The Vanished

CHAPTER 2

The discovery of the photographs in the loft was naturally of interest to Konrad Simonsen in his role as head of investigation on a case he too had gradually begun to think of as the postman case. But at the same time, the images of the girl had a positive personal effect on Simonsen in as much as she ousted another, that since his operation had tormented him more than he had been willing to acknowledge.

His daughter Anna Mia and the Countess had been with him as he stared at the screen and watched while the surgeon, whose name was Shears, widened Simonsen’s obstructed coronary arteries. It was a film he did not wish to see repeated: an invasive body poking about inside his heart, steered by two foreign hands, the ultimate surrender of control. He sincerely hoped his next heart attack would be swift and without warning: bang, and then dead. It was a scenario much preferable to the intravascular meddlings of Dr Shears.

Some days later, the same physician again took Simonsen’s life in his well-manicured hands, albeit verbally, taking his time to turn over every stone of his misfortune, eagerly supplemented by cues from the Countess and Anna Mia. Most of it was lost on Simonsen, but the long, foreboding words stuck: damage to the rear wall, balloon catheter, collapse of the coronary arteries, restricted blood circulation, chronic obstructive lung disease, diabetes diagnosis, drug dosage, period of convalescence. He had hoped for some remote Latin terminology, that unfortunately was unforthcoming. Anna Mia wrote down the list of horrors, while the Countess discussed them with the doctor, nodding earnestly when he spoke, then bombarding him with new questions. Simonsen himself said nothing. He sat in a stupid wheelchair, in a dressing gown. Who could be rational in a dressing gown? Besides, he needed time for it all to sink in. If he even had more time.

As a farewell token he was presented with a highly illustrative colour photograph of his formerly fatally decrepit arteries, readily interpreted by his physician, whose biro pointed out to him what was living tissue and what was dead. The image appeared to show a poorly woven rag mat in shades of red and black, marred by numerous little blue flaws, treacherous calcium crystals patiently accumulating, until one day they were ready to shut down his life.

Ever since, the rag-mat image had regularly returned to haunt him and plunge him into the darkest of moods. It was particularly bad before sleep and he would have to contain his urge to go downstairs and speak to the Countess about it. He kept quiet – pathetic was the last thing he wanted to be, and what good did talk ever do? Now the problem had solved itself all of a sudden: he no longer slept with the rag mat foremost in his mind, but with the image of the girl in the postman’s shrine of mirrors, wondering who she might be, and what she wanted him for. It was a definite improvement.

The investigation was in a state of limbo.

Jørgen Kramer Nielsen paying young girls to walk about his flat naked and his turning his loft into some weird hall of mirrors were sufficient grounds for Simonsen to put off handing in his routine report to the Deputy Commissioner. But what they had discovered was far from enough to justify a request for resources to conduct a full-scale investigation, one that included anyone besides Simonsen himself and Pauline Berg. There was still nothing to suggest that the postman’s death was the result of a crime. Simonsen would have to wait for the forensics report and Kurt Melsing’s take on the mobile photos showing the position of the body on the stairs before he reached a conclusion on that, and neither of them was even remotely on the horizon. The case was hardly a priority, which for Konrad Simonsen was an unfamiliar state of affairs he kept telling himself was a good thing. Nonetheless he found himself annoyed by it. He tried to give things a nudge in the right direction one day in Arne Pedersen’s office, where they chatted for a few minutes about nothing very much until Simonsen casually said:

‘By the way, do you think you could give Melsing a ring and get him to have a look at my postman? I’m stuck before I get an answer out of him.’

Arne Pedersen laughed in his face and refused point blank.

‘Would you, in my position?’

Simonsen had gone away again, feeling restless and in a bit of a sulk. And, as if to make matters worse, he had bumped into the Countess in the corridor. He grumbled about it, without really intending to, and she recommended he take a couple of days’ holiday, before hurrying off again.

Today’s workload consisted of interviewing Hans Ulrik Gormsen, which took all of fifteen minutes and turned up less than zero, Gormsen’s mobile having died a watery death in his toilet bowl since he’d used it to photograph the dead postman. Forensics would have to make do with the printouts they already had. Apart from that, Gormsen’s statement matched the others Simonsen had taken in the case. But the man was unbearably annoying, with a superior, know-it-all attitude, so once it became clear he had nothing to add to the investigation, Simonsen thanked him half-heartedly and hoped never to see him again.

