The Vanished

CHAPTER 13

It was 12 December, a Friday, the weather calm and dismally grey. It had been a night of violence in Copenhagen: three people had been wounded, one seriously, in a shootout involving bikers and members of an immigrant gang, while out in Amager a young man had been stabbed to death in a club. And yet, things were about to get worse. Much worse. During the morning, a pregnant young financial adviser to one of the big banks was murdered as she left home on her way to work. The perpetrator was a forty-four-year-old psychiatric outpatient, released from treatment the previous evening with a handful of pills and a prescription in his pocket. Not because he didn’t need help – plainly he did – but because no more beds were available, a chronic shortage now in its fifteenth year. The killing had been utterly without reason or premeditation. Moreover, it was an attack of the most brutal nature, the victim having been kicked to death. Curiously, this had taken place on Hambros Allé in affluent Hellerup. Normally, such incidents were confined to less privileged areas – housing estates comfortably remote from city centres, in the peripheral regions of the hinterland – only very seldom in areas whose inhabitants could afford private treatment for psychiatric illness. Certainly not in Gentofte Kommune, inside whose boundaries, clustered together within a radius of only a few hundred metres, resided assorted members of parliament, no less than three television presenters and two chief editors of national newspapers. The killing was hands-down the morning’s top story. A grave government minister appeared on television, genuinely affected by the incident. His daughter lived on the same street.

‘Do you mind if I switch it off?’ Simonsen said to Pauline, who was sitting sprawled at the opposite end of the sofa in his little annexe.

‘Be my guest. I can do without him going on.’

He pressed the remote.

‘I hear you and the Countess are taking some holiday,’ she said. ‘Are you going anywhere?’

‘I might. I’m not sure yet.’

‘Oh, well, I hope you have a nice time. What are we supposed to be doing today anyway?’

‘Melsing and I have got an appointment with the Deputy Commissioner in an hour to go through the Kramer Nielsen case for Hans Ulrik Gormsen and his mother-in-law from the Legal Affairs Committee. You can come with us, if you want.’

‘Do you need me?’ she asked, sounding disinterested.

‘Not really. But I don’t want you feeling left out. You’re the only one besides me who’s been with the case from day one.’

‘Will you be going through all those figures again?’

‘Of course. You don’t have to decide yet, though. Just come along, if you feel like it.’

She didn’t.

The presentation went off according to plan: none of their audience understood a word.

Kurt Melsing passed handouts around and held forth on the HOMS software application and his complex differential equations with their various physical and physiological parameters, eventually leading on to levels of significance and a statistically well-founded conclusion: Jørgen Kramer Nielsen’s death was due to an accidental fall on the stairs outside the door to his flat. Only politeness prevented his exclusive audience of three from fleeing the building as he droned on.

Simonsen was affability itself.

‘Would you like us to go through it again? It can be rather opaque the first time around.’

No one took him up on the kind offer, and instead he turned to Hans Ulrik Gormsen.

‘Perhaps you’d like to comment from your side?’

His politician mother-in-law thought this to be a splendid idea and stared in anticipation at the former police officer who had initiated the whole matter as he rummaged hectically through the pages of his handout, only to declare red-faced:

‘Well, it seems obvious to me that the man fell down his own stairs. That’s what the calculations show. No doubt about it, none whatsoever. The science is quite clear about that.’

The woman beamed. Her son-in-law was a most gifted communicator. Simonsen took back the handouts.

On the Saturday, Konrad Simonsen moved out of his flat in Valby. He’d been dreading the day, but his sadness at leaving the place turned to gladness once he realised how excited Anna Mia was about her new home. The move itself didn’t take long at all, the Countess having hired a firm of professionals, and in no time the place was cleared and his stuff shifted into storage in his former gallery at the house in Søllerød.

Sunday afternoon he stopped by Police HQ, spending an hour clearing up the odds and ends of his investigation so he’d be ready to start on something new once he got back from his holiday. He finished a couple of reports he’d been putting off, making sure the case was archived in the proper manner. After that, he left together with Klavs Arnold, who’d come in to get his new office sorted out. Simonsen offered him a lift to Farum.

