toward the dark doorway.

A faint smell wafts through the doors. A musty smell, one she didn’t pick up on before. As though the bedrock’s breath has shifted. Become thicker, more raw.

The smell scares her. Makes her even more sure.

This is a monstrous place.

An evil place.

But she has no choice but to go on.

Into the darkness.

 

MONDAY

 

ASKER

Leo Asker wakes up with a creeping feeling in her bones. A sort of premonition, a warning, that something is about to hit her.

Something big, for which she has had no chance to prepare.

It may have something to do with the new case.

A young couple missing since Friday, vanished without the slightest trace.

But she has run similar investigations before without this kind of doomsday feeling.

Even after one hundred push-ups and as many sit-ups on her bedroom floor, the feeling refuses to subside. If anything it is reinforced by the gray weather and darkness outside.

It’s still October, and the trees in the park bear their autumn hues.

Normally she likes this time of year.

Fresh air, geese flying in Vs against a bright blue sky.

But the chill and damp mists on offer this morning echo the feeling in her gut, a warning of what is to come.

Winter in Skåne is a mix of gales and biting rains that feel as though they cut through the soul. She hates winter, hates the cold.

Has already had enough of it to last a lifetime.

One must steel oneself, as Prepper Per used to say. Discomfort and pain are just laziness leaving the body.

That he should come to mind on a day like this is no surprise. Doomsday feelings were always Per’s thing. His lifeblood.

The house isn’t hers; she’s housesitting for a family who are abroad. Lives in the guestroom. One of the guestrooms.

It’s an old, flashy pad; the renovation alone cost millions.

Copper roofing, balconies, herringbone floors and moldings.

Panoramic windows with lake views.

Asker is rarely here. She comes home late, goes out early. It’s how she prefers things.

She takes a scalding-hot steam shower, puts on some jeans, a shirt, and a blazer. Then downs an espresso over the marble worktop in the enormous kitchen while pulling up Smilla Holst’s Instagram account.

Still no updates to either her or her boyfriend’s accounts. Only that selfie from Friday, the last sign of either of them.

It was Smilla’s family who raised the alarm on Saturday night, when she hadn’t picked up the phone in over twenty-four hours. A police investigation was opened almost immediately, which is unusual when it comes to missing people.

But all of Malmö knows who the Holst family are. The sort of wealth they represent. The power.

Despite the coffee, the sense of foreboding clings on. Gradually turns to a pounding headache. She knocks back two aspirin, then locks up and sets the alarm. Puts on her headphones, pulls up the hood on her jacket, and lets the music clear her mind of Prepper Per and everything else he brings.

“Hello, Leo!” exclaims the dog-walking grandpa as she passes him on her way to the train. “Monday again! New week, new opportunities!”

Asker doesn’t hear him, but reads the words on his lips. One of the many random talents she has Prepper Per to thank for. Though in this case lip-reading isn’t any great feat. The man has only about four stock greetings, and this one is number three.

Asker forces a polite smile and a wave, doesn’t stop to chat even though he does, just points at her wrist as if to say she’s in a hurry. The grandpa is a widower, lives in the former gatekeeper’s lodge at the end of the drive, which makes him her closest neighbor.

He’s the sort of man who doesn’t know how to appreciate solitude, instead fights it tooth and nail through idle chitchat with strangers.

It’s seven a.m. when she reaches the station. Sunrise is still a while away, and the platform is half-empty. The mist dampens the squeal of the train’s brakes.

As soon as she steps onto the train and pulls down her hood she catches a whiff of cigarette smoke.

The source of the stink: a long-haired man in a leather jacket and ripped jeans. He is unshaven, has hoops in his ears, leather wristbands, and a tattoo that coils its way up his neck. Legs spread so wide you would think he had cacti growing in his crotch.

Besides the fact that he’s brazenly puffing away, the man is obviously drunk. Either he started unusually early, or—more likely—is on his way home after some overnight escapades at one of the more remote stations on the regional train line.

In front of the man stands a female train conductor aged around twenty, to whom he is loudly proclaiming that he’ll smoke his bloody cigarette wherever the fuck he wants.

The other passengers are staring out of the windows or at their phones, pretending not to notice, since obviously they don’t want to get involved. A Swedish national sport.

Asker turns off her music, tilts her head to one side, and scans the man from head to toe. He’s around fifty, about six feet in height, 190 pounds—ten of which are excess. He’s confident, used to a bit of boorishness being enough to get him what he wants. Thinks he’s a prizefighter but definitely doesn’t move like one.

“The train can’t move until you put it out!” the conductor says, trying to keep her voice steady. The man detects her fear, savors it.

“Blow me,” he sneers, blowing smoke in her face.

Asker sighs. Pulls her headphones down and walks over.

