Out of the dark, p.1
Out of the Dark, page 1
OUT OF THE DARK
By the same author
Last Train to Helsingør
My Name is Jensen
The Girl in the Photo
Back From the Dead
First published by Muswell Press in 2025
Copyright © Heidi Amsinck 2025 by agreement with Grand Agency
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To Nick
December
Day One
1
Detective Inspector Henrik Jungersen counted to three, flung open his car door and sprinted for the wrought-iron gates at the entrance to Ørstedsparken.
At least the rain kept the ghouls away, he thought as he nodded at the unlucky cop on guard duty and slipped inside the park.
The TV news crews were staying in their vans, watching from behind steamed-up windows.
Good.
He had no answers anyway.
One question had been gnawing at his brain all morning: how was it possible to abduct a child in the middle of Copenhagen, barely a couple of hundred yards from a busy metro station, shops and fast-food restaurants, without anyone noticing?
Nine-year-old Matilde Clausen had been missing for seventeen hours.
The playground, dug into the slope between the street and the large, vaguely boomerang-shaped lake in the middle of the park, was now a crime scene. As Henrik descended into the sandy hollow surrounded by trees and shrubbery, Detective Sergeant Mark Søndergreen came rushing towards him with an umbrella.
His face mirrored Henrik’s strong sense that something was horribly wrong.
Every parent’s worst nightmare.
‘They haven’t found anything, Boss,’ said Mark, gesturing at the technicians working in among the trees.
Henrik wasn’t surprised. Trampled on by dozens of kids and parents and soaked in overnight rain, the ground was unlikely to yield anything useful. But they had to try. ‘At this stage, nothing is irrelevant,’ he had told his team of investigators at the morning briefing.
The mobile phone Matilde had been given for her ninth birthday despite her mother’s protests was switched off, last detected inside the park a few minutes after she went missing. If they found it, they might be able to determine if she had been in touch with anyone of potential interest.
‘Give me a moment,’ said Henrik as he sheltered under Mark’s umbrella with the rain hammering on the canopy.
His jeans and boots were soaked, and water was trickling inside the collar of his shirt and down his back. He welcomed the icy sensation; he needed to stay awake, alert.
The past few months were a blur, a blank nothingness of training, shifts and paperwork.
Little daylight penetrated the thick cloud. The opposite end of Ørstedsparken, a sunken oasis of tranquillity close to Nørreport Station, was lost in the misty gloom.
You could almost feel it, the northern hemisphere hurtling towards the point furthest from the sun. The Christmas lights that had sprung up all over the city made a flimsy defence against the enveloping darkness.
Henrik tried to imagine what the playground would have been like yesterday afternoon, with screaming children crawling on the timber frame and being pushed on the swings by adults chatting and warming their hands on takeaway coffees.
It had been brighter then, a brief respite from the perpetual winter rain, but bitterly cold. The park would have looked beautiful, the light from the setting sun glinting off the surface of the lake, the old roofs and spires of the city just visible beyond the tree-lined perimeter.
‘Talk to me,’ he said finally, turning to Mark who had been waiting patiently, knowing better than to interrupt his boss when he was getting his bearings.
Good old Mark. Younger and fitter than him, energetic, loyal and hardworking. Did as he was told, a forgotten virtue in society at large, Henrik had always felt.
Mark had been a godsend after the turbulent events of the summer, quietly holding him up whenever he felt his knees buckling under him.
Above all, Mark knew when to keep his mouth shut and when to speak.
‘Stine Clausen . . . she’s the mother . . . was sitting over there, with Matilde’s half-brother asleep in the pram,’ said Mark.
He pointed to a wooden picnic table decorated with graffiti and Henrik was reminded that Ørstedsparken was open twenty-four hours. It was also widely known in Copenhagen as a gay cruising spot. Had been for more than 150 years. In his time, Henrik had dealt with rapes here, and a few stabbings, but never a missing child. Usually, such cases were solved before they reached his desk.
‘And where was Matilde?’ he said.
‘In there apparently.’ Mark gestured at the area of trees and bushes close to the picnic table, a mixture of evergreens and naked branches with a few yellow leaves clinging on for dear life.
Henrik had read in the notes that Matilde was a shy child, slight for her age. He frowned. ‘What was she doing in there?’
Mark shrugged.
‘And Stine?’ said Henrik.
‘On her phone, apparently. She would check now and again for Matilde, looking for her red coat, but then the baby began to cry, and she got busy settling him. When she looked up again, she couldn’t see her daughter.’
For how long had she been preoccupied? Henrik wondered. Phones made people deaf and blind; they got sucked in, forgot their surroundings.
(‘You should know,’ said his wife in his head.)
He kept meaning to put his phone away, to stop scrolling, but it had been like a compulsion in him lately, a shield against his thoughts and, God forbid, having to talk.