‘We just have to stop off in Valby first, I need to give my daughter some keys.’

Arnold accepted willingly, having only the vaguest notion of where Farum and Valby might be on a map.

Arnold went up the stairs to the flat with him, eager to say hello to his superior’s daughter. Simonsen led the way, only to discover the door was open. Inside, someone was hammering. They went in and followed the racket into the kitchen. Half the units had been ripped out and lay in bits in a heap on the floor. A pair of legs in blue jeans and sneakers poked out from under a cupboard. They weren’t Anna Mia’s.

‘Can you get me that jemmy, sweetie? It’s on the window sill.

A hand reached back. Konrad Simonsen placed a wrench in it.

‘No, that’s not it. It’s blue and looks like… well, a jemmy.’

Simonsen picked up a screwdriver but the man apparently decided to fetch the tool himself and crawled out backwards to get it.

The two men stared at each other. Klavs Arnold glanced around at the mess. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ he said.

The man was in his twenties, tall, with tousled, dark brown hair and bright blue eyes. He was wearing a lumberjack shirt and claimed his name was Oliver.

Simonsen put out a reluctant hand and received a firm handshake in return.

‘Anna Mia’s probably just popped out to the shop. I’m sure she’ll be back in a minute,’ Oliver said, sheepishly.

‘What’s this sweetie business?’ asked Simonsen.

Oliver explained. He was a carpenter by trade, which satisfied Klavs Arnold. He lived in Rødovre and had known Anna Mia, your daughter, since the summer, and together with a friend of his he ran his own little building firm. His words emerged in a nervous stutter, and Konrad Simonsen decided he liked him. He handed over the keys, before cautiously stepping over the pile of broken wood on the floor and making his way out. In the doorway he stopped.

‘Oh, and one last thing. Treat her nicely or I’ll be down on you with all the might of the constabulary. But I suppose you know that already?’

Oliver smiled and nodded. Klavs Arnold chipped in with his Jutland accent:

‘It’s a hiding to nothing. Make sure you do a good job on that kitchen.’

Konrad Simonsen proposed in a flower bed on Sunday afternoon, in a tangle of last year’s perennials. He went down on his knees on the soggy ground before the Countess, who true to weekend habit was out in the garden clearing autumn leaves. At the same instant, he forgot the speech he’d been carefully rehearsing, but realising there was no going back he improvised, eventually popping the question and feeling like time stood still in the split second it took for her to say yes.

‘Simon, I thought you’d never ask. Better late than never, though. Come on, let’s celebrate.’

‘I’ve got you a present as well,’ he mumbled.

He’d placed each of the pictures on a chair and turned them towards the light, presenting them as best he could. Two rubbings of ancient rock carvings from Nordkalotten. Helena Brage Hansen’s deaf friend Kaare had shown him how, by rubbing the roots of a certain kind of moss hard against a sheet of paper, you could make the carvings appear in the loveliest ochre. Subsequently, he’d had them framed.

The Countess enthused about them.

‘What do they depict, do you know?’

‘People celebrating the return of the sun. At least, that’s what Kaare said.’

In the evening they sat and watched TV. Suddenly, with a sense of purpose in his voice, he announced:

‘I’m going to Liverpool on Thursday. I want to be there for Lucy Davison’s funeral. The service is at St Mary’s Church in Walton, I’ve found it on the map. There’s an early flight, so I should be able to make it there and back in one day.’

She didn’t answer, and for a moment he thought she wasn’t pleased with him for wanting to go on his own, though he conceded that would have been unlike her. But then, cryptically, and as if speaking only to herself, she said: ‘You gave me such a lovely present before. Perhaps I can give you one in return, if there are any tickets left. Wait here, Simon, I’ll be back in a tick.’

A tick turned out to be an hour and a half. He was dozing and she had to wake him up.

‘Sorted,’ she said. ‘We’re going on a little getaway together, to celebrate, so your departure’s put forward a day.’

