The Dinosaur Feather

thunder up the stairs. Two uniformed police officers and an ambulance doctor arrived; the doctor disappeared immediately into Helland’s office and thirty seconds later another two police officers turned up. One of the officers entered Helland’s office and the other three started to ask questions. Professor Jørgensen and Professor Ewald talked over each other and Anna fixed her eyes on a button on the lino. The two professors disappeared down the corridor with one of the officers and Anna was still staring at the button until a warm spot on her head told her Johannes was looking at her.
    ‘Right, we had better have a chat,’ a police officer said to Anna and Johannes. They spoke for five minutes. Johannes repeated what he had already said, and Anne explained who she was and said she had seen Helland’s trousers through the gap in the door as she passed, that she had heard agitated voices coming from inside, and yes, it might just have been one agitated voice, and no, she hadn’t heard exactly whathad been said. Johannes kept on staring at her. Anna tentatively held out her hand to see if it was trembling. It was.
    The doctor emerged in the doorway and quietly briefed the two police officers, who nodded. One officer took Anna and Johannes a little further down the corridor, where he told them to sit down.
    ‘Please wait here. We’ll be a few minutes,’ he said and returned to Professor Helland’s door. Anna watched as the two officers cordoned off the entrance to Helland’s office and a section of the corridor with red and white police tape.
    More police officers arrived, uniform and plain clothes. Two of the plain-clothes officers put on thin white boiler suits and face masks and disappeared into Helland’s office. A tall man came down to Anna and Johannes and introduced himself as Superintendent Søren Marhauge. He had brown eyes, freckles and short hair, and he looked kindly into Anna’s eyes.
    At Anna’s suggestion they went to the small library, which lay between Professor Jørgensen’s and Helland’s laboratories. Søren Marhauge had a soft voice with a strange, slow drawl, as though he struggled to articulate his thoughts. Anna grew impatient. She thought he asked her the same question over and over, and when there was a knock on the door twenty minutes later, she had nicknamed him the World’s Most Irritating Detective. An officer poked his head around the door, whispered a message and the meeting was over. The World’s Most Irritating Detective disappeared down the corridor and Anna returned to her study. The corridor was teeming with police and she groaned inwardly. In two weeks exactly she would defend her dissertation which, at this very moment, lay in Professor Helland’s office, soaked in blood.

CHAPTER 3
     
    It was early Monday morning, 8 October. Søren was driving to Copenhagen, his car right behind a red Honda. He was Denmark’s youngest police superintendent, based at Copenhagen’s Police Department A, Station 3 in Bellahøj. It was well known that Søren had risen quickly through the ranks because he could ‘knit backwards’ as he called it. He possessed an extraordinary eye for the true nature of things, and many of the most spectacular conclusions reached in Department A had been reached by Søren. At the age of thirty he had been promoted to superintendent. That was seven years ago.
    Søren was in a rush so he overtook the Honda. He was late because he had stopped in Vangede to have breakfast with Vibe. Vibe and Søren were an item for seventeen years, but three years ago they split up. They had lived together in Nørrebro in Copenhagen, but Søren now lived in a house in Humlebæk, north of the city. Vibe had since married and lived with her husband in a house by Nymosen in the suburb of Vangede.
    When they were still a couple, Vibe and Søren had done everything together. Picked strawberries, gone inter-railing,travelled to India, shared student digs and opened a totally unnecessary joint bank account. They had even worn matching rings. In those seventeen years it had never once crossed Søren’s mind that Vibe might not be the right girl for him. Vibe was his girl. The end. They had met at a highschool disco, their teenage romance carried on into adulthood and no one ever questioned it, least of all Søren.
    Then one morning Vibe woke up wanting to have a baby. Having children wasn’t something they had ever really discussed and when Vibe first brought it up