Afterwards, he called Pauline. He’d got her compiling a profile of Jørgen Kramer Nielsen and had left her to get on with it. She was far from done but obviously glad he’d called. Which was a relief, since he’d feared the opposite. He glanced at his wrist watch and noted that he wasn’t due to be picked up for another two hours.

On the Saturday Simonsen went for his daily walk, this time with his daughter. Anna Mia was in buoyant mood. Both of them wore tracksuits and trainers. The September rain fell, warm and dusty, while the neighbourhood seemed to have gone into hibernation. A battered Chevrolet with four youngsters in it passed them slowly, breaking the listless silence with a series of whoops and toots on the horn. Anna Mia waved at them cheerfully and they returned the gesture before speeding up, the screech of tyres ruffling the listless afternoon.

‘I like exercising with you. I’ve been looking forward to this,’ said Simonsen’s daughter.

Her high spirits were infectious: Simonsen smiled. He, too, had started to grow fond of his walks, if only because it was the one time of day he didn’t miss smoking. Even when he slept he wanted a cigarette. At least, that’s how it felt.

‘It’s nothing for you… you’re young, fit and sensible.’

‘Every little helps. Have you noticed how it gets easier?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘When you first started, you couldn’t walk and talk at the same time. You’re not snorting like a pig any more, either.’

She was right. He hadn’t thought about it like that.

‘Pigs don’t snort. Horses snort, pigs grunt.’

‘And heads of Homicide Departments.’

‘Not this one.’

‘Wait till we start jogging! It’ll be great, I promise. Anyway, tell me how things are getting on at work. Are you glad to be back? Has the wicked witch given you a decent case to be getting on with?’

As a matter of routine he reminded her to speak respectfully of the Deputy Commissioner, then without enthusiasm told her about his postman case.

‘A killing, wow! I thought she was going to ease you in gently. Has it been in the papers?’

‘It happened more than six months ago, and he probably wasn’t killed at all. That’s what I’ve got to find out, if I can.’

‘So now you’re gathering evidence to have him dug up?’

‘That’s not quite how it works. Anyway, he was cremated.’

‘It sounds like you’ve quite a job on your hands then. How are you going about it?’

‘We’re just trying to gain an overall picture at the moment.’

‘Dad, who’s Rita?’

Characteristically, she’d changed the subject quite without warning. Her mother had had the same habit, which he’d found highly annoying back then, but with Anna Mia it didn’t bother him.

‘Why do you ask, kid?’

‘Can’t you stop calling me that? If you must call me something, try my name.’

She was right. It was childish, and Anna Mia was no longer a child but in fact in her third year at police college, having previously studied for a legal degree at university, though she had not completed it. Now she was part of a trial scheme where candidates received time and support to study law alongside completing their police training. And besides that, she had a sensible approach to life. Too sensible, he sometimes thought.

‘Oh, I am sorry,’ he said. ‘And why do you ask, little diddums?’

She ignored his teasing.

‘Nathalie says you called her Rita when you woke up after the op.’

Anna Mia always called the Countess by her proper name. She was the only one he knew who did. He tried to evade the question with a non-committal grunt.

‘I’m sure Nathalie’s going to ask you herself at some point.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’

A bit later his daughter had another go:

‘How come you never talk about yourself? I mean, really talk about yourself. Your feelings.’

‘I feel like having a cigarette, and besides that I feel a loathing towards everything low-fat, free-range or organic.’

‘Thanks for nothing! You’re incorrigible.’

‘Rubbish. You don’t tell me about your sweethearts.’

He could have bitten his tongue off, but the damage was done. Exercise and thinking at the same time were clearly incompatible. Anna Mia responded like a spring suddenly released:

‘You mean, you’ve got two on the go? Blimey, I never saw that coming.’

‘Come off it, I’m not even sure I’ve got one, never mind two. Forty years ago I knew someone called Rita, and that’s all there is to it. I can’t remember anything other than that, and it doesn’t mean a thing.’

