‘It’s resonance, that’s all. We’ve got a new intern in the secretariat and she’s got one of those squashed-up little tape recorders with earphones… iPods, I believe they’re called. Anyway, when she leans her head back against the wall, her skull and the partition work together like a loudspeaker.’
He sighed with relief and at once felt exhausted. It was the familiar pattern: first fear of dying, then fatigue.
‘Why don’t you ban her from using it?’
‘I have, but it seems her relationship to authority is… how should I put it?… strained. I was thinking…’
But Konrad Simonsen had stopped listening.
The boy with the submachine gun had reached his destination. The school was on Marmorgade, a short street that lay tucked between H. C. Andersens Boulevard and Vester Voldgade, and comprised a three-winged red-brick building of four storeys, dating back to the early 1900s. The playground faced out on to the street, separated from the pavement only by a chain-link fence. The main entrance was at the rear of the building, imposing steps of granite leading up to an oversized pair of double doors that were painted green and seemed oddly out of place in this setting. The boy headed slowly towards them.
Through a window in the north wing his class teacher spotted him. She had already resolved to speak to the boy about his habitual lateness: it had been dire before the summer holiday, and the new school year had kicked off quite as badly. Moreover, she had a stack of handouts for his class, and if she had a word with him now, she thought, she wouldn’t have to go all the way up the stairs to the second floor. Two birds with one stone. She opened the window and called out to him but to her astonishment he failed to react, though he was no more than a few metres away. She sighed. It wasn’t like him at all, but then being him probably wasn’t always that easy, poor lad.
After battling his way up the stairs and along the corridor to his classroom, the boy sat down on a bench outside to get his breath back. The pause lasted longer than he had anticipated, but he was exhausted and racked by nerves, badly needing to collect himself. Not until a few minutes later, when he caught sight of his class teacher coming towards him with her papers under her arm and a determined smile on her face, did he get to his feet and go inside.
None of his classmates seemed to notice him come in, not even when he crossed their line of vision to get to his chair. He heaved for breath, but did not seat himself. Instead, he remained standing beside his desk with his back against the wall. The substitute teacher who stood at the board conjugating irregular verbs in English appeared undisturbed by the boy’s late arrival. He turned his head to look over for a second, casting a brief and disinterested glance in his direction before carrying on as if nothing had happened. The boy studied him for five long seconds and felt the hatred well inside him, delivering courage.
The substitute was a fair-haired, rather foppishly dressed man in his early thirties with an appealing demeanour and a classically handsome profile, popular with boys and girls alike, and an excellent teacher as well. As though by some premonition, he turned his head once more and looked over his shoulder. It was then he saw the weapon, the short, black barrel pointed straight at him. Tunnel vision, pumping adrenalin. He reacted with impressive speed, reaching the door in three seamless, athletic bounds and managing to grab the door handle before the gun spat out its rounds.
Thirty-seven shots in less than half a second.
Later, each would be classified: eleven struck the victim in the back, three in the head, one in the upper arm. The man was dead before he hit the ground. The remaining twenty-two rounds had all gone through the door, most of them at a height of more than two and a half metres above the floor, presumably because the boy was unfamiliar with the firearm and had failed to take account of the upward pull of the barrel during operation. However, three rounds had penetrated the door at a height of around a metre and a half, one of which had struck his class teacher, who at that moment had approached the other side. A bullet had gone through her hand. Another had ripped a shard of wood from the door, this having struck her in the right eye, lodging itself between the orb and her cheek, though causing only superficial damage.
She felt no pain at these injuries, only astonishment. In a reflex action, she immediately reached up to her eye and pulled out the shard; then, after staring in bewilderment at her injured hand, she fainted. She suffered from haemophobia, an irrational fear of blood.
Inside, the students panicked. Most screamed and huddled together as far from the fat boy as possible. One pupil jumped resolutely from an open window at the rear and was more than fortunate not to land on the tarmac of the playground below, but on the roof of a van in the process of unloading deliveries. He got away with a broken wrist and a nasty abrasion on his cheek. One girl crawled inside a cupboard and managed to close the door from inside. There she cowered, curled up like an embryo, as quietly as she could. The rest of the class clumped together in the corner furthest from the blackboard, some lying down or seated on the floor, others clinging to the wall as though it might help if they were to be shot at. Their screams faded and became intermittent sobs. All stared in terror at the killer, frightened eyes following each movement of his weapon. The boy himself flopped down on a chair, stunned and confused. He, too, was crying.
Following his meeting with the Deputy Commissioner, Konrad Simonsen adjourned to his office with the case folder under his arm. On his way, he decided he was all right about starting off slowly and with something that didn’t really matter much, a thought that both perplexed him and put him at his ease.
Just as his boss had said, he found his office had been revamped in his absence, the room next door now having been incoporated into it. Previously it had been a storeroom, with mostly pens and stationery at one end and discarded computer equipment at the other. Now it was a kind of informal anteroom, newly painted and decorated, with wall-to-wall carpeting and a leather sofa that had seen better days. It was equipped with a fridge, a coffee maker and a 50-inch TV he assumed must have been inherited from Poul Troulsen, a former close colleague, now retired. On a low, rectangular table in front of the sofa, coffee and bread rolls had been set out, as well as a splendid vase of flowers, and up against the walls stood a handful of colleagues waiting for him, among them the Countess, who besides being one of his closest co-workers also happened to be his life-partner. They lived together in her house in Søllerød. It had been more than a year now since he’d moved in with her, though he still kept on his flat in Valby and slept in a separate bedroom in her house, ostensibly because of his heart condition. She greeted him with a kiss, a gesture that was seldom made during working hours. He looked around him and said:
‘Well, you certainly kept this a secret.’
‘Yes, it was meant to be a surprise. Arne’s on his way, too, he just had to deal with a phone call.’
Simonsen greeted those who had come and noticed Pauline Berg, a woman in her late twenties, another of his closest colleagues. At least, she had been. This was the first time he had seen her in almost a year. The previous September she had been abducted while investigating a case on which Homicide had been working. A seriously disturbed individual had held her hostage together with another young woman in a bunker in the Hareskoven woods. The other woman had been slaughtered in front of Pauline Berg’s eyes and Pauline herself left to rot in captivity, before being rescued at the last minute. Since then, he had received sporadic bulletins as to how she was getting on: she had sold her house in Reerslev and bought a flat on the sixth floor of a high-rise in Rødovre, where she lived alone. For long periods following her stay in hospital she had been too frightened to go out, and any number of things, from cats to cellars, could send her spinning into anxiety. Moreover, she suffered from severe changes of mood and found it difficult to deal with people she didn’t know, especially men, unless she sought their company of her own accord. She must have started work again while he’d been ill. As soon as he saw her, he felt guilty. As her immediate superior he ought to have monitored her progress more diligently. But he was no good at that kind of thing, and more recently he’d had his own problems.