Department Q takes up Alberte’s cold case

Department Q takes up Alberte’s cold case after Bornholm police sergeant Christian Habersaat’s suicide transforms an appeal Carl Mørck had brushed aside into a demand he can no longer ignore. The investigation begins with two linked failures: Habersaat could not bring his long-running case to a conclusion, and Carl initially refused to hear him out. In time, Carl comes to believe that Habersaat anticipated this very outcome and made his own death a means of transferring the case to others.

The appeal Carl rejects

Habersaat first contacts Carl while serving with the Bornholm Police in Rønne, on the eve of his retirement. He refers to Carl’s recent casework, including a complicated circus case in which the culprit died by suicide before trial, and explains that his own experience on the island has given him knowledge of its central and eastern districts. His call is not simply a compliment or a farewell. He is seeking help with a case, although Carl does not yet know what the case is.

Carl assumes that Habersaat wants Department Q to take on an investigation and cuts him off. The department already has too much work, Carl says in effect, and another floor should handle the request. Habersaat falls silent and ends the call. Carl reacts with irritation rather than concern, treating the caller’s abrupt departure as proof that he was not worth accommodating. That judgment makes the next contact more consequential: the department has already been offered the opportunity to listen, and Carl has chosen not to.

The message that reaches the office afterward is brief and stark. Habersaat writes that Department Q is his final hope and that he cannot continue. Rose recognizes the gravity of the note and urges Carl to call him. The appeal is no longer an abstract request to take on a case; it is a warning that the person asking may be near collapse. Even so, the significance of the message becomes clear only after the event that follows.

Habersaat’s death and the decision to go

Christian Habersaat attends his retirement farewell at the community hall in Listed. An hour after he arrives, and fifty minutes before the report reaches Carl, he releases the safety on his pistol and shoots himself in front of ten witnesses. The farewell gathering becomes the setting for a public death, witnessed not only by those present but, through the local police commissioner’s account, by the authorities who must now respond.

Rose informs Carl of the suicide and immediately starts arranging the journey to Bornholm. Carl objects to the idea of flying there, and tries to distance himself from the case by emphasizing how little he knows about the dead sergeant. Rose answers that the department must respond and tells him to book passage on the ferry from Ystad to Rønne, leaving at twelve thirty. She makes the obligation personal: Carl’s refusal to take Habersaat seriously helped bring them to this point. While she contacts the police commissioner, she sends Assad to prepare as well. What had been a call Carl could end by hanging up has become an investigation the three of them are going to conduct.

Taking over the investigation

On Bornholm, Carl acknowledges that he had spoken briefly with Habersaat the previous afternoon. At the time, he understood only that the sergeant wanted to involve him in a case, and admits that he had not been receptive. Now he asks to look into the circumstances and the investigation, expecting that their work need not disrupt the local police. His admission makes the transfer more than a practical response to a colleague’s death: it is also a recognition that he had been given a chance to help before the crisis and had rejected it.

The case’s unresolved center is the mystery of the girl in the tree, a question that Carl raises directly with John Birkedal. Department Q receives material from the local investigation and settles down to read it before asking further questions about Habersaat’s work and the events surrounding the case. Birkedal’s restrained reaction suggests that the visitors are free to examine the material, while Carl presses the uncomfortable possibility that the department may find something local investigators should have found long ago. The handover thus begins in an atmosphere of both cooperation and reproach: Department Q is taking responsibility for the case, but its presence also exposes how long the mystery has remained unsolved.

Suicide as an instruction to continue

As the investigation develops, Carl revisits Rose’s understanding of Habersaat’s motives. He accepts that the sergeant may have suspected a particular man for years without being able to find him, and may have grown exhausted by the failure to solve the case. On this reading, Habersaat’s suicide did not merely end his own involvement. It was also a deliberate way of ensuring that the investigation would continue after he could no longer carry it himself.

Carl consequently reinterprets the journey to Bornholm. He comes to believe that Habersaat expected Department Q to cross the water and take over, making his death the means by which he secured the attention his earlier request had failed to obtain. Assad gives the image a stark finality: they have no return ticket. The phrase captures how the assignment changes from an inconvenient call into an obligation with no easy retreat. Habersaat’s appeal, the unanswered message, and the public suicide form a single chain: refusal, loss, and then the compelled resumption of the case. His death does not solve the mystery of the girl in the tree; it ensures that Department Q will pursue it.