Bjarke Habersaat's Infatuation with Frank Brennan

Bjarke Habersaat’s infatuation with Frank Brennan emerges as a hidden family history with fatal consequences. Bjarke’s love was rejected, but the evidence left behind—a carved likeness and a poem concealed among computer files—shows that Frank’s relationship with Alberte Goldschmid became, for Bjarke, a source of anger and a reason to blame Frank. Christian Habersaat’s final explanation joins that private wound to Alberte’s murder and acknowledges how long he had mistaken the object of his suspicion.

Evidence Hidden in an Object

A wooden figure brings Bjarke’s attachment into the investigation before its meaning is understood. When it falls from a Danish policeman’s pocket, Pirjo Abanshamash Dumuzi recognizes the likeness as Frank, the man who has just proposed to her. She wonders why the police possess it and imagines them using it to unsettle Frank with questions about the striking resemblance. To her, the figure looks like an instrument of Alberte’s influence: she believes Alberte carved it as a kind of voodoo doll to bind Frank in obligations from which he could not escape.

Pirjo’s certainty is revealing, but it is not the final account of the object. Frank remembers Bjarke helping him with excavations at Knarhøj, where Bjarke wanted to give him the figure and declared his love. Frank did not want it. He told Bjarke that they were leaving; Bjarke answered that everything was Alberte’s fault. Pirjo had interpreted the likeness as evidence of Alberte’s hold over Frank, whereas Frank’s recollection places it in Bjarke’s direct, rejected appeal. The object that seemed to confirm one woman’s supposed power instead exposes another person’s attachment.

Rejection and Resentment

Frank’s recollection gives the relationship its defining encounter. He describes Bjarke as a Boy Scout who was obsessed with him and whom he allowed to assist with the excavations. The gift made the attachment explicit. Frank’s refusal, followed by his announcement that he and Alberte were leaving, brought the private rejection together with a change in Bjarke’s family circumstances. Bjarke blamed Alberte, and Frank recalls breaking up with her and never seeing her again. The evidence does not present the episode as a sustained romance: it shows a declaration, a refusal, and the anger that followed.

That anger becomes more legible through a text recovered from Bjarke’s computer. The poem, titled To Frank, had been concealed among executable files in a 1995 Star Trek game, making it difficult to find. Its contents are described as expressing rejected love and immense anger: Bjarke resented Frank for bringing his world crashing down, for the damage Frank’s decisions had done to Bjarke’s family, and even for Frank’s existence. The poem turns what could have remained a private and unspoken fixation into evidence of how Bjarke understood his loss. Its placement among obscure game files also explains why the feeling remained undiscovered until the computer was examined thoroughly.

The Infatuation and Alberte’s Murder

The recovered poem changes the interpretation of Bjarke’s knowledge. Carl Mørck initially struggles to understand why Bjarke knew about Frank and Alberte but had not told his father. Rose’s account supplies the missing emotional connection: Bjarke was in love with the same man as his mother, and the discovery of that overlap helps explain why Frank became the focus of Bjarke’s hostility. The evidence therefore links his infatuation not just to a rejected gift, but to the family rupture he associated with Frank and Alberte.

Christian Habersaat’s writing makes the connection explicit while also revising the case’s history. He says that, after finding the poem, he understood that Bjarke had been in love with the same man as his wife and that Bjarke killed Alberte because he had been pushed aside for the young girl. Christian believes Bjarke wrote the poem sometime afterward, probably shortly before moving out. He calls the explanation clear and logical, but also heartbreaking. The timing remains his estimate; the identification of Bjarke as the killer is the conclusion he draws from the poem and the history it reveals.

Christian Habersaat’s Admission

The disclosure also exposes the cost of Christian’s long pursuit of the case. Rose asks whether he could have known that Bjarke had the snowplough, then offers her theory that Christian suspected his own son and directed suspicion toward the person he hated most: his wife’s lover. Christian’s final writing confirms that he had come to suspect Bjarke, though the excerpt does not settle every part of Rose’s theory. He admits that he had been determined to pin the crime on an innocent man while his son had committed it, and apologizes for that insistence.

Christian says he cannot bring himself to go after his own son and leaves Bjarke’s fate in the investigators’ hands. In that ending, the poem is more than a record of unreturned love: it is the clue that redirects the accusation from Frank to Bjarke and forces a father to name what he had resisted. The relationship remains defined by asymmetry—Bjarke’s declaration and Frank’s refusal—but its consequences reach beyond the two men, into Alberte’s death, the family’s collapse, and the investigation that Christian could not bring himself to resolve.