“Put that out.” She shows her police badge.

The man’s eyes narrow. She can see the cogs turning in his skull, read the inferences in his eyes as he sizes her up.

Police, early thirties, blonde. Short hair, unusually tall and broad-shouldered for a woman. Different-colored eyes—one blue, the other green. The condition is known as heterochromia, but of course this dude doesn’t know that. Besides, he’s too busy checking out her figure. She sees him add up his surface findings, pair them with his over-inflated ego and drunkenness, and arrive at the expected conclusion.

“Hey sweetcheeks!” He flashes a nicotine-yellow grin. “If only all cops looked like you.” The man pats one of his thighs in invitation.

“But here’s the thing, love, old Jocke’s been round the block a few times, so if he’s going to have to put out his fag, then you might as well call for backup right now. Or else you can just sit pretty till he’s done.” He lifts his cigarette to take another drag. Winks at her as he does.

It isn’t the underestimation that annoys her most, or Jocke’s stale view of women, but the fact that he talks about himself in the third person.

Besides, she has a headache, which lowers her already-low threshold for assholery.

Without the slightest warning, she bats Jocke’s cigarette away. Grabs one of his ringed ears and gives it a good pinch.

His body reacts to the pain long before his brain, instinctively doing all it can to relieve it. Before Third-Person Jocke even knows it, he’s up out of his seat and staggering through the carriage, bent forward with one of his wrists locked behind his back.

“What the fu…” is all he can splutter before his legs are kicked out from under him and he nosedives onto the rainy platform in a humiliating bellyflop.

A few of the sleepy passengers fumble around with the cameras on their phones, but it’s too late.

Out on the platform Jocke scrambles to his feet. His face is purple, his fists clenched. Asker stands in the door and studies him.

He has two options: he can either try to restore his wounded pride through violence, or swallow his frustration and pretend this infuriating incident never happened.

She raises her eyebrows in a well? to hurry along his decision.

Jocke is still hesitating. He clenches and opens his fists, his jaw, too. Tries to stare himself to a decision, but now that his self-confidence has taken a beating, her two-toned eyes make him even more unsure. She can see the questions in his face.

What is she; who is she; and how can he deal with her?

Before Jocke can make up his mind, the doors glide shut and the train pulls softly away. He plucks up his courage, runs up and bangs on the window. Shouts something idiotic to save a shred of self-esteem, before he and the platform disappear into the gray haze.

Asker takes a seat and puts her headphones back on.

The cellphones around her lower in disappointment.

“Thanks,” mumbles the conductor, who gets a nod in response.

The young woman looks as though she wants to say something more.

But Asker has already put  on her music and turned away.

 

ASKER

Malmö was first built on a sandbank, sandwiched between marsh and sea. Its situation was practical rather than strategic, having to do with the herring fishery and the commerce that that brought with it.

In the seventeenth century, when Skåne changed hands from Denmark to Sweden, Malmö became a border city. It was severed from the surrounding wetlands by bastions and a long moat that fed out into the sea, transforming the city into a fortified island that was almost impossible to capture.

Two hundred years later the city started to grow in earnest. The fortifications were torn down, and the moat was turned into a canal.

The small lakes and wetlands that had once surrounded the city were drained and rebuilt as new city districts. Rörsjöstaden, where the police headquarters are situated, is one such district.

The headquarters lie at the intersection of Exercisgatan and Drottninggatan, with a view over the spot where the canal turns northwest on its way back to sea.

In recent years the site has been further bolstered with a detention center, district court, and outposts for the Prosecution and Economic Crimes authorities respectively, forming one enormous justice center. Perhaps it is because the ground it stands on was once marsh and seafloor that the cold and damp occasionally seep their way through the building’s heavy doors and airlock insulation. Especially on days like this, when the wind kicks up off the sea.

The Serious Crime Command is located on the sixth and top floor of police HQ, with a view over rooftops and water. Glass walls, big-screen displays, soft lighting. Dark carpets that absorb the sounds of the phone signals pulsating through the air. No expense spared; even the coffee machine in the airy kitchen is first-rate.

Asker has worked at Serious Crime for almost four years now, which is less time than most, but she has already progressed to head of section. In a matter of years she expects to be running the entire command. Not all of her colleagues relish this thought.

She stands at the front of the state-of-the-art incident room. Unlike the rest of the department, this room has no windows onto the outside world, but a glass wall that overlooks the large internal atrium running straight down through the center of the building.

Before her sit fifteen of her police colleagues in rows. Several are new faces, loaned in from other departments, which surprises her a little.

At one minute to nine the department chief enters and takes a seat on the back row. Vesna Rodic is between forty and fifty, round of build and a head shorter than Asker. Normally Rodic isn’t the sort of manager to get involved in investigations like these, which is one of the things Asker likes about her.

