The Dinosaur Feather (21 page)

“What about them?” Anna said.

“They were filled with hate.”

Anna sighed.

“So you’re saying Freeman is using the bird symposium as his excuse to go to Denmark and murder Lars Helland?”

“Yes.”

“And that you’ll be next?”

“Yes.” Tybjerg swallowed a second time.

“I hope you realize just how insane that sounds.”

Tybjerg’s face shut down and Anna instantly regretted her words.

“And what about me?” Anna forced Dr. Tybjerg to look her in the eye.

“I don’t know,” he whispered. “He must have found out we’re about to deal him the fatal blow. I don’t know if he’s made the link to you.” Tybjerg gave Anna a wretched look. “But I think you need to be careful.”

“You’re wrong,” Anna said, lightly.

“Possibly, but I’m not taking any chances.”

“But you’re wrong.”

Tybjerg focused on the darkness. He was in a world of his own.

“Helland died because his body was riddled with parasites,” Anna said and waited for his reaction. Tybjerg continued to stare into space until, slowly, he turned to her.

“I don’t understand.”

“His tissue was full of
Taenia solium
cysticerci. Thousands of them; several were found in his brain and that’s why his heart failed. The police are currently trying to establish whether the infection was the result of a crime. But whether or not it was deliberate, it couldn’t have been Freeman. The infection had reached an advanced stage. The cysticerci were three to four months old. Big ones.” Anna straightened her back. “So unless you think Freeman came here in the summer to infect Helland, then it couldn’t have been him.”

Tybjerg looked confused.

“I know this from Professor Moritzen and Superintendent Søren Marhauge. By the way, Marhauge is looking for you,” she added.

“Leave now,” Tybjerg suddenly urged her.

“Dr. Tybjerg, my dissertation defense is in twelve days, even if we have to hold it down here! I
have
to do it. Did the office forward my dissertation to you? I handed in three copies last Friday. Have they given you one?”

Tybjerg nodded.

“Have you read it?”

“You need to go now,” Tybjerg said.

“Yes, I do,” Anna said, but she waited. “Perhaps we could leave together?” she suggested.

“No, I’ve a few things to do,” he mumbled. “Just go without me.”

Anna shrugged.

“Okay, bye,” she said. She started walking down the aisle, turned around and said, “See you, Dr. Tybjerg.”

Tybjerg didn’t reply, but turned his back to her. Anna pretended to leave, but slipped back inside and closed the door. She stood very still. Her sneakers were still on the floor where she had left them. She could hear Tybjerg mutter to himself. Anna tiptoed back to the light. Rather than retrace her original route, she walked two aisles further along. Then she peeked around the corner. Tybjerg had opened one of the cabinets and was struggling to pull something out. It was a thin mattress, which he rolled out on the floor. Then he undressed, took out a sleeping bag, climbed into it, and made himself comfortable on the mattress. He started reading a journal and munching an apple. Anna watched him for a little while, then she slipped silently out of the collection and started her run home.

It was 10:15 p.m. when she came down Jagtvejen, and though her speed was good, she was cold in her running clothes. She would defend her dissertation in less than two weeks, she had yet to prepare the one-hour lecture that would precede it, and she still had plenty of revision to do if she was to have a hope of answering the questions that would follow. When she had met with Dr. Tybjerg, she had intended to tell the police where he was the next day. Smoke him out, force him to examine her. Now she was having second thoughts. Tybjerg was clearly terrified and beyond rational argument. What if he had a breakdown? She had already lost one supervisor, and the last thing she needed was for Tybjerg to be out of action. She sped up as if she could run off her frustration.

Anna let herself into the communal stairwell and heard a door open upstairs. The timed light went out and Anna felt a pang of guilt. A run shouldn’t last nearly two hours, not even with the bogus excuse of picking up a book. She reached out to turn on the light, but it came on before she touched the switch. She leaned forward and looked up the stairwell. A cold, defensive shiver ran through her.

Lene’s face appeared in the gap between the banisters, looking down.

“Any problems?” Anna said, shamefaced, taking several steps at a time. Her downstairs neighbor was holding the baby monitor in one hand and Anna’s key in the other.

“Who was that?” Lene asked. The light went out and Anna turned it on again.