He yawned and shook his head in an effort to dispel sleep.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We’re going to a football match on Wednesday night.’

‘In Liverpool?’

‘Yes, and you can start looking forward to it.’

‘But I don’t like football.’

‘You’ll like this. It’s a lot more than football, believe me.’

However, all was not entirely well. Amid the sweet nothings and tender caresses that abounded in the wake of their engagement, and a newfound belief in a bright and better future, was a single source of irritation that wouldn’t go away. The Countess probed into the Kramer Nielsen case, pointing to little cracks in the logic that she failed to comprehend, forcing him to account for each in turn, only to find that for each satisfactory answer he provided, two new questions arose. He felt like she was interrogating him, which was more or less exactly what she was doing, albeit flippantly and in a tone that indicated to him that she no longer believed a word he was telling her. Eventually, he had to come clean.

‘OK, so Melsing and I haven’t told the whole truth.’

‘You don’t say,’ she said, sarcasm dripping from every syllable. ‘I’d never have guessed.’

‘I’ll give you the full story in due course.’

‘And when might that be? I wonder.’

‘Everything comes to she who waits…’

She cut him off with annoyance:

‘Oh, don’t start that again, Simon.’

Konrad Simonsen was not one to be easily impressed but Anfield took his breath away. From the very first, he was fascinated: the swell of the songs he didn’t understand, the supporters’ euphoric pride in their team and the stadium, the sense of belonging in everyone around them. There was no humility about it, and yet it was quite without arrogance or aggression.

‘What do you think?’

‘It’s amazing. Magnificent.’

The Countess swept out an arm as though it all belonged to her:

‘This is Anfield.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I’ll tell you about that later. All I can say is, I’ve been looking forward to showing you this. I knew you’d like it.’

‘It’s overwhelming. Do they sing all the time?’

‘As good as. Liverpudlians like their songs. There was a band from here once, they got to be quite famous.’

He missed the reference entirely. By now she was pointing to the area behind the goal.

‘That section over there’s called the Kop. They decide what to sing and when.’

‘What’s our bit called?’

‘I’m not sure, to be honest. Oh, yes, we’re the Paddock, but we’re not as famous as the Kop.’

‘How long have you known about this?’

‘It’s not exactly a secret.’

‘No, of course not, stupid question. What I mean is, I wish I’d realised before.’

‘I know how you feel. My dad always said: “You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the Pyramids, made love under a full moon and seen Liverpool play at Anfield Road.”’

Suddenly, she roared with the crowd. Simonsen looked around the stadium: a heaving ocean of red and white scarves raised above tens of thousands of heads in joyous praise. The actual match he found less interesting.

‘It all makes sense when you’re here. Has anyone scored?’

‘Not yet. You won’t be in any doubt when Liverpool do, though.’

He nodded, twisting round again to look up at the packed tiers of the stand above.

‘So, have you seen the Pyramids and made love under a full moon?’ he asked, turning back to look at her with a gleam in his eye.

‘No, but this is the ninth time I’ve been to Anfield.’

Lucy Davison’s funeral failed to stir up much feeling in Konrad Simonsen. He’d already said goodbye to her at the airport in Copenhagen and found it hard to engage in further farewells. Not even when her remains were taken to the grave accompanied by prayers and blessings and once more laid in the ground was he able to summon emotion. The ceremony was tasteful and the church filled with parishioners, but he kept himself apart at the back and made sure he was among the first to leave once it was over, recognised by no one and without awakening the slightest interest in his presence. Afterwards, he stood waiting on the corner across the road, and for the first time in what seemed like an age he wanted a cigarette. A short while passed before he caught sight of the man. He crossed back over, hastening up alongside him.

‘We meet again.’

The priest turned, his face lighting up instantly as if he’d run into an old friend.

‘What a nice surprise. Yes, indeed.’

‘A coming together of two people, isn’t that what you called it?’

‘Ah, yes. A coming together.’

‘Have you got time for a chat? I’ve got lots to tell and something I’d like to ask you.’

‘All the time in the world. Shall we find a pub?’

