Already on Friday evening the calls had started to pour in to police stations around the country, especially to the police headquarters in Copenhagen. The majority were from people who tried to impress on their listeners all kinds of nonsense about the murder victims. Many were easy to weed out, but not all, so the work of identifying the deceased went on. The exception was Mr. Northwest, who was confirmed as Thor Gran, a fifty-four-year-old architect from ?rhus. Two architecture students had walked into the Lyngby police station with a newsletter, The Architect, from April 1999 with an article about landmark buildings and restoration techniques by Thor Gran. Even a layman could have established a connection between the picture in the newsletter and Arthur Elvang’s facial re-creation. With the identification of Mr. Northwest, all that was missing were the names for Mr. Northeast and Mr. Southeast. Simonsen had gone home convinced that both of these would be established by the time they met the following day. This optimism was perhaps justified since he did not know that the two architecture students had been rejected three times and that only their determination had secured the investigation’s results.
Simonsen was back at work at eleven on Saturday morning, since he had used the morning to address a series of personal matters that he had been putting off because of his workload. Once he arrived at his office, armed with a cup of coffee and a bag of croissants, he sat down at his desk and started the day by calling his daughter. He and Anna Mia were going to the movies that evening and he wanted to find out where and when they should meet before he threw himself into the tasks of the day. His telephone was dead. He tapped on the switch a couple of times without hearing anything, then took his cell phone out of his inner coat pocket. It was turned off because he had received several calls from random people that night who apparently wanted nothing more than to wake him up, and he had forgotten to turn it on again in the morning, which was a mistake. He activated it, waited for a signal, and immediately received a call. A young woman or girl told him, giggling, that she had recognized her brother among the published photographs. He heard shouting and laughter in the background. He ended the call without reply, then immediately received another call. This time it was a man who claimed to have seen one of the victims during a soccer game at Br?ndby Stadion. He turned off his cell phone again and went to Arne Pedersen’s office, where a note on the door directed him to Poul Troulsen.
Troulsen’s office was far and away the nicest at the Homicide Division. During a long career and with a sure eye for quality, he had obtained furnishings that made the office look more like a living room than a workplace. The pièce de résistance was a gigantic flat-screen TV that had originally been purchased as a digital information screen for the lunchroom but that had ended up in his office due to an unfortunate bureaucratic oversight. It was an arrangement pleasing to everyone since no one particularly cared to have his meals interrupted by inconsequential messages from police management. Instead, they now actually had a place to gather whenever there were sporting events of national significance. And a cozy place at that.
When Simonsen walked into the office, Troulsen was lying on his couch watching a cartoon while Arne Pedersen was lounging in an armchair eyeing a betting sheet. Neither one appeared in a hurry to interrupt his activities when the boss arrived.
Simonsen said, “What on earth is going on here?”
Troulsen turned off the TV and said, “Nothing, except I’m amazed at how bad cartoons have gotten since I was a child and it’s a bleeding shame.”
Pedersen put his sheet down and explained, “Half of the people in this country have gotten the misguided idea of calling the police. Our lines have gone down. You can’t call in or out.”
Simonsen was confused. “Why is that?’
“Well, our modern society is vulnerable like that. Half of the population may be an exaggeration, of course, you don’t need more than a couple of thousand and you’ve maxed out our capabilities. And now I’m talking about the whole country and not just here at HS. We’ve just seen a telecommunications expert on the news, which of course will get even more people to call.”
“Are you telling me that lines are down at other police stations?”
“More or less. There is some variation but no one has a good grasp of the situation.”
“What about management? Have they been informed?”
Troulsen sat up on the couch. He commented ironically, “Yes, we’ve been down to the mailbox with a letter.”
Simonsen shot him a disapproving look.
Pedersen said, “The national chief of police is at a conference in London. His second-in-command is at a golden wedding anniversary in Falster.”
“So no one is trying to put a stop to this nonsense?”
“Don’t think so. It’s only in the last half an hour that it’s gotten really bad. Three-quarters of an hour ago the telephones were still working but the wait for incoming calls was absurdly long. We were down at the exchange—”
“The call center,” Troulsen interrupted. “Remember it’s called the call center now. It was the exchange in the olden days, back in the stone ages when the things actually worked.”
Simonsen reprimanded him impatiently: “Stop it, Poul. If you don’t have anything constructive to add to the conversation, you should just go home. Go on, Arne.”
“Sure, but unfortunately there’s not much more to say. Except perhaps the fact that one or more of our colleagues must have added fuel to the fire by posting our private cell phone numbers and direct work lines on the Internet, but you must already have discovered that. You and I are on the list, but Poul, the Countess, and Pauline have unlisted numbers. Do you want to see one of the pages where our numbers are published?”