Later, on his way in to Police HQ, he plugged in the satnav, regardless of the fact that he could find his way there in his sleep. The tinny female voice drilled into his ears. Right turn ahead. Bossy, authoritative, in command. In six hundred metres, turn left. He burst out: ‘Shut your mouth, woman!’ It felt good to be so vulgar. ‘Shut it now, I don’t want to know.’ He savoured being loutish for a few kilometres until eventually tiring of it. He muted the satnav and forced his thoughts back in time. He could decide for himself who and what to think about. Or meet up with.
‘Why don’t we just go to Vordingborg?’
He remembered the question so vividly. It was a Sunday, a dismal early morning on the seventh floor of the Grønjordskollegium student halls in April 1973. He’d thought Rita was asleep. Or at least, he had striven not to make a sound as he got out of bed to put on his clothes. There was no reason to wake her. He had to go to work and wanted to stop by his own flat first and had therefore set the alarm for five o’clock, only to wake up before it went off. He’d
just got his socks on when he lay back next to her again, relishing her warmth for a moment, however brief.
‘For May the first, you mean?’
She did.
Her suggestion came as a surprise. He asked her again, to make sure. The previous evening they had talked about what to do on the day. Not an argument, but a joint consideration of the matter, which in itself was new. The year before, he hadn’t been invited. The first of May, International Workers’ Day, was usually celebrated with a demo in the Fælledparken together with Rita’s friends, not him. But this year was different. Her enthusiasm for demonstrating had fallen off dramatically. Maybe they could sit and enjoy a beer, just the two of them, somewhere in the centre of Copenhagen, away from the demonstrators.
But now she didn’t even fancy that. She wanted to go to Vordingborg.
It was an odd time for them, the six months or so that passed between her terminated pregnancy at the hospital in Køge and her emigrating and his losing touch with her. In some respects it was all bad, or rather: it felt frightening. In others they seemed to pull closer together. Their ideological differences weren’t as divisive as before. They seldom argued, and when they did it rarely seemed to be about politics. His barbed comments and questions no longer found their mark:
‘Rita, what’s actually going to happen to me when the revolution comes?’
A year previously he would have been lucky to have escaped a bullet through his brain in exchange for being put in a rehabilitation camp. At that time his questions could trigger lengthy dialogues in which Rita was wholly unaware that he was having a dig at her.
‘How long does that kind of rehabilitation actually take?’
It varied, and she was unable to provide him with any exact answer.
‘I’d like you to be in charge of it, if that’d be possible?’
She doubted it, but could not entirely rule out the possibility.
Humour wasn’t on the cards for the serious subjugators of capitalism.
But if he asked her now, all she would say would be that she had no idea, seeming listless and without any apparent enthusiasm for her revolution. As if she could hardly be bothered thinking about it.
They’d found a little bolt-hole close to Vordingborg, eleven kilometres outside the town, halfway out on the slender tongue of land called Knudshoved Odde, in a commune whose members had chipped together to buy up a former smallholding. He and Rita – and anyone else, for that matter – were free to come and go as they pleased. To begin with, Rita had known one of the people who lived there, but even though he had since moved out they kept coming back and were accepted as friends of the household. Konrad Simonsen loved the place. It was a hippie refuge that remained stuck in time, an anarchistic shanty without any structure, without a plan, and yet undeniably pleasant. New arrivals deposited whatever money they could spare in the communal kitty, a battered old coffee tin kept on the shelf above the dining table. The tin had the Cirkel logo on it, an African woman in profile. And if you had nothing to spare, that was all right, too. Anyone had the right to eat whatever was in the fridge whenever they happened to be hungry, and in the morning to put on a pair of clean socks from the communal sock basket in which it was impossible ever to find two that were alike, not to mention the same size.
Next door to the place lived the co-op manager and the district midwife, a couple in their forties who held each other’s hand when they went for a walk and called each other embarrassing pet names. Their place was a former farmhouse fully renovated from cellar to chimney stack. He was a cheerful, happy-go-lucky sort who almost daily brought the young people of the commune perfectly good food just past its sell-by date. Good neighbourliness was what it was all about, and it was a shame for things to go to waste, he would say as he dumped his crates in the kitchen with a thunderous laugh and poorly concealed expectations of a cup of tea. She was rather more reserved, a woman of strong limbs and a peculiar kindliness that often took people by surprise. Only when the hippies, as she consistently called them, sunbathed in the nude in the commune’s front garden did she take offence, marching up the driveway with long, unco-ordinated strides. What kind of behaviour was that, naked bodies lounging around in full view, when Arnold had to whitewash the house? They could at least go round the back.
Konrad Simonsen loved that couple. He could sit for hours staring across at their marvellous property while Rita lay beside him reading. He would imagine Rita and himself living like that. Peace and quiet, in lovely surroundings. She could get a job teaching at the Vordingborg Gymnasium, work her way up into something secure. And he could be… well, a policeman, that was good enough, surely? What else could he do? They would have three children, three happy kids, one after another, running barefoot about the place and spreading joy with their laughter. In time he might learn to sail and they could have a little boat and visit the islands of the Smålandshavet at weekends.
Rita looked up from her book.
‘What are you thinking about, Konrad? You’re gawping.’
He told her. She let out a sigh.
‘Yes, that’d be nice. It really would.’
She sighed again, perhaps wiped away a tear she thought he hadn’t seen, and tried to regain her composure.
If the weather was good they went for long walks along the spit. Here they spent what might have been their best times together, ambling slowly through the hilly moraine landscape with its low-lying outwash plains. They saw ospreys and red kites, and heard the croak of the fire-bellied toad in the wetlands as the hawthorn blossomed all around. Copenhagen was far, far away.
Unlike Konrad Simonsen, who was full of energy, Arne Pedersen was bleary-eyed when the two men met in Pedersen’s office. The Homicide Department’s temporary head had been up balancing the books half the night and kicked off proceedings in somewhat manic mood.
‘Right, let’s get to work, Simon.’
Hardly had the words left his lips before Malte Borup barged in, heaving to regain his breath and apologising at the same time.
‘Oh, I didn’t mean to interrupt, only you said it was urgent.’
Pedersen reached up to fidget with the knot of his tie and replied in a resigned tone:
‘I’d been hoping you’d make it before Simon got here.’
‘Sorry. I’ve been as quick as I could. The thing was I had to do the dishes first or else Anita will go ballistic when she gets home. I promised, you see.’
‘All right. So now both of you can see how I’ve made a mess of this bloody smartboard…’
Arne got to his feet and removed the cloth he had hung over the board.
‘I used an ordinary felt-pen and it won’t rub off.’