June's Suicide Leap from Lilleborg

June Habersaat’s suicide leap from Lilleborg comes immediately after she admits that she killed Alberte Goldschmid, overturning the assumption that Bjarke Habersaat was responsible. With police and an ambulance approaching, June asks what sentence awaits her, then runs to the opening in the wall and jumps from the cliff. Her death echoes Alberte’s: the two women’s falls are joined by the image of a body caught below, making the confession’s revelation inseparable from the old case’s violence.

Confession and the reversal of blame

Before the leap, June Habersaat describes Frank Brennan’s influence over her family and the damage she believes he caused. The conversation has already placed Bjarke Habersaat’s suicide within that history: June says he could no longer bear what had happened, especially after his father had given up. Assad counters that Bjarke killed Alberte out of jealousy, pointing to the car and snowplow as evidence. June rejects that accusation and identifies herself as Alberte’s killer.

The admission changes the meaning of the investigation’s physical evidence. The car and the snowplow had seemed to support a case against Bjarke; June insists that they do not identify the killer. Assad initially believes she is protecting her son, but June’s emphatic denial gives way to a long silence. She looks across the hill and the forest beyond the lake. Carl recognizes that the next question has to be carefully chosen, and tells June that he and Assad believe her and want her to tell everything from the beginning, in her own way.

June begins with her relationship with Frank. She says she fell in love with him and believed they would end up together; they met at the place where the investigators found her and made love in the grass. She contrasts Frank with her husband, Christian Habersaat, saying that Christian could not give her what Frank could. This account supplies the intimate history behind her earlier explanation of Frank’s influence, but it does not make the confession less stark: June says the person who killed Alberte was herself, not Bjarke.

The approaching sentence

As the sirens draw nearer, June asks whether a police car is coming as well. Carl assumes there will be one. Her next concern is what punishment she will receive. When she asks Assad directly how much time she might face, he estimates ten years to life and explains that a life sentence is usually fourteen years. June calculates that she would be seventy-six by then if she were still alive, and says she does not think she would have the will to live.

Carl tries to soften the estimate by pointing out that many people receive reductions for good behavior. But the practical details of the approaching arrest do not settle June’s fear: a sentence has become a future she can picture, measured in years and in an age she may reach. The sirens are now close to the parking lot. Carl expects June to leave in an ambulance under police escort, but that expected sequence is interrupted before it can begin.

June smiles to herself and recalls that Frank taught her to dream herself away to another place. She explains that this means no longer being happy where one is, and asks whether the detectives understand. They nod. The narration connects this recollection to the song on her mind, “River” (Joni Mitchell song). In the scene, the song’s association with escape meets the immediate reality of the wall and the cliff: June does not wait for transport or custody.

The leap from the wall

June stands abruptly, catching Carl and Assad off guard. She runs the four steps to the opening in the wall, jumps four steps down, and takes a large leap over the outer wall. Carl and Assad lunge after her and reach the outer wall together. The sequence is brief and decisive: the approaching sirens, the anticipated ambulance, and the conversation about a possible sentence are all overtaken by her movement.

Far below, they see June’s mutilated body. She has struck the cliff hard and was probably killed on impact before sliding over the last edge; she now hangs from a tree, head downward. The narration’s physical particulars refuse to make the leap abstract. June’s death is not merely an announced outcome: the detectives see its consequence below them, at the boundary where the wall gives way to the drop.

Alberte’s repeated image

The account explicitly compares June’s body to Alberte seventeen years earlier. That comparison links the newly confessed crime to the death that had remained unresolved: Alberte’s fall is no longer only the old case’s central image, but also the pattern through which June’s own ending is described. The resemblance does not erase the difference between the women or explain every circumstance of their deaths. It makes the repetition itself the closing fact, binding the confession and the suicide through a shared fatal image.

Carl and Assad remain at the wall for several minutes, following the flashing blue lights until they fade into the green trees. The response to June’s death is therefore presented alongside the departing emergency lights, rather than through a further explanation of her motives or an account of what happens in custody. Her leap prevents the arrest Carl had anticipated and leaves the investigators with both the solution to Alberte’s killing and the immediate sight of a second body. The case’s answer arrives, but the scene ends not with resolution in the ordinary legal sense: it ends with the old death recalled in the new one.