Gordon

Gordon’s importance to Department Q’s investigation of Alberte Goldschmid’s death begins with a problem of scale: Christian Habersaat has left behind a mass of material whose connections are difficult to see. Rose makes Gordon the case manager for those documents, asking him to build an overview the others can use and, eventually, a system showing how Habersaat’s scattered leads might fit together. The assignment turns a seemingly peripheral colleague into the team’s human index to a case that has resisted order for years.

Role in Department Q

Gordon first enters the work in an unglamorous capacity. Surrounded by clutter and removal boxes in Carl’s office, Carl calls for him to come and help get rid of the accumulated material. Assad explains that Gordon is busy being depressed. The exchange establishes the lightly comic register through which the novel often presents him: his mood is treated as one more feature of a workplace where, in Carl’s view, nearly everyone has reason to be depressed. But Rose’s subsequent plan gives Gordon work that is more consequential than clearing a room.

Rose proposes that Gordon take charge of Habersaat’s documents, assembling an overview that can function like an encyclopedia for the investigators. While the rest of the team follows individual leads, Gordon is to look for a system that could reveal how the papers connect. Carl accepts the arrangement, and Assad reminds Gordon that Carl remains the boss. The division of labor gives Gordon a specific investigative function: not to replace the detectives pursuing witnesses and evidence, but to make a large, confused archive intelligible to them.

The search among former students

Carl soon assigns Gordon another labor-intensive task: find current addresses and telephone numbers for the students who attended Bornholm Folk High School in the fall semester of 1997. There had been fifty students, including four from Estonia, two from Latvia, four from Lithuania, and two from Russia. Carl notes that some may have changed their names. The numbers make plain why the request is daunting, but Carl also turns Gordon’s knowledge of the list into encouragement, insisting that he is the right person for the job.

The work proves difficult for reasons beyond the number of names. When Gordon reports on his progress, former students often cannot remember the events clearly, or confuse the school with other places they attended. One woman had studied at five different folk high schools and could not distinguish one from another. A former student from Lithuania could not speak English, while addresses had changed so widely that almost no one still lived where they had in 1997. For many of those Gordon did reach, Habersaat’s persistent questioning was more memorable than the circumstances of Alberte’s death; otherwise, they retained little beyond her name and the fact that she had been found dead.

The thinness of these recollections is itself an obstacle to the case. The students’ ordinary day at school on November 20, 1997, had not seemed dangerous, and the death of a popular young woman did not leave every classmate with a durable memory of the details. Gordon has to work across the distance between a major event in Habersaat’s life and the limited impressions retained by people who had been living an otherwise normal school routine. His work therefore tests not just where witnesses can be found, but what the passage of years has left them able to say.

Leads recovered through persistence

One of Gordon’s reports is a useful account of how imperfect interviews can still yield specific leads. A former student, Lise W., who lived in Frederikshavn and had become a high-school teacher, recalled that the group had met a man during a trip to Østerlars Church. He boasted that he could bend spoons, laughed when the students did not believe him, and called himself Uri Geller the Second. Gordon brings the story back to Department Q with evident excitement. Carl explains the reference: Uri Geller had become known in the 1970s for bending spoons through the power of thought and demonstrating other tricks in the media.

Lise’s recollection points toward the man Alberte had dated, though she cannot establish every part of the identification. She had also taken photographs on the church trip and promised to look for them. The photographs might provide a visual record of the meeting, while the spoon-bending story supplies a distinctive detail by which the man could be recognized. Gordon’s discovery does not solve the case, but it turns a former student’s scattered memory into two concrete avenues for follow-up.

Another breakthrough emerges only after sustained telephone work. Gordon looks exhausted when he eventually tells Carl that he has made forty-six calls. He has reached one woman, Karen Knudsen Ærenspris, who knew the man the investigators are seeking and can be contacted for an interview. Gordon explains that she and the man once lived together in a commune in Hellerup. The group practiced a shared economy, wore shared clothes, and ate what Gordon understands as micro-macro food; its members all took Ærenspris as a surname. The commune had disbanded fifteen or sixteen years earlier, and Karen was apparently the only one who kept the name in the long term. That information connects the elusive man to a past community and gives the investigation a witness with direct knowledge of him.

Persistence, embarrassment, and change

Gordon’s reports do not arrive with the composure of a seasoned field investigator. On May 7, 2014, he describes the former-student search as a ridiculous problem: people forget, mix up schools, move, and sometimes cannot communicate with him in English. His complaint reflects real investigative limits, but the narrative also makes his discouragement part of his characterization. He hunches himself up to display his suffering, and later appears so tired that his long legs seem close to giving way. After the forty-six calls, he looks around as though he expects sympathy for having worked hard to obtain only a crumb of information.

That weariness coexists with flashes of success. Gordon emerges from Assad’s broom cupboard beaming and announces that the man could bend spoons, treating the lead like a theatrical revelation. His excitement is striking precisely because the evidence remains incomplete: the witness remembers the boast and the nickname, but not yet enough to close the distance between the stranger at the church and the man Alberte knew. Gordon’s contribution lies in carrying such partial clues back to the team, where they can be tested against the wider investigation.

By May 13, Gordon has also changed in a different, more personal way. When Carl sees his battered face and asks whether he has had an accident on his bicycle, Gordon explains that he has been in a fight. Rose asks what happened, and Gordon says he punched a man in the nose because the man had been insulting his department and his boss. Carl and Rose respond with amused approval; Carl concludes that Gordon has entered the world of men. The moment does not turn Gordon into a hard-edged detective, but it shows him no longer merely absorbing the team’s teasing or recoiling from difficult assignments. His loyalty to Department Q has become something he is prepared to defend physically.

Narrative function

Gordon’s part in the investigation joins clerical labor to the uncertain work of memory. The documents he organizes and the names he pursues are not cleanly arranged evidence: former students have moved on, forgotten, or retained only fragments. Yet those fragments—the meeting at Østerlars Church, the spoon-bending boast, the commune in Hellerup—give the detectives new ways to approach the man at the center of Alberte’s past. Gordon makes the slow accumulation of leads visible, including its repetition, frustration, and occasional sudden reward.

His comic self-consciousness also gives that labor a human scale. The book places the exhaustion of forty-six calls beside the exhilaration of a recovered detail, and a battered face beside Gordon’s willingness to stand up for his colleagues. He is neither presented as an infallible sleuth nor reduced to a joke: his work is difficult, his findings are provisional, and his commitment becomes clearer as the investigation proceeds. In a case shaped by what people remember and what they failed to say, Gordon’s patience in asking again helps turn a scattered past into something Department Q can investigate.