Carl Mørck’s hypnosis session with Albert Kazambra turns an uncomfortable, transactional visit into a breakthrough in the search for Frank Brennan. After the session leaves Carl feeling unexpectedly relieved, Kazambra recounts Frank’s earlier visits, describing a man who feigned trance, pursued hypnosis as a means of influence, and intended to build something far more ambitious than a small following. His account ends with a name, a location, and a leader: the Nature Absorption Academy, headquartered on Öland in Sweden and run by Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi.

The Visit and Its Price

Kazambra’s house in Tulstrup had recently been renovated and stood out as the flashiest in town. The setting suited his reputation for charging heavily. When he let Carl, Rose, and Assad into the corridor, he insisted that they come in one at a time. Carl clarified that the police had come to ask what Kazambra knew about Frank Brennan. Kazambra agreed to discuss Frank, but pointed out that he had already arranged with Rose not to work for free. Carl objected that the Danish police did not pay for information and gave Rose a reproachful look; the disagreement made the visit feel less like a straightforward police interview than a negotiation whose terms had been settled without him.

The session order sharpened that discomfort. Rose went first, followed by Carl, while Assad remained to be seen. Carl sat opposite the coughing Kazambra in a dim room lined with oak bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Their wary scrutiny and the quiet contest of whispers, growls, and stares left Carl ill at ease. He had more than twenty years in the police service, but that experience did not make the encounter comfortable. Then, in Carl’s account of the session, everything disappeared.

Carl’s Experience

Afterward, Carl waited with Rose in Kazambra’s lobby for Assad to emerge. He felt strangely relieved, as though a weight had been lifted. Kazambra cautioned that a reaction could follow and suggested they could discuss it later, but reassured him that they were on the right track. Carl would ordinarily have pressed to learn what had been done to him and what had been said during the session. At that moment, however, those questions seemed unimportant beside the good feeling that remained.

That response marks a change in the encounter’s immediate balance. Carl had arrived protesting the payment arrangement and watching Kazambra with professional suspicion; afterward, he did not insist on an account of the procedure. The text establishes his relief and his temporary lack of curiosity, but does not specify what occurred in the hypnosis beyond the sudden disappearance he experienced. The scene therefore keeps the session’s mechanics obscure while making its bodily and emotional aftermath clear.

Kazambra’s Account of Frank

Kazambra said that he had not been in contact with Frank for years, but remembered him distinctly from their meetings in the summer of 1998, a painful period following the death of Kazambra’s wife, Helene. Frank had made a frightening impression. According to Kazambra, he was the only person in the hypnotist’s long career whom he had been unable to hypnotize. The more disturbing discovery came later: Frank had not come to be rid of a burden, as clients commonly did, but to be filled up. By the second visit, Kazambra believed Frank was watching and learning the art without intending to use it only for good.

Kazambra suspected that Frank wanted hypnosis as an instrument for dominating the people around him. He described him as unusually capable of manipulating others and recalled a woman who followed him with the devotion of a puppy, apparently as though she too had been hypnotized. She spoke Swedish with a Finnish accent, was slender and sinewy, and had henna-dyed blonde hair. Kazambra remembered her as inwardly troubled and not at ease with herself. He supplied these identifying impressions but did not name her in the conversation.

The account also explains why Kazambra eventually ended their work. On Frank’s third visit, he refused to receive him again. By then, Kazambra was certain that Frank had been pretending to enter a trance during their sessions, and he had learned enough about Frank’s plans to find them alarming. Kazambra distinguished Frank from people who sought to gather a modest circle of followers: Frank spoke of the disintegration of the great religions and new paths for humanity, and appeared systematic, determined, and possessed of a much larger ambition. Kazambra emphasized that ending the sessions had been his decision. His apparent relief in recounting the history suggests that the disclosure also served as a confession of what he had witnessed and of his own part in it, though he had ultimately refused to continue.

The Academy Lead

Kazambra could not say that he had seen Frank since those encounters. He had, however, followed him from a distance for a time and learned that Frank had founded an academy in Sweden. He handed Carl a sheet of paper bearing a concise note in his neat handwriting: the Nature Absorption Academy, run by Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi, with its head office on Öland, Sweden.

The written lead transformed Kazambra’s recollection into something the investigation could pursue. Carl’s reaction was immediate: he thought he could have squeezed Kazambra, then judged the money spent that day to have been exceptionally well spent. The identification of the academy also made the name Atu newly significant to him. The scene thus joins two kinds of disclosure: Kazambra’s account explains the threat he had perceived in Frank years earlier, while the paper supplies the investigators with an institution, a Swedish island, and a named leader to follow.