There had been other people in the park yesterday, lots of potential witnesses, and no one had reported seeing a little girl dragged off against her will. Someone Matilde knew then?
The distance from the playground to the nearest road made it hard to see how it could have been an opportunist move. It must have been planned meticulously, rehearsed even.
He rubbed his hand over the rough skin of his scalp and face. ‘And then what?’
‘Stine wasn’t too worried at first,’ said Mark. ‘Only when Matilde didn’t respond to her calls did she begin to panic. Other parents joined the search. They ran all over the park, and after about fifteen minutes, Stine called the police. It was almost completely dark by then.’
Henrik didn’t have to imagine that part. He could feel the primal fear of it, hear the increasingly desperate cries for Matilde echoing between the trees, the scene transformed from serenity to terror in a heartbeat.
‘The first uniforms were here in eight minutes and more arrived after that,’ Mark said. ‘They sealed off the playground and closed the park. The rest you know.’
Yeah, thought Henrik. The rest is a big fat zero.
The overnight response by operational command at Bellahøj police station had been textbook; he couldn’t fault it. The trouble was that none of it had worked.
Henrik looked at the lake, wondering if they would have to get the divers out.
Mark read his mind. ‘Matilde had been told not to go near the water under any circumstances.’
Since when did kids do as they’re told? Henrik thought.
But he didn’t truly believe the girl had drowned in the lake. It was more likely that she had left by the nearest exit to the playground, on the corner of Ahlefeldtsgade and Nørre Farimagsgade.
Alone or with someone.
Voluntarily or by force.
Most of the people who had been in the park when Matilde disappeared would have left by the time the police arrived. They needed those potential witnesses to come forward.
He looked at his phone, seeing missed calls from several crime reporters.
Jensen was a crime reporter, and knew his number, but she hadn’t called.
For months now, they had managed to avoid each other.
In the summer, when Jensen’s attempt to build a life with a new boyfriend had ended in disaster, he had been glad, hoping things could now go back to normal between them.
Until she had told him that she was pregnant and keeping the baby.
Jensen as a mother? It was unthinkable.
And it had changed everything.
Dreaming that he and Jensen might one day be together had made his marriage tolerable, like the possibility of escape, however remote, keeping a prisoner from abandoning all hope.
Now, the dream was dead. There would always be a child between him and Jensen.
Another man’s child.
The child of a psychopath.
He hadn’t known what else to do but throw himse
He sighed, considering whether to return the reporters’ calls. The media would spread the word faster, encouraging witnesses to come forward, and he needed that, but was loath to get drawn into speculation about what might or might not have happened.
Seeing everyone in one go would save time.
And Jensen might come.
Her baby was due soon, but if he knew her at all, she would be working until she went into labour, possibly beyond it. The thought made him smile, despite himself.
‘Get the press department to call a doorstep,’ he said to Mark. ‘As soon as possible.’
Mark shuffled his feet, too polite to remind Henrik that his boss, Superintendent Jens Wiese, was wary of him addressing the press.
Wiese was wary of him full stop.
If it were up to Wiese, he would only see daylight, muzzled and on a tight leash, when strictly necessary.
‘You weren’t my first choice,’ Wiese had said that morning when he had assigned Henrik as lead investigator on the Matilde case.
Wiese needed good statistics but held his nose when it came to the grime and chaos of real-life police work.
Henrik knew it wasn’t always pretty.
‘I need this one handled sensitively,’ Wiese had said. ‘A missing child this close to Christmas is bound to cause a lot of fear. Her parents are beside themselves with worry. I don’t want you crashing about in your size tens causing chaos.’
Henrik had blinked at him innocently. ‘Why do you assume I’m going to?’
‘I’ve been watching you, Jungersen,’ Wiese replied. ‘You’re stressed, erratic, on edge. When did you last take leave?’
‘I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘But as you pointed out yourself, we’re busy, so what are you going to do, send me home?’
Wiese had scowled at him, but Henrik knew he had no choice. There were just three lead investigators in Copenhagen’s violent crime unit, and Jonas and Lotte, his peers, were both up to their necks in cases.
He turned to Mark. ‘Just do it. I can handle the media.’
Just as well Jensen wasn’t here to hear him say that. He could see her face now, hands on hips, dark-blue eyes flashing at him angrily.
Those eyes.
Stop it, Jungersen.
He shook his head again, and began to walk towards the nearest exit, with Mark hot on his heels.
‘Get back to work, everyone,’ he shouted gruffly. ‘Let’s find Matilde.’
2
The chatter around Dagbladet’s meeting table died instantly when Margrethe stepped through the door, tall and broad, dressed in a navy-blue blazer with a silver brooch.
For all the joy she spread in the room, she might as well have worn a black cloak and carried a scythe.
