Not until well into her first song did Simonsen regain sufficient composure to listen. She sang in a clear, ringing soprano, accompanying herself on the twelve-stringed acoustic guitar, an instrument she played with great skill. ‘Sweet Sir Galahad’ once again climbed in through the window of Joan Baez’s younger sister, this time in an excellent, albeit rather frail, interpretation that met with deservedly enthusiastic applause from her audience. According to the programme, her following two songs would also be Joan Baez, though this proved to be a slight misrepresentation. Nevertheless, her next song sent Simonsen on a journey back into his past. Teresa Metz Andersen dreamed of Joe Hill; Simonsen dreamed of Rita. The young girl’s version of the judicial murder of the workers’ rights activist was skilful and accomplished. But also bloodless and tame, a far cry altogether from her grandmother’s. And then, abruptly, the memories came flooding back, as they had done so many times before in the past months.
In 1972 he and Rita had braved the cold of February and biked up to the Reprise Teatret in Holte to see a double bill of Bo Widerberg films. First up was Ådalen 31 about the Swedish workers’ strike in the communities of Sandviken and Utansjö in the Ådalen district in 1931, a conflict that ended tragically with the deaths of five workers when Swedish troops opened fire on a demonstration. Already in the interval between the two films they had argued, Rita conveniently leapfrogging the forty intervening years to claim brashly that such an incident could easily occur in the Denmark of their day. Subjugation of the Danish trade unions by the military was a scenario for which they had to be prepared. For his part Simonsen had found the film quite excellent, though hardly topical. He reminded her that representatives of the Danish trade unions regularly met and co-ordinated with the government and were hardly likely to be shot, even in the event of a general election tipping the balance of power in the opposite direction. They bought four grilled sausages with bread, ketchup and mustard, of which she devoured three. Because he was so stupid. He protested. Would starving make him any more intelligent? She finished chewing and gave him a kiss in reply. He found this preferable to the sausage.
After the second film, however, it all went wrong. Widerberg’s Joe Hill was a gripping portrayal of the Swedish-American union agitator, syndicalist, social critic and satirical songwriter, executed in Utah in 1915 following a politically motivated show trial. When it was over, Rita’s blood was boiling. It was as if she wanted them to disagree, to direct her indignation at a tangible target: him. Simonsen was annoyed with her. She and her left-wing friends had no monopoly on justice, and he had no desire whatsoever to defend judicial murder. What’s more he felt in no way responsible for Joe Hill’s execution, regardless of whether he was a policeman or not.
And so they had been at each other’s throats all the way home, and in Sorgenfri she had seized the opportunity to let the air out of his front tyre, mean-spiritedly exploiting his need to stop and answer a minor call of nature. When they continued on their way, she cycled slowly, dawdling on the opposite bike path, singing the words of ‘Joe Hill’ to him as he trudged along, wheeling his own bike:
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I: ‘But Joe, you’re ten years dead.’
‘I never died,’ said he,
‘I never died,’ said he.
Rita’s arrestingly beautiful voice cut through the winter night and he would gladly have arrested her for disturbing the peace if only he had been able to keep up with her. An angry voice demanded quiet from a window, prompting her only to sing even louder. It had begun to snow. She biked off, leaving him to walk the rest of the way on his own, furious with her for her senseless vandalism and yet missing her dreadfully. At the same time he envied her social conscience, though he would never admit the fact. Then suddenly she reappeared. As he passed through Lyngby a snowball struck him in the back of the neck. She was hiding in a bus shelter and had decided to feel sorry for him. He was an unenlightened pig who couldn’t help being deluded. He could come back to her place, seeing as how it was so cold out.
They wheeled their bikes together, hand in hand, little clouds of frosty breath illuminated by the street lamps, and forgot all about the cold. When they got to Klampenborg they free-wheeled down the long hill on Rita’s bike, he in the saddle, she seated on the pannier rack, while he steered his own bike alongside them with his free hand, hoping none of his colleagues was patrolling in the area. It had to go wrong, and it did. They had almost reached the bottom when the rear wheel skidded out from under them on a bend. They slid across the road in a cascade of snow. Neither of them was in the slightest bit hurt and they lay there for a while, surrounded by the woods, laughing.
Then Rita took his head in her hands and began to sing again. This time gently, her pretty voice only for him:
From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
Where working men defend their rights,
it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill,
it’s there you’ll find Joe Hill!
And now her granddaughter sang the same song, flawlessly, and not a single music teacher in the land would surely have a word of criticism to say whereas for Konrad Simonsen, with his own memories and associations, it evoked an unsettling blend of suppressed emotion and grim reality. For a brief moment, Bo Widerberg’s striking American and Swedish landscapes once again filled his mind, only to be superseded by a very recent photograph of sandy spruce plantations on Denmark’s west coast, sent to him by Klavs Arnold after they’d located the holiday camp. Simonsen found himself gripped by a feeling of rage, not knowing where it came from, perhaps directed towards the girl onstage whose voice was so full, or her grandmother who had let the air out of his bicycle tyre, or Lucy Davison whose body lay in that sandy earth. Perhaps even towards them all.
Teresa Metz Andersen’s final song, ‘We Shall Overcome’, disqualified her once and for all from the role of protest singer. Her performance was exquisite, demonstrating all too clearly that the closest she’d ever been to a cotton field was her well-fitting Patrizia Pepe tunic. She bowed demurely when she had finished, relinquishing the stage to the next young genius in line.
In the interval he thought about leaving and yet decided to stay, drinking a cup of weak coffee in a quiet corner of the foyer on his own, from where he could survey the crowd. Now and then his eyes darted this way or that, but mostly he felt calm and settled.
Returning inside, he discovered someone had opened his programme and placed it face down on his seat. He picked it up and stared at the hastily scribbled though clearly legible address, the date and time written in the top right corner, and with that he changed his mind and left, taking the programme with him.
On Monday morning Konrad Simonsen and Klavs Arnold commenced the search for Lucy Davison’s body at Esbjerg’s town hall, where an accommodating, albeit unexpressive deputy chief executive of the local authority provided them with two bespoke environmental maps from the planning department and permitted them to inspect the grounds of the former Vesterhavsgården with a view to isolating possible sources of pollution – a pretext Klavs Arnold found utterly superfluous, but for which Konrad Simonsen was grateful. The last thing he wanted at this stage was to have the tabloids tugging at his coat tails, and he knew from bitter experience how little it took before reporters suddenly materialised with their barrages of awkward, time-consuming questions.