The Dinosaur Feather

mind to become a policeman.
    Søren quickly became the family’s official detective, charged with finding lost items such as reading glasses, user manuals and tax returns. He asked numerous questions, and nine times out of ten he would locate the missing object. Knud’s reading glasses lay on top of his shoes in the hall where he had bent down to scratch his ankle, the user manual for the fizzy drinks maker was in the boot of the car, on top of a box of telephone directories for recycling, and the tax return was found in the ashes in the fireplace because Elvira, in a moment’s distraction, had scrunched it up and thrown it there.
    ‘How do you do it?’ Vibe asked one evening when Søren, after a most unusual interrogation, reached the conclusion that her calculator had accidentally ended up in the bin in between some old magazines. He even offered to go downstairs to check – there was a chance that the bins might not have been collected yet. Five minutes later, he presented Vibe with her calculator.
    ‘I knit backwards,’ Søren began. Vibe waited for him to continue.
    ‘When you solve a mystery,’ Søren explained, ‘you should never accept the first and most obvious explanation which presents itself. If you do that, it’s just guessing. You’ll automatically assume that the man with blood on his hands is the murderer and the woman with the gambling debt is the fraudster. Sometimes that’s the way it is, but not always. When you knit backwards, you don’t guess.’
    Vibe nodded.
    In December 2003 Vibe attended a course in Barcelona with her business partner, and Søren was home alone. While she was gone, he caught himself enjoying the solitude. Vibe had started to look at him with deeply wounded eyes and Søren had felt guilty for weeks. The whole point was that he did
not
want to betray her. In her absence he went to work, sorted out old photographs, watched
The Usual Suspects
, which held no interest for Vibe, and sat on the lavatory reading
Calvin and Hobbes
. On the Friday he played squash with his friend and colleague, Henrik.
    At first glance, Henrik was the ultimate cliché. He pumped iron, sported a ridiculous number of tattoos (including aprohibited one on his neck, which had nearly cost him entry to the police academy) and his hair was never more than a few millimetres long. A small, aggressive moustache grew on his upper lip; Søren thought it looked ridiculous. While still a recruit, Henrik had married Jeanette and they had two daughters in quick succession. The girls were older now, teenagers, and Henrik was for ever moaning how there was no room for him in their flat because of all their girly stuff, clothes, shoes and handbags, and when they go to school, he ranted, they look like bloody hookers, the sort we keep arresting in Vesterbro, and Jeanette just tells me to shut it, it’s the fashion, she says, what’s that all about? And Jeanette had started going to yoga all the time and he wasn’t getting any, what the hell was that all about, no, he missed the good old days, when he was single, and so on and so forth. His bark was infinitely worse than his bite. Søren knew perfectly well that Henrik loved his three girls and would go through hell and high water for them.
    Søren hadn’t mentioned to Henrik that he and Vibe were going through a rough patch and whenever Henrik tried to pry with his
what’s up, you getting any these days?
he deflected him. His private life was nobody’s business. Nor had he told Henrik he was home alone, but when they were cooling off in the changing room after their squash game, Søren blurted out that Vibe had gone to Barcelona. He could have kicked himself. Henrik lit up like a Christmas tree; the two of them were going to hit the town. He called Jeanette from the changing room and Søren could hear an instant row erupt – something to do with their younger daughter – and quietly hoped this would lead to their night out being cancelled.But Henrik stood his ground. Bitch, he said, as he hung up, she can go to her power yoga some other fucking time. Time for them to have some beers.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Søren said, pulling his jumper over his head. ‘I was just going to get a pizza and watch a DVD at home. I’m bushed.’
    ‘You’re a boring old fart, that’s what you are,’ Henrik scoffed.
    Søren said nothing.
    They found a small bar in Vesterbro and got drunk. Henrik grew increasingly raucous, and Søren was desperate to leave when