The Dinosaur Feather

obvious.
    ‘Sten,’ he exclaimed and looked utterly revolted. ‘Helland’s brain was teeming with parasites. No wonder he couldn’t type.’
    When Sten had left, Søren called Professor Moritzen again to insist on a meeting. She was still in her cottage, she protested. Søren checked his watch, asked her for the address and told her he would be there as quickly as the motorway traffic would allow him. Reluctantly, she agreed.
    Then he called Johannes Trøjborg. Søren’s intuition told him that the account given by the transparent Johannes was genuine. Still, he wanted Johannes to explain why he hadn’t mentioned his row with Helland. The telephone rang repeatedly, but no one answered.

     
    Søren found Professor Moritzen’s cottage, with great difficulty, in a holiday resort at Hald Beach. It was a small, well maintained cottage on a huge plot, like a building block on a football pitch. The cottage consisted of a single airy and sparse-furnished room, with a few Japanese-inspired objects placed directly on the floor. Hanne Moritzen served an almost white but surprisingly strong tea in Japanese beakers and offered Søren something he thought was chocolate, but which turned out to be a foul-tasting Japanese concoction. She laughed when she saw the look on his face.
    She’s not a happy woman, Søren thought instinctively, and felt sad. Anna Bella Nor wasn’t exactly a picture of happiness, either, but she had her rage, and rage, at least, sparked life. Hanne Moritzen had given up, and her defeat had left permanent traces in her dull silver eyes. However, she was articulate, precise and far more accommodating than Søren had expected after their telephone conversation. She was wearing soft clothes and her hair was loosely gathered in a band.
    Søren tried to explain the situation as best he could. He passed on Dr Bjerregaard’s best wishes, though she hadn’t asked him to. Hanne Moritzen went white as a sheet when Søren summarised the autopsy and mentioned the 2,600 cysticerci, and he noticed how her eyes flickered and her hands trembled slightly before she regained her composure. Søren asked to use the bathroom and when he came back, she had calmed down and gave, without prompting, her opinion on the matter. She was adamant that Professor Helland couldn’t have been infected at work accidentally.
    ‘He was a vertebrate morphologist,’ she said, as if thatexplained everything, and then she added: ‘He hasn’t been in contact with parasites in the course of his work since the obligatory introduction to parasitology at the start of his degree in the 1970s. It’s a highly specialised field, and Lars Helland went completely in the opposite direction. Parasitology and vertebrate morphology are about as far removed from each other as psychiatry and orthopaedic surgery.’
    In the next half hour Professor Moritzen confirmed all of Dr Bjerregaard’s hypotheses.
    ‘The last registered case of cysticercosis in Denmark was in 1997,’ she informed him. ‘The patient, a twenty-eight-year-old male, presented with violent skin symptoms after a lengthy stay in Mexico. We soon located nine cysticerci in his subcutaneous tissue and all were surgically removed. And do you know how he was infected? He got caught up between two gangs of boys hurling mud at each other and the mud hit his mouth. It sounds very unlikely, but it was the only explanation we could come up with. There are plenty of other parasites which are easy for people from Western Europe to pick up, parasites which infect you directly through your skin, through food and drinking water, from unhygienic toilets or sexual transmission. But an actual cysticercus infection is rare, if hygiene levels are generally high. If we’re talking about the tapeworm itself, well, of course, that’s another matter. Raw or undercooked meat is a constant source of infection, and the human penchant for raw meat is, for some inexplicable reason, considerable.’
    ‘So, in your opinion, a natural infection is unlikely?’
    ‘No,’ Professor Moritzen said. ‘A natural infection is the
only
explanation which is even vaguely possible, but it stillremains highly improbable. I just don’t buy that Helland had an accident in his lab.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because he had no contact with parasites,’ she said, emphatically. ‘There is no living material in his department.’
    ‘Might he have become infected during a visit to the Department of Parasitology?’
    ‘In