The Joni Mitchell call to June Habersaat

Hardy Henningsen’s call to June Habersaat turns a wheelchair, a phone, and an iPod into instruments of an investigation. By impersonating Frank, Hardy draws out June’s history with the missing man; her response links him to a seventeen-year absence, Bjarke’s suicide, and the identity of a “miracle man.” The call gives Department Q a substantial lead, but not proof that Frank is the same person connected to Alberte’s death.

Preparation and Performance

Five minutes after the preceding exchange, three men gathered around Hardy’s wheelchair, while Morten’s soup was left to wait. Hardy instructed Mika to dial June Habersaat’s number and checked that the iPod was ready. Mika placed the phone close to Hardy’s ear, June answered, and Mika started Joni Mitchell’s music. He then moved the phone toward Hardy’s mouth, allowing the music to accompany the conversation rather than letting Hardy simply announce himself.

The arrangement makes the call a small performance conducted under practical constraints. Hardy cannot handle the phone himself: Mika places it and adjusts its position, while Hardy supplies the voice and timing. The narration emphasizes his stillness—he sits without blinking, eyes unfocused—and presents his concentration as professional discipline. Although paralyzed, he resumes the role of a policeman at work, attending to tone, timing, and the need to sound anonymous. The contrast is central to the scene: his body limits his actions, but it does not prevent him from directing the deception.

Hardy begins with June’s name and lets the music continue behind him. The pause that follows does not make him abandon the attempt. When the conversation proceeds, he responds to what June says, including an expression of sympathy and a question about how she is. The call therefore depends on more than a recognizable voice or an opening line. Hardy has to sustain the assumed identity long enough for June to reveal what she knows and how she understands the caller.

June’s Recognition and the Information She Reveals

June identifies the caller as Frank before Hardy has supplied that name. Hardy later recounts that she asked whether it was him; he answered yes. Her response is not simply a welcome to a long-lost acquaintance. She remarks on the extraordinary way he has contacted her after seventeen years and says she had not imagined hearing from him again. The exchange establishes a long interruption in their contact, while leaving its cause unexplained in this scene.

June also brings Bjarke into the conversation. She asks whether Frank has heard that her son is dead and whether that is why he has called. Bjarke took his own life. Hardy says he did not know about her son, then asks how she is. These details show June treating the caller as someone with a past connection to her, yet someone who has been absent long enough not to know of a major event in her life. The disclosure makes the conversation personally charged as well as investigative: the assumed Frank is being confronted with both estrangement and bereavement.

Her next question shifts the exchange from personal history toward identification. June asks where Frank is; when Hardy turns the question back on her, she asks whether he is playing the miracle man. Hardy later tells Carl and Assad that he thinks he mishandled this moment, particularly when he asked what she thought he was called these days. He believes June was onto him—or may simply have wanted to stop talking to the man she thought was Frank. Her abrupt ending prevents the investigators from resolving which explanation is right.

The Call’s Investigative Consequences

After June hangs up, Hardy reports the conversation to Carl, who asks for everything that was said as precisely as possible and tells Assad to take notes. Hardy’s account gives the team several concrete points: the caller presented himself as Frank; June understood him to be Danish; and, in her account, he had not contacted her for years. The staged call has extracted information, but the information comes through an impersonation and through June’s interpretation of the caller. The distinction matters: her recognition is evidence of a connection, not independent confirmation of the caller’s actual identity.

Carl voices that uncertainty directly. He wonders whether June’s apparent recognition could be a coincidence, especially because she had also seemed to confuse Frank with the man associated with the VW Kombi when Carl questioned her. Assad is more certain. He says Frank fled the island after what happened to Alberte, identifies him as the person Christian Habersaat had been seeking, and connects him to both June and Alberte. Assad further alleges that the man had slept with both women and probably many others, echoing Kristoffer’s description of him as a Don Juan. These are Assad’s conclusions, not facts established by Hardy’s call alone.

A Lead, Not a Resolution

The scene’s result is deliberately divided between what the call confirms and what the investigators infer. June’s recognition, her reference to seventeen years, her news about Bjarke, and her question about the miracle man make Frank’s identity and history more sharply defined. Yet Hardy’s performance falters at the very point when June asks where the caller is and challenges his identity; she hangs up before he can clarify her meaning. Carl remains cautious, while Assad treats the exchange as confirmation that the Frank they seek is the man connected with Alberte.

That gap between revelation and proof gives the call its narrative force. A song and a single name open a channel into June’s past, but the channel closes as soon as the disguise becomes suspect. Hardy’s physical stillness and exacting control make the deception possible; the uncertainty in June’s response limits what it can establish. The call advances the search not by solving Frank’s identity outright, but by giving Department Q a set of connections—and a disagreement over how firmly those connections can be trusted.