Bornholm is the central setting of the investigation into Alberte Goldschmid’s death, and more than a backdrop to the case: its roads determine what the collision could have looked and sounded like, while its communities and landmarks preserve the leads that Carl Mørck and Assad must follow. The island’s open countryside, scattered settlements, and layered history bring together the physical reconstruction of a fatal incident and the more uncertain pursuit of a man remembered through stories, attraction, and spiritual belief.

Landscape and First Impressions

When Carl Mørck and Assad arrive at Bornholm Folk High School, the setting answers Carl’s expectations of an island landscape while also marking his unfamiliarity with it. The school stands amid fields and forests, directly beside Ekkodalen Valley, a celebrated destination visited by schoolchildren from across Denmark on compulsory school camps. Carl has heard of the place but has never seen it: people from his part of the country went instead to Copenhagen, where a trip to Tivoli Gardens was the customary excursion. The contrast makes Bornholm feel not remote in any absolute sense, but outside Carl’s own habits and experience.

The school itself occupies a spacious, eclectic setting. A pennant moves above a large engraved boulder announcing the folk high school; beyond it, red-and-white buildings from different periods are distributed across the grounds among bushes, windbreaks, homemade totem poles, and a miniature coffee pavilion. The sequence of buildings and handmade features gives the institution a distinct presence within the island landscape. It is also a practical point of entry into the case: Rose searches interviews with former folk high school students and identifies one transcript that may lead to a useful appointment.

Roads and the Reconstruction of Alberte’s Death

The investigation turns from the school grounds to a side road near Aakirkeby. On Friday, May 2, 2014, Carl and Assad consult a map and work out the route the driver may have taken. Carl proposes checking the tree on Skørrebrovejen, near the highway; Assad asks whether they should approach by the back road so they can follow the suspected driver’s route. Their discussion is not merely logistical. The route is a way of testing what the landscape allowed a driver to see and what witnesses could have heard.

Driving up from the south, Carl accelerates around the bend by the farm where an elderly couple lived. The distance from that bend to the tree is about a mile and a quarter, with roughly six hundred metres to the first bend. The tires screech as the car takes the turn. In the otherwise isolated countryside, the sound makes the old couple’s house a potentially important point of reference: a noise like that could have carried to where they lived. The road’s emptiness, which might invite a driver to speed up, also makes a loud maneuver harder to dismiss as unnoticed.

The road is flat and exposed. From the end of it, where Alberte may have waited with her bicycle, she would have been able to see a car clearly for the final five or six hundred metres. That visibility becomes part of the investigators’ reconstruction, connecting the position of the bicycle to the approaching vehicle and to the question of whether the collision could have been accidental. Across the island, mapped sites—including the collision scene, the community hall in Listed, and the folk high school—form a provisional picture on Carl’s notice board. Yet the map’s apparent clarity produces further questions: Alberte had cycled out early to a side road some distance from the school, and the reason she was there remains uncertain.

Ølene, Memory, and the Search for Frank

Bornholm’s landscape also sends the investigation into the past. Carl considers visiting Ølene before going to a nursing home in Rønne, hoping to find someone who lived there when the hippies were present. He knows Christian Habersaat had already investigated the area, but doubts whether that work was sufficient. The enlarged photograph kept at Habersaat’s house has directed Carl’s attention toward the unidentified man, and Ølene offers a way to connect a face in a photograph with people who might remember him.

Inge Dalby’s account supplies one such memory. She says she met Frank Brennan in Rønne, though she already knew who he was from an earlier visit to Ølene with a friend. There, she had seen him walking shirtless at the hippie house. After meeting again in Rønne, she and Frank began an affair, which she kept from Kristoffer Dalby. She understood the relationship as something likely to end suddenly and regarded Kristoffer as someone from the island to fall back on. Her recollection makes Ølene more than a name in an old investigation: it is the place where her prior image of Frank formed, before their later relationship took shape.

Other testimony gives Bornholm’s reputation a different, more mystical register. People on the island have interpreted events and discoveries as signs connected with Frank. The blind woman Beate Vismut reportedly described him as having encountered a true light and being unable afterward to live without it. Such accounts do not establish what Frank did; they show how his presence was remembered and explained. The island’s local knowledge is therefore valuable but not self-verifying: investigators must distinguish what a witness saw, what others believed, and what the evidence can support.

Archaeological Traces and Competing Interpretations

Rose’s research links another Bornholm location to the case’s recurring language of signs. Investigating a reference to Knarhøj, she discovers that a maze west of Listed was built on a mound of that name in 2006. The gallery owner who made the maze chose the site because of the area’s history. Nearby lay Sorte Muld, a Bronze Age settlement where substantial finds included several thousand guldgubber: thin gold pieces embossed with figures and used as offerings. The owner had also found a sunstone, an object Rose says had no known precedent of that kind.

These discoveries give the island a tangible historical depth, but their narrative importance lies partly in how people interpret them. Archaeological finds, a modern maze, and a sunstone become part of the same search for significance. Carl and Assad hear that Bornholm residents have seen signs in different places, and the evidence about Frank is sometimes expressed through the language of light and spiritual recognition. The investigation must keep the material history distinct from the beliefs attached to it, even as both help explain why particular people and places remain memorable.

The Island as an Investigative Network

Bornholm’s importance emerges through connections rather than through a single landmark. A road near Aakirkeby offers measurable distances, sound, and sightlines; the school supplies interviews; Ølene preserves memories of the hippie community; Rønne links Inge’s personal history with Frank; and the area west of Listed joins archaeological discoveries to more recent interpretations. Carl’s notice board gathers these places beside photographs, maps, and people, making the investigation look at once compact and difficult to resolve.

The island also serves as a reference point beyond its own shores. When Carl and Assad later visit the Nature Absorption Academy on Öland, they recognize a timber circle resembling structures they had seen in pictures from Bornholm. The comparison makes Bornholm part of a wider network of spiritual sites without making the academy itself an island location. In the case’s larger pattern, Bornholm is where the investigation begins to connect Alberte’s last journey with the people, histories, and ideas that may explain why she went there—and why the apparent simplicity of a country-road collision gives way to so many competing possibilities.