It was Thursday, 18 March 2010, and still dark on Skovvej in Humlebæk. Deputy Chief Superintendent Søren Marhauge was woken up by his girlfriend, Anna, talking to him. She was sitting, fully dressed, on the edge of their bed with her bag slung across her chest and her short, dark hair in damp disarray as if she had just stepped out of the shower.
‘Eh?’ he grunted, still half asleep.
The night before they had both been reading in bed, but Anna had switched off her light first. Søren had assumed that she must be asleep until her eyes snapped open and she announced that his light was bothering her. He had switched it off ostentatiously and a foul mood had descended on the bedroom. From then on Søren’s irritation had kept him wide awake while Anna had lain so still that it was obvious she was not asleep either.
Finally he had said, ‘Did you have to sound quite so pissed off?’ Whereupon Anna had launched into an angry tirade. He hadn’t bothered listening properly to what she had said. A few minutes later, he had pulled off the duvet, grabbed her wrist and stuck his tongue between her legs. That was how their arguments usually ended.
He must have fallen asleep straight afterwards, dammit. They never had time to savour their stellar moments.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ Anna said, in the morning darkness. ‘Please would you take Lily to nursery today? The deadline for my funding application is in two weeks and I can’t get it out of my mind. I want to go to the faculty and write it up. Is that OK? I’ll cycle to the station and catch the train. Please would you also pick Lily up, cook dinner and put her to bed? I know it’s my turn, only I’d really like to be able to work late, with Anders T., if need be. So that we can crack that application. Do you mind?’
‘Don’t you ever draw breath?’ Søren muttered, and pulled the duvet over his head. ‘But, yes, I’ll take Lily to nursery. And pick her up. And cook dinner. And everything else.’
‘Thank you.’ Anna quickly hugged him through the duvet. ‘See you tonight. It’ll be late.’
Shortly afterwards he heard the front door slam.
*
Across the passage Anna’s daughter, Lily, was asleep in her natural-history bedroom. She had pictures of animals on the walls and, on the shelves, Plexiglas boxes with her findings: seven spotted eggshells, four feathers, thirty-two brown pine cones, moss dried out around the edges, piles of various leaves, a scrap of fur she had felt sorry for and three small rodent skeletons that were her prized possessions and displayed on cotton wool. When she grew up, Lily wanted to be a biologist, just like her mother.
Lily was five years old and the apple of Søren’s eye. In the evening her soft, tiny hand would stroke the velvety patch at the top of his ears while he read aloud to her from natural-history books for children. With her other hand, she would point to the illustrations and explain to him how to tell the seagulls apart.
Lily and Søren had lived in the same house for a year now and everything in the garden was rosy. When he fetched her from nursery, Søren could pick out the colour of her snowsuit in a sea of other snowsuits at a distance of thirty metres. The children would flock around his legs when he opened the gate and he would reach down into the crowd, lift her up and she would hug him as hard as she could. ‘My Søren,’ she would say, as if he had rescued her from a frothing sea.
Lily called Søren Søren. After all, he wasn’t her real dad: that was another man. Who was an idiot.
‘You’re jealous,’ Anna would invariably remark, when Thomas, Lily’s biological father, came to fetch Lily. Søren had stopped trying to deny it. Thomas was a doctor at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm and would say, ‘Hello, hello,’ when he turned up, as if visiting Lily was merely an extension of his rounds. What Anna had ever seen in him was beyond Søren. She had told Søren about her previous relationship and how Thomas, shortly after Lily’s first Christmas, had dropped the happy-family project like a rotten plum and moved to Sweden, but Søren had never learned exactly what had gone wrong. Anna had only said that Thomas had got cold feet. It turned out family life wasn’t his thing after all.
For a long time after Søren and Anna had got together, Thomas had not been a part of their life and Søren had been overjoyed. Several of his colleagues at Bellahøj Police Station had stepfamilies and they said it could be tricky. Not only in practical terms when it came to planning holidays, but also emotionally. Whose rules applied and who was in charge? And when new children arrived, the situation became extra complicated. Søren used to think he had been lucky with his package. When he had met Anna, Lily had been barely three; she hadn’t seen her father for the last two years and winning her heart had been easy. However, shortly after Anna and Lily had moved into Søren’s house in Humlebæk, Thomas was back on the scene. He was still living in Stockholm, now with his new wife and their baby, and would visit Copenhagen every three months where he would spend a long Saturday with Lily.
A very long Saturday.
Every time Thomas pulled up in front of the house, Søren would go outside and make small talk while Anna helped Lily get dressed. Lily would then, ignoring Søren, make a beeline for Thomas, shouting, ‘Hi, Daddy,’ and although Søren had noticed that Thomas never featured in Lily’s drawings, he still had to bite his tongue as she dashed right past him with her SpongeBob SquarePants rucksack on her back and her greasy cuddly toy, Bloppen, dangling from her right hand and threw herself into the arms of her real dad. Søren never looked at Thomas when Lily hugged him; instead, he would stare at the hunched profile of the beech trees at the bottom of the garden where the woods began. Even so, he knew that Thomas was gloating.
*
Until recently Søren had been the youngest superintendent in Danish police history, but then he was promoted and became the youngest but most frustrated deputy chief superintendent in Danish police history. He was still working for Copenhagen Police at the Violent Crimes Unit at Bellahøj Police Station, but with an extra rhombus on his lapel, a bigger office and a pile of paperwork with which now, only six months into his promotion, he was thoroughly fed up. The first few months he had swum in the fast lane to catch up with the workload, but now he had admitted to himself that it could not be done and had begun to slow down. Perhaps a little more than he should. He still spent a lot of time in his office and worked longer hours than he needed to on the days it was Anna’s turn to pick Lily up, but his mind had started to wander. He would think about Anna and stare out of the window. He would look at the photograph of Lily on his desk and at the drawing on the wall she had done for him.
He Googled a recipe for pork meatloaf and decided that, from now on, he would cook only dishes inspired by the animal kingdom when he and Lily had dinner alone: mock turtle soup, bird’s nest soup, butterfly cakes, spaghetti worms with tomato sauce. Internal reports, budget compliance meetings, job interviews and salary negotiations held no attraction for him. What made it all worse was that he had feared this was exactly what promotion would mean: drowning in a sea of mind-numbing paperwork. But Henrik Tejsner, his friend and junior colleague, had assured him that a higher rank would bring more freedom. And now that Søren had Lily, he wanted greater flexibility at work.
But it just wasn’t true.
All Søren had got more of was trivial problems. For example, before Christmas he had wasted six weeks on the officially required procedure to get to the bottom of an incident where one officer had accused another of making racist comments in the lavatories during a staff party, and as soon as that case had been resolved, Søren had been told to draft a circular clarifying management guidelines for the use of private mobile telephones during working hours. He had wanted to scream. And, to top it all, someone had recently managed to nick eighty grams of confiscated cocaine from the evidence room in the basement under Bellahøj Police Station, which meant that Søren was forced to spend three long weeks investigating internal security measures, supervised by a surly civil servant from the National Police Force. But any number of people could have nicked that bag. The cleaners, an outsider, the police commissioner himself – what did Søren know? Well, one thing he did know was that he was desperate to be working an investigation hands-on again; he longed to knit backwards.
Besides, Søren suspected Henrik of having talked up the job of deputy chief superintendent purely so that Henrik himself would be considered for superintendent if Søren was promoted. And that was exactly what had happened. Three weeks after Søren’s promotion, Henrik had been appointed superintendent at the Violent Crimes Unit.
*
Søren had met Anna during his investigation of ‘the campus murders’, as the media had dubbed the bizarre killings, first, of Anna’s supervisor at the Institute of Biology and then, shortly afterwards, her best friend Johannes. Søren had fallen head over heels in love with her and not cared that it was unprofessional. Unfortunately, his feelings didn’t appear to have been reciprocated in the slightest. When everyone of interest had been interviewed, the police report filed and the trial finished, Søren had risked emailing Anna, tentatively suggesting dinner. She had replied with an email consisting of just two letters:
No.