It was lies, all of it. He had thought about her every single day since he woke up from the operation, as if a door had suddenly opened in his heart after being closed for an eternity. To begin with, he’d thought she would leave him again, but it was almost the opposite. And after seeing the girl in the postman’s loft, thoughts of Rita had become even more prominent in his mind, as if the two women somehow fed off each other. Her face seemed newly clear in his memory: a smatter of freckles; her lively eyes and turned-up nose; her teeth, ever so slightly wonky. If he was lucky, he and Rita would again come together in his dreams.

His answer seemed momentarily to satisfy Anna Mia, only then she added matter-of-factly:

‘If you can remember her name, you can remember more. She must have made quite an impression for you to wake up pining for her forty years on.’

He parried further questions by pleading a feeble memory, and eventually his daughter gave up in annoyance. He defended himself using the same argument as before:

‘You don’t talk about your sweethearts.’

They walked on for a while without speaking, until suddenly she said:

‘I met this student teacher, Kim, in the winter holiday. Tall, great figure, nice little bum, very musical movements. We went skiing together at…’

He put his hands to his ears.

‘I don’t want to know about him.’

She raised her voice:

‘Who said it was a him?’

‘You could find yourself a shop dummy for all I care, I still don’t want to know.’

His daily exercise was over, and Anna Mia turned the conversation back to work.

‘That case of yours sounds boring. But what about the people in Homicide, were they glad to see you back?’

‘I’m sorry if my work doesn’t entertain you. When I meet this postman in the afterlife, I’ll tell him his death was boring.’

‘You shouldn’t joke about things like that, Dad.’

Anna Mia halted, as did he, regretfully.

‘It makes me really sad to think about someone dying like that.’

‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I was just defending myself, that’s all. It’s hard sometimes. It feels like there was no transition. One minute I was lying there, struggling to come round. The next I’m here, needing all sorts of help. Everything’s new and different now… I don’t know how to explain it… I think I’d been expecting a break, only I never got one.’

‘You must be glad of the help you’re getting from your colleagues?’

‘I am, yes. I’d never have got through it without them. It chokes me up, thinking about it sometimes. The only thing is, I can’t show it. I never learned how.’

‘I think you’re getting there.’

‘Easy enough for you to say. When I was your age I never needed help from anyone, ever.’

‘Now you’re mixing things up. You just need someone to love, that’s all.’

‘I’ve got someone to love.’

‘Two, then.’

They held hands up the garden path of the Countess’s mansion. The path was narrow, but stepping on the grass was forbidden. Not that he knew why, it just was. Simonsen and Anna Mia jostled for position like children playing. Eventually, she nipped in front, one step ahead, but without letting go of his hand.

On Tuesday Pauline briefed him on what she had dug up on Jørgen Kramer Nielsen. It wasn’t much, and most probably a waste of time and effort. Simonsen found it hard to concentrate on her presentation, which wasn’t particularly well structured. She went up to the whiteboard and wrote two words in her handwriting, fussy and over-particular: Mathematics and Photography. She drew an oval around each, then said:

‘I’m not going out to that storage facility again. It’s scary.’

‘You don’t have to, then.’

She stood for a moment, staring into space. Simonsen wondered if he should say something, tell her he understood her reaction, comfort her or something. But he didn’t need to: she picked up the thread herself.

Most of the books Jørgen Kramer Nielsen had left were about maths or related subjects. His many exercise books were filled with mathematical puzzles he’d solved, meticulously recorded in the old-fashioned way using a fountain pen and blotting paper. Mostly it was differential equations, probability calculus and analytic integrals. The exercise books were from the bookshop at the Butikstorv on Hvidovrevej, where the owner remembered him. The look of them changed from time to time for sales purposes, bringing the design up to date, and while the owner was reluctant to commit himself he reckoned the first of them dated back as far as the 1970s, if not before. He’d suggested Pauline get in touch with the manufacturer.

