“I’ll take the door-to-door,” he volunteered.
“Excellent,” Jeppe said. “You’ll report directly to Detective Larsen. Thank you.”
The bald Morten or Martin nodded again.
“We need to examine the bike from the surveillance footage. Can we identify the make? Who sells them? Was a bike like that stolen in the last couple of months? And so on.”
Larsen volunteered, brash and ambitious as always. Jeppe nodded to him and then looked at the superintendent in the front row.
“Supe, I’m assuming that you’ll brief the press?”
Her somber eyes met his. Supe, as she was called, had been threatening to retire for a long time, but as far as Jeppe could tell, she was perkier and sharper than ever. And he predicted that she would keep it up for a few more years. Now she gave him a youthful thumbs-up. She found press conferences only mildly disruptive, whereas to Jeppe they were almost insurmountable obstacles.
He smiled at her gratefully.
“Any questions?” he asked, looking around the room. His eyes rested on Detective Falck, who stared down at the table in front of him, as if something was expected of him that he wasn’t able to do. He had just returned from a relatively long disability leave due to stress and did not seem entirely back in fighting form. Falck was an old-timer, whose mustache competed with his eyebrows for the prize for bushiest and grayest. His potbelly was usually kept in check by a pair of colorful suspenders, and his general work tempo varied between moderate and snail’s pace.
Jeppe slapped his hand on the table and declared, “Let’s get to it!”
Everyone got up and moved toward the door, holding notepads and empty coffee cups, while they milled around chatting and arranging details. Sara Saidani and Thomas Larsen left the room together, Larsen with his hand casually on her shoulder. Jeppe ran his tongue over a blister he had on the inside of his cheek and bit down on it. A minute later only he and the superintendent were left in the meeting room.
She regarded him soberly and said, “Kørner, I need you to tell me that you can run this investigation, that you’re up to it.”
“What do you mean? You’re the one who picked me.”
“I’m not questioning your competence,” the superintendent said, raising her eyebrows and with them her heavy eyelids.
“So why are you asking?”
“Calm down! I just have a bad feeling about this case. It’s not going to be an easy one to handle or solve, and you don’t have your partner.…”
So that was her concern! That he wasn’t up to leading a big investigation without Anette Werner at his side. Jeppe smiled at her reassuringly.
“I wonder if this case won’t be solved faster now that I don’t have Werner slowing me down.”
The superintendent patted him on the shoulder and left the room. She did not look convinced.
CHAPTER 2
“Who are you talking to, Isak?”
The young patient raised a pale face from his book and stared in surprise.
“No one,” Isak answered. “Was I talking out loud?”
“Yes, you were.” Social worker Simon Hartvig smiled reassuringly but without seeking eye contact.
It was a matter of spotting the psychotic symptoms in time so they didn’t have a chance to develop. Isak seemed calm right now.
“It’s fine,” Simon said. “Just keep reading.”
The common room walls were painted orange and decorated with movie posters—Grease, Pretty Woman, Dumb and Dumber. Two other patients were playing foosball, and a group in the corner was making friendship-bracelet key chains, kept busy by his enthusiastic colleague Ursula. The rain drummed softly on the roof, a scent of freshly baked bread hung in the air, and soon there would be phone time until lunch. This place was actually really nice. The enhanced Inpatient Ward U8 housed some of the country’s most severely mentally ill pediatric patients, children and teenagers with conditions like paranoid schizophrenia. But on a calm Monday morning like the present, one might easily believe that this was just a regular, old boarding school. A boarding school with guitar lessons and a twenty-four-hour staff, crafts, home cooking, and locks on the windows.
Simon sat back in his chair and peered out the window at the hospital grounds. The copper beech just outside dripped discouragingly, making the yard outside the Bispebjerg Hospital’s pediatric psychiatry center look more like a cemetery than a place for children to play. It angered him that the kids didn’t have a more inspiring outdoor space, a natural area that could be utilized and serve as a backdrop for edifying experiences. He had been lobbying to set up a kitchen garden on the grounds for a long time. All modern research showed a clear correlation between outdoor activity, a healthy diet, and mental well-being, so nothing could be more appropriate than a kitchen garden at a psychiatric hospital, could it?
The bureaucracy was unbearably slow, though, and his previous proposals to get the cafeteria to go organic and to convert a shuttered section of the hospital into a rec center had both failed. But this time things looked more hopeful.
Along with his colleague Gorm, he had set up a committee six months earlier that wrote letters to the city council and collected signatures from employees and family members. So far they had managed to raise 150,000 kroner for the kitchen-garden project. Unfortunately the plans were on hold with the city’s Technical and Environmental Administration, which believed that the current hospital grounds should be preserved, possibly even protected as a conservation area. But the committee wasn’t planning on giving up. Simon would see to that.
He scanned the common room to make sure everyone was calm and engaged. The key-chain group had abandoned their embroidery floss and were now playing air hockey instead. Isak was still reading with his legs pulled up underneath him.
Sometimes working in health care felt like renovating a fixer-upper with modeling clay. Often he went home from his shift feeling like his work as a social worker didn’t make any difference, that he wasn’t doing enough. Even though he was young and newly qualified, he already felt the impotence crawling under his skin. The system didn’t encourage individuals to take initiative or foster a can-do attitude. But it was impossible for him to accept that conditions weren’t better for the patients and that the beautiful old hospital’s space wasn’t being put to good enough use. More so because he loved the place and appreciated the old buildings that had been built to outlive those who had built them. They reminded him of a bygone era, where solutions lasted and were more than just stopgap measures.
Society had moved on. Now washing machines broke two months after their warranties ended, buildings were made of drywall instead of plaster, and disorders were something managed with painkillers without considering what had caused the pain to begin with.
It was all just symptomatic treatment. Idleness had won; the system was broken.
He got up to go do his rounds.
“Hey, who’s winning?” he asked. “You’re not cheating, are you, Isolde? I’m keeping an eye on you!”
He tweaked Isolde’s arm and walked on with a laugh. One of the upsides of being young was that the patients could relate to him better than to many of his older colleagues. He cleaned up the embroidery floss, even though they were supposed to do it themselves, and found himself next to Isak’s chair again.