Asker prepares to start the presentation, stands up tall and clears her throat.

“Good morning, everyone! For those of you who are new, I’m Detective Inspector Asker and I’m head of section here at Serious Crime. Today’s case involves two missing people, which we are treating as a suspected kidnapping.”

She clicks the remote control, which brings up the selfie of the two missing youngsters on the giant screen behind her.

“The people we are looking for are Smilla Holst and Malik Mansur. They were reported missing by Smilla’s parents on Saturday night, and the last sign of them was a social media post from Friday morning, which means they have now been missing around three days.”

She lists the known facts,

mostly for the new arrivals.

“Both of their phones have been switched off since Friday, but we are of course keeping an eye on them in case they are turned on again. We have requested all saved operator data, but as most of you know that process tends to be…”

Short pause.

“… challenging,” she adds with a caustic smile. “Based on previous experience I would expect us not to have a response until toward the end of the week.”

She waits for the collective groan.

Next image, only Smilla this time. She is beautiful: pale skin, curly blond hair, blue eyes. On her nose a few lingering freckles that will surely be gone in a few years. The sort of unspoiled beauty that only exists between seventeen and twenty.

“Smilla Holst, nineteen years of age,” Asker goes on. “Graduated from high school in spring, now studying in Paris. Currently home for reading week. Smilla is registered at her parents’ address in Limhamn. She’s conscientious, ambitious, and has good grades. Her parents claim they have a very good relationship, and that there’s no reason why she would cut contact voluntarily.”

“Which is exactly what everyone says when they don’t want to admit they’re bad parents who don’t keep track of their kids.”

The man who has interrupted Asker is Johan Eskilsson, who for some inexplicable reason goes by the name Eskil and not Johan.

He is a year or two older than her, and half an inch shorter, which annoys him, since he’s the sort of man who would get annoyed by such things.

As always, Eskil’s hair is neatly trimmed and his face freshly shaven, and he smells of both aftershave and the hand cream he bought at his favorite influencer’s recommendation. The same cool cat who inspired his haircut, shirt, tie knot, thumb ring, and watch—and perhaps even the privately leased sports car that Eskil drives between home and Pilates classes.

Eskil the Detective—as he calls himself on Tinder—is a very good cop. At least in his own humble opinion.

He has plenty of other opinions, too. One of them being that he should be head of section and not Asker.

Asker ignores Eskil’s comment and clicks up another slide.

It shows a young man with curly dark hair, pronounced features, and velvet eyes. He, too, looks almost impossibly handsome.

“Malik Mansur, known as MM, twenty-one years of age. Lives in an apartment in Värnhem, is a second-year architecture student at Lund University. He is also described by his parents as conscientious—”

“Well…,” Eskil scoffs, to

 the approval of the colleagues around him. He is unusually chipper this morning. Has placed himself right at the front, surrounded by his usual stooges. Some of the more bro-ish colleagues who would rather have a leader with balls. In the literal, not metaphorical sense.

“What Eskil here is so keen to point out is that Mansur has a few hits in our databases,” says Asker. “A summary fine relating to a minor drug offense from a few years ago, and some intelligence notes from the summer about him being a passenger in a car used by a hardened Malmö criminal.”

“Exactly.” Eskil nods smugly. “And if you ask me that’s the connection we should be focusing on.”

Asker has had enough.

“But I didn’t ask you, Eskil,” she says. “And until I do, I would appreciate it if you could spare us your invaluable insights.”

She fixes her two-tone gaze on him. He looks around shiftily for backup, but his yes-men and the rest of the room avoid eye contact. Know just as well as Asker does that his balls are more physical than metaphorical.

“Well excuse me,” he mutters.

Asker changes the slide again. The same one she started with.

“This selfie, posted on Smilla’s Instagram account on Friday morning, is, as mentioned, our last trace of the two of them, and also the closest we can come to an actual description.”

The young people are standing cheek-to-cheek, gazing happily into the camera. The clothes that are visible look practical: turtlenecks and waterproof jackets—his black, hers turquoise. Around Smilla’s neck hangs a camera strap, and behind them the hood of Malik’s black car is visible.

Off on new adventures reads the caption, followed by #newadventures and #love.

“Smilla and Malik have been together a few years,” Asker goes on. “Met at a mutual friend’s party. According to her sister they broke up over the summer, just before Smilla moved to Paris to study, but they stayed in touch. Judging by this picture their relationship was back on.”

She clicks again. Brings up images of two humorless-looking men who appear to be father and son.

“Smilla’s father, Tomas Holst, who you see on the left here, is CEO of Arkadia Holdings. Arkadia was founded by Smilla’s grandfather Eric Holst, ...