He had stared at the screen in amazement and concluded that she had a rare talent for antagonism. The only problem was that he couldn’t stop thinking about her. After another three weeks, and Henrik’s advice to ‘forget about that drama queen’, he decided to lay siege to her. He started inventing all sorts of excuses, both plausible and implausible, to see her. At lunchtime he would turn up with sandwiches at the Museum of Natural History where Anna was now a PhD student. ‘I’ve already eaten,’ she would say suspiciously, as he munched away and tried to keep the conversation going by asking her about her research. He invited her to the cinema every day for a week and received seven refusals. He started doing his shopping at the Kvickly supermarket on Falkoner Allé, and when he bumped into Anna and Lily, he would exclaim, ‘Fancy meeting you here!’ and would then insist on giving them a lift home afterwards. But it was no use: Anna’s frostiness didn’t thaw. So Søren ratcheted up the charm another notch. When they ran into each other in Kvickly for the fourth time that week, and Søren made no attempt to hide that he had been standing behind a shelf of tinned food spying on them for some time, Anna gave him a resigned look, said, ‘Anyone would think you’d taken a second job as a shelf stacker,’ and agreed to go to the cinema with him – once. She had held up her hand and shown him one finger.
Three cinema trips later they kissed on St Hans Torv and the following weekend they went to bed. Søren was delirious with happiness. He had never had sex like this before. Anna lunged at him, and when she had come, she rolled away from him, panting, demanding to be left alone. Søren was quite content to be put out to pasture for a while because, though the act itself had been too fierce and strange for intimacy, it beat peeping at her from behind a supermarket shelf. But after a couple of weeks, he began to long for her to open up and let him in.
It happened very suddenly. One night she didn’t roll away from him. Søren lay completely still for fear of breaking the spell and realised that Anna was listening carefully to his heart. She did that five dates in a row before she raised her hand and put it on his chest.
‘What is this?’ she said, in a low voice. ‘Just a bit of fun or are you serious? Because I can’t bear . . . to be that unhappy again.’ It was just as well that it was dark so that no one could see the huge smile on Søren’s face.
‘Anna, I’m very much in love with you,’ he said.
*
Just over two years had passed since then. Anna had bought a half-share in his house in Humlebæk, they had written wills in favour of each other, and Søren had named Anna as his beneficiary on his pension. Everyone would look at their life and say, ‘So, you won her over in the end, eh, Søren Marhauge?’
But Søren himself wasn’t quite so sure.
Anna was married to her academic career and would go off to the university at the drop of a hat. When she talked about her research, her eyes came alive. The biomechanics of vertebrates reached parts of Anna that Søren couldn’t. When she was at home, she tended to lie on the floor drawing pictures with Lily while they listened to audio books or she would read on the sofa or bake a cake. She was physically there, but she wasn’t present, at least not to him. He was starting to doubt that she really loved him.
The very thought was terrifying.
Lily was still so young. If he and Anna broke up, Lily would forget him while he would never be able to forget her. And the thought of Anna with another man . . . Anders T., for example. Anna’s fellow PhD student was in his late twenties and had an irritatingly casual manner, as if he had just parked his surfboard on the beach while he carried out some important research before trekking around Annapurna in a ripped T-shirt. Søren couldn’t think of a more ridiculous sport for a Dane than surfing.
‘Well, he does spend a lot of time in Australia, actually,’ Anna had informed him.
*
To begin with, Søren had loved the way Anna threw herself into anything she did. She would lose herself completely in a book and, on the rare occasions that she ventured into the kitchen, she would go all out to cook some ambitious French dish that took hours, only to chuck the whole thing into the bin because some aspect of it had failed. Anna did everything at breakneck speed. In her he recognised himself as he used to be. Back when he, too, had been married to his work and his relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Vibe, had been a pleasing backdrop rather than taking centre stage in his life.
Søren was starting to realise that he was most definitely not the centre of Anna’s life. At the same time, he had stopped being quite so immersed in being a police officer, or at least in being a deputy chief superintendent. All he cared about was Anna and Lily. It troubled him.
Anna and he argued a lot. Frequently. Too frequently. They didn’t argue when Lily was awake, but there was constant high-voltage tension between them and it could explode in a split second. In the kitchen, when Lily was watching children’s television in the living room, Anna would snap at him because it was getting late. Søren had never hit a woman. He had barely had an argument with one. But Anna could rile him: when she started sulking and looked highly combustible, he couldn’t stop himself striking a metaphorical match and flicking it in her direction. An arsonist could not have hoped for greater success. Anna would spin around when he baited her, her eyes blazing with rage, and he would be overcome by a strong urge to put in her place. What he did do was grab her and half turn her towards him. ‘Bloody well relax, will you? There’s no need to get so pissed off over a little thing like that,’ he would hiss in her ear, so that Lily wouldn’t hear.
Anna would respond by unbuttoning her jeans and he would unzip his and enter her deeply, it took only ten seconds, and it was vitally important that they did not drown the adventures of Bamse and Kylling on the telly, so Søren had to keep all the noise in his head. Nothing more was said. As they buttoned themselves up afterwards, they looked at each other, placated.
The earth was smouldering.
Then, for a little while, the mood would be lighter. Anna would pour him a glass of wine, stroke his neck and call Lily, who would march into the kitchen with her doll’s pram and Ib, her furry caterpillar, and announce that she was hungry. They would eat and Ib would join them at the table in his jam-jar next to Lily’s plate. Søren could still smell Anna when he raised his fork to his mouth, and he had no idea what the hell was going on.
Søren never discussed Anna with anyone. He hadn’t discussed his ex-girlfriend, Vibe, with anyone either, not even when their relationship was breaking down and they had split up. Henrik always chided him for it. Henrik himself had been married for twenty years to Jeanette and, after a rocky patch when Henrik had had an affair, they had ironed out their differences; as a result, Søren now received regular updates on how ‘bloody brilliant it is that Jeanette has started having Brazilians’ and ‘The woman wants new tits now, would you believe it?’ Henrik had whispered the latter and looked terribly pleased with himself. Last year he had even announced that there was ‘an afterthought in the oven’, even though he and his wife already had two teenage girls who drove him crazy.
‘Why don’t we ever swap stories about the wimmin in our lives?’ Henrik asked, with a big, macho grin. But since Søren had already heard all the stories about Jeanette there were to know, he knew that Henrik was really asking why Søren never volunteered information about his relationship with Anna.
‘Anna is an ocean,’ Søren tried, one day, when he was still seething from last night’s row with her.
Henrik had looked at him for a long time, then said, ‘An ocean? What the hell are you on about, mate?’
Henrik had nicknamed Anna ‘Tiger Pussy’, and Søren knew that if he ever tried to explain his comparison Henrik would curl his hands into two claws, paw the air and say, ‘Miaow, those bitches!’
But Anna wasn’t a bitch. She was a force of nature.
*
Whenever Søren watched Thomas walk down the flagstone path holding Lily’s hand, he knew perfectly well why Thomas had dropped the Anna-and-Lily project. It took the courage of a lion to be with Anna, and Thomas was fundamentally a lightweight who could not cope with Anna’s sparring.
‘Don’t waste your breath, sweetheart,’ Anna would say, and hug him from behind as Søren gazed at the flagstone path in front of their house.
‘But I’m her dad,’ he mumbled.
‘Being a dad isn’t about being a sperm donor,’ Anna replied, ‘but about the next eighteen years. Of course you’re Lily’s dad.’
Søren had made this his one condition from the start of their relationship. Anna could date him as casually, as bizarrely as she wanted to and they could spend the night together when Lily was with Anna’s parents, but if he was to stay over when Lily was at home, different rules would apply. If he was to get to know Lily, there could be no restrictions. He wanted the right to love Lily, and she should have the right to risk loving him. It meant that if he and Anna were to go their separate ways, Søren would still be in Lily’s life.
A few months later, when Anna and Lily had moved in with him, Søren had fenced off the pond at the bottom of the garden that bordered the forest, fixed a padlock on the tool shed and put up jungle wallpaper in the bedroom that was to be Lily’s. He unscrewed the sign saying ‘Marhauge’ on the front door and replaced it with a new one.
‘Nor and Marhauge,’ Anna said contentedly. ‘It sounds like a karate chop. Highly effective.’