Besides the Hvidovre bookshop, she had been to the university and had shown the exercise books to a maths lecturer, who’d assessed Kramer Nielsen’s work to be at about the same level as a capable undergraduate’s. Clearly, he had felt no intellectual drive to expand his mathematical horizons, and over a span of almost forty years his abilities remained the same. His calculations were therefore best seen as a past-time, the equivalent of doing crosswords or solving jigsaw puzzles.

She ticked the Mathematics oval on the whiteboard. That was dealt with. Simonsen stifled a yawn, and she went on:

‘Oh, I nearly forgot. Those Netto receipts with the figure on the back that I couldn’t get a handle on. Remember them?’

‘Of course I do, I’m not senile.’

She laughed, which felt like a release.

‘So you say! Anyway, the figure turns out to be the length of the receipt in centimetres. Once a year he did a regression analysis of the total price of goods bought as on the receipts, and…’

She stopped, noticing the expression on Simonsen’s face.

‘It’s not that interesting, is it?’

‘No.’

She skipped it and moved on to her next point. The postman developed his own photos. He used to have a darkroom; she’d spoken to the fitter who’d installed it for him.

‘It was nine years ago, when he moved up on to the first floor. Anyway, he was a regular customer at the photo shop on Hvidovrevej, just next door to the bookshop as it happens. The owner calls himself Photo-Mate.’

She told him how Photo-Mate and the postman used to talk regularly about photography and developing. She’d also drawn up a list of prices and dates relating to photo equipment Kramer Nielsen had purchased there in recent years. And then she ticked Photography, commenting half as a question, half as a statement of fact:

‘That wasn’t very good, I know.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘It’s difficult when you’re on your own.’

He agreed with her. Anyway, it was partly his fault, he ought to have given her a clear brief to work to. He just hadn’t thought it necessary, though he didn’t say as much. He looked at the whiteboard to see if he could squeeze any relevant information out of her uninspiring efforts. It wasn’t easy. He asked her about the photography angle in respect to the girl and the landscapes in the loft, but Pauline it seemed hadn’t any answers. Instead, he turned rather half-heartedly to her second point.

‘Do you know when he graduated from upper secondary school?’

‘No. Probably some time in the late sixties, I’d imagine.’

‘What was his final mark in Maths? Any idea?’

‘I’m afraid not. I didn’t come across his exam certificate. I reckon he burned it.’

‘Burned it? What on earth makes you think he’d do that?’

‘We saw a film once in Social Studies… when I was in upper secondary, that is, and we were studying the sixties. There was one year when all the new graduates from the gymnasium schools burned their exam certificates on Kongens Nytorv in protest against something or other – the school system, Vietnam, or maybe to express their solidarity with the workers – what do I know? I’ve no idea what got into them. They were all stoned, I suppose. And they wouldn’t wear the traditional student caps either.’

To his own surprise, Konrad Simonsen felt a twinge of annoyance at her negative views. What did she know about the sixties? She hadn’t even been born then.

‘See if you can find his exam certificate. Check out the Ministry of Education, or the National Archive. And what school did he go to? That shouldn’t be too difficult to discover. I’d like a copy of his will, too.’

She jotted it all down, before asking:

‘Is this just to give me something to do?’

‘No, I’ve got this inkling…’

He let the words hang promisingly in the air, but in fact they weren’t true. He had no inkling at all, and it was just to give her something to do, though strictly speaking that wasn’t his responsibility. Nevertheless, Pauline refrained from further comment and instead asked if she could drive him home, much to his astonishment.

He accepted.

An hour later, as they went down to the car, she complained to him:

‘I’d really like to have my own case. Like you, like everyone else.’

He made do with a nod and a grunt, though he could have said a whole lot more on the matter. Such as, the Homicide Department’s cases were not handed out to please its employees, or that she had just displayed a complete lack of overview, which didn’t exactly put her first in line to lead an investigation. Instead, he asked casually:

‘How about a little detour and then a walk? There’s something I want to see.’

She hesitated:

‘It sounds good, only I’m not sure…’

‘Roll on the day I can drive myself again.’

‘Yeah, I understand that, it’s just…’

Pauline stalled, willing to go along with his request as a friend, but clearly afraid of what the official consequences might be.

‘You’re not exactly following orders that much anyway at the moment, or so I’ve heard.’

