‘How reassuring you don’t know everything.’
‘Now you’re avoiding the issue. In actual fact, you were very, very lucky. If our investigation hadn’t kicked off in such chaotic manner, our technicians would have discovered the truth within days.’
‘You do seem to rely a lot on luck, good and bad.’
‘Let’s say it’s just my way of looking at things. If you prefer, we could call it divine providence.’
‘Divine providence, I like that.’
‘So we agree. As it turned out, we believed the lack of physical evidence from the short flight of stairs was down to time elapsed and the cleaning that had been done in the interim. Later, we found skin cells in the carpet of the long flight, in the exact places we’d expect to find them, clearing you of suspicion of killing him, though I never seriously thought you did.’
They came to a crossing. For the umpteenth time, Simonsen nearly got himself run over, looking left instead of right before stepping out. The priest grabbed his shoulder and held him back.
Simonsen collected himself for a moment, before going on:
‘There’s something that puzzles me. The first time I questioned you, I thought I’d caught you out with regards to your confessing to your bishop. Now I’m uncertain.’
‘You needn’t be. I was completely unprepared for that. I fell right in. I must say, it was a very clever trap you laid for me there.’
‘A coming together.’
The priest smiled.
‘Indeed, a coming together.’
Again they walked in silence, the streets continually changing character: rows of small, terraced houses, as any tourist in a northern English town would expect to see, giving way to imposing edifices of the nineteenth century, unpretentious rows of local shops in whose doorways the proprietors often stood waiting for passing trade, towers of steel and glass striving for the sky. A mix of run-down and pleasant.
Eventually, the priest spoke again:
‘What will happen now?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? Isn’t that getting off rather lightly?’
It was indeed. According to paragraph 125 of the criminal code, what he had done carried a sentence of up to two years’ imprisonment, or a very considerable fine at minimum. This was the reason Simonsen and Kurt Melsing had gone to such pains.
‘I’m glad you moved him, and officially it doesn’t make much odds whether he fell down one flight or the other. On that, my technical colleague and I are in complete agreement. He’s prepared a report stating that Kramer Nielsen’s fall occurred on the shorter flight of stairs, and the funny thing is his exposition is all still perfectly correct.’
‘How strange.’
Simonsen told him about the FBI’s software.
‘The conclusion, then, is that if the premises hold up, the fall could have taken place quite naturally on the shorter flight, too.’
‘But the premises don’t quite, do they?’
‘A very astute reader with the requisite skills in mathematics and physics might conceivably wonder about a single detail. You’re an educated man, perhaps you know about the empirical physical constant denoted by the letter g?’
‘The gravitational constant, if it’s a capital G. Small g denotes free-fall acceleration, popularly known as gravity. Nine point eight one metres per second per second, if I remember rightly.’
‘Gravity, that’s right. Very good. And that’s just one of dozens of parameters in the software that can be varied. Maybe they think one day we’ll be solving crimes on the moon, who knows? But it turns out that by increasing gravity by only thirty per cent, Jørgen Kramer Nielsen’s fall down the top stairs comes out as natural in relation to the position in which he was discovered, and, well, you know better than I do, climbing those stairs must feel like heavy going sometimes, or am I wrong?’
‘I’ve never thought about it, to be honest, but now you mention it, yes, it does. Hasn’t anyone asked questions yet?’
‘Not yet, and I’m sure it’s not going to happen either. No one can be bothered reading anything other than the conclusion. The actual body of the thing is too complicated, mind-numbingly to be frank, so Jørgen Kramer Nielsen’s death has been well and truly buried in the maths, you could say. Funny, really: all his adult life he carried this dreadful secret around and sought refuge in mathematics to keep his demons at arm’s length, and now the actual circumstances of his death are hidden away in calculus.’
Simonsen held up a pre-emptive hand.
‘I know you can’t answer, and this isn’t an interrogation. It just struck me how ironic life can be. I should mention, though, that there’s one person to whom I do intend to tell the truth at some point, but she can keep a secret. Probably just as well as you.’
They passed by a church and the priest stopped to look up for a moment. There was a wistful note in his voice.
‘I’m fond of mathematics and physics, and rhetoric, too, for that matter, though that’s something else entirely. But there’s one thing I can never understand when it comes to people who subscribe to the natural sciences, and that is, they’re never in doubt about their own infallibility. Particularly when it comes to logic – if something hangs together logically, then it must be true and all other forms of inquiry and ways of seeing must therefore be wrong. It’s a very peculiar form of hubris: if something’s true, it’s logical; if it’s logical, it’s true.’
Simonsen didn’t know quite what to say and so chose to say nothing. The priest asked him a question.
‘You’ve tied a very nice, logical ribbon around your investigation, I must admit. But tell me: considering what you know about me, however little that might be, do you really think that, arriving home from holiday to find a dead body on my stairs, my immediate thought would be to seek to exploit the circumstance and manipulate the police into finding a second body? I know what your logic tells you, but is it what your knowledge of human nature says, too?’
Simonsen continued walking without replying for a while, eventually conceding:
‘No, it isn’t. So what did you do? I know you moved him, that’s beyond doubt.’
‘Yes, I did. But I don’t think you’d understand why.’
‘Try me.’
This time it was the priest’s turn to contemplate before answering.
‘Jørgen’s body lay at the bottom of the lower stairs, as you so rightly say, in the dimmest of light. I closed his eyes, sat with him and said a little prayer. But then, as I was about to go inside to my own flat and call the ambulance, I happened to look up. The most wonderful light was streaming in through the window on the upper landing: yellow, green, red, blue, a rainbow filtered through the stained glass of the panes. It was as if it were crying out to us, and I stood there almost in awe for quite some time. Then I carried him up into the light, as I felt compelled to do. And when I put him down I was filled with a most wondrous sense of peace and joy such as I’d never known before. I knew then that I’d done the right thing.’
Simonsen thought for a moment, before admitting that this was more plausible by a long way.
There was no more to say about it. And yet they continued walking. Like an LP that went on turning with the needle in the run-out groove, the music finished.
‘Road, street, place, avenue, way, drive,’ Simonsen mused after a while. ‘I wouldn’t be able to find my way back if I had a month to try.’