“Who?” Anna was confused.

“That guy.”

Anna looked perplexed.

“Didn’t you pass a guy on his way down? He’s just left.”

Anna squinted.

“I didn’t see anyone. I’ve been out running.” Anna was still confused.

“There was a guy here just now,” Lene persisted. “The baby monitor bleeped, and I went upstairs to check that everything was okay. He was sitting on the stairs by your landing. He was waiting for you, he said, and that was fine by me. I said you would be back shortly. Lily was sleeping when I went inside, so I don’t know what set off the monitor. I put her comforter back and was going to call you to find out when you were coming back because we wanted to go to bed. I’d left your front door open, but when I was about to leave, the guy had made himself comfortable on your sofa, and I wasn’t happy about that. I tried calling you to find out if it was okay.”

Anna fished out her cell from her running jacket. Three missed calls.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was on silent.”

“Because I couldn’t get hold of you, I asked him to wait outside. I explained you had gone running and he would just have to wait on the landing. I’ve never seen him before; I couldn’t just leave him in your apartment when you hadn’t mentioned anything about visitors, could I?”

Anna shook her head.

“I wasn’t expecting anyone,” she managed to say. She felt cold all over.

“But you must have seen him,” Lene insisted. “He only just left.”

“I didn’t see anyone,” Anna said. “Could it have been Johannes, my colleague from the Institute of Biology? Did he have red hair?”

“He wore a cap. And a long coat,” Lene said. “I think he removed his cap when he sat down in your living room, but I don’t know if his hair was red. More brown, I think. I’m not sure.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Anna said. “I used my key to let myself in downstairs and then I walked up. No one came down. I swear.”

Lene looked tired and ran her fingers through her hair.

“Weird,” she mumbled. “He raced down the stairs only a minute ago. I’d closed my door, thinking how odd it was for someone to visit you this late. I wondered if I should fetch Otto, and then I heard him leave in a hurry. As if he had changed his mind and decided not to wait for you. I went back out on the landing, I saw his hand glide down the banister, the light went out, you switched it back on and we spotted each other in the gap.” Lene pointed to the curved banisters. Anna felt another chill down her spine.

“You turned on the light, right? Because it wasn’t me,” she said.

“No,” Lene said. “I didn’t turn it on. You did.”

Anna raced up the stairs to her own front door, holding out her key as a weapon. Her hands were shaking, and it took three attempts before she found the keyhole. The apartment was dark. Anna ran blindly into Lily’s room. She could make out the comforter, Lily’s toy dog, Bloppen, which had keeled over, and her daughter’s favorite embroidered pillow; she could even make out the stickers Lily had stuck on her bedposts, but she couldn’t see Lily. She heard Lene behind her, and the two baby monitors screeched when they got too close. Lene switched off the transmitter and Anna turned on the light.

Lily twitched, but soon resumed sucking her pacifier energetically and carried on sleeping, rosy-cheeked and safe. Anna slumped next to her daughter’s bed and buried her head in her hands. She was shaking all over and struggling to breathe. What did she think she would find? An empty bed? A blue-eyed doll? A child’s corpse?

She heard the hiss of a kettle boiling and of cups being filled. The cups were carried into the living room, away from Anna who was still sitting on the floor, panting. Of course Lily was safe and sound in her bed, where else would she be? Anna dug her fists into her eyes. She had to repeat this rational explanation, a thousand times if necessary, or she would go crazy.

Anna heard Lene open the doors of the wood stove, heard the scrunch of newspaper followed by the sound of logs and a match being struck. Shortly afterward, Lene appeared in the doorway.

“Why don’t you come into the living room?” she said.

Anna got up. A cup of tea was waiting for her and a white ribbon of steam wound its way up to the rosette in the stucco ceiling. Anna couldn’t look Lene in the eye. A man had been waiting for her. He could have been anyone, and that was seriously weird. Anna would surely find out who he was tomorrow, or in a few days. A suitor who had gotten cold feet, was Lene’s suggestion. She, too, thought the whole incident had been bizarre.

But Anna had panicked, and Lene had witnessed it. The tears started rolling down her face. Lene stroked her hand.

“I’d like to go to bed now,” Anna muttered.

“But are you all right?” Lene asked. “I’ll stay if you want me to.”