*
On the morning of 18 March, Søren was sitting in his office at Bellahøj Police Station waiting impatiently for information from the Institute of Forensic Medicine. The medical examiner, Bøje Knudsen, had promised to get back to him on Monday, but now it was Thursday. Søren knew Bøje was hard to track down – the man didn’t even carry a mobile phone – but he was usually quick to respond to emails. Now he was unresponsive on all channels and Søren knew why. A series of violent rapes in the Kødbyen district demanded all police resources. The victims were young female students, and one of them had turned out to be the goddaughter of the justice secretary, so the assaults received considerable attention from both politicians and the media. When one of the girls had died from her injuries over the weekend, the case had gone viral, and Station City in central Copenhagen had requested assistance from Bellahøj. Which they had got, of course. Everyone was rushed off their feet. But Søren was still stuck with an unfinished case involving a ninety-two-year-old woman who had been beaten up in her home by burglars looking for jewellery; she had since died in hospital. They had arrested the burglars and the case was straightforward. But the woman’s family called the police every day to find out when her body would be released for burial. What could Søren tell them? That Bøje was too busy to sign a piece of paper? It was unlike Bøje to treat ordinary Danes so insensitively. He hated snobbery. It had been one of the main reasons why he had opted for demotion, as he put it, and had quit his job as state pathologist last year and gone back to being a bog-standard medical examiner.
‘All I want,’ Bøje had said, when Søren had asked him, ‘is to wield my scalpel like I used to, where all bodies are equal. It’s back to basics for me.’
Søren had envied him, but it seemed that Bøje was just as snowed under now as when he had been the state pathologist. Søren decided that, unless Bøje called him very soon, he would have to swing by the Institute of Forensic Medicine himself.
Watching a hopeless morning briefing, in which Henrik had issued a frantic mess of contradictory orders as he distributed that day’s assignments, had done nothing to improve Søren’s mood. Henrik was stressed and clearly not just because he had had to lend officers to Station City. His forehead was glistening, he was irritable and, rather than spread calm and show leadership of his investigation team, he exuded anxiety. Henrik was actually a good police officer. He didn’t deliver big, insightful breakthroughs, but he was a solid team player and particularly handy in any situation that required some muscle. His language could make even a sailor blush and on the street he had ice in his veins. But promoting him to management had been a mistake.
After the campus murders, Henrik and Søren’s friendship had temporarily changed for the better. It had become serious, more forbearing, more Søren. But the respect Søren had developed for Henrik was dwindling, not least because Henrik was constantly sniping at him. When Søren was a superintendent, he had become famous all over Denmark for his investigative method of knitting backwards, a private metaphor that Søren had accidentally used in an interview in the Politiken newspaper. The expression had subsequently come into common use. Søren based his starting point on the impenetrability of the mystery, he had explained to the journalist, then worked his way backwards by unravelling what he saw. Eventually he would find himself back at the beginning and, in most cases, would know the identity of the killer. Since then he had come across the term in the newspapers several times. Young officers at the police academy were even taught the method, and he was proud of that, obviously. But it had also led to pranks at the station; for example, someone had recently stuck two crossed jumbo knitting needles on Søren’s office door. No offence had been intended, but Henrik regarded these innocent jokes as his carte blanche for constant teasing.
‘Time to put away your crochet hooks and other outdated investigative methods,’ he had quipped that very morning, ‘and knuckle down, boys and girls.’
Fortunately no one had thought it was funny.
Outside work, however, Henrik was nowhere near as cocky. Six months earlier, when he had been promoted to superintendent, he had started ringing Søren at all hours to discuss a rape case in north-west Copenhagen. The victim was a girl of the same age as Henrik’s younger daughter, who had been beaten so badly that she was now in a coma. The police had the rapist’s DNA, but as his profile was not in the DNA register and there was very little other evidence, the investigation was at a standstill. It was a hard case to take on as your first, especially because the media were following it closely. Henrik called Søren day and night to ask for advice. When the girl died shortly afterwards, the media went crazy. ‘Sometimes that’s just how it is,’ Søren assured Henrik. ‘You’ve done everything you can so now you have to move on and ignore the media frenzy. It won’t last.’ Søren told himself that his words had had some effect, but Henrik kept calling him. ‘Hi, it’s only me, Henrik,’ had long since become a standing joke in Søren’s house. Henrik was only calling to find out what Søren would have done about this and what Søren thought about that, and if Søren really had fallen foul of journalists all the time. And, as for the amount of paperwork, it was ridiculous. You might have warned me that life as a superintendent is a chronic state of stress. Just get on with it? Easy for you to say. Being senior management is a cushy number. ‘But what can I do about it?’ Henrik had said, sounding as if he felt sorry for himself when he called on Monday evening. He had been asked to send four of his twelve officers to Station City to assist.
‘While those amateurs are slacking at Station City and getting on the front page of Ekstra Bladet, I spend my whole day in front of a computer,’ Henrik complained. ‘Anyone would think I was a secretary, not a superintendent.’
‘Sometimes it’s just the way it is, Henrik. Some weeks it’s slow and steady, then all the criminals decide to strike at once, all hell breaks loose and your feet don’t touch the ground. It’s part of the job.’
‘I haven’t slept for four bloody nights,’ Henrik said. ‘When I finally get to bed, I can’t shut my brain down.’
But the next morning Henrik had shouted something sarcastic to Søren across the room when he turned up for work and their relationship had soured again.
Now the corridors at the back of Bellahøj Police Station where the Violent Crimes Unit was located had fallen silent. While Søren waited for the call from the Institute of Forensic Medicine, he drew a pie chart of his family life. He picked Lily up from nursery three times a week, no later than four o’clock so Anna could work late at the Institute of Biology, and he looked after her every Saturday when Anna would cycle to the university initially just for a couple of hours, but invariably she came back at seven in the evening. That made 19.5 hours a week. Then there was the one hour he had with Lily every morning, which made it 24.5 hours a week in total, plus sundry times when Anna would leave early or call home to let him know she would be late. He then started calculating how many hours he was with Anna. They rarely went to bed before midnight and, if he deducted putting Lily to bed, laundry and clearing up after dinner, that made it 3.5 hours a day, less the time they were in the same house, but doing different things; it meant that ‘net time with Anna’, as he wrote, equalled 12.5 hours per week. He stared at the number. Where was Anna during all those other hours? At the faculty, of course, where she was writing her PhD in ‘Terrestrial Movement and Biomechanics in Mammals and Dinosaurs’, which Søren had taught himself to reel off whenever someone asked him what his girlfriend did. But where exactly was she when she was there? Away with the fairies in her own head, completely immersed in her subject, lost to the world. Passionately lost to the world. Sitting next to Anders T. and his bulging biceps, one of which was tattooed with the poncy motto ‘carpe diem’ because, well, it would be, wouldn’t it?
And then there was Søren. With his greying temples and budding spare tyre. If he didn’t pull himself together soon, he would be summoned to Chief Superintendent Jørgensen’s office and asked to explain himself. What do you think you’re doing, Søren? Søren caught himself fantasising about the scenario. Finally he would have the chance to say it out loud: I don’t want to be senior management. I want to move down the ranks, please. I want to be a police officer again.
When Bøje finally called, it took him less than five minutes to give the green light to the old lady’s family. The body could be released. Bøje sounded pressured and hung up before Søren had had time to moan about the slow response time. The telephone rang again immediately. This time it was Henrik.
‘Tell me, did you drop your mobile down the bog? I’ve called you eight times. I want you to know it’s the last time I share a car with that tosser,’ he ranted.
It was Søren’s job to pair off the officers, and that morning he had put Henrik with one of the unit’s older men, Per Molstrup, partly to wind Henrik up because Molstrup wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Søren could hear Molstrup chuckle in the background.
‘He’s eaten pickled onions.’ Molstrup laughed even louder.
‘Anything else? I’m rather busy.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Henrik said. ‘He says he’s rather busy,’ Henrik announced to Molstrup in a stage whisper. Søren was about to hang up.
‘We’re outside the Institute of Biology and—’ Henrik said.
‘What are you doing there?’ Søren managed, before all his internal organs crashed onto the floor. ‘Has something happened to Anna?’
The telephone crackled.
‘With Anna? No, no. Hey, relax, I’d never give you bad news about Tiger Pussy with that moron in the car.’
Søren heaved a deep sigh of relief. ‘Right. Then what is it?’
‘We received a call. There’s a professor hanging in an office up in . . .’ Henrik read aloud from a piece of paper. ‘The Department of Immunology at the Institute of Biology, Stairwell Four. Where the hell is that? Do you know where it is? We’re parked outside the stairwell to Anna’s department, Stairwell One, and we’re lost. And don’t tell me to look for the ambulance because it’s parked right in front of me and they can’t find it either. Can’t you get Anna to ride to our rescue? It’s what she usually does.’