‘This is different.’

‘Are you scared I’ll drop dead?’

‘Yes.’

He couldn’t fault her honesty, at least.

‘Listen, Pauline, it’s not going to happen. Look at me. I haven’t felt better in years.’

They both knew he was exaggerating.

‘As long as it’s no more than fifteen minutes then… and you’re not to tell anyone. Not even the Countess. Especially not the Countess.’

‘Scout’s honour.’

Pauline followed his directions. They were lucky and found a parking spot. As they crossed Gothersgade she took him by the arm and didn’t let go until they reached the other side. He let it pass without comment. They chatted as they walked along by the wrought-iron railings of the Kongens Have park.

‘That’s Rosenborg Castle, isn’t it?’

She pointed back over her shoulder with her free hand, as though she could have meant just about any other structure.

‘It is indeed.’

Then suddenly she said:

‘You know I get panic attacks, don’t you?’

‘Yes. I don’t imagine they’re much fun, either.’

‘No one can imagine anything who hasn’t been through it themselves. It’s terrible, but I’ve got these pills I always carry around with me. Truxal, 30 milligrams. When I take one of them I can sleep standing up after twenty minutes. The thing is, if I haven’t got them on me I start panicking wondering if I’m going to panic, so I have to keep making sure about fifty times a day that I’ve got them on me. Literally.’

He guessed what she was angling for.

‘And you want me to carry one of your pills around with me, just in case you need one when you’re with me?’

‘Would you?’

‘Of course. I’ll put one in my wallet, I’ve always got that on me.’

She handed him a little pellet of tinfoil.

‘Can we just check before you put it away?’

He unfolded it carefully while she watched. The pill was black and it was there.

They carried on without talking for a bit, both finding it difficult to know where to start. Then Pauline asked:

‘Where are we going anyway?’

They had just turned left down Kronprinsessegade and still had Kongens Have on their left-hand side.

‘Nowhere, we’re here now. Would you be kind enough to leave me on my own for a couple of minutes?’

Mystified, but asking no questions, she let go of his arm and Simonsen stepped up to the solid wrought-iron gate leading into the park. He gripped a bar of it gently in each hand and allowed his mind to drift.

Here it was that Rita had played guitar and sung for him one summer evening when it had seemed like they were the only two people in the entire city. She’d brought sandwiches and a rug, and he’d bought four bottles of beer. Her voice was enchanting, even if she couldn’t play the guitar, and he’d been utterly besotted, on that evening especially. Her songs were always simple, melodious and in English:

Stop complaining, said the farmer,

who told you a calf to be?

Why don’t you have wings to fly with,

Like the swallow so proud and free?

He tried to hum along, and she sang softly, so that he, too, might be heard. Afterwards, he cautiously asked what ‘complaining’ meant. She translated, but her overbearing smile hurt. She would soon graduate from the gymnasium, like all her friends, if they hadn’t already begun to study at the university. They were better educated than he, all of them could look forward to greater opportunities in life, so why didn’t they just stick in and study? It was beyond him.

And here it was that he and Rita had spoken for the last time too. He hadn’t seen her since. They had kissed through the railings. He was in uniform and people stared: a policeman and a hippy kissing in public, far from done in those days. Her former friends sat on the other side, a little group of them, jeering and whistling. They were stoned, and she was too, he supposed, although she no longer had much to do with them. She had chosen another path, a political one, and had come to say goodbye to them. They had sat themselves down on the lawns only a few metres from the sign saying Keep Off the Grass, and there they had openly passed around their pipe. It was hopeless…

He tore himself away from his thoughts and went back to Pauline Berg, who again took him by the arm. He felt he should explain.

‘It’s a dream I’ve been having of late, something from the old days. It may sound odd, but it means something to me.’

‘I don’t think it’s odd. Not in the slightest.’

‘Thanks. It’s nice to hear I’m normal.’

‘Sometimes I dream in cartoons, or in black and white.’

‘You should see a therapist.’

‘I’ve got two, that should be enough.’

She gave him a shove with her hip. They laughed, and above them the sky was as cloudless and quite as tritely blue as it was meant to be on a late-summer afternoon in Kongens Have.

