Without any superfluous chatter Kurt Melsing placed his guest in front of an oversized computer screen and hit the keys. Melsing was famously reliable in terms of the conclusions his department reached in any investigation, and quite as infamous for his total lack of communication skills. He began the briefing now by methodically displaying each of the photographs from Hans Ulrik Gormsen’s mobile in turn, and for each image that appeared on the screen he stated a number. Like a caller in a bingo hall, only more systematic. At regular intervals he gazed fixedly in the direction of the glass wall. When at last he was done, having spent ten minutes telling Simonsen what he could have said in ten seconds, i.e. the unsurprising information that the hard-copy photos had now been digitalised, Melsing revealed the reason for his restlessness.
‘I’ve got someone coming who’ll help put you in the picture.’
Simonsen nodded and said nothing.
‘I’m glad you’re not dead,’ Melsing added.
They both stared through the glass and waited.
At home in Søllerød later on, Simonsen mentioned Kurt Melsing’s taciturn ways to the Countess. They were lying on the lawn, she with her head resting on his arm. It had gone numb, but he ignored the discomfort and told her about the interminable wait in Melsing’s office.
‘We just sat there, mute, until help arrived. It was barely five minutes, but it felt like an eternity.’
‘Yes, he can be rather trying.’
‘I like him, but he’s a hard man to get along with. How he can head up a department of several hundred staff is beyond me. I mean, those forensics people are incisive and efficient while he… he can hardly utter his own name.’
‘Now you’re exaggerating.’
‘What are you smiling about?’
‘I can’t say, you don’t want us to talk about it yet.’
‘Did Kurt come and see me when I was ill?’
‘Yes.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. You can’t remember a thing, can you?’
‘I remember going to work in the morning, and then I remember waking up in the hospital four days later. The rest is a black hole.’
‘Most of the time you were asleep. Do you want me to tell you about it, or do you want to wait?’
‘Maybe it’s time.’
‘We were at Poul Troulsen’s leaving reception and you were standing holding a glass of wine and a sandwich. First you complained about pains in your chest and then, shortly afterwards, in your back. Then all of a sudden you started gasping for air, dropped your glass and sank to your knees. Later, the doctor said you’d had a massive myocardial infarction… or heart attack to the rest of us. You certainly created havoc at the reception, and I panicked, I’m afraid. Started to cry. Malte Borup too. Poul Troulsen even loosened his tie, and Arne Pedersen the same. You had everyone running around like hens. Everyone except Kurt Melsing. He upturned my handbag and found my mobile, then he climbed on to a table and shouted for everyone to shut up, in a booming voice that must have echoed all the way through HS. Then he called the emergency services, ordered an ambulance with coronary-care facilities and identified your symptoms as precisely as any doctor. In the meantime a Samaritan arrived and administered first aid.’
HS for Head Square, the Homicide Department’s internal slang for Police HQ, so she was exaggerating, of course. The point she was making was obvious enough, though.
‘Are you saying Kurt Melsing saved my life?’
‘We’ll never know for certain, but as soon as they got you in the ambulance they filled you full of anti-coagulants and something for the shock. It stabilised your condition.’
‘And that was all down to Kurt Melsing?’
‘Whose taciturnity would seem not to be a permanent affliction, which is my point here. He’s even been eloquent in a number of other situations I can recall, though none quite as dramatic.’
Simonsen removed his arm and sat up, the Countess bumping her head on the ground as a result.
‘Ouch, you could have warned me!’
‘Sorry. I just feel embarrassed, that’s all. I haven’t even thanked him. He must think I’m the most ungrateful man in the world.’
‘No, he doesn’t. He knows full well you can’t remember anything and that you’ve been wanting to wait a while before being put in the picture about what happened.’
‘Well, that’s something anyway. How does he know all that?’
Simonsen lay down again.
‘He phones regularly, to ask how you’re getting on.’
‘You never told me that.’
‘You can’t be put in the picture and left out at the same time! Where’s your arm? And how did the meeting with him go, anyway? Did he give you anything significant?’
‘He did, as it happens. And there’s more to come, apparently.’
Once Melsing’s spokesperson finally arrived, things got going. Melsing ran the computer and his young staff member did the vocals. Simonsen listened. They were a good double act.
‘We’ve focused a lot on the abrasion on the back of the victim’s right hand.’
Melsing clicked up an enlarged image on the screen.
‘It was a good observation from your side, though at first we weren’t really sure if it was going to be useful to us. We were wrong, though. As you know, mobile images are pretty limited in terms of quality, these ones especially so, having been scanned from printouts. Basically, that means we can’t really zoom in on the hand in any way that’s going to be profitable to us.’
‘I’m with you. But information isn’t created by enlargement, only made clearer, if it’s there.’
‘Exactly. But we’ve done something else instead that’s almost as good. Using the matchbox as a reference, we can rotate and transpose objects in all three directions, then by a process called affine…’
Melsing interrupted gently.
‘All the hands mapped together.’
He displayed the result.
Simonsen was impressed.
‘Blimey.’
The mark on Jørgen Kramer Nielsen’s hand was as clear as if it had been photographed from five centimetres away. Next to it, a close-up of the stair carpet had been inserted at a slightly distorted angle: smooth-faced sisal hemp with an easily recognisable granulated pattern. The weave of the carpet and the mark on the hand matched up, and Melsing’s spokesman condensed the important points.
‘This is irrefutable proof that the deceased had a fall down the stairs. Moreover, we’re certain most of his body weight went down on that hand when he scraped it, otherwise it wouldn’t have been as pronounced.’
Melsing interrupted again.
‘It’s not all good, though.’
His man elaborated:
‘Unfortunately, we don’t much care for the position of the body at the foot of the stairs. Or, more exactly, in our experience it sets off a lot of warning bells…’
This time it was Simonsen who cut him off.
‘That’s not very exact.’
Melsing smiled wryly, but his man wasn’t thrown.
‘No, of course not. What I mean is, experience has us wondering how Kramer Nielsen’s body could end up in the position in which it was found, following a fall of not quite two running metres down a staircase with an approximate gradient of thirty degrees. Especially when he breaks his neck at the same time on his way down and manages to get his right arm under him and scrape the back of his hand against one of the steps. And in the direction of the knuckles rather than the other way round. If we knew what step he scraped himself on things would be a lot easier, but we haven’t been able to work that out, seeing as the skin cells he must have left behind are all gone. Besides that, you’ve got to bear in mind that the most natural reaction of any living person in a fall is to put their hands out flat in front of them, to cushion the impact.’