Someone had brought in an advent candle stuck in clay and decorated with fir branches and spray-on snow. The work of a nursery child, Jensen guessed.
It seemed inappropriate now, a pathetic gesture in the face of Dagbladet’s existential crisis.
After its takeover by a Swedish venture capital fund, the paper had seemed to turn a corner, but the positive momentum hadn’t lasted. Rumours had been circulating for weeks that the Swedes had lost patience and were looking for further cut-backs.
The production of the print edition had already been outsourced to an agency, only a few subs remained, and repeated rounds of redundancies had reduced the editorial staff to a skeleton crew.
The pressure told on the faces of the journalists assembled around the beaten-up boardroom table. What was going to happen next? For how much longer could they carry on?
‘We’re going all out on the Matilde Clausen story,’ said Margrethe, her figure casting a shadow across the print copies scattered in front of her.
Jensen’s article about the missing nine-year-old had made it onto the front page minutes before deadline last night but in the bottom corner, below a story about flooding caused by weeks of heavy rain.
By now, Matilde was the only story. Her smiling face, adult front teeth just poking through the gums, stared out from every digital front page in the land. She looked younger than her years, her white-blonde hair scraped back with a plastic tiara.
‘What do we know?’ said Margrethe.
Jensen felt her colleagues turn to stare at her. Her hair was still wet after the bike ride from Margrethe’s flat in Østerbro, her sweatshirt soaked through where her coat would no longer do up.
‘Very little,’ she said. ‘The police have just called a press conference.’
‘Does that mean they’ve found her?’ said Margrethe.
‘More likely the opposite,’ said Jensen. ‘They’ll be appealing to the public for help.’
‘So, what’s the plan?’ said Margrethe.
‘Find out if they have any theories about what happened, try to speak to Matilde’s family, her school, neighbours, friends,’ said Jensen.
All of it seemed inadequate.
‘I want regular updates throughout the day. Give it everything you’ve got,’ said Margrethe.
Jensen nodded, refreshing the feed on her phone for the hundredth time.
Still no news.
The baby kicked, startling her. She looked at her bump, watching as it shifted and moved under her jumper. It still felt unreal, like her body belonged to someone else.
She had been seven weeks gone by the time she found out she was pregnant. Not too late to have an abortion, as the doctor had pointed out when Jensen had told her that the father was no longer around.
The fact that he was a murderer awaiting trial was something she had kept to herself.
She hadn’t so much decided to keep the baby, as drifted past the twelve-week point of no return without deciding. How could she, knowing that it might be her only chance to have a child?
Margrethe had taken her in when she had lost her home back in the summer. It was supposed to have been for a few weeks, but Jensen hadn’t managed to find a flat within a reasonable cycling distance of the newspaper. At least, not one she could afford on her single income.
No matter which way she looked at it, her situation was dire. No home of her own, no partner, and a baby arriving in a couple of months.
Her year in Copenhagen was starting to look like a failed experiment.
She could go back to London, lose herself in the anonymity of a city with almost twice the population of Denmark. The container with her belongings was already there; she had returned it just a few months after first arriving in Copenhagen, convinced she wouldn’t be staying. It had felt right to keep things temporary, to be able to leave quickly if a time came when it all got too much.
Such as now.
She spent the rest of the editorial meeting scrolling through the Danish news sites, quickly concluding that no one had any more information than she did on Matilde Clausen’s disappearance.
The TV news channels were all showing the same looped footage of officers moving in the rain behind the taped-off entry to Ørstedsparken.
When Margrethe slammed shut the black spiral notebook in which she orchestrated the news of the day, people quickly scrambled to their feet, relieved to have made it through another meeting without some grim announcement.
Margrethe cleared her throat loudly. ‘Wait,’ she shouted. ‘There’s more.’
The room fell silent, a collective suspension of breath. Outside, across the square with the giant Christmas tree, the bells in the City Hall tower began to strike the hour.
‘As you know,’ Margrethe began, ‘we’ve cut our overheads significantly in the past year, but I’m afraid we must tighten our belts further.’
Were more people about to be sacked? Or would the rumours that the Swedes were dropping Dagbladet’s print edition finally turn out to be true?
‘Hear me out,’ Margrethe said, raising her voice above the anxious mumbling. ‘As there are fewer of us now, we must shrink our footprint. Come the New Year, we’ll be renting out the top floor of this building.’
A sigh of relief went round the table; everyone had imagined something far worse.
Everyone but Jensen.
She stared at Margrethe in disbelief. Her private room in the warren of corridors under the eaves where journalists had once been milling in and out of each other’s smoke-filled offices to the tap-tap sound of typewriters had been her sanctuary, a safe space where she could ease her way into newspaper life after years of solitude as a foreign correspondent.