Two days later, the Centre of Forensic Services in Vanløse finally got round to Konrad Simonsen’s case.

The abrasion on Jørgen Kramer Nielsen’s hand was the primary topic when Simonsen eventually met Kurt Melsing in his office. The room itself was rather ordinary and could just as easily have belonged to Simonsen, but for the fact that the glass wall facing the centre’s machine room, as it were, revealed what looked more like the kind of scene one might expect in a chemical laboratory than a venerable department of the National Police. Modern forensics was high-tech and demanded highly specialised knowledge and constant training. It was a standing joke among police officers that fingerprint experts were now called dactyloscopists, and how hard was that to get your tongue around? Despite the self-aggrandising new job titles, however, the help forensic science gave to police investigation could not be denied. It had increased tenfold over the last decade.

Without any superfluous chatter Kurt Melsing placed his guest in front of an oversized computer screen and hit the keys. Melsing was famously reliable in terms of the conclusions his department reached in any investigation, and quite as infamous for his total lack of communication skills. He began the briefing now by methodically displaying each of the photographs from Hans Ulrik Gormsen’s mobile in turn, and for each image that appeared on the screen he stated a number. Like a caller in a bingo hall, only more systematic. At regular intervals he gazed fixedly in the direction of the glass wall. When at last he was done, having spent ten minutes telling Simonsen what he could have said in ten seconds, i.e. the unsurprising information that the hard-copy photos had now been digitalised, Melsing revealed the reason for his restlessness.

‘I’ve got someone coming who’ll help put you in the picture.’

Simonsen nodded and said nothing.

‘I’m glad you’re not dead,’ Melsing added.

They both stared through the glass and waited.

At home in Søllerød later on, Simonsen mentioned Kurt Melsing’s taciturn ways to the Countess. They were lying on the lawn, she with her head resting on his arm. It had gone numb, but he ignored the discomfort and told her about the interminable wait in Melsing’s office.

‘We just sat there, mute, until help arrived. It was barely five minutes, but it felt like an eternity.’

‘Yes, he can be rather trying.’

‘I like him, but he’s a hard man to get along with. How he can head up a department of several hundred staff is beyond me. I mean, those forensics people are incisive and efficient while he… he can hardly utter his own name.’

‘Now you’re exaggerating.’

‘What are you smiling about?’

‘I can’t say, you don’t want us to talk about it yet.’

‘Did Kurt come and see me when I was ill?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. You can’t remember a thing, can you?’

‘I remember going to work in the morning, and then I remember waking up in the hospital four days later. The rest is a black hole.’

‘Most of the time you were asleep. Do you want me to tell you about it, or do you want to wait?’

‘Maybe it’s time.’

‘We were at Poul Troulsen’s leaving reception and you were standing holding a glass of wine and a sandwich. First you complained about pains in your chest and then, shortly afterwards, in your back. Then all of a sudden you started gasping for air, dropped your glass and sank to your knees. Later, the doctor said you’d had a massive myocardial infarction… or heart attack to the rest of us. You certainly created havoc at the reception, and I panicked, I’m afraid. Started to cry. Malte Borup too. Poul Troulsen even loosened his tie, and Arne Pedersen the same. You had everyone running around like hens. Everyone except Kurt Melsing. He upturned my handbag and found my mobile, then he climbed on to a table and shouted for everyone to shut up, in a booming voice that must have echoed all the way through HS. Then he called the emergency services, ordered an ambulance with coronary-care facilities and identified your symptoms as precisely as any doctor. In the meantime a Samaritan arrived and administered first aid.’

HS for Head Square, the Homicide Department’s internal slang for Police HQ, so she was exaggerating, of course. The point she was making was obvious enough, though.

‘Are you saying Kurt Melsing saved my life?’

‘We’ll never know for certain, but as soon as they got you in the ambulance they filled you full of anti-coagulants and something for the shock. It stabilised your condition.’

‘And that was all down to Kurt Melsing?’

‘Whose taciturnity would seem not to be a permanent affliction, which is my point here. He’s even been eloquent in a number of other situations I can recall, though none quite as dramatic.’