Søren typed a text message to Anna. Please look out of your window, he wrote. To Henrik he said, ‘Can you give me some more information?’
‘I don’t know very much. Merethe Hermansen, the department secretary, called the emergency services, and all I know is that a student found him hanging from a hook in the ceiling . . . Oh, I can see Tiger Pussy now. Always present whenever someone kicks the bucket around here. Got to go.’ Before Søren had time to say anything, Henrik had hung up.
Søren shot up from his chair. Henrik, that waste of space, had just called Søren, his boss, to ask for directions.
*
A plate of Danish pastries had been set out in the briefing room earlier and it was still there, but one flashback to Anders T.’s biceps convinced Søren to leave its contents alone. The coffee in the Thermos flask was lukewarm, but he poured himself a cup anyway and accidentally added two heaped teaspoons of salt and had stirred them in before he spat out the vile concoction on the floor in front of the whiteboard. Bollocks! He stopped at the washroom on his way back to his office and rinsed his mouth.
Henrik had tricked Søren into accepting the promotion to deputy chief superintendent so that he could take over Søren’s old job as superintendent. That was bad enough. But that Henrik called his boss because he was lost only to hang up on him the second Anna appeared had pushed Søren over the edge. He was sure that Henrik had already ogled Anna’s bottom three times and delivered just as many smutty remarks. Henrik had lost all sense of boundaries. What the hell was the matter with him?
Søren sat down in his office and tried to focus on his paperwork. Two hours later he threw in the towel, got up and stood fuming in front of the window. Then he grabbed his jacket, went down to the basement car park of the station and headed for the University of Copenhagen. He had had enough of being the butt of everyone’s jokes, especially Henrik’s.
*
Søren’s parents had died in a car crash when he was five years old. All his adult life he had believed that he had been on holiday with his maternal grandparents when it happened. That was what he had been told. It was not until the investigation into the campus murders two years ago that he had learned the truth: that he had also been in the car when his father overlooked a give-way sign and drove straight into a truck; that Søren had been trapped in the back of the car for more than an hour with his dead parents until the Falck emergency services had managed to free him.
‘What a lot of boxes of unresolved crap we hide in our mental basement, eh?’ Anna had said, one day, when they were discussing the past. Her remark had hit a nerve. What was the point of knowing? Given the choice, wouldn’t he have preferred to live out the rest of his life in blissful ignorance of the traumatic circumstances of his parents’ death? What difference did it make that he now knew the macabre details? Knowing wasn’t going to bring them back. He told himself that he had been more happy-go-lucky before old wounds had been reopened. The ability to put a lid on certain memories was a good one, he had said to Anna, mostly to provoke her. To his astonishment, Anna had agreed with him.
‘No matter how illogical it sounds,’ she mused, ‘in a modern society where everyone is in therapy to straighten out their thinking, there has to be some evolutionary advantage in the ability to suppress, because otherwise that ability would have been deselected long ago. But, even so, I still believe it does us good to clear out our mental basements.’
Anna, too, had stumbled upon big secrets in her own family during the investigation of the campus murders, but she seemed resolved and at peace now. She got on well with her parents and saw them regularly; she had plenty of energy for her research and at night she slept like a log, even those nights when Søren was lying wide awake and deep in thought by her side. His maternal grandparents, who had looked after him since the death of his parents, had died, so he would never know why they had chosen to hide the circumstances of his parents’ death from him. It made no sense because in every other respect they were intelligent and honest people. In the months after Søren had learned that he had been trapped in the wrecked car with his dead parents, he had half-heartedly tried to investigate the case. Like some pathetic TV detective, he had shaken his grandparents’ books one after the other in the hope of finding a secret letter with a fanciful explanation. He had carefully examined the boxes in the loft of his grandparents’ house in Snerlevej in Vangede before he had rented it out. He had used his police status to access the National Register of Persons – he had even trawled meticulously through the Marhauge family records – but he hadn’t found anything. Finally he had reached the conclusion that he, too, was resolved and at peace.
‘Are you sure?’ Anna had asked.
‘Yes,’ he had replied. ‘Quite sure.’
*
It took Søren only three minutes to drive from Bellahøj Police Station to the Institute of Biology because he switched on his siren and carved through the yielding traffic, having made up his mind to give Henrik a bollocking and show him how proper police work was done. He parked in front of the building, where a crowd of onlookers was still rubbernecking, watching the ambulance and Henrik’s highly conspicuous patrol car. Søren had to ask one of the onlookers for directions and was told that all he had to do was ‘just enter through that door, go up to the third floor, across the walkway, down to the second floor and there go through the first door on your right, but not the one which is the entrance to the Museum of Zoology, but the door opposite, and then Kristian Storm’s office is at the far end of the corridor.’ Søren had thanked him and sworn under his breath. Despite the labyrinthine architecture of the Institute of Biology, rumours appeared to spread faster here than in a hairdresser’s salon.
Søren raced up the stairs, his whole being filled with the certain knowledge that, deputy chief superintendent or not, there was no way he was going back to a desk job.
*
When Søren entered the Department of Immunology, he spotted the red and white police cordon immediately and walked briskly down the main corridor towards what he surmised must be the entrance to the late professor’s office. Where were his fellow police officers? Along the way he passed an open door and nodded briefly to a man sitting behind a desk. Thor Albert Larsen, Søren read on a sign. He also noticed a couple of young people on chairs around Larsen’s desk, all very subdued.
When Søren reached the cordoned-off office, he stopped outside the doorway, aware that he must not enter the scene before he had donned protective clothing. To his huge surprise there were only two people inside, a crime-scene officer, Lars Hviid, in protective clothing and holding a camera, and Henrik, who was standing with his back to him, wearing shoe covers and a mask, but without the compulsory overalls.
‘We’ll put it down as an unexplained death,’ Henrik was thinking out loud, ‘but, if you ask me, there’s bugger all to explain, wouldn’t you say?’ Lars Hviid nodded. He was relatively new to Bellahøj and even at the job interview Søren had thought he looked wet behind the ears, though his CV listed his date of birth as 1983. He was gazing at Henrik with boundless admiration and Henrik lapped it up.
‘Now, if you ask me, our nerd killed himself,’ Henrik said. ‘And what removes the last bit of doubt, little Hviid? He left a note.’ Henrik took an evidence bag from a box of other bagged items and waved it in the air, like a teacher. At that moment, Hviid spotted Søren and his gaze started to wander.
‘And what happens to the computer now?’ Henrik carried on. ‘Come on, little Hviid, you know the answer . . . Hello?’ Henrik followed Lars Hviid’s distracted gaze and discovered Søren.
‘Hi, Søren,’ he said, taken aback. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Why aren’t you wearing protective clothing?’ Søren said. ‘And where is the body?’
‘The body was taken to the Institute of Forensic Medicine forty-five minutes ago. But what are you doing here?’ Henrik said again.
‘Forty-five minutes ago?’ Søren thundered. ‘How the hell did you manage to finish investigating the scene that quickly? Has the medical examiner been?’
‘What the hell do you think?’ Henrik pouted. ‘Do you take us for complete amateurs?’
‘Yes,’ was all Søren said.
*
Later that day Søren was summoned to Chief Superintendent Jørgensen’s office. Henrik was already in there and looked daggers at him. Since leaving the Institute of Biology, he had called Søren’s mobile four times. Eventually Søren had switched it off.
‘First, the case. Brief summary, please,’ Jørgensen said, and nodded to Henrik, who cleared his throat. Søren was famous across the police force for being unsurpassable in the important discipline of producing a brief summary. On the day Henrik had been promoted to superintendent, he had had a beer or two too many and declared that he intended to wipe the floor with Søren in every discipline, especially the brief summary. Søren smiled sweetly at him and Henrik cleared his throat again.
