“Okay, but I don’t remember anything about that. Around that time, he was here and there and everywhere, manning different posts in the plant.”
“But if Rose and Arne Knudsen were normally up in the office you just showed us where the young woman was sitting, why were they down here when it happened?”
“Oh, you must have misunderstood. That part of the hall with the new feeder operator office where Micha is sitting hadn’t been built yet. Back then, there was only this.” He turned around toward a wooden building behind them. “They sat up there in the office. And once in a while they came down to the piles of slabs here and marked the ones next in line for the pusher furnace.”
Carl looked around. “What do you think, Assad? Does anything jump out at you?”
He looked down at the police report. “All it says is that the magnet failed and that Arne Knudsen broke the safety regulations by standing under a slab that was being hoisted by a crane. No one was held responsible for the incident, which was determined to be an accident, even though it was incredibly seldom that the power failed. Arne Knudsen was deemed to be solely responsible and paid the ultimate price for not heeding the safety regulations.”
“So Rose was in the office when it happened?”
“No. Some people came running over from the front area when they heard his screams, and they found Rose right next to him as he drew his last breath. She was standing in total shock with her arms down by her sides, unable to utter a sound and her eyes staring in horror.”
“You weren’t here then?”
“No,” answered Andresen. “It wasn’t my shift.”
“I was working down at the dock, which is a good bit away from here,” said Polle.
“Can you tell us in your capacity as someone who worked with the power supply, what caused the power cut, Leo?”
“We have computer systems that ought to be able to establish exactly that, but they couldn’t in this case. My personal opinion is that it must have been one of the employees who caused it because the cut was so brief that the magnet only just released the slab and not a second longer. If you ask me, the timing was too perfect.”
“So you’re saying it was done deliberately?”
“I can’t know that for sure, but it’s not something I’d rule out.”
Carl sighed. It was seventeen years ago. How the hell could he expect anything more precise than that when neither the police nor the working environment authority reports could offer anything more?
—
“There might come a time when we can ask Rose about it all,” said Carl when they finally arrived back at his office.
Assad shook his head. “Did you hear that I asked them whether Rose could have pushed her dad under the slab when it fell? Their reaction seemed very odd.”
“Yes, I heard you. But they looked stranger when you hinted that she might’ve had an accomplice. Leo Andresen did mention that the power cut could’ve been deliberate, so they couldn’t really have expected to avoid the question.”
“But how did they time it, Carl? There was no intercom where they were standing and no cell phones either. It all came down to a split second, right?”
A tall shadow appeared in the doorway. “Hi there! I’m supposed to ask again from the commissioner when you’ll be back. I haven’t told him you’re already here.”
“Thanks, Gordon. Good thinking. Tell him that his TV crew will have something to sink their teeth into later today or tomorrow, and that we’ll be ever so well behaved.”
He didn’t look happy. “Anyway, I’ve spoken with that guy who saw Rigmor Zimmermann stop on a street corner and look back before rushing off, but there wasn’t much more to it than that. He hardly remembered anything.”
“That’s a shame. But have you managed to discover Denise Zimmermann’s whereabouts?”
“No, no luck there either. She disappeared from her home address a week ago, on May 23rd. I spoke to the other people who live in her building: some fairly odd types. And I also spoke with her mother. Well, ‘spoke’ is maybe not the word, because she’s a complete mess. I could hardly understand a word she said.”
“You said Denise disappeared?”
“Denise told her mother that she’d moved in with a man in Slagelse.”
“Seven days ago?” Carl looked despondent. Would they now have to widen their search to the back of beyond? No wonder you could end up feeling a bit weary at times.
Then his telephone rang. “Can you two post a summary on the notice board of the cases we’re working on? We can look at it together when I’m finished here.” And then he answered the phone.
“Yes, it’s me,” sounded a listless voice at the other end. It was Marcus Jacobsen. “Have you looked at my notes, Carl?” he asked.
“Yeah, uh, kind of.”
“Well, can you look at them now, then? I’ll wait.”
Carl rummaged through the paperwork on his desk before finding one of the notes. It was written in Marcus Jacobsen’s angular but easily legible handwriting:
Notes on the Stephanie Gundersen Case:
Hardy noticed a woman by the name of Stephanie Gundersen in the audience at a school-based crime-prevention talk.
Check the parent lists for the 7th and 9th grades again.
Parent-teacher meetings led by S. Gundersen together with the regular class teacher twice ended in arguments with parents—and even once with a single mother!
What was S.G. doing in ?stre Anl?g Park? She was supposed to be going to badminton.
“Yes, I have one of your notes in front of me. It’s a list of four points.”
“Good. Those are the four things we never managed to get to the bottom of during the investigation. We’d already spent too much time on the case, at the same time as we were being inundated with lots of other important cases. So I had to make the call that we had done all we could in relation to Stephanie Gundersen’s murder and wouldn’t make any further progress at that time. The conclusion was that we had to shelve the case even though I really hated having to do it. You know how it is. It’s terrible to shelve a case, because deep inside you know that it’ll eat away at you.
“Anyway, I found the notes when I cleared out my office at HQ, back when I retired, and since then I’ve had them hanging on my fridge door, much to my wife’s annoyance—while she was still alive, that is. She always said, ‘Why can’t you just let it go, Marcus?’ But it doesn’t work like that.”
Carl agreed. There hadn’t been many cases like that which he’d had to shelve, but there had been a few.
“The way I see it, question number four is particularly conspicuous. What were you thinking when you wrote it?”
“Probably the same as you’re thinking now: Why would you skip your weekly badminton session for a walk in the park? For romantic reasons, of course.”
“But you didn’t find out who Stephanie met?”
“No. Strangely enough, there was nothing to indicate that she had a partner at the time. She was a discreet girl, you know. Not someone to shove her love life in other people’s faces.”