May 1, 2014

May 1, 2014, gives the investigation a public, ordinary setting even as its questions lead back to Alberte’s death in 1997. On May Day, Carl and Assad work amid the signs of a town preparing for celebration; the contrast is not between a solved past and a settled present, but between everyday routines and a case whose witnesses, suspicions, and concealed relationships remain unsettled.

The Day’s Present-Tense Frame

The date is introduced as Thursday, May 1, 2014. At breakfast, Rose sits by a window overlooking the harbor, her attention turned out to sea. Assad tries to draw her into conversation, while Carl tells him to leave her in peace. The small domestic scene establishes the team’s strained, familiar rhythm: Rose is withdrawn, Assad probes, and Carl tries to manage both the conversation and the investigation.

Outside, May Day is taking shape in the square in front of the Brugsen supermarket. Assad watches a small group of demonstrators preparing their banners, one of which declares solidarity. In that ordinary civic scene, he raises the question of whether Bjarke Habersaat was gay. Carl frowns and asks what information has prompted it. The moment shows how the investigation moves between public life and private uncertainties: a May Day gathering supplies the backdrop, while an unanswered question about Bjarke redirects attention to the Habersaat family.

Later that day’s chapter returns to the aftermath of Christian Habersaat’s suicide. Carl and Assad visit Villy Kure, known as Uncle Sam, whose yellow half-timbered house stands two homes north of Habersaat’s. The setting’s idyllic view of fishing huts, harbor, and sea is shadowed by the recent death. Villy is away; Carl finds the hood of his four-wheel drive ice-cold. The practical explanation is tied to Bornholm’s vulnerable power connection: when a damaged undersea cable is being repaired, Villy goes out by boat to turn away vessels that might interfere with the work. Asked whether Habersaat confided in him about Alberte, Villy’s acquaintance is described as limited in recent years: they could play cards, but the case was not something he expected Habersaat to share.

The Earlier Date Behind the Case

The investigation’s present-day questions lead back to November 20, 1997, when the winter term at Bornholm Folk High School appeared entirely ordinary. About fifty students, aged eighteen and older, were taking classes in music, glasswork, painting, or pottery. According to Birkedal, they were mostly cheerful and got along well; the day brought no sense of danger. The apparent normality is sharpened by what the students did not yet know: Alberte, one of the school’s gentlest, prettiest, and most popular students, had been killed in a car accident that morning.

More than a day passed before Alberte was found, thrown high into a roadside tree and nearly impossible to see. Christian Habersaat, then a uniformed police officer from Nexø, happened to look up as his car passed. The discovery began the long connection between Habersaat and the case that would dominate his life. Set against May 1, 2014, the account makes the elapsed years tangible: what had been a normal school day became a death that the community remembered incompletely and Habersaat could not leave behind.

What Memory Adds—and Withholds

As the investigation develops, recollections from the school years complicate the first accounts. Inge Dalby remembers that Habersaat repeatedly asked about the man Alberte had been seeing. She had told police in Rønne, but Habersaat returned to the question on his rounds. Her memory of the name is fragmentary: Alberte had once said it sounded exotic, and Inge recalls only that it consisted of several parts, beginning with a shorter, biblical-sounding one. She also remembers that the man came from Copenhagen, not Bornholm or Jutland, and that he had a Volkswagen. When shown a photograph, she could confirm only that its color and shape seemed the same.

Inge’s account also unsettles the assumption that Habersaat’s repeated visits were neutral fact-finding. She says she had things she could have told him but did not, disliked him from the beginning, and felt he was trying to make the school community point to one of its own as Alberte’s killer. In her view, he returned again and again when the first round of questioning failed to produce that answer. Her testimony preserves both a concrete pattern of questioning and her own distrust of the officer, making memory a source of evidence as well as a record of suspicion.

A later disclosure supplies a more intimate history of Frank and Alberte. Inge recalls discovering that Frank was seeing Alberte while also involved with her. She followed him, noticed the pair exchanging small notes by a boulder outside the school, and recognized the parallel with the notes she and Frank had left where they met. She says she went to find him at the commune at Ølene; there he told her he loved Alberte and intended to take her back to Copenhagen. The boulder, passed repeatedly without significance by the investigators, becomes a material trace of a relationship that had been hidden in plain sight.

The Date as a Narrative Hinge

May 1, 2014, is not merely a calendar label for the team’s activity. Its May Day banners and breakfast conversation place the investigation among ordinary routines, while the return to the 1997 school day exposes how little that apparent normality revealed. Between those dates, witnesses have carried partial memories, withheld information, and personal grievances. Their accounts do not arrive as a single, uncontested version: Inge’s recollections of Habersaat, the unfamiliar name, the Volkswagen, and Frank’s notes each add a detail while preserving uncertainty.

The date therefore marks a present in which the past is being reopened rather than simply recalled. Carl’s visit to Villy asks whether Habersaat shared the case with a friend; Assad’s question about Bjarke turns toward another unresolved aspect of the family; and testimony about Alberte’s relationships brings the investigation closer to what the school’s cheerful November day concealed. May Day’s public gestures of solidarity stand beside a more difficult task: determining what the community knew, what it did not say, and how the old case continued to shape the living.