The two pistols from the Habersaat home

The two pistols from the Habersaat home are a pair of nearly identical firearms whose significance emerges only after one has been treated as an incidental detail of Christian Habersaat’s suicide. A report that the dead teacher at Bornholm Folk High School owned two matching pistols turns the apparent question of which gun Habersaat used into a trail: the weapon at his death was known, but its twin had vanished. That second pistol eventually appears in June Habersaat’s hands at a graveside, where she uses it to kill Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi. Its recovery connects two deaths and reveals that the missing weapon had not simply disappeared from the story.

Origin and disappearance

The pistols belonged to a teacher who had died at Bornholm Folk High School. Their history surfaces indirectly, when a policeman relays what a relative of the teacher reportedly said: the teacher had owned two completely similar pistols, and the one not used in Habersaat’s suicide had never been found among Habersaat’s possessions. The information is secondhand, but it supplies a specific lead that the earlier account had lacked: there was not merely a gun associated with Habersaat, but an unaccounted-for twin.

The school is also where the investigation into Alberte Goldschmid’s death began. On November 20, 1997, roughly fifty students were pursuing courses in music, glasswork, painting, or pottery, and the day initially seemed ordinary. Alberte was killed in a car accident that morning; more than a day passed before she was found in a roadside tree by Christian Habersaat. The pistols’ connection to a deceased teacher at the school places them within the same institutional history as the case that consumed Habersaat, even though the account does not identify the teacher or explain when the guns left the teacher’s possession.

The distinction between the two firearms first seems unimportant to Carl Mørck. In the immediate aftermath of Habersaat’s suicide, Carl considers it irrelevant whether Habersaat used one pistol or another: the investigators, in his view, had come to make Rose understand that Alberte’s case was not theirs to take up simply because Habersaat had wanted them to. Later, the report of a second, missing pistol changes the force of that distinction. What seemed like a minor question about the weapon at one death becomes a question of where its twin went.

The second pistol at the graveside

The missing weapon is identified during the funeral gathering for Bjarke Habersaat. June Habersaat pulls out a large-caliber pistol as Atu, also known as Frank, approaches the grave and calls her name. She fires what sounds like four or five shots. Atu collapses beside the grave, and the shooting is presented as a deliberate execution rather than an accidental discharge. Carl and Assad stop; Carl has not been armed for a long time, leaving them without an immediate way to intervene.

After the shots, June raises the pistol to her head. Assad anticipates that she may shoot herself, as her husband did, but the vicar rushes at the gun with his shovel. The blow strikes June’s hand and sends the pistol aside, interrupting the apparent attempt. She runs across a bench and over the stone wall surrounding the churchyard, while Carl tells Assad to pursue her and turns to find someone who can call the police. The weapon is thus part of a sequence that moves rapidly from murder to threatened suicide and escape; it is not secured until the immediate disorder has begun to break apart.

The vicar confirms that Atu is dead. Carl picks up the pistol and recognizes it as just like the one Habersaat used to shoot himself. The resemblance, combined with the earlier report that the teacher owned two similar pistols and that the second had gone missing, leads Carl to conclude that Habersaat had taken both. He further infers that June must somehow have taken one without her husband’s knowledge. The account gives no precise explanation of when or how she obtained it, so the route from Habersaat’s possession to June’s remains an inference rather than a fully reconstructed chain of custody.

What the pair reveals

The pistols’ narrative importance lies in the difference between possession and proof. Before the missing weapon is recovered, the existence of a matching pair is only reported through another person’s recollection. At the graveside, Carl can compare the recovered pistol directly with the one associated with Habersaat’s suicide and recognize the match. The physical object converts a remembered detail into a tangible connection between the two scenes, while Carl’s explanation of how June acquired it remains necessarily less certain than his identification of its type.

The pair also reverses the weight Carl initially assigns to the question. At first, he regards the choice of pistol at Habersaat’s suicide as immaterial to the department’s purpose. Once June uses the second gun to kill Atu, the difference between one pistol and its twin has immediate consequences: it helps explain how a weapon presumed missing could reappear in a murder. The guns connect Habersaat’s private history to the violence at Bjarke’s funeral, but they do not by themselves establish every step by which the second firearm passed between people.

The recovered pistol remains at the graveside after June escapes over the churchyard wall. Its recognition closes one narrow mystery—the identity of the weapon and its relation to the one used in Habersaat’s suicide—while leaving the means of June’s access unresolved. In that sense, the pair works both as evidence and as a measure of the investigation’s limits: one firearm makes the second legible, but resemblance and inference cannot supply the missing history of its transfer.