Simonsen removed his arm and sat up, the Countess bumping her head on the ground as a result.

‘Ouch, you could have warned me!’

‘Sorry. I just feel embarrassed, that’s all. I haven’t even thanked him. He must think I’m the most ungrateful man in the world.’

‘No, he doesn’t. He knows full well you can’t remember anything and that you’ve been wanting to wait a while before being put in the picture about what happened.’

‘Well, that’s something anyway. How does he know all that?’

Simonsen lay down again.

‘He phones regularly, to ask how you’re getting on.’

‘You never told me that.’

‘You can’t be put in the picture and left out at the same time! Where’s your arm? And how did the meeting with him go, anyway? Did he give you anything significant?’

‘He did, as it happens. And there’s more to come, apparently.’

Once Melsing’s spokesperson finally arrived, things got going. Melsing ran the computer and his young staff member did the vocals. Simonsen listened. They were a good double act.

‘We’ve focused a lot on the abrasion on the back of the victim’s right hand.’

Melsing clicked up an enlarged image on the screen.

‘It was a good observation from your side, though at first we weren’t really sure if it was going to be useful to us. We were wrong, though. As you know, mobile images are pretty limited in terms of quality, these ones especially so, having been scanned from printouts. Basically, that means we can’t really zoom in on the hand in any way that’s going to be profitable to us.’

‘I’m with you. But information isn’t created by enlargement, only made clearer, if it’s there.’

‘Exactly. But we’ve done something else instead that’s almost as good. Using the matchbox as a reference, we can rotate and transpose objects in all three directions, then by a process called affine…’

Melsing interrupted gently.

‘All the hands mapped together.’

He displayed the result.

Simonsen was impressed.

‘Blimey.’

The mark on Jørgen Kramer Nielsen’s hand was as clear as if it had been photographed from five centimetres away. Next to it, a close-up of the stair carpet had been inserted at a slightly distorted angle: smooth-faced sisal hemp with an easily recognisable granulated pattern. The weave of the carpet and the mark on the hand matched up, and Melsing’s spokesman condensed the important points.

‘This is irrefutable proof that the deceased had a fall down the stairs. Moreover, we’re certain most of his body weight went down on that hand when he scraped it, otherwise it wouldn’t have been as pronounced.’

Melsing interrupted again.

‘It’s not all good, though.’

His man elaborated:

‘Unfortunately, we don’t much care for the position of the body at the foot of the stairs. Or, more exactly, in our experience it sets off a lot of warning bells…’

This time it was Simonsen who cut him off.

‘That’s not very exact.’

Melsing smiled wryly, but his man wasn’t thrown.

‘No, of course not. What I mean is, experience has us wondering how Kramer Nielsen’s body could end up in the position in which it was found, following a fall of not quite two running metres down a staircase with an approximate gradient of thirty degrees. Especially when he breaks his neck at the same time on his way down and manages to get his right arm under him and scrape the back of his hand against one of the steps. And in the direction of the knuckles rather than the other way round. If we knew what step he scraped himself on things would be a lot easier, but we haven’t been able to work that out, seeing as the skin cells he must have left behind are all gone. Besides that, you’ve got to bear in mind that the most natural reaction of any living person in a fall is to put their hands out flat in front of them, to cushion the impact.’

‘So Jørgen Kramer Nielsen could already have been dead when he hit the stairs?’

‘Perhaps. But note that we’re basing this on our experience, and that’s not wholly scientific. Falling humans can react in all sorts of different ways, and this might be one of the more extreme examples we just haven’t seen before and for that reason are unable to recognise.’

‘In other words, you can’t come to any solid conclusion?’

Both men smiled broadly. Kurt Melsing was the one to answer:

‘Well, we might.’

‘Go on.’

‘Your intern’s helping us. And you, too, you could say.’

‘That needs explaining.’

Kurt Melsing clicked open an app and typed in some words before jabbing a finger towards the glass wall. Simonsen turned his head, and to his surprise saw Malte Borup stand up at the far end of the room and come towards them. Malte Borup was the Homicide Department’s intern. He was supposed to be on holiday at the moment, but apparently had chosen to spend it here.