‘Why not just walk? The weather’s nice.’

‘Anywhere in particular?’

Simonsen didn’t know the city at all, so he had no preference. They agreed just to wander, and did so for a while in silence. Eventually, Simonsen spoke:

‘There’s a story I’ve been wanting to tell you. I almost did, when we met in Valby, but this is better.’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with our… with the investigation. To tell you the truth, it’s a private matter, and I’m not sure exactly why I want to talk to you about it rather than anyone else. It’s just the way it’s turned out.’

‘I’m all ears, regardless.’

‘Back in nineteen seventy-three I had a girlfriend who’d got herself into a spot of trouble. We were an odd match. I was in the police and she was a left-wing activist.’

He told the story of how, following the Olympic Games massacre in Munich, Rita desperately wanted to break with the political association she’d got herself mixed up in. It wasn’t entirely accurate, insofar as she didn’t actually say as much until the following year, but explaining it this way added cohesion, and it made no difference in terms of what he needed to convey.

‘She wanted to go to the States and start again. Only she didn’t have any money and her ideas for getting hold of some were… well, naive, and would have involved putting herself at risk.’

‘Such is the way when we need money fast.’

‘Don’t I know! Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, my own ideas on the matter were neither naive nor particularly risky. You won’t have been old enough at the time, but there were a lot of struggles going on back then in the early seventies.’

He recounted the strikes, many politically motivated, others simply in favour of higher wages, others still to demonstrate solidarity with striking workers elsewhere, though in many instances it seemed like the actual purpose was known only to the organisers.

‘They called them lightning strikes, or wild strikes, and that’s exactly what they were, though not illegal, even if that’s sometimes claimed.’

‘There was no compulsory labour, not even then.’

‘No, thank goodness.’

Many of these strikes were partly or wholly beyond the control of the established trade unions. They were led by desultory groupings of radicals, thrown together ad hoc. Simonsen named a few examples of ones he could remember. And yet it had also been a time of solidarity, strikers often being helped along financially by what was referred to as the man with the cardboard box.

‘The cardboard box being full of money?’ the priest enquired.

‘Exactly. A lot of money.’

It all went on very discreetly, otherwise the donor, usually another trade union, ran the risk of heavy penalties. No one ever knew anything, Simonsen explained, apart from the fact that some person or persons unknown had been rather charitable all of a sudden. He went on:

‘Oddly enough, this money was actually always delivered in a cardboard box, never a carrier bag or a rucksack, but a cardboard box.’

‘See, hear and speak no evil?’

‘You could say.’

The priest nodded and listened with interest. Simonsen continued with his story. The recipient of the cardboard box would preferably be the senior shop steward for whatever area was on strike. There were no accounts, for obvious reasons, and no involvement by the banks, and thereby no risk of banknotes being traced. Those involved trusted each other, and had to.

‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, it didn’t take a genius to work out who’d have large sums of money stashed away in the bedroom dresser at the end of the month. Quite literally, as it happens.’

‘I understand.’

‘The shop steward I’d picked out lived on his own. In a fourth-floor flat in Nørrebro.’

Simonsen had stolen a bike from outside the Hovedbanegården, the city’s central station, and now he pedalled off, away from Rita and the telephone box. Two hundred metres along the street he turned in through a gateway and got off, wheeling the bike into the courtyard and parking it in the bicycle rack, confident that this was behaviour that would not awake suspicion. Systematically, he glanced around. The yard was deserted, and in the windows at the back of the premises he detected no signs of activity. With purpose in his stride, and without hurrying, he went up to the door leading to the rear stairway, opened it and stepped inside. He stood for a moment as planned, having imagined nerves would require him to pause here and collect himself. To his own surprise, however, he realised he wasn’t in the slightest bit anxious. Nonetheless, he stuck to his plan and slowly counted to thirty before making his way up the stairs to the fourth floor.

