The Dinosaur Feather

row, and who explodes with rage when said lover dares to spill his brains all over the floor.’
    Søren pricked up his ears.
    ‘What do you mean by
lover
?’
    Bøje was quiet for a while.
    ‘You’re right, I’m not sure about that,’ he said, surprisingly timid all of a sudden. ‘The victim had a pierced penis, through the urethra and out on the underside of the head, which makes him a bit out of the ordinary, don’t you think? Ordinary men, real men, I mean men like us, don’t sport a Prince Albert, do we? The victim must have been queer.’
    Søren was tempted to agree with him.
    After his conversation with Bøje, Søren dealt with a few things in his office and ate his lunch behind a newspaper in the canteen, so no one would be tempted to join him. Just before two o’clock he drove to Charlottenlund to pay Mrs Kampe a visit.
    The Kampe family home looked like a mansion and when Søren drove up the poplar-lined avenue, he couldn’t help thinking of Johannes’s measly flat. Could this really be the place where little Johannes had grown up? It was a three-storey house with a broad two-winged staircase which led to the main entrance.
    It was as silent as the grave.
    Søren rang the doorbell. The door was opened by a woman who looked at him with Johannes’s intelligent eyes. She shook his hand and invited him in. There were ornaments and furniture, rugs and stuffed animal heads and hides from floor to ceiling in the three rooms Søren managed to see, before they reached a large drawing room where a fire was burning in the fireplace. Two royal blue sofas faced each other and Søren noticed a woollen blanket and a hastily folded newspaper on one of them. Janna Kampe gestured towards the other sofa and sat down opposite him. Søren began by telling her that the preliminary autopsy report didn’t suggest that there was a link between the murder of her son and the death of Professor Helland three days earlier. Mrs Kampe looked momentarily sceptical. Then he changed the conversation to the cause of Johannes’s death. His training had taught him to say as little as possible without being downright obstructive. Mrs Kampe looked away when her eyes welled up.
    ‘It’s very important for the investigation that we form as clear a picture of Johannes’s social life as possible. His circle. People he spent time with, his friends. That’s why I’m here.’
    Mrs Kampe looked at him for a long time, before she said, ‘I wish I could help you, but I can’t. I didn’t know Johannes verywell. This Christmas, it’ll be two years since we last saw each other. I’ve no idea who his friends are. Or that’s to say . . .’ She got up and returned with a scrapbook. Søren watched her face. Maintain the façade, it told him, keeping up appearances matters more than anything. She handed him the scrapbook.
    ‘I know a little. I saved some newspaper cuttings.’
    Søren opened the book. The pages were covered with various items featuring Johannes. Søren studied a picture of a beaming Johannes who had just got a distinction for his viva. He was holding several bouquets and, as far as Søren could see, the article was from the university’s newsletter. In another piece, Johannes was one in a crowd and Søren read about a seminar in the caption; a third article was about the communication of science and had been published in the journal,
Dagens Medicin
. Here, Johannes had been photographed with his colleagues from the Department of Cell Biology and Comparative Zoology and Søren was startled when he recognised Anna. She looked straight into the camera. Johannes was standing next to her, smiling gently, and behind them was Lars Helland, distracted and looking at something outside the photo. Søren carried on. There were roughly forty articles in the scrapbook, cut out and filed like prized stamps.
    ‘May I ask why your relationship was so strained?’ he said. Mrs Kampe looked at him for a long time.
    ‘I married into all of this,’ she said, gesturing towards the elegant drawing room. ‘My late husband, Jørgen, wasn’t the children’s real father. Their father died when they were very young. My daughter wasn’t even a year old and Johannes barely four. We became financially secure for the rest of our lives,’ she said, not looking happy at all.
    ‘My children have never really appreciated their good fortune,’ she continued. ‘Of course, my daughter could be excused, but Johannes . . . Johannes has always