‘I live in Helsinge, actually, but I run a cheese shop in Frederiksværk. Just by the station, left-hand side as the train comes in from Hillerød, between the florist’s and the sandwich bar. You can’t miss it.’
The thought occurred to Simonsen that he had indeed missed it, and had been doing quite all right despite that fact, and indeed hoped the happy state of affairs would continue, but he said nothing. His silence prompted the man to explain further:
‘Juli worked in the shop for me a couple of days a week. She only lived three hundred metres down the road, so it was just the jo…’
He pressed a conspiratorial finger to his lips before charmlessly adding:
‘On the sly, of course, so don’t let on to the taxman. But for a time I knew her quite well… I mean, very well, indeed, if you get my drift.’
He winked suggestively, and Simonsen found himself thinking he’d seldom met a person he found so immediately objectionable. He glanced at the wedding ring on the cheesemonger’s finger:
‘Juli and August, how funny. You must have had a good laugh about that the first time you met. Juli and August, such a nice match. I don’t suppose your wife would have thought so, though? Still, there’ll be plenty of opportunities to ask her if the case is reopened – which, however, I doubt.’
The man blushed and stepped back behind Linette Krontoft as though to hide himself. If that was the intention, it wasn’t a bad place to choose. But then all of a sudden Simonsen froze. The cheesemonger’s windcheater was open and the top buttons of his shirt had been left undone, presumably to demonstrate his masculinity to the world by suggesting he didn’t feel the cold. Around his neck was a fish on a silver chain. The cross, the fish and the Chi-Rho christogram, three signs of Christianity… Madame’s words of warning in the gallery about listening to the Christian man he didn’t like rang in his ears. Perhaps his meeting here wouldn’t be a waste of time after all. He smiled to himself, and poked a finger towards Linette Krontoft.
‘The agreement was that two people could attend this meeting, and that’s what I told the professor. Now there’s three of you, so if that doesn’t suit him you’re the one who leaves, and without a fuss. Understood?’
She looked a bit nonplussed, but agreed nevertheless.
The room in which Professor Arthur Elvang received his visitors was bare to the point of emptiness. The walls had just been painted white and the floorboards had obviously very recently been planed and varnished. The place smelled of pinewood and decorating. The furnishings were as sparse as could be and in marked contrast to the newness of the rest of the room. Five classroom desks, the old-fashioned wooden kind with desk and seat all in one, as Simonsen remembered them from his own schooldays, had been arranged in a semi-circle around a larger, more regular desk of recent date. On this latter piece of furniture lay a stack of papers, neatly gathered and placed in meticulous alignment with its foremost edge. Next to them was a seemingly cylindrical object of some thirty centimetres in height covered up by a black cloth that prevented further investigation. Behind the desk sat the professor himself.
He greeted them aloofly in turn and gestured for them to sit down. They edged their way with difficulty on to their seats. Simonsen and Linette Krontoft in particular found it all a bit of a squeeze. He wondered where Elvang had dug up such antiques, but thought a good guess would be the rearmost corner of a storage room in the furthest depths of the department’s basement. Once they were all seated, the professor began.
Simonsen was in no doubt whatsoever that the purpose of all this was to humiliate them: it was the professor’s little joke, a sarcastic comment on the matter at hand. Nonetheless, he had feared Elvang making no effort at all to appear convincing to his select audience. Now, however, he could see this was not the case. On the contrary, the professor introduced himself by rattling off a selection of his many titles, as well as a number of executive positions on company boards of directors. Most of it was new to Simonsen and he found himself thinking that the old man to his credit had never appeared snobbish or so overly pleased with himself as to broadcast unnecessarily his many academic and professional attainments. However, the no-doubt severely abridged curriculum vitae he now outlined certainly had the desired effect, Linette Krontoft raising a respectful finger in the air and dutifully waiting to speak until the professor indicated that she might.
‘Would the professor mind if we recorded his appraisal of the case on a dictaphone? We know some people who would very much appreciate listening to what he has to say.’
Simonsen interrupted immediately in an attempt to avert the danger, but to no avail, the professor putting him in his place by stating that they were free to record as much as they liked. Permission granted, Linette Krontoft extracted herself from behind her seating arrangement and placed her dictaphone on the professor’s desk, whereupon his assessment of Juli Denissen’s autopsy report could begin. Elvang’s tinny voice enunciated:
‘Juli Denissen, twenty-four years old, deceased tenth of July two thousand and eight at Melby Overdrev, district of Halsnæs, post-mortem performed eleventh and twelfth July, Department of Forensic Medicine, Hillerød General Hospital, consultant Hans Arne Tholstrup.’
He screwed up his eyes and squinted at the report, to Simonsen’s pleasure explaining that normally in the country’s eastern region all post-mortems were done by the Rigshospitalet in the capital, but in particularly busy periods the hospital at Hillerød would also be used. This was one of the ten concerns the group had raised.
Elvang looked up and endeavoured in vain to focus through the lenses of his glasses on each member of his audience in turn, then solemnly continued:
‘The validity of this autopsy report is beyond question.’
With that he nodded a couple of times as though confirming the fact to himself before going on with his assessment while leafing through his papers.
‘A number of samples were taken. Vaginal, anal, oral. From the pharynx and the cavum oris, which is to say palate and oral cavity. Moreover, biopsies of the skin, liver, kidneys and thyroid, as well as samples of blood and hair, were taken – the simple reason for all this being that two students were involved in the procedure as part of their training. At any rate, we may conclude that the deceased was examined very thoroughly indeed, much more so than would normally be the case. Subsequent analyses, however, reveal no signs whatsoever of poisoning or anything else, shall we say, untoward.’
He peered questioningly at something in the report – at what exactly, Simonsen was unable to see – then shook his head as though in annoyance. It was a sure sign, in Simonsen’s experience, that someone, somewhere along the line, had made an error. None of the others seemed to notice this indication of the professor’s irritation, and his conclusion was emphatic.
‘Quite categorically, then, the woman was not poisoned. Moreover there is no poison or any other chemical substance capable of triggering what she died of, which is to say a severe subarachnoid haemorrhage, that is a bleeding into the space between the brain and its protective membrane.’
He then provided a detailed account of how the haemorrhage in the woman’s brain had caused pressure to build up on her respiratory centre, leading to her being unable to breathe. After that, he spent some time explaining that approximately one per cent of the population was born with such aneurysms – blood-filled bulges in the wall of the brain’s blood vessels – and that these abnormities could rupture due to physical or mental strain, for instance while playing sport or during sexual intercourse.
‘The symptoms are severe headache, a stiff neck, nausea and vomiting, and often subsequent loss of consciousness or death. In this case, death occurred very swiftly, perhaps in the space of a minute, two at most, the reason being that the bleeding was unusually massive, which although not normally the case, is certainly not unusual.’