He put his ear to the kitchen doors on both sides of the stairway, first one, then the other, listening and hearing nothing. He took his tools from his little rucksack, though only the lock pick proved necessary, the lock a simple and commonplace older variety that took him less than a minute to open. He stepped into a narrow kitchen. Yesterday’s dirty dishes had been left in the sink. The flat was small, comprising besides the kitchen only a living room, a hall and a single bedroom. As soon as he’d satisfied himself he was on his own, he opened the front door, jammed a matchstick in the lock and closed it again gently. Now he’d have plenty of time to make his getaway if the owner suddenly came back in his Wartburg Convertible and Rita, for whatever reason, failed to phone. Thus, he began systematically to search the place, quickly and with efficiency, taking care not to disturb anything unduly.

The shop steward had hidden the money away in the second drawer of the bedroom dresser, wads of banknotes stashed away in nine long socks at the bottom of the drawer. Simonsen checked the contents of one: used notes in large denominations. It could hardly have been better. He stuffed the haul into his rucksack, closed the drawer and left.

The priest summed up without any air of condemnation:

‘So you stole the money from the drawer?’

‘The lot, almost three hundred thousand kroner, an absolute fortune in those days. It’d be ten times the amount today. And, just as I’d thought, it was never reported. It was all dealt with internally, and it can’t have been much fun for that poor shop steward. That was what worried me most, more than the fact that I’d taken something that didn’t belong to me. On the whole, though, if I’m to tell the truth, what I’d done didn’t really bother me that much. I was too busy trying to get the money transferred so my girlfriend could get it paid to her in the States. It was no easy matter, it took some time.’

‘Well, I can’t say I condone what you did. It was wrong, especially in view of the fact that you were in the police. But then you realised that yourself a long time ago?’

‘Yes, I did. And put it all well and truly to the back of my mind. It’s been there ever since, until now. So many things have happened in my life of late that seem to have brought it bobbing back up to the surface again. Not least this Lucy Davison case. Such a senseless killing… so without meaning… and yet her death has affected so many people for life. It’s as if we could just as well throw a dice and determine our fate that way. If I’d been found out that day back in nineteen seventy-three, my whole life would have been drastically different.’

‘I’m not sure things are quite as meaningless as you make out, though naturally I can’t provide explanations for everything, nowhere near. But when you stole that money, Lucy Davison had already been in the ground more than four years. Perhaps the reason you weren’t found out then was because you were needed to find her again all this time after. Who knows?’

‘That sounds even more frightening.’

‘You think so? I don’t. And I don’t think you need to feel particularly weighed down by what you did back then, either. You’ve led a law-abiding life since, I assume.’

‘Of course.’

‘All I can say is that I’ve heard much worse. It’s not up to me to forgive, but in the big picture your crime is rather trivial.’

‘A scruple, isn’t that what you call it? A minor sin?’

The priest laughed:

‘Indeed, let’s call it that, shall we?’

Simonsen smiled.

‘I needed to tell another person. Not even my girlfriend at the time, Rita, knew for certain what I’d done. But these past months I’ve found it increasingly difficult to keep it inside. I’m glad I’ve told you.’

‘Me, too.’

‘Don’t get me wrong, it’s not because I want us to swap secrets or anything.’

‘The thought hadn’t occurred to me.’

They walked on for a while without speaking, each preparing for the next act they both knew would come. All of a sudden they came to Anfield. Simonsen jabbed a finger towards the ground.

‘I was there yesterday and heard them sing.’

‘Really? I did happen to see on the news this morning that the English army had just won the war.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t war, not at all. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. Not the football – I wouldn’t know about that – but the atmosphere. We stayed behind in our seats for a bit while the crowds were leaving. I just needed to sit there and… take it all in. Eventually we were asked to move along by one of the stewards.’

‘I tend to just skim the results in the paper. It’s quicker that way.’

To his surprise, Simonsen felt offended.

‘It’s not the same.’

‘No, of course not, but they’re football mad in this city and I like to tease them a bit every now and again. The truth is I’ve seen a few matches there myself.’

‘I wish I could sing with them.’

‘It comes with time.’

‘You mean, you know the songs?’

‘A couple. The most important one, certainly. I might let you hear it later on. But it wasn’t football you wanted to talk about, was it?’