‘The deceased is a man in his mid-sixties, and we have had it confirmed that he’s professor of immunology Kristian Storm, who has been employed by the University of Copenhagen since 1982. The deceased was found hanging from a noose attached to a light fitting in the ceiling, and on his desk we found a note where he confesses to scientific dishonesty and asks for forgiveness. In addition, there was a framed photograph smashed on the floor, which we have had confirmed is a picture of Storm and his two protégés. CSO Lars Hviid’s initial assessment is that Storm had been dead for between fourteen and fifteen hours, so he died some time between nineteen thirty and twenty thirty yesterday, Wednesday, the seventeenth of March, but we’ll have it confirmed once Bøje Knudsen has had a look at the body. Based on preliminary interviews with Kristian Storm’s colleagues, the picture we have of the professor is as follows: he had an international reputation in his field and was notorious for his controversial views, but within the university itself he was respected for his dedication and his support of his students. However, I had an interesting conversation with a lecturer, Thor Albert Larsen, today. He has worked with Storm for many years, and he told me that Storm had recently been accused of scientific dishonesty, and that the case is currently being investigated by . . . eh,’ Henrik glanced at a note in his hand, ‘the DCSD, which is the acronym for the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty. It’s about some research results that Storm and one of his students published last September. The accusations were made anonymously.’ Henrik took another look at his note. ‘Thor Albert Larsen has absolutely no doubt that these accusations were eating away at Storm and that it would be a huge blow for him to be found guilty. So Storm might have looked like a success from the outside, popular and respected and all that, but the truth was that he was facing career bankruptcy on a major scale. The note we found confirms Thor Albert Larsen’s theory. It’s one long spiel about how he has let down his colleagues and that he hopes his students can forgive him. Thor also told me that Storm’s father committed suicide back in the 1980s, so it seems to run in the family. Besides, Steen has already got back to me regarding Storm’s computer. It usually takes him a couple of days to plough his way through the entire hard disk, but this one was blank. Storm personally wiped everything there was on it at twenty oh two on Wednesday evening. To be honest, I think this is an open and shut case: Kristian Storm committed suicide.’
‘Have you spoken to Storm’s students?’ Søren asked. ‘Have you spoken to his support staff?’
‘You’re not the only one who went to the Police Academy. Yes, I spoke to the ones I thought might be relevant. But, come on, there’s got to be a limit to how many police resources we can waste on a straightforward case like this.’
‘Good work, Tejsner,’ Jørgensen said, sounding satisfied. ‘And you’re right. Our resources must be targeted appropriately. We don’t have too many of them. How many days do you need?’
‘Three, max,’ Henrik said. ‘I still need to talk to Trine Rønn, who found Kristian Storm. She was so shocked she had to be seen by the trauma team. I’ll call her tomorrow. As soon as Bøje pulls his finger out and takes a look at the body, I’ll write my report, and that’ll be the end of that. So, Tuesday morning at the latest.’
‘Monday morning,’ Jørgensen said. ‘Two days should do it unless something crops up, but then you’ll need to come and see me, understand?’
Henrik nodded. Søren was fuming. All that was left was for Henrik to place a shiny red apple on Jørgensen’s desk.
‘Good,’ Jørgensen said, looking over the rim of his glasses, first at Søren and then at Henrik. ‘Next. I hear there’s trouble in the playground. What kind?’
‘Several hours after we had arrived at the Department of Immunology, Søren marched in,’ Henrik quickly interjected. ‘But why? I had the situation under control. Everything had been documented and sealed, we had put Storm’s note in an evidence bag and we had sent the body to the Institute of Forensic Medicine ages ago. Søren is my superior and has the right to view any scene I work, but I don’t enjoy having strips torn off me in front of my staff. And just try to imagine what would have happened if I had stormed in six months ago and disturbed the master himself at work. Jesus Christ.’ Henrik slapped his thigh.
Jørgensen nodded at length and then he looked at Søren. ‘What do you have to say?’
‘I quit.’
‘What?’ Henrik and Jørgensen both stared at Søren.
‘Shut up. Of course you’re not quitting,’ Henrik said.
‘Yes, I am,’ Søren declared. ‘I’m fed up with paper-pushing. I’m fed up with human-resources responsibility. I’m fed up with endless reports and planning interesting work for other people. Turning up at the university today was a mistake. I apologise.’ Søren glared at Henrik. ‘But you should see it as a sign that our working relationship is messed up. I’m a police officer, not some sort of . . . skivvy, who has nothing better to do than Google maps for you.’
‘Oh, Søren, get a grip . . .’ Henrik flung out his arms, but Søren had already opened the door and nodded to Jørgensen.
Somewhere down the corridor he heard Jørgensen say, ‘Easy now, Tejsner, give the man a chance to cool down,’ and Søren had to suppress a sudden urge to spin around and tell his boss to fuck off.
*
Two hours later Søren had signed his letter of resignation, cleared his office of personal belongings, filled a cardboard box with various papers, copied the unfinished reports on a USB stick and left it in Jørgensen’s pigeonhole, along with his warrant card. He had put two half-dead pot plants on his secretary Linda’s desk and handed in his service weapon to Human Resources. He looked at his watch. It was quarter past three, the perfect time for collecting Lily.
Outside the police station Søren stopped in his tracks. The spring had been chilly. Now the temperature could generously be described as into double digits and the sun had come out.
*
As he walked from the car park to the nursery, Søren looked forward to the precious moment when Lily would notice him. When she dropped whatever she had in her hands and threw her arms around his neck. A thousand tiny, wonderful, dirty outdoor smells in his nostrils, a tiny breath, Lily. She was not outside in the playground today as she normally was, so he went inside. The nursery teacher in Lily’s unit looked surprised. Lily had developed a temperature and Anna had picked her up at two o’clock. They had rung him first because, according to their records, he was due to pick her up, but he had not replied.
Søren looked at his mobile as he walked back to his car. Shit. He’d forgotten he’d switched it off to avoid Henrik’s calls. When he turned it on there were six unanswered calls and one text message from Anna:
Don’t know where you are, but one of us has to pick Lily up because Kålormen called to say she is ill. If I don’t hear from you in fifteen minutes, I’ll get her. But hey, cool if you could call, right? There is that small matter of my application, you know . . .
She didn’t sound pissed off, but Søren knew that, at best, she was mildly irritated.
He let himself into the house in Humlebæk and Lily came racing out into the hall. She did not seem particularly ill, a touch warm at the most, but she had a fine mesh of pale pink spots on her cheeks, upper body and arms.
‘I got measles and I’m infectious,’ she announced proudly. Søren knelt down, rubbed his nose against the rash and said that, since she had such fine-looking dots, he wanted some too.
‘I can’t go back to nursery until they’re all gone,’ Lily said smugly.
*
Anna was sitting on the sofa in the living room, working away with her laptop. Lily had been watching a movie.
‘Sorry,’ Søren said, and kissed Anna’s forehead. ‘My mobile was turned off.’
‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I was just surprised because we agreed only this morning that you would pick her up today. Never mind. It turns out Lily has . . . German measles. It’s just rotten timing because Anders T. and I have to finish that application.’ Suddenly she gave Søren a quizzical look. ‘I had to show Henrik the way to the Department of Immunology earlier today. Is it true that Kristian Storm killed himself?’
Søren perched on the edge of the sofa and Lily immediately climbed onto his lap and started snuggling. He was keen to pump Anna for information about Storm, but not in front of Lily. ‘Oh, Lily,’ he said casually. ‘I’ve been missing Ib so much today.’
‘No, you haven’t.’ Lily giggled.
‘Oh, yes, I have. Why don’t you go and get the little creepy-crawly so I can give him a big hug?’
‘You can’t hug a caterpillar or you’ll squash him,’ she said, but she jumped down from his lap and sprinted to her room. When she was out of earshot, they were free to speak. Anna knew Kristian Storm well.
‘He lectured on several occasions when I did my master’s,’ she said. ‘He was inspirational. He was also a bit of a celebrity, if you can use that term for a scientist. He had a long list of publications and an army of . . . dedicated disciples, I guess you could call them. Thor Albert Larsen, for example, the youngest ever lecturer at the University of Copenhagen. He was eighteen when he started reading biology, twenty when he began assisting Storm at the Department of Immunology, and later he wrote his master’s thesis and PhD with Storm as his supervisor and was eventually appointed the youngest lecturer at the Department of Immunology. Kristian Storm is known for hatching top scientists, but also to be interested only in his own research. I guess he was quite discriminating, especially when it came to his work in Africa. He would act as supervisor only for students who were interested in the same subject area as he was. Hey, I’ve actually just read a big feature on him, in Weekendavisen. Not this weekend but last, I think it was. Have you thrown out the papers yet?’ Søren got up and started sifting through the contents of the wicker basket next to the wood-burner.
