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.