‘No, quite. Do you want to know how I discovered the truth? It’s a bit funny, actually.’

‘The truth, indeed. No mean feat. Tell me, by all means.’

It was hard for him to know quite where to start. After his epiphany on his nocturnal wander that night in Valby, the pieces had all simply fallen neatly into place, though the order in which they came to him was the opposite of the actual chronology of events. He told the priest about the woman officer who’d accidentally removed Jørgen Kramer Nielsen’s mobile phone from the scene. He’d contacted her again recently and realised there was an important detail that ought to have puzzled him at the time, but which for some reason had escaped his attention.

‘You closed Kramer Nielsen’s eyes when you found him, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘It could have happened by chance, but we would have expected his eyes to be open, regardless of whether he was killed or just fell. But they weren’t.’

‘I never gave it a thought until now. It seemed the natural thing to do, that’s all.’

‘Cui bono? For whose benefit? That was what set me off, that expression. The answer was so obvious all of a sudden: for my benefit.’

He’d found Lucy, and now finally she’d come home. It was a satisfactory conclusion, and it pleased him more than anyone. Moreover, the priest was contented, too. Simonsen had come to see the man at his side in a whole new light. He had studied the transcripts of his interview with the priest and his bishop again from a fresh vantage point, and been impressed. Not once had the priest told a lie, not once had he compromised his vow of secrecy, but at the same time he had allowed the police to believe exactly what they wanted to believe: that he had been led into revealing that he knew Lucy Davison and that she was dead. Simonsen explained the finer points and concluded with a smile.

‘On the other hand, what would one expect of a man who won his seminary’s annual debating competition twice in a row?’

‘You’ve been doing your homework.’

‘I certainly have.’

‘Perhaps there was a convergence of interests during that interview.’

‘Definitely. We didn’t know that, but you did. Do you know the story about Mefisto from Ekstra Bladet?’

The priest knew it well. Simonsen told him anyway. Erling Olsen, a keenly intelligent scholar, also known as the Owl, was Minister of Housing in Prime Minister Anker Jørgensen’s government in the seventies. At the same time, Olsen was penning highly insightful and scathingly satirical political copy in a national tabloid Ekstra Bladet under the pseudonym of Mefisto. No one knew Mefisto’s true identity, only that it was obvious it had to be someone very high up in the political echelons. Legend had it that the prime minister eventually narrowed the field down and confronted Olsen at a cabinet meeting, asking him straight out if he was behind the articles, to which Olsen supposedly had replied rather indignantly: Why would I do a thing like that? And with that the matter was effectively closed.

‘I never thought for a moment that you would lie to me directly,’ Simonsen went on. ‘So when you said you didn’t move Jørgen Kramer Nielsen’s body, I believed you. Until one night I realised that you’d never actually said that at all. I asked you in your garden if you’d moved the body or altered its position in any way, and you said: Why on earth would I do that? You could see your neighbour was obviously dead and that there was nothing you could do. Which was true, there wasn’t. But while I believed you to have told me you never moved the body, the truth is you never actually said one way or the other. What you said led me to believe what I wished to believe. Our former housing minister would have complimented you.’

‘How astute. It sounds like you know more than I do,’ said the priest, his voice a mutter.

Simonsen laughed.

‘Come now, there’s no need to be modest. I think the time has come for us to tick some boxes, see how much of what we know tallies. Jørgen Kramer Nielsen lay dead on the stairs when you got back from your holiday. He’d fallen and broken his neck, not down the short flight that starts by his own door, but down the longer one that ends at yours. Seeing your upstairs neighbour lying dead like that, you realised the chances of ever finding Lucy Davison and having her remains laid to rest in consecrated ground were now slim indeed. The thought tormented you, as it had tormented Kramer Nielsen, but you were both bound by an oath that couldn’t be broken. You, however, had an idea. You decided to move him up on to the little landing before calling the ambulance, and as you did so Kramer Nielsen’s mobile fell out of his pocket, only you didn’t notice that. By changing the position of the body you hoped the police would realise something didn’t add up and look into the matter in such detail as to discover the secret he’d been keeping all those years. What’s more, you were right, that’s exactly what happened. There’s only one thing I don’t understand, though: how come you didn’t carry him all the way up to his own door, rather than leaving him at the bottom of the second, albeit shorter flight?’

