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.’