The Score
The investigation led Katrine into a world she found simultaneously beautiful and absurd — a world where adults spent months arguing about the tempo of a single bar, where rivalries burned with an intensity that would embarrass a war zone, and where the word "interpretation" could be wielded like a blade. The opera company cooperated with the enthusiasm of people who had been waiting for decades to inform on each other. Everyone had a theory. Everyone had a grudge. The challenge was not finding suspects but narrowing the field.
The breakthrough came from the score itself — not Mozart's original but the annotated rehearsal copy found on the conductor's stand. Someone had made alterations to the dynamic markings in the second act, subtle changes that would have been invisible to anyone who was not looking for them. The modified passages required Birgitte to sustain certain vowels longer than the original score demanded, increasing her exposure to whatever had been applied to her costume's collar. It was murder composed in musical notation, and Katrine found herself admiring the precision even as it revolted her.
She interviewed the conductor, a Finnish man named Virtanen whose emotional range appeared to span the narrow territory between irritation and contempt. He claimed not to have noticed the alterations, which was either a lie or an indictment of his professionalism — both