He found the professor’s residence without difficulty on a residential street off Klampenborgvej not far from the Dyrehaven, and after sitting in the car for a few minutes to muster the courage went up to the front door and rang the bell. It took a while before someone answered and Arthur Elvang’s emaciated features and skinny frame appeared in front of him. The initial words of politeness Simonsen had prepared remained stuck in his throat as the professor peered at him through the thick lenses of spectacles that Simonsen reckoned must have had a lens power capable of correcting blindness.
‘What do you want?’
Simonsen sighed with relief. He had been afraid the old man would slam the door in his face. Now at least there was contact. He did his best to explain, while Arthur Elvang listened with his head tilted to one side, thin-lipped and sceptical. When he was finished the old man barked out a command:
‘Tell me again!’
Simonsen repeated his words, well aware now of how weak it all sounded. The professor was of the same opinion.
‘What rot! I haven’t heard such poppycock since Sunday school. Come with me!’
Arthur Elvang stepped out of the door and walked around the side of the house. Simonsen followed him. In an outhouse the old man handed him a garden rake and relieved him of the folder he had been holding in his hand. Elvang poked a crooked finger towards the lawn. It was covered in leaves from the chestnut tree over by the fence that divided the garden from the adjacent property.
‘You can shift some leaves for me while I consider the matter. I don’t work for nothing.’
It took Simonsen an hour to get finished. The professor needed only five minutes. They met on the patio.
‘If you’re thirsty there’s water in the tap. Get it yourself, in the kitchen.’
Simonsen declined. He preferred to hear Elvang’s conclusion on Juli Denissen’s autopsy report. And yet he was made to wait. The professor grunted:
‘I hear your new woman’s left you now.’
Blushing slightly, Simonsen refuted this. The Countess was on a job in Esbjerg, there was no more to it than that. He wondered where on earth the man got his information from, but then put the thought from his mind and went straight to the point.
‘So what’s your first conclusion? About the report?’
‘My first conclusion is the same as my final conclusion, which in turn is the only conclusion. I thought you wanted to wait? Said something about bringing two women with you to hear my conclusion. Wasn’t that what you were waffling on about before?’
‘Yes, but I’d like to know your verdict beforehand.’
‘My verdict is that the young woman’s death was caused by cerebral haemorrhage. That’s bleeding in the brain, to you. It’s all there in black and white, man. Any first-year medical student could have told you that.’
Ten minutes later, Konrad Simonsen was strolling on familiar paths in the woodland expanses of the Dyrehaven, thinking about what a first-year student of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture had to tell him in 1972. They had walked there together, though with a void between them. He remembered it vividly, even the date: 2 November.
Rita was wearing her Afghan coat, a full-length sheepskin worn with the smooth side facing out. It was edged with gaudy embroidered borders of red and yellow flowers, a garment that looked like the factory had never got round to finishing it. The coat of the honest, hard-working Afghan peasant… bought for a small fortune in the Janus clothes store on Larsbjørnsstræde in the centre of Copenhagen, but it was the symbolic value that mattered. He loved to see Rita wearing that coat, though it often made him laugh, too. It could only be done up at the front by means of hooks, so if the weather was cold she froze. Most likely in solidarity with the honest, hard-working peasants, but nonetheless impractical in November.
They had biked out to the Dyrehaven at Rita’s suggestion: there was something she wanted to talk to him about, she’d said. He could tell by her tone on the phone that it was serious, and he had tried to prepare himself in the event that she was going to break off their relationship. Maybe it was for the best. The past year had been hard on them: there were so many things that set them apart from each other. Often he loathed and loved her at the same time; likewise the company she kept. He felt clear dissociation from her one minute and sullen envy the next, at least with respect to the people she used to know. He didn’t envy her new political friends at all.
Rita was by that time enrolled in the School of Architecture, where she immersed herself in Marxist economics and Leninist theory. There were no free rides to the revolution, even for the elite. She’d moved into a room at the Grønjordskollegium student halls in Amager, on the seventh floor with a view out across the grasslands of the Amager Fælled and inland towards the city’s towers and steeples. He had helped her decorate and move in. And he had built her shelving system, fitting the elements together until it took up the whole of one wall. It was quick, easy and ugly to look at. But she had lots of books. He’d glanced at some of the titles after putting them in place and found himself wondering who was actually going to be designing Danish housing of the future, since students of architecture apparently weren’t learning the slightest thing about it.
Nineteen seventy-two was a year of momentous world events. He and Rita disagreed about most of them, especially the Munich massacre. During the Olympic Games that summer eleven Israeli athletes were murdered by a Palestinian terrorist group, Black September. The world was in shock, and Simonsen with it. It was a cowardly and horrendous attack. Following a day of mourning the Games continued. But the joy was gone from the contest. He turned off the TV, and for once he didn’t mince his words. Congratulations, Rita. Your friends have won a great victory. Eleven defenceless athletes. I hope you’re proud.
Rita clenched her fists and flew off the handle: she didn’t give a damn about Munich. As long as the comrades banged up in Stammheim Prison were being tortured in isolation while the world looked the other way, she wasn’t going to get herself worked up about a few dead athletes. She stomped off in a rage. The comrades banged up in Stammheim – Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe, murderers all four. As far as Simonsen was concerned they could rot away in their isolation. Later, he got hold of a Fahndungsplakat from a colleague in the border police at Kruså. It wasn’t hard, the posters were all over the place, in every public institution in West Germany. Twenty black-and-white portrait photos of young people, high-contrast. The headline was unequivocaclass="underline" Terroristen. With a thick black felt-tip he crossed out the faces of those dead or captured. He put the poster up on the door outside her room without her noticing. It remained there for a day and a night. When eventually Rita discovered it she could hardly catch her breath for rage, but he denied all knowledge: Who, him? Of course not. It must have been one of the other students. Maybe there were still one or two who didn’t agree with her opinions. Had she considered the possibility?
Then, on 2 October, she and the radical left she idolised received an emphatic kick in the teeth. Denmark voted to join the Common Market by an overwhelming majority. They were at Simonsen’s place, watching the count on television. He openly gloated, but she didn’t react as he was expecting. The defeat wasn’t that important to her. Six months before, she’d been involved in the People’s Movement against the EC, Folkebevægelsen mod EF, but now she couldn’t seem to care less. And it wasn’t because her side had lost, it was something else, more chilling. That evening he felt for the first time that something wasn’t right. He was afraid.