At Bjarke Habersaat’s funeral, June Habersaat kills Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi—also known as Frank Brennan—with a pistol beside the open grave. Carl Mørck and Assad witness the shooting but cannot prevent it; the scene ends with Atu dead and June fleeing, while a connection to Christian Habersaat’s missing pistol gives the killing a further link to the case’s history.

The Funeral and the Approach

The burial was nearly over when Carl Mørck and Assad reached the churchyard. About a hundred meters ahead, Atu, dressed in yellow, was walking directly toward the mourners gathered at the graveside. They hurried after him, caught between two risks: moving too quickly might make him turn and flee again, but they also needed to protect June Habersaat from whatever he intended. The funeral’s ordinary closing gestures had already begun: the vicar had set aside his small shovel, and the mourners had thrown earth onto the coffin.

June went to the edge of the grave and dropped something in, prompting an audible reaction from those who saw it. She then reached into her bag. Atu called her name in a desperate voice; the mourners recoiled in surprise as he stretched his arms out toward her. Carl and Assad quickened their pace, but they could not reach the pair before June drew a large-caliber pistol.

The Shooting and Its Immediate Aftermath

June fired what sounded like four or five times. The shots echoed against the church walls, and Atu doubled over before collapsing beside the grave. The narration identifies the killing as an execution, premeditated rather than accidental: the mourners’ sudden retreat had opened a space between the armed June and the approaching Atu, while Carl and Assad were still closing the distance. They stopped where they were. Carl had not been armed for a long time, and the scene’s brief delay between seeing the pistol and hearing the shots became the measure of how little they could do to intervene.

June seemed stunned by the speed of what had happened. Her gaze moved between Atu’s body, the bottom of the grave, the mourners, and the vicar, who approached her with calming words. The priest checked Atu’s pulse at the neck and shook his head: Atu was dead. Carl saw him lying with one foot over the grave, his eyes wide open; the yellow shirt had two deep holes in the stomach and another in the shoulder. One bullet had passed through near the tattoo reading RIVER, a detail Carl recognized. The grave, the burial, and the dead man’s tattoo converge in this moment, but the immediate fact is stark: the gathering has become the scene of a killing witnessed by the mourners and the investigators.

Flight, Symbolism, and the Weapon’s Origin

A sudden impact made June scream; the pistol flew from her hand. She did not look back. Instead, she ran to a bench against the churchyard wall, climbed over the stone boundary, and dropped down toward the road beside the field. Carl sent Assad after her and turned to the stunned mourners, telling one of them to call the police while he went for the car. The shooting thus split the scene in two: Atu remained beside the grave, while June escaped beyond the churchyard and Assad pursued her.

Carl paused over Atu’s body. One foot lay across the grave, his eyes were wide open, and the yellow shirt showed two deep wounds in the stomach and one in the shoulder. The wound near the RIVER tattoo recalled the song associated with Atu, while the place of his death sharpened the scene’s irony. The man who had sought to be a guardian of enigma and a son of the sun had ended his life in the shadow of the island’s famed Østerlars Round Church, a building associated with the Knights Templar’s supposed mystical secrets.

The pistol Carl picked up resembled the one Christian Habersaat had used to kill himself. It appeared to be the second of the two pistols that had belonged to the deceased teacher from Bornholm Folk High School and had never been found. Carl inferred that Habersaat had taken both weapons, and that June, his former wife, had somehow removed one without his knowledge. The weapon therefore connected the churchyard killing to the earlier death and concealed history of the Habersaat household; June’s escape did not erase the physical clue left behind.

Narrative Function

The scene is built around a short delay between recognition and action. June’s first movement at the grave prompts a reaction among the mourners, but its meaning remains unclear; only after Atu calls her name and the crowd recoils do Carl and Assad see the pistol. The narration makes the weapon visible just before the shots, preserving the gap between understanding the danger and being able to stop it. That gap defines the event: the investigators reach the funeral in time to witness the killing, but not in time to prevent it. The burial’s closing gestures become the frame for a second death, and the churchyard changes, within moments, from a place of mourning into a crime scene.