For me, it began with the murder of a cat. And the murder of an old woman. And the cries of a ghostly baby coming from the panelled walls of a Copenhagen apartment. At the time we felt that “The Crying” – submitted for an early series of The Time Being – was perhaps too dark a story for a weekday afternoon, but we didn’t want to let go of the writer. So we aired another tale, “Detained”, in which a businesswoman has an epiphany of sorts at a snowbound airport. This was Heidi Amsinck’s radio debut, early in 2005.

Since then, we have commissioned and produced eight more of Heidi’s stories for radio – and “The Bird In The Cage”, the first story from a brand new series, Copenhagen Curios, airs tonight.

Heidi returned to Copenhagen – or rather the imagined, spooky Copenhagen that has become her trademark – for her second story, “Conning Mrs Vinterberg” (2007). Mrs Vinterberg is a seemingly frail old lady who lures an antique dealer to her apartment – with the promise of a Qing vase – and then drugs and smothers him with a cushion embroidered with the words Baltic Marine Conference 1957. 

I don’t know where the old lady thing comes from – you’d need to ask Heidi – but I do know that in the world of her stories the best thing to do if you meet a woman over 60 is run like blazes in the other direction. The von Trauen sisters (“Last Train To Helsingør”) capture and ‘farm’ people to work their estate; Mrs Hoffman kills the postman – as she has killed others before – to fertilise “The Climbing Rose”; and my favourite, Gudrun Holm, kills with her mushroom knife to protect the secret location of “The Chanterelles of Østvig” from big agriculture.

Are there any old ladies in Copenhagen Curios? You’ll have to listen to find out. What I can tell you is that, as the series title suggests, antiques feature prominently, and some pretty strange things happen.

The way Tim McInnerny brought the sinister Mrs Vinterberg to life all those years ago has long passed into Sweet Talk folklore. Here, as he did with Danish Noir in 2011, Tim reads all three tales with a mixture of perfect pacing, dark humour and more than a little menace.

Heidi has lived in England for more than twenty years now, which has freed her to ‘make things up’ about the city of her birth, and there are echoes of Tales Of The Unexpected in her work. As with the previous series Danish Noir and Copenhagen Confidential, the world of Curios  ‘is Copenhagen – but not as we know it’, and is the setting for three very assured pieces of storytelling.

Copenhagen Curios broadcasts 15, 22, 29 March 2015 on BBC Radio 4, Sundays, 7.45 pm and thereafter on iPlayer.