Christian Habersaat’s suicide at his retirement farewell marks the point at which an old investigation passes into the hands of Carl Mørck and Assad, but its significance changes as they uncover what Habersaat had been unable to resolve. At first, the death seems to explain only why the case has been abandoned; later, the pistol and Habersaat’s final letter turn it into evidence of a father’s belated recognition that his own son committed Alberte Goldschmid’s killing.

The Cold Case Behind the Suicide

The history leading to Habersaat’s final act began on November 20, 1997, at Bornholm Folk High School. For roughly fifty students, the day had been ordinary: they attended courses in music, glasswork, painting, or pottery, and, as John Birkedal later explained, the mostly young group had been in good spirits and felt no danger. Alberte, described as among the gentlest, prettiest, and most popular students, had already been killed in a traffic collision that morning. She was not found until more than a day later, thrown high into a roadside tree and nearly invisible. The person who looked up at just the right moment was a uniformed police officer: Christian Habersaat.

Habersaat’s connection to the case did not end with that discovery. Years later, Inge Dalby recalled that he repeatedly asked her about the name of the man Alberte had been seeing. She had already given the police her account, but Habersaat returned to the question during his rounds at the school, seeking the same information again. Inge could remember only fragments: Alberte had once remarked that the man’s name sounded exotic, and it contained several parts, one of them biblical. She also remembered that he apparently came from Copenhagen and drove a Volkswagen van, though she could not confirm that a photograph shown to her depicted the same vehicle.

These fragments show the persistence of Habersaat’s inquiry, not that he had solved it. When Carl and Assad took over after his death, the case still required investigation. Habersaat’s repeated questions had left a trace in witnesses’ memories, but those memories were incomplete and uncertain. His suicide therefore made the investigation both an inheritance and a problem: the detectives had to distinguish useful recollection from the assumptions and unanswered suspicions that had accumulated around the case.

The Retirement-Farewell Death

The book identifies Habersaat’s death as a suicide at his retirement farewell. Carl initially resists making the reason for it the focus of the detectives’ visit. He tells Assad, by a look, not to pursue whether Habersaat used one pistol or another; to Carl, the weapon seemed irrelevant to the work they had come to do. He believes their more immediate task is to make Rose understand that the Alberte investigation is not theirs simply because she thinks they should have taken it on for Habersaat. That early impatience frames the suicide as an interruption to Department Q’s work rather than its central mystery.

The weapon nevertheless becomes significant. A policeman tells Carl that a relative of a teacher who had died at the school remembered the teacher owning two nearly identical pistols. Habersaat had obtained one and used it to kill himself; the second had never been found, not even among his possessions. Carl dismisses the distinction at first, reasoning that the presence of another pistol would not explain much in a country where gang members could readily have guns. The detail matters less as a clue to the mechanics of the suicide than as a reminder that Habersaat’s death had left uncertainties the investigators could not simply wave away.

Habersaat’s death also alters the way witnesses encounter the reopened inquiry. When Carl tells one of them that the investigator she had spoken to years earlier has committed suicide, the news appears to make little impression; she may barely remember him. Yet when Rose recounts his sustained interest in the case and the witness’s earlier questioning, the woman follows closely and seems to remember the interviews. The contrast separates the knowledge of his death from the history of his work: his suicide does not itself unlock the witnesses’ memories, but the old investigation remains present in them.

Suspicion Turns Toward His Son

As the inquiry develops, Rose proposes a darker explanation for Habersaat’s persistence. He had been a policeman and had devoted seventeen years to the case; she believes he may have suspected his own son and pursued the investigation in order to remove that suspicion. In her theory, blaming the person he hated most—his wife’s lover—would have offered a convenient alternative. Carl challenges the theory by asking why Habersaat would have directed Department Q toward the case if he wanted it forgotten after his suicide. At this stage, the detectives are weighing an interpretation, not yet stating what Habersaat knew or why he acted as he did.

The eventual disclosure comes in Habersaat’s letter, dated April 29, 2014. He apologizes for having insisted on pinning the crime on an innocent man when, as he now acknowledges, his son had committed it. He says he is leaving his son’s fate in the investigators’ hands because he cannot bring himself to go after his own child, and declares that the matter stops with him. The letter makes the long pursuit newly legible: Habersaat’s fixation was not simply an inability to let an old case go. It had also become a way of circling the possibility that the perpetrator was his son, while directing suspicion elsewhere.

The letter gives the suicide its decisive narrative consequence without reducing it to a fully explained motive. Habersaat names the truth and admits his failure to act against his son, but the surviving evidence does not establish that this recognition alone caused him to take his life. Instead, the suicide leaves behind an unfinished responsibility that he transfers to the investigators. Carl and Assad must now pursue the case whose burden Habersaat carried for seventeen years, while confronting the familial conflict he could not resolve himself.

Meaning and Aftermath

The progression from dismissal to discovery gives the suicide a double role. It is first the reason Department Q is drawn into the Alberte case, and then a delayed revelation about why Habersaat pursued it so insistently. The missing second pistol briefly draws attention toward the material circumstances of his death, but the more consequential evidence is not another weapon: it is the letter that identifies his son as the killer and admits that Habersaat could not bring himself to pursue him.

The case thus converts a retirement farewell from an apparent ending into a transfer of unfinished work. Habersaat’s death cannot restore Alberte or undo the years spent accusing an innocent man; nor can his letter settle the son’s fate. It does, however, break the concealment around the central crime. Carl and Assad inherit not only a cold case but the truth Habersaat finally put into writing, and the silence that followed his confession marks the weight of what they have learned.