Malte came in, and Melsing’s man addressed him.

‘If you’d like to open the programme and prepare to demonstrate, I’ll explain what it is you’re working on.’

He turned to Konrad Simonsen and began talking before the young intern had a chance to respond.

‘A couple of months ago we purchased some new software from the FBI. It’s called a Human Object Movement Simulator, a bit of a tongue-twister, but a highly sophisticated and complex tool that can simulate human reactions to various stimuli in an astonishingly precise manner. It’s the result of years of development work involving various branches of science, but first and foremost classical physics and physiology, and that’s exactly what we need in this situation.’

He paused, presumably to breathe in, and Konrad Simonsen took advantage of the lull.

‘But?’

‘Correct, there is a but, and it’s the time factor. The manual that comes with it runs to no less than eleven volumes, and we simply haven’t had the time or resources yet to immerse ourselves in it. I’m off to Washington to receive instruction in October, but that’s not much good to us at the moment in September. But then Malte offered to help, and I must say he’s come a long way in a very short time indeed.’

‘He’s a good lad.’

‘He certainly is. Now let’s see how far he’s got.’

Malte Borup had started up the software. A graphic depicting the staircase of Jørgen Kramer Nielsen’s house appeared on the screen. Borup clicked the mouse and a dummy-like figure materialised at the top of the stairs. Melsing’s man went on:

‘It might not look like much, but the room and the dummy are correctly dimensioned, which has taken a lot of time to set up. The software can now allow the man to fall from any conceivable position, with or without human reactions underway. Moreover, we can simulate different kinds of external resistance the body might encounter before and during the fall. Make him fall forwards down the stairs, Malte.’

Malte Borup was transfixed.

‘Er, I haven’t got through all the manuals yet.’

‘Never mind, all we want is the general impression.’

He clicked again, hesitantly this time. The dummy jumped into the air and smashed its head against the ceiling like a fly on speed.

‘Like I said, I haven’t got through all the manuals yet.’

Melsing wrapped things up:

‘Later, Simon. Come back later, we’ll give you a call.’

Later was a lot sooner than Simonsen had feared. Someone must have been putting in overtime. At any rate, three days later he was back at the Centre of Forensic Services and in his own car, the doctors finally having allowed him to drive again. Besides that, there was another little triumph that for the time being he was keeping to himself: he had run. Twenty metres, thirty perhaps, that same morning, between two cracked flagstones meticulously selected to be his starting and finishing lines, a brief and rather seamless change of pace during his walk. Slow and poorly co-ordinated, and yet unmistakably running. It had felt absolutely marvellous.

It was the forensic technician from the previous meeting who received him. Neither Malte Borup nor Kurt Melsing seemed to be around. Simonsen had been hoping for a clear-cut conclusion, which indeed was forthcoming, though not quite the way he had envisaged.

Melsing’s man laid it out for him.

‘We’ve tried endless variations, but the only thing we can make fit is this.’

He started up the software. The dummy’s point of departure was still the top of the stairs, only this time it wasn’t alone. Another dummy grabbed it from behind, crooking its arm around the first one’s neck and breaking it with a single twist. The effect was amazingly lifelike. The dead figure was then shoved backwards down the stairs, falling limply like a sack of potatoes. On its way down it scraped its hand in a brief slow-motion sequence before landing seven stairs down in the position familiar to Simonsen from Hans Ulrik Gormsen’s photos.

They watched the animation three times before Simonsen rather solemnly asked:

‘Are you absolutely certain about this?’

‘Ninety-nine per cent.’

‘Why not a hundred?’

‘In the version you’ve just seen, the victim receives a pretty hard shove down the stairs. What we don’t understand is why his assailant didn’t just let go if Kramer Nielsen was dead. But it doesn’t matter how we do this, the victim has to be lifeless, has to have had his neck broken first and has to fall backwards for us to get him to land in the position in the photos. As well as, like I said, to be given a good shove after the neck has been broken. Unfortunately, all these things can only come together if…’

He allowed his words to hang in the air, and Konrad Simonsen completed the sentence:

‘… if Jørgen Kramer Nielsen was murdered, outside his own door.’