The Dinosaur Feather

upset. They finished the conversation.
    Søren parked in the basement under Bellahøj police station and was slow-clapped by his colleagues when he arrived for the morning briefing, five minutes late. He summarised Bøje’s unofficial conclusion and saw how nausea coloured every face. Søren’s colleague reported on his visit to Helland’s widow and daughter the day before. This had, not surprisingly, been depressing. The daughter, Nanna, had been on her own and the officer had stayed with her while Mrs Helland rushed home. The girl had cried her heart out and her mother sat on the sofa hugging her for a long time before the officer had been able to ask them questions. A family friend was called to comfort the daughter. Mrs Helland insisted that her husband was in great shape. He was a cycle-racing enthusiast, a hobby he had enjoyed for years, and he also played squash and went running, but then Mrs Helland remembered that Helland’s father had died from a heart attack at an early age, and soon convinced herself that a similar fate had now robbed her of her husband. At this point, everyone looked at Søren, as though a collective decision had been made that he would be the one to go back to the villa in Herlev and break the news to the widow about Helland’s uninvited guests.
    No one touched the Danish pastries, quivering with yellow custard, on the table.
    At noon, Søren and Henrik arrived at the Serum Institute. It was yet another trip through a bewildering maze of clinical corridors and Søren gave up trying to find his bearings. Thewoman escorting them swept through the building with familiar ease, pressed buttons, turned corners, opened doors and led them, at last, to a light and pleasant laboratory. A woman rose from one of the microscopes, smiled and introduced herself as Dr Bjerregaard. She offered them a seat in a low suite at the centre of the room.
    ‘I’ve looked at the samples,’ she said, once they had sat down. ‘And there’s no doubt that the parasite is an advanced cystic stage of the pork tapeworm,
Taenia solium
. It takes between seven to nine weeks for a viable cysticercus to grow and, in my opinion, the patient was infected three to four months ago, at the most.’ She looked briefly at the two police officers.
    ‘
Taenia solium
is a member of the phylum
Platyhelminthes
, or as they’re more commonly known, flatworms. In its adult stage,
Taenia solium
is a parasite in humans where it feeds on intestinal fluid. Inside the intestines, it deposits proglottids, as they are called, which leave their host through faeces. Each proglottid contains approximately forty thousand fertilised eggs. From human faeces, the eggs access the secondary host, also known as an intermediate host, which, in the case of
Taenia solium
, are pigs. Pigs acting as intermediate hosts, by the way, are the primary reason why
Taenia solium
cysticercosis is mainly found in countries where animals and humans are in close contact, for example, in households in developing countries where people defecate in areas accessible to pigs. We know of hardly any cases in the West, where animals and humans live separately, nor in Muslim or Jewish areas, where pork isn’t consumed.’
    Again she looked briefly from Søren to Henrik, and didn’t appear to have much faith in their ability to keep up withher. She seemed to be contemplating something, then she rose and conjured up a whiteboard, which descended silently from the ceiling. She grabbed a felt pen and accompanied her explanation with simple drawings.
    ‘Inside the pig, the egg hatches and the bloodstream transports the larva until it attaches itself to muscle tissue, nervous tissue or subcutaneous connective tissue, where it develops into a cysticercus, a dormant cyst, whose further development isn’t triggered until the pig is eaten – by humans, for example.’ Her hands flew across the board. ‘Inside the human stomach, the cysticercus wakes up from hibernation, attaches itself to the intestines where it grows into a tapeworm, thus completing its life cycle.’
    Søren felt nauseous. He stared at his notepad, where he had scribbled down a few words. He was about to say something, but Dr Bjerregaard beat him to it. She put the cap back on her pen.
    ‘A tapeworm is harmless and won’t necessarily cause its host to fall ill,’ she said. ‘As a result, you can host even very long tapeworms for a long period of time without knowing that you’re infected. In the