‘He was heavily involved in a vaccine research project in West Africa and was practically commuting between Copenhagen and Guinea . . . Guinea something or other.’ She grabbed the laptop and briefly glanced at the screen. ‘Guinea-Bissau, and the research project is called . . . the Belem Health Project, after the district in the city where the research station is based. Storm would appear to have fallen out with half the world’s immunologists following his allegation that some of the vaccines recommended by the World Health Organization aren’t entirely without their problems. He even goes so far as to claim that they kill lots of children. He was one of those firebrands who think they can save Africa. Have you found the newspaper?’ Søren shook his head and Anna changed the subject.
‘Phew, when I stood there this morning, I had a flashback to the day I found Helland dead. And to add to the insanity of it all, I even know the woman who found Storm! Trine Rønn. We studied terrestrial ecology together. She must be in total shock. People have spoken of nothing else all day. Anders T. and I didn’t manage to write a single line of our application. People kept coming into our office wanting to talk about what had happened. And in the middle of it all, the nursery rang and I tried to get hold of you.’
At that moment Lily returned with tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘Ib is gone,’ she sobbed. ‘But I don’t understand how it happened. The lid is still on, but he really has gone!’ Lily held up the jam-jar to Søren, who peered closely between the apple leaves for the psychedelic green caterpillar. He shook the jar gently.
‘He hasn’t gone, sweetheart,’ he reassured her. ‘He’s here. He has pupated to his chrysalis stage.’
‘Pupated?’
‘Pupated. Your mother will explain it to you.’ Søren scooped Lily up, placed her on the sofa next to Anna and left to hang up his jacket in the hallway. In the doorway he turned and said, ‘By the way, we don’t need to organise someone to look after Lily until she’s better. You can go to the faculty whenever you like. I’ll take care of her.’ Anna looked like a question mark, but when Søren added, ‘I’ve just quit my job,’ her expression turned into an exclamation point.
*
When Lily had been put to bed that evening, Søren walked through the living room and heaved a sigh at the chaos of toys, magazines, reference books and clothing. He did not have the energy to tidy up, but flopped onto the sofa. Anna had returned to the university after speaking to Anders T. on her mobile.
‘I’ll only be a couple of hours,’ she’d said to Søren before she left. ‘I’ll be back before eleven.’ She had left her laptop on the sofa, and when Søren moved it to make himself more comfortable, he woke it up from its hibernation. Anna had several websites open. She would appear to have been reading about infectious diseases on Kristian Storm’s homepage, www.belem.org.
The more frequently you are exposed to an infection, the more ill the disease will make you. This explains why the rate of infection is much higher in low-income countries than in industrialised countries because in low-income countries many people, especially children, sleep close to each other in very little space.
This was news to Søren. He had always believed that you became just as ill regardless of whether you were exposed to one bug or ten thousand. Suddenly he understood the point of vaccinating whole populations. He had heard the term ‘herd immunity’ before, but had never quite understood what it meant. Now the penny dropped. If the aim was to vaccinate the whole population so that it became immune, then even unvaccinated individuals gained a potential advantage because there would be fewer people to infect them and, in the long run, it meant that the disease would disappear. Genius. Wanting to know more, Søren read an article about recent outbreaks of otherwise eradicated diseases. It often happened in urban, educated environments in the Western world where some modern parents made a personal decision not to have their children vaccinated. Never before had it crossed Søren’s mind: the magnitude of responsibility towards our fellow human beings, embodied in tiny needle pricks.
Anna had also Googled ‘forgotten the MMR vaccine’, Søren could see, but appeared to have found only useless hits. Moreover, she had visited the homepage of Statens Serum Institute, one of Denmark’s largest research institutions in the health sector, to read up on German measles.
German measles is caused by infection with the Rubella virus. However, after the introduction of the MMR vaccine programme, German measles has been almost eradicated in Denmark.
Really? Then how had Lily caught it?
Søren could see that Anna had Googled images of ‘German measles and rash’ and by comparing the severity of the rashes he calculated that Lily was only mildly ill. He could conclude, with his new-found knowledge, that she had been exposed to the infection for a short period. Perhaps because she went to a nursery where the children spent so much time outdoors. When Lily had started at Kålormen Nursery, Søren had read on its homepage that children who were allowed to run around in the fresh air were less likely to fall ill than others. Now he understood why. When you spent most of your day hanging upside-down from a branch, there were fewer opportunities to swap germs.
Søren was overcome by a sudden urge to sneak a peek at Anna’s inbox and quickly slammed shut the laptop.
At that moment Henrik called. Søren stared at the display and considered letting the call go to voicemail, but before he knew it, he had answered it.
‘What the hell happened today?’ Henrik demanded. ‘You weren’t serious, were you? Come on, mate, don’t be such a—’
‘I couldn’t be more serious. I’ve handed in my resignation to Jørgensen,’ Søren said.
‘Yeah, yeah, I know all that. As does everyone at Bella. But you’re not serious? Are you?’
‘Yes,’ was all Søren said.
‘Only I really love my new job, Søren. Jeanette really loves that I got it, as well.’
‘I’m not out to steal your job, Henrik. Relax. Besides, the union would give Jørgensen hell. I signed my new employment contract ages ago, as did you. We’re not swapping football cards here.’
‘And just imagine if Henrik Tejsner actually deserved his promotion,’ Henrik snapped.
‘You’re a good police officer, Henrik,’ Søren replied amicably. ‘But you’re a lousy manager. You’re meant to lead your team.’ Not treat them as your personal cheerleaders, he thought, but didn’t say.
There was silence at the other end. Søren was about to say goodbye when Henrik said, ‘I’ve just spoken to that Trine Rønn woman, the one who found Kristian Storm. She won’t hear a word about suicide and doesn’t care that we have a note and a motive. She totally lost it and demanded that “the police investigate this properly, all the evidence, every detail”. What a drama queen.’
‘You visited her?’ Søren asked.
‘Nah, I rang her from my comfortable chair. Resources, you know. You heard Jørgensen.’ Henrik chuckled. ‘But you’d agree with me, wouldn’t you? Claiming that this death is something other than a suicide is over the top, right?’
Søren mulled it over. ‘Well,’ he said at length, ‘if I were you I would probably visit her . . . and try to form an impression of who Kristian Storm was, both as a human being and as a scientist. Anna has told me that opinions about him were divided. On the one hand, people were queuing up for him to supervise their masters and PhDs, while on the other hand, he had a reputation for being quite obsessed with promoting his own area of research and probably wasn’t universally popular among his colleagues, at home or abroad. Personally I would cast my eye over that contradiction and possibly also check up on his father’s suicide. But let it simmer a day or two. If nothing else comes up, I, too, would file the case as suicide.’
Henrik made small affirmative noises. ‘It was good to talk to you,’ he then said. ‘I’ll call you soon, right? And please reconsider your decision. You can take the man out of the police force, but you can’t take the police force out of the man, or however the saying goes . . . You’ve given Jørgensen at least another ten new grey hairs, mate.’
‘I’m good with it,’ Søren said. ‘I’ve got other stuff I’d like some time to think over.’
‘Is everything all right with you and Tiger Pussy?’
‘Fine. Everything’s fine.’
‘Oh, by the way, there was something else I wanted to tell you . . . I attended another suicide this morning. Out in Vangede . . .’
At that moment a bleary-eyed Lily appeared in the doorway and Søren could see that she had wet herself. He remembered he had forgotten to put on her night-time nappy.
‘Listen, got to run. Lily’s woken up and—’
‘Right. Time for you to breastfeed, ha-ha,’ Henrik said.
Dickhead.
*
When Søren woke up the next morning, Lily was fast asleep next to him in the double bed. Anna was nowhere to be seen. Søren put his hand on Lily’s forehead and could feel a light, quivering heat coming from her skin. He pulled off the duvet so she would not overheat and wandered down to the living room where he found Anna asleep on the sofa. She awoke with a start when he stepped on a toy on his way to the kitchen.
‘Hiya.’ She yawned.
‘When did you get back?’ he asked, while he made coffee.
‘Not until one o’clock.’ Anna had followed him and was standing in the doorway with one of the duvets from the guest bedroom wrapped around her. ‘It dragged on. Something happened . . .’ Søren’s heart started pounding. He had known something was bound to happen sooner or later. He knew Anders T.’s type. Anna came into the kitchen and pinched the cup of coffee he had just made for himself.