‘How reassuring you don’t know everything.’

‘Now you’re avoiding the issue. In actual fact, you were very, very lucky. If our investigation hadn’t kicked off in such chaotic manner, our technicians would have discovered the truth within days.’

‘You do seem to rely a lot on luck, good and bad.’

‘Let’s say it’s just my way of looking at things. If you prefer, we could call it divine providence.’

‘Divine providence, I like that.’

‘So we agree. As it turned out, we believed the lack of physical evidence from the short flight of stairs was down to time elapsed and the cleaning that had been done in the interim. Later, we found skin cells in the carpet of the long flight, in the exact places we’d expect to find them, clearing you of suspicion of killing him, though I never seriously thought you did.’

They came to a crossing. For the umpteenth time, Simonsen nearly got himself run over, looking left instead of right before stepping out. The priest grabbed his shoulder and held him back.

Simonsen collected himself for a moment, before going on:

‘There’s something that puzzles me. The first time I questioned you, I thought I’d caught you out with regards to your confessing to your bishop. Now I’m uncertain.’

‘You needn’t be. I was completely unprepared for that. I fell right in. I must say, it was a very clever trap you laid for me there.’

‘A coming together.’

The priest smiled.

‘Indeed, a coming together.’

Again they walked in silence, the streets continually changing character: rows of small, terraced houses, as any tourist in a northern English town would expect to see, giving way to imposing edifices of the nineteenth century, unpretentious rows of local shops in whose doorways the proprietors often stood waiting for passing trade, towers of steel and glass striving for the sky. A mix of run-down and pleasant.

Eventually, the priest spoke again:

‘What will happen now?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing? Isn’t that getting off rather lightly?’

It was indeed. According to paragraph 125 of the criminal code, what he had done carried a sentence of up to two years’ imprisonment, or a very considerable fine at minimum. This was the reason Simonsen and Kurt Melsing had gone to such pains.

‘I’m glad you moved him, and officially it doesn’t make much odds whether he fell down one flight or the other. On that, my technical colleague and I are in complete agreement. He’s prepared a report stating that Kramer Nielsen’s fall occurred on the shorter flight of stairs, and the funny thing is his exposition is all still perfectly correct.’

‘How strange.’

Simonsen told him about the FBI’s software.

‘The conclusion, then, is that if the premises hold up, the fall could have taken place quite naturally on the shorter flight, too.’

‘But the premises don’t quite, do they?’

‘A very astute reader with the requisite skills in mathematics and physics might conceivably wonder about a single detail. You’re an educated man, perhaps you know about the empirical physical constant denoted by the letter g?’

‘The gravitational constant, if it’s a capital G. Small g denotes free-fall acceleration, popularly known as gravity. Nine point eight one metres per second per second, if I remember rightly.’

‘Gravity, that’s right. Very good. And that’s just one of dozens of parameters in the software that can be varied. Maybe they think one day we’ll be solving crimes on the moon, who knows? But it turns out that by increasing gravity by only thirty per cent, Jørgen Kramer Nielsen’s fall down the top stairs comes out as natural in relation to the position in which he was discovered, and, well, you know better than I do, climbing those stairs must feel like heavy going sometimes, or am I wrong?’

‘I’ve never thought about it, to be honest, but now you mention it, yes, it does. Hasn’t anyone asked questions yet?’

‘Not yet, and I’m sure it’s not going to happen either. No one can be bothered reading anything other than the conclusion. The actual body of the thing is too complicated, mind-numbingly to be frank, so Jørgen Kramer Nielsen’s death has been well and truly buried in the maths, you could say. Funny, really: all his adult life he carried this dreadful secret around and sought refuge in mathematics to keep his demons at arm’s length, and now the actual circumstances of his death are hidden away in calculus.’