“No,” Anna said. “It’s okay. I’m just tired.”

Once Anna was alone, she took off her damp running clothes and sat naked on a chair in front of the fire. She opened the doors and let the warmth soften her skin. She checked her cell. Only one of the missed calls was from Lene. The other two were from Søren Marhauge’s cell. Johannes still hadn’t returned her calls. She rested her head against the back of the chair and spent a long time studying a framed photograph on the wall above the wood stove. It was black and white, and it had been with her since her childhood. Cecilie and Jens, very young, both with long, unruly hair and unlined faces. Jens had his arm around Cecilie’s shoulder; it looked as if he was nudging her gently toward the lens. Anna was peeking out between them; she was laughing and her eyes shone.

Anna had always loved that picture, but suddenly she couldn’t understand why. Cecilie didn’t look happy at all. Her mouth was smiling, but her eyes were dead. Jens’s arm rested heavily on her shoulder. If he were to let go, she would fall out of the frame. Jens’s gaze showed determination that this picture would happen. As though he knew the moment must be captured, so the image could accompany his daughter into adult life and remind her of her happy childhood. Anna’s own grin was broad, her eyes sparkled with euphoric stars, and she was on top of the world. But the adults were suffering.

Around midnight she had spread her own and Lily’s personal papers across the living room floor. Her own were reasonably well organized; she had Cecilie to thank for that. Anna looked briefly at her own birth certificate. When Lily was born, Thomas and she had disagreed vehemently about what her name would be and finally, two days before the mandatory six-month deadline was up, they had drawn lots. “Or we’ll just have to name her after the queen,” Anna had joked, but had secretly breathed a sigh of relief when the winning ticket said
Lily
. When Anna herself was born, the rules would appear to have been less strict. She had been named Anna Bella Nor on November 12, 1978, when she was almost eleven months old. She put the birth certificate aside and began looking through Lily’s papers, which she had chucked into a large buff envelope. The colorful child-health record book from the health visitor, the very first photographs from the maternity ward, and the plastic ID bracelet from the hospital. Anna had intended to create a scrapbook for Lily, but nothing had come of it. She and Thomas had broken up between Lily’s nine- and twelve-month checkups. Their health visitor had been shocked when she came to see Lily and found Anna falling apart. Anna had made tea while the health visitor rolled colored balls to Lily.

Suddenly, the health visitor had said, “And I thought you were such a lovely family.”

Anna knew she meant no harm, but she exploded with anger and screamed at the woman.

“We still are. With or without Thomas.”

The health visitor had apologized, Anna burst into tears, and Lily refused to play with the colored balls.

Feeling a little sad, Anna flicked through Lily’s child-health record book, scared to stir up memories that might upset her. The teething, the endless nights when Anna paced up and down with her inconsolable baby so as not to disturb Thomas, on the brink of insanity from exhaustion, yet simultaneously more ecstatic than she thought possible. Lily had gained weight, the numbers recorded for posterity in the health visitor’s neat handwriting. Anna ran her fingertips over all the new skills Lily had acquired.

Anna’s own child-health record book from 1978 was orange, the paper slightly furry, and the tone more businesslike than in Lily’s. Curious to know more, Anna leafed through it. She had started crawling when she was eight months old, and she took her first steps two days after her first birthday, she read. The health visitor recommended cod-liver oil and hard-boiled egg yolk, and had written down how positive it was that Anna ate meat and fruit. There had to be a second book, Anna thought, as she looked through it. Recordkeeping in the one she was looking at now had begun in September 1978, when Anna would have been around eight months old, and ended in January 1979.
Anna says “oops” and “no,”
it read. Anna smiled. The name of the health visitor, Ulla Bodelsen, was neatly printed on a dotted line.

She got up, went to her computer and searched the telephone directory for Ulla Bodelsen. She got two hits. An Ulla Karup Bodelsen who lived in Skagen, and an Ulla Bodelsen listed as living in Odense. She noted both numbers and sat for a while looking at the note before she put it aside.
Anna says “oops” and “no”
echoed inside her head. She stared at the photograph again. The mouths of Cecilie and Jens were smiling, but Anna’s smile was the only genuine one. She was three years old in the picture and had no hidden agenda. Just like Lily.