‘I’ll tell you about it,’ she said calmly, ‘but first I just need to know if you were serious when you said you’d quit your job.’
‘Yes, I was.’ Søren was standing with his back to her.
‘But why?’
‘I’ve always loved my work, Anna. I’ve always been my job. Until now. Now driving to Bellahøj makes no sense,’ he said, without turning. ‘I should never have agreed to that promotion. I’ve become a pseudo police officer. But it’s not just that. It’s—’
‘I knew a desk job wouldn’t suit you,’ Anna said. ‘I knew it!’ Suddenly she was standing right behind him and Søren could feel her arms around him.
‘Søren, I have to talk to you about something,’ she said, and Søren closed his eyes.
‘Trine Rønn, the woman who found Storm dead, called me last night and said she needed to talk to me. As I was at the faculty, I said, “Why don’t you pop over?” but she said she was afraid. So I met her at a bar in Blågårdsgade. That’s why I got home so late. She’s in deep shock, Søren. Her hands were shaking and she was totally out of it. She needed to talk to someone who knew what it was like, she said. She wanted to know when the shock would start to wear off. So at first we just talked about her finding Storm. But then she suddenly said she was convinced that Storm didn’t kill himself.’
‘Perhaps Trine didn’t know him as well as she thought she did.’ Søren turned to Anna and hugged her with relief.
Anna wriggled to free herself. ‘Søren, a box of documents from Storm’s office has gone missing. It’s his research from Guinea-Bissau, and Trine says that there’s a Nobel Prize in that box. It’s the most significant discovery within immunology since the invention of vaccination in the late seventeen hundreds, nothing less. Trine says that Storm had just returned from Guinea-Bissau with the most recent records of five years’ work. It makes no sense for him to kill himself now when the finishing line’s in sight. He was about to make a major scientific breakthrough.’
‘She needs to tell that to Henrik or whoever ends up interviewing her,’ he pre-empted her. ‘When did Anders T. go home last night? Did you finish your application?’
‘Don’t change the subject,’ Anna said. ‘Trine did tell Henrik. Or, rather, yesterday, when the police reopened Storm’s office, she went there to rescue the box and keep it safe, but it was gone. She called Henrik immediately to ask if the police had seized it and to draw their attention to how valuable it is. But Henrik said he hadn’t taken any box. Besides, she wasn’t interviewed properly. Trine is adamant that Kristian Storm was murdered, Søren. Henrik would appear to have hinted yesterday that the police regard the DCSD’s charge against Storm as his motive to kill himself, but Trine says that’s nonsense. Storm couldn’t give a toss what other scientists thought about him. As in a Greek Orthodox toss, Trine says.’
‘OK, that’s a lot of conclusions in one go,’ Søren said.
‘Trine knew Storm really well, Søren! They worked closely together, especially in the last few months because Storm’s regular assistant is on sick leave. Trine has been on maternity leave and out of the loop, but she’s been back in the department since Christmas. Don’t you think that she would have noticed just a little bit if Storm had intended to kill himself? And where is the box?’
At that point, Lily appeared in the doorway and Anna fell silent.
‘Please can I watch cartoons?’ she said.
‘All right,’ Søren said, over his shoulder to Anna. ‘I’ll look into it. Only I don’t know how far I’ll get without my badge. Come on then, munchkin, let’s find you some cartoons.’ He picked Lily up and carried her into the living room.
‘Have you lost your badge?’ Lily said, sounding anxious. She had been told countless times that she must never play with it because Søren would be told off by a man called Jørgensen if he lost it.
‘I washed it by accident last night,’ Søren said. ‘With your wet PJs.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘It shrank and got very small.’
‘So can I have it for my Sylvanian Family?’ Lily wanted to know.
‘I’ll think about it,’ Søren said.
*
It was well past noon that Friday before Anna drove to the faculty to meet Anders T., while Søren and Lily made themselves comfortable at opposite ends of the sofa and watched My Neighbour Totoro. Lily’s temperature was not particularly high and she had a healthy appetite for crusty rolls with a thick layer of chocolate spread. Just before two o’clock Søren woke up to the credits and left to have a shower. When he had got dressed, he went to see Lily, who had started drawing.
‘We’re not really that ill, are we?’ he said.
‘I’m very ill,’ Lily stated firmly.
‘Too ill to go to the Natural History Museum and eat hot dogs afterwards?’
Lily pursed her lips while she gave the matter her full consideration. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not too ill for that. But what happens if Mum sees us?’
‘She won’t,’ Søren assured her. ‘Don’t forget, she works in a completely different building. Besides, it’s good for budding biologists to visit the Museum of Natural History as often as possible. Think of all the things you’ll learn.’
*
It was Søren and Lily’s umpteenth visit to the Museum of Natural History. First they touched the glacier that stuck out from the wall. Then they inspected all of Lily’s favourite displays, ate French hotdogs in the café and finished off in the Evolution Room where an anxious-looking Lily kept her distance from the two human skeletons.
‘Are they real?’ she whispered, while Søren assured her yet again that they were plastic. Finally they took the lift down to the ground floor where they browsed in the museum shop while Søren surreptitiously made a mental note of all the doors he could see. One led to the lavatories and on another it said, ‘University of Copenhagen, no public access’. While Lily admired all the colourful toys and knickknacks, Søren carefully pressed down the handle. It might be out of bounds to the public, but the door was not locked.
‘Please may I have this one?’ Lily asked, holding up a clear rubber ball with a poisonous green frog inside it to Søren.
‘Yes, you may,’ Søren said, and together they went to pay.
‘And this one as well?’ Lily was pushing her luck and had grabbed a random soft toy, which happened to be a squashy, full-size python.
‘No, not that one.’
‘OK,’ Lily said, putting back the snake. They paid for the ball.
‘Come on, we’re off to the loo,’ Søren said, dragging Lily towards the lavatories.
‘But I don’t need the loo,’ Lily protested in a loud voice.
‘Oh yes you do. You should always go when you have the chance,’ Søren said, his voice just as loud.
‘Oh, really,’ Lily said, even louder.
The shop assistant, who had kept a sporadic eye on them over her half-rimmed glasses, now looked down at some papers on her counter. And, quick as a flash, Søren scooped Lily up and went through the unlocked door.
‘Why are we here?’ Lily said, sounding cross, and Søren whispered, ‘Ssh, we’re here to catch a thief.’
‘A thief?’ Lily exclaimed.
Søren glanced back at the door to the museum, but no one had come rushing after them. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a thief who has stolen a box belonging to your mum’s friend, which he brought back all the way from Africa. Come on, it’s not dangerous – it’s an awfully big adventure.’
Suddenly Lily looked very sly.
*
They got lost as always. Søren carried Lily through the long, deserted corridors, past tables covered with boxes of bones, books in classroom sets, cardboard sheets with herbaria, and stuffed animals, and Søren felt Lily dig her fingers into his back. A couple of times they heard a conversation through an open door and the moment they bumped into a human being – a young woman carrying a stuffed heron – Søren immediately asked for directions to the Department of Immunology.
‘You need to go up two floors,’ she said. ‘The stairs are over there.’
‘My mum knows everything about dinosaurs,’ Lily said to the woman, and Søren quickly moved on. ‘Why are you carrying me?’
Søren set Lily down and they walked on hand in hand.
At long last they reached the Department of Immunology. Here there were no stuffed animals or yellowing posters of water lilies and diving ducks, but modern laboratories laid out like pearls on a string, stainless-steel trolleys and a vaguely sinister atmosphere. Søren made his way to Storm’s office.
He and Lily stopped to look at the many cards and flowers placed outside the door to Storm’s office and Søren got a lump in his throat. A great loss for us and for Africa, he read on one card, Thank you for everything, Storm, on another. On a large, colourful bouquet, there was a small, silver-rimmed card that read, In respect, in grief, from your colleagues at Stanford University, and next to it someone had placed an African mask and lit tea lights. More flowers, more cards.
‘Oh, doesn’t that look nice?’ Lily said.
*
Søren knocked on Thor Albert Larsen’s half-open door, hoping that Thor would recognise him from yesterday and not ask to see his warrant card. ‘Enter,’ a voice called. Thor was on the telephone, but made a friendly gesture to indicate that Søren should wait. He ended his call and shook hands with both Søren and Lily.