Simonsen held up a pre-emptive hand.

‘I know you can’t answer, and this isn’t an interrogation. It just struck me how ironic life can be. I should mention, though, that there’s one person to whom I do intend to tell the truth at some point, but she can keep a secret. Probably just as well as you.’

They passed by a church and the priest stopped to look up for a moment. There was a wistful note in his voice.

‘I’m fond of mathematics and physics, and rhetoric, too, for that matter, though that’s something else entirely. But there’s one thing I can never understand when it comes to people who subscribe to the natural sciences, and that is, they’re never in doubt about their own infallibility. Particularly when it comes to logic – if something hangs together logically, then it must be true and all other forms of inquiry and ways of seeing must therefore be wrong. It’s a very peculiar form of hubris: if something’s true, it’s logical; if it’s logical, it’s true.’

Simonsen didn’t know quite what to say and so chose to say nothing. The priest asked him a question.

‘You’ve tied a very nice, logical ribbon around your investigation, I must admit. But tell me: considering what you know about me, however little that might be, do you really think that, arriving home from holiday to find a dead body on my stairs, my immediate thought would be to seek to exploit the circumstance and manipulate the police into finding a second body? I know what your logic tells you, but is it what your knowledge of human nature says, too?’

Simonsen continued walking without replying for a while, eventually conceding:

‘No, it isn’t. So what did you do? I know you moved him, that’s beyond doubt.’

‘Yes, I did. But I don’t think you’d understand why.’

‘Try me.’

This time it was the priest’s turn to contemplate before answering.

‘Jørgen’s body lay at the bottom of the lower stairs, as you so rightly say, in the dimmest of light. I closed his eyes, sat with him and said a little prayer. But then, as I was about to go inside to my own flat and call the ambulance, I happened to look up. The most wonderful light was streaming in through the window on the upper landing: yellow, green, red, blue, a rainbow filtered through the stained glass of the panes. It was as if it were crying out to us, and I stood there almost in awe for quite some time. Then I carried him up into the light, as I felt compelled to do. And when I put him down I was filled with a most wondrous sense of peace and joy such as I’d never known before. I knew then that I’d done the right thing.’

Simonsen thought for a moment, before admitting that this was more plausible by a long way.

There was no more to say about it. And yet they continued walking. Like an LP that went on turning with the needle in the run-out groove, the music finished.

‘Road, street, place, avenue, way, drive,’ Simonsen mused after a while. ‘I wouldn’t be able to find my way back if I had a month to try.’

‘You’re forgetting park, lane, grove, hey, croft and close. It’s confusing, I know.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘No idea.’

On Croxteth Lane the priest said:

‘We could come over again when Missing Children get their new premises on Rydal Avenue finished. You’ll be able to see your posters again. I think that would be rather nice.’

Konrad Simonsen thought it was a good idea.

‘Perhaps we could go to a football match. I really must do that again.’

‘That’s what everyone says who’s been to Anfield. I did, too, after my first time.’

‘By the way, do you know when the sun is at its highest in northern Norway?’ Simonsen asked, changing the subject all of a sudden.

‘Midsummer, when the tilt of the earth towards the sun is at its greatest. It’s the same throughout the northern hemisphere.’

They talked about Simonsen’s trip to Hammerfest. As they had done in Valby.

‘Will you say a prayer for Lucy on Midsummer’s Eve?’

‘I will indeed. You can, too.’

‘I don’t know any prayers.’

‘Make one up. Often, they’re the best.’

They found themselves in a park, ambling along crooked paths lined with angular, half-bare trees.

‘You promised you’d sing for me.’

The priest looked at him and nodded. He took a breath, and then began to sing in a loud and confident tenor. Passers-by smiled at them, and the priest repeated the final lines:

Walk on, walk on,

with hope in your heart,

And you’ll never walk alone!

You’ll never walk alone.

Konrad Simonsen joined in. He sang poorly, hitting only an occasional note. But it didn’t matter. Two were better than one. Now they were a choir.