The Dinosaur Feather

no way Tybjerg is in LA.’
    ‘No,’ Søren said. ‘But that’s what he told his tenant. I wonder why?’
    They drove down Falkoner Allé in the direction of Vesterbro. Several times Søren prepared to say something, but Henrik leaned back against the headrest and looked like he was snoozing. Søren drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and manoeuvred the car effortlessly through the traffic. He felt totally isolated. They parked in Kongshøjgade and Henrik let Søren enter Johannes Trøjborg’s stairwell first. The stairs were worn in the middle; it had to be at least thirty years since they were last renovated. On each landing lay scrunchedup juice cartons, sweet wrappers, cans, and in one place a rubber strap that had once been pulled tightly around an addict’s arm. The light worked on the first floor, but from then up, all the bulbs had gone and the two men could barely see where they were going. It stank of urine.
    ‘Bloody hell,’ Henrik commented softly.
    ‘Yes, lovely place, isn’t it.’
    At last they reached Johannes’s front door. It was quiet. Suddenly Søren’s stomach lurched. Henrik stuck out his hand to ring the bell, but Søren grabbed his arm.
    ‘Look,’ he said, pointing. The door was closed, but not completely. A faint crack, almost invisible in the dark stairwell, had caught Søren’s eye.
    ‘I’ve a bad feeling about this,’ he said, taking a pencil from his breast pocket and pushing the door. It swung open. The silence was deadly.
    ‘We’re going in,’ Søren announced.
    The flat was, if possible, even darker than the stairwell. Søren and Henrik stopped inside a small hallway with a kitchen to the left and a living room to the right. They could see a window, closed curtains, a cast-iron sofa with deep cushions and fabric draped across it; in front of the window was a dining table with four chairs. Henrik went into the kitchen and turned on the light. The kitchen was cluttered and filthy. Empty soft drinks bottles, stale food in opened containers and a greasy grill, which had been removed from the oven but had never made it to the sink. It stank, and Henrik opened the door under the sink which brought an over-filled bin into view. Søren took two pairs of rubber gloves and two pairs of shoe protectors from his inside pocket and handed one set to Henrik. He could see where this was going; he had been a police officer for far too long.
    They checked the flat carefully and discovered Johannes in the bedroom. It was a grotesque scene. In an abstract painting of blood, Johannes was lying in his bed, his duvetcarefully tucked in, looking like he was asleep. The blood had come from a dark hole to the back of his head.
    ‘Christ, Johannes,’ Søren exclaimed. The two men were silent for a moment. The bedroom smelled stuffy.
    ‘The time is ten eighteen,’ Henrik said laconically, took his mobile and called for back-up. Soon they heard the sound of approaching sirens. Søren watched the body and, for once, he found it hard to suppress his feelings.
    ‘Johannes is my best friend,’ Anna had said.
    The rest of the morning was pure routine. Bøje, the Deputy Medical Examiner, and the team from Forensics arrived simultaneously. Bøje quickly established that Johannes had been dead somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours, which instantly filled Søren with guilt because it meant that Johannes had been alive while they were looking for him. Why the hell hadn’t he just answered his mobile! The bloody trail on the floor proved that Johannes had been killed in the living room, and Bøje asked the crime scene technicians to look for the murder weapon, a hard, pointy object. It took the chief technician three minutes to locate it.
    ‘Right there,’ he said, waving his colleagues closer. They focused on one of the four decorative orbs on the corners of the cast-iron sofa.
    ‘Blood, brain tissue and hair,’ the technician informed Søren, who was watching from the hallway to avoid trampling on potential evidence.
    Bøje glanced at the finial from where he was in the bedroom doorway and announced, ‘Looks about right,’ before resuming his work.
    Søren and Henrik left the flat and watched from the landing while the technicians identified evidence on the floor, the walls and on fabric. Flashlight exploded from their cameras, and Søren scratched his head. His job now was to carpet-bomb the immediate neighbourhood with door-to-door interviews. The coroner’s assistant