‘Today is my day off and I’m taking my daughter to the museum,’ Søren lied. ‘But when you’re investigating a case, you’re never really off duty – it’s probably just like being a scientist.’
Thor asked Søren and Lily to sit down on a small seating arrangement in the corner of his office. He was pale, but composed. ‘I did think about taking today off,’ he said, glancing at Lily and the pale red rash on her face. ‘I’m very upset, I must admit. But it wouldn’t be in Storm’s spirit to slack. “To research, to conquer” was his motto. Besides, it’s just as well that I’m here. Colleagues from all over the world have heard about his death and the phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Now, what can I do for you? I spoke to your colleague this morning, Henrik Tejsner, who is heading the investigation, and he said that the police have filed the case as suicide.’ Suddenly he looked suspicious.
‘It’s correct that Kristian Storm killed himself,’ Søren said, muttering curses under his breath. ‘But, even so, I wanted a better understanding of the case. Please could you give me a list of Storm’s students and anybody else employed here in the department? There are some loose ends we’d like to tie up.’ Søren smiled again.
‘Yes, of course.’ Thor sat down behind his desk and looked at his screen. ‘He had many students,’ he added. ‘I myself was one of them – once.’
‘Was he a good supervisor?’ Søren asked.
‘Yes,’ Thor replied, without hesitation. ‘It’s quite a few years ago now. I finished my PhD in 2005 and started working in the department the following year. But I still remember my three PhD years as the time when I gained my proper foothold as a scientist. No one can motivate a student like Storm. He’ll keep pushing you . . . He would keep pushing you, home in on details, and he wouldn’t let go until you’d had it up to here, but at the same time he could zoom out like no other scientist I have met and understand complex relationships. He was a true . . . mentor. I can’t think of a single one of Storm’s students who hasn’t done exceptionally well, though it cost them blood, sweat and tears along the way.’ Thor smiled and added, ‘Except Marie, of course, but it wasn’t her fault that she never managed to start her PhD.’
‘Marie?’
‘Oh, that has nothing to do with Storm. Marie Skov was one of Storm’s master’s students last year. The two of them in the same lab . . . sparks flew! But then Marie fell ill, that was all I meant. Her PhD proposal had already been approved and the funding was in place, but God knows if she’ll ever get to finish it. By the way, it was Marie’s lab figures that triggered the dishonesty case against Storm.’ Thor got up and fetched a printout.
‘Here’s the list. Everyone’s names, phone numbers and email addresses.’ Again Thor looked sceptical. ‘I’d actually promised to email it to Henrik Tejsner yesterday, but he didn’t say anything about it when he called me this morning, so I presumed that it was no longer needed now that you have closed the case. But perhaps you could give it to him?’
‘I’ll do that,’ Søren said lightly, and took the paper.
‘We’re looking for a stolen box,’ Lily suddenly proclaimed and Søren spluttered.
‘Why don’t you go out into the corridor and try out your new bouncy ball?’ he suggested to her. ‘I bet it can jump all the way up to the ceiling if you whack it really hard against the floor.’ Lily was already out of the door and soon afterwards they heard boing-boing noises.
‘Are you surprised that Kristian Storm killed himself?’ Søren asked.
Thor thought about it. ‘Yes and no,’ he said at last. ‘When Trine found him yesterday, I quite simply refused to believe it. I had been chatting to him in the senior common room the day before and he appeared just as dedicated and diligent as usual. So initially it seemed absurd that he would have taken his own life. Since then I’ve thought of little else, of course, and last night I concluded that it does make sense after all. I no longer saw Storm outside work and I don’t know anyone else who did. Marie Skov, perhaps, but like I said, she’s on sick leave and hasn’t seen him for a long time. Storm and I ran the Department of Immunology together and we were a good team, but we were not friends. So even if he had been depressed, he would not necessarily have confided in me. And, to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have wanted Storm’s life. Despite what you may have heard, most scientists have a life outside their research. But not Storm. He worked twenty-four/seven, and when he finally did do anything social, it was with his students. It’s dangerous to identify too closely with your profession.’ Thor looked gravely at Søren. ‘We’ve seen it before when we’ve had to make cuts. People suddenly realise they have nothing left if their work is taken away from them, and some choose to end their own life. And perhaps being accused of scientific dishonesty is even worse. It’s bad enough that all activity has to stop while the DCSD review the research that has been called into question – and while that happens, it’s practically impossible to be considered for grants or have any scientific papers published. But even if you’re ultimately cleared, the accusation tends to stick. Everyone in science knows that. Storm was his research, and the fear of being found guilty of scientific dishonesty must have been extremely distressing . . .’ Thor looked speculatively at Søren ‘. . . especially if he knew deep down that he had fiddled the figures.’
‘Do you have any reason to believe that?’
‘No.’ Thor hesitated slightly. ‘Not really. Storm was a fine scientist, very conscientious, highly critical, and he rose above the personal rivalries and desire for prestige that drive many scientists, myself included, I must admit. Seen from that perspective, he wasn’t an obvious candidate to massage data. Saying that, Storm had become very fanatical about his Africa project in recent years, in fact so much so that the head of the institute commented on it when, yet again, I ended up presenting our annual accounts rather than Storm because he was in Africa – as usual. I didn’t mind, so that wasn’t the problem . . . but I was starting to notice it. How Storm slowly but surely put all his eggs into one basket, and that’s always risky. Then there were the lab results, which Storm and Marie published in connection with her master’s dissertation . . .’ Thor hesitated again. ‘They were just too good to be true . . . and their conclusion questioned the premise of every single WHO vaccination programme.’
‘How?’ Søren asked, with genuine interest.
Thor thought about it. ‘Storm discovered that some of the vaccines which the WHO recommends worldwide are associated with a number of negative side effects as well as protecting against specific diseases. Most of the vaccines boost the immune systems of the people vaccinated so they develop increased resistance to diseases in general. But one of the vaccines appears to weaken the immune system. The former is good, the latter is catastrophic, and the overall observation is revolutionary. If it’s true . . . So while I was pleased for Storm when he published the results, I was also sceptical.’
‘You thought he might have cheated.’
Thor shrugged his shoulders. ‘Storm obviously wanted Marie Skov’s results to back up his observations from Guinea-Bissau. So “cheating” is too strong a word. But perhaps he misinterpreted them and hoped he would get away with it.’
‘He misinterpreted them on purpose?’
‘I’ll leave it up to the DCSD to decide that,’ Thor said.
‘One of Storm’s students insists that Storm “couldn’t give a toss” about what other scientists thought of his research. That doesn’t sound like a man who could be shamed by an accusation of scientific dishonesty or a possible verdict against him?’
Thor shook his head slowly. ‘I’m aware of that. It’s Trine, isn’t it? She refuses to accept that it was suicide. She rang me to rant and rave only this morning. And I do understand that it’s difficult to come to terms with it. Like I said, I reacted in exactly the same way at first. With disbelief. But Trine has been on maternity leave for more than a year – no, longer because she went on sick leave at the very start of her pregnancy and she’s only just returned. She hadn’t seen just how obsessed with his Africa project Storm had become. Nor did Trine know that Storm’s father also killed himself. A not irrelevant detail. I told her about it when she called me today.’
‘How did you know that Storm’s father killed himself?’ Søren asked.
‘From Storm himself,’ Thor said. ‘I’ve known about it for many years, ever since I wrote my master’s, I think. A long time ago there was a rumour at the institute that a museum professor had skimmed his department for money, and when Storm overheard me and another student talk about it, he rebuked us. His own father, who was a famous professor of medicine, had been the victim of that kind of damaging gossip, he told us, and even though he was eventually cleared, his reputation never recovered and he ended up taking his own life. Storm was clearly still affected by it, and, well, we know from psychological studies that suicide often recurs in families.’
Søren watched Thor for a moment. Then he stuck out his hand and thanked him for his help.
‘You’re welcome,’ Thor said. ‘And please don’t hesitate to contact me, if you have any further thoughts. I’m here if you need me.’ He stretched out his arms.
Outside in the corridor, a poisonous green frog jumped right into Søren’s face.
‘Oops, sorry,’ Lily said, and Søren threw her over his shoulder, like a sack of potatoes, and carried her out of the university.
Oh, yeah, totally undercover.