June Habersaat

June Habersaat’s story turns on the name she refuses, the family she believes Frank Brennan ruined, and the secret she has carried since Alberte Goldschmid’s death. First presented to Carl Mørck’s investigation as the estranged wife of Christian Habersaat, she is eventually revealed as Alberte’s killer. Her grief over Bjarke Habersaat, her decision to shoot Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi at the graveside, and her final confession bring the family’s buried history into the open only moments before she kills herself.

Identity and Family History

June has put her marriage so thoroughly behind her that she has discarded the Habersaat name along with other reminders of her husband. When Carl tries to reach her by telephone, she makes clear that Christian’s death has not made her willing to revisit their shared problems. She says he failed to choose his family during the years when she—and especially their son—needed him, and condemns his suicide as cowardly. She will not help the investigators learn about the passion that consumed his later life.

The separation is not simply a matter of names. At her home, the door bears the name Kofoed, and she insists that there is no Habersaat there anymore. When Rose tells her that Bjarke is dead, June’s composure gives way: she looks from one investigator to another, seems to grasp the news, and collapses. Carl then tells her directly that Bjarke died by suicide at about four o’clock. June recognizes the time as shortly after she had telephoned him to tell him his father was dead. The timing fixes her own last contact with her son to the moment of his death and gives her grief an immediate, personal association with the family’s earlier loss.

June’s account of Christian is shaped by resentment as well as bereavement. She tells Rose that after Christian found Alberte’s body, he became obsessed with the case and ceased, in her view, to exist in the family’s world. She describes him as having become loathsome, spiteful, and creepy. Yet when she challenges Assad over what he understands about her dreams and her effort to make them real, her certainty falters; for a moment, she seems unable to answer the question herself.

The Investigation and the Name Frank

The investigators have reason to suspect that June may know the identity of the man they are seeking. Rose arranges for Assad to speak with June’s sister, Karin Kofoed, who lives in a nursing home, and suggests that she may have told June about Christian’s inquiries. Later, Carl and Assad regard June as a possible key to naming and describing their prime suspect. June, however, treats questions about her acquaintances as an invasion and a threat.

When Carl calls about a long-haired man who drove a light-blue Volkswagen Kombi and had lived in a commune at Ølene, June angrily challenges the investigators’ reliance on her sister, whom she calls demented. She says she has just lost her son and demands that they stop calling. Carl mentions a photograph, but June denies knowing whom he means and dismisses the material in Christian’s papers. Her denial protects her from questioning in the moment, but it does not erase the connection the investigators are pursuing.

A later attempt gets closer to the truth by approaching June through the name Frank. Hardy Henningsen, with Mika’s help, places a call while Joni Mitchell’s voice plays in the room. June answers as June Kofoed. When Hardy uses her first name, she takes him for Frank. She recalls that it is a strange way for him to contact her after seventeen years, refers to Bjarke’s death, and asks whether Frank is now playing the miracle man. Hardy breaks character clumsily, and she ends the call. Even so, the conversation establishes that she once knew a Danish man called Frank and had not heard from him for years. The song and the borrowed voice open a brief passage through the defenses that defeated Carl’s direct calls.

Grief, Recognition, and the Graveside Shooting

June’s knowledge of Frank becomes dangerous when the investigation’s attention reaches Bornholm. Birtemaja tells Pirjo that police have been asking about Atu, though they know him only as Frank, in connection with something that happened on the island. Pirjo is initially relieved, then realizes the inquiry concerns something worse than the case she fears. The exchange situates June’s past connection to Frank within a wider chain of concealed violence, though June’s own role remains hidden until the climax.

At Bjarke’s funeral, Carl Mørck and Assad arrive as the burial is ending and see Atu approaching the mourners. They hurry toward the graveside, mindful both that he might flee and that June may be in danger. June has gone to the edge of the grave. When Atu reaches her, she draws a pistol and fires what sounds like four or five shots. He collapses beside the grave. The shooting is deliberate and public: the man she once knew as Frank is killed in front of mourners, while Carl and Assad are close enough to witness the act but too far away to prevent it.

In the aftermath, June explains that seeing Frank—or Atu, as the investigators call him—at the funeral felt like a gift. Her stated intention had been to shoot herself. She says she and Bjarke had drifted too far apart, and that she blamed herself; after his death, guilt was all she had left. She connects that guilt to the influence Frank had over her family, saying he ruined her life and the lives of those closest to her. She had thought Bjarke could not bear the damage, particularly after his father gave up. Her explanation initially appears to make his suicide part of a family history shaped by Frank, but it also prepares the ground for a more consequential reversal.

Alberte’s Death and June’s Confession

Carl confronts June with the investigators’ belief that Bjarke killed Alberte, citing the car and the snowplow. June rejects that conclusion and says that she killed Alberte herself. Assad suspects she is protecting her son; June insists otherwise. Her confession changes the meaning of the earlier investigation and of the guilt she has just described: Bjarke was not the driver who killed Alberte, and the act that had haunted Christian and helped estrange the family belonged to June.

She recounts how she used Bjarke’s Toyota while he was at work in a workshop in Aakirkeby. He habitually left the car outside Karin’s home because he ate lunch there. To prevent the collision from leaving a mark on the car, June took the snowplow Bjarke had welded himself from the garage at Listed. She put it in her own car, drove to Jernbanegade, and attached it to the Toyota’s fender, where it was designed to fit.

June says Alberte went out early every morning, before the others were awake, whether or not there was anything to see. June knew that Alberte was due to meet Frank by the tree that morning. She describes approaching Alberte at the roadside in the snowplow, making it appear that she would drive around her. Alberte smiled at the vehicle’s inscription, although there was no snow and Christmas was still more than a month away. June then jerked the steering wheel and drove into her, striking Alberte first and her bicycle afterward. She says the hour was early and that nobody else saw what happened. The confession supplies both the practical preparation—the borrowed Toyota and fitted plow—and the deliberate maneuver that turned an apparent pass into a fatal collision.

Final Act and Narrative Role

As police sirens approach, June reflects that Frank taught her to imagine herself elsewhere, away from a place where she was unhappy. Her account of that escape from the present ends in action rather than explanation. She suddenly rises, runs four steps toward an opening in the wall, descends four steps, and leaps over the outer wall. Carl Mørck and Assad reach it as she falls. Her body is found far below, badly mutilated and caught in a tree; the account indicates that the impact probably killed her immediately.

June’s trajectory joins two deaths that the investigation had treated as separate questions. She is the hidden perpetrator of Alberte’s killing, while Bjarke’s suicide and the family’s estrangement form the immediate setting for her public killing of Atu and her own death. The contrast between her early denials and the precise, physical details of her confession gives the revelation its force: the nameplate that refuses the Habersaat past cannot erase the events binding June to it. Her final leap ends the possibility of further questioning, but not before she has overturned the investigators’ theory about who killed Alberte and exposed the family guilt beneath her hostility.