The Dinosaur Feather

Chapter 2

Monday morning, October 8. The Institute of Biology was an H-shaped building squeezed in between the Natural History Museum and the August Krogh Institute in the University Park in the Østerbro area of Copenhagen. The main building was a narrow rectangle of four floors, which bordered Jagtvejen on one side and a cobbled square on the other.

Anna Bella parked her bicycle outside the entrance to Building 12, which housed the department of Cell Biology and Comparative Zoology on its second floor. It had been a terrible morning. When she tried to drop off Lily at nursery, Lily had sobbed and refused to let go of her in the coat room. Through the window in the door Anna could see the other toddlers, see them fetch their cushions and get ready for morning assembly. Lily was inconsolable. She clung to her mother, smearing snot and tears into Anna’s jacket.

Eventually, one of the nursery teachers came to Anna’s rescue. Lily’s sobbing grew louder. Desperation gushed from the pores of Anna’s skin. She looked at the nursery teacher with pleading eyes and the nursery teacher lifted Lily up, so they could pull the snowsuit off her.

Anna suffered from a permanently guilty conscience. Cecilie, Anna’s mother, looked after Lily almost all the time. Cecilie had volunteered her help six months earlier when Anna’s studies had become increasingly demanding.

“If you’re to have any hope of finishing your dissertation within the allotted time, you can’t possibly leave the university at four o’clock every day to pick up Lily from nursery,” she had argued.

And that had been that. Lily loved her granny, Anna told herself, so why not? It was the obvious solution.

For several months she had worked virtually around the clock, and although she had finally submitted her dissertation, she still had to prepare for her forthcoming thesis defense. No matter how much Anna missed her daughter and knew very well that the temporary arrangement had gotten out of hand, there simply was no room for Lily in the equation. And, as she kept telling herself: Lily liked being with Granny.

“Stop it, Lily,” she snapped. “I have to go now. Granny will pick you up today. You’re sleeping at Granny’s tonight. Now let go of me!” She had to tear herself loose.

“You go,” the nursery teacher said, “I’ll deal with her.”

When Anna had finished locking up her bicycle, she caught sight of Professor Moritzen in her office on the ground floor. Anna tried to catch her eye, but the professor was hunched over her desk and didn’t look up.

Hanne Moritzen was a parasitologist in her late forties, and four years earlier she had taught Anna in a summer course at the university’s field center in Brorfelde. One night, when neither had been able to sleep, they had run into each other in the large institutional kitchen that belonged to the Earth Sciences department. Hanne had made chamomile tea, and they started talking. At first the topic was biology, but Anna soon realized that Hanne, in contrast to other professors she had met, wasn’t particularly interested in talking shop. Instead they discussed favorite books and films, and Anna found herself genuinely warming to Hanne. When dawn broke, they agreed it was pointless to go back to bed, and when the bleary-eyed kitchen staff arrived, they had just started a game of cards.

Later they had bumped into each other in the faculty lounge, said hello, exchanged pleasantries, and then had lunch together several times. Anna admired Professor Moritzen’s serenity and sense of purpose. It was now a long time since their last lunch. Once she had defended her dissertation, she would make it up to all the people she had neglected: her daughter, Hanne Moritzen, herself.

Finally, Hanne looked up from behind the window, smiled, and waved to Anna. Anna waved back and walked through the revolving doors to Building 12.

The department of Cell Biology and Comparative Zoology consisted of offices and laboratories arranged on either side of a long, windowless corridor. The first office belonged to Professor Lars Helland, Anna’s internal supervisor. He was a tall thin man without a single wrinkle. This was remarkable. Biologists, as a rule, made a point of never protecting their skin when doing fieldwork. The only clues that revealed he was in his late fifties were white flecks in his soft beard, a slowly spreading bald patch, and a photograph on his desk of a smiling woman and a teenage girl with braces on her teeth.

Anna was convinced that Professor Helland loathed her; she certainly loathed him. During the nine months he had been supervising her dissertation, he had barely taken the time to offer her any guidance. He was permanently crotchety and uninterested, and when she asked a specific question, he would go off on an irrelevant tangent and couldn’t be stopped. It had angered Anna from the start and she had seriously considered making a formal complaint. Now she had resigned herself to the situation, and she tried, as much as possible, to avoid him. She had even left her dissertation in his cubbyhole last Friday, rather than hand it to him in person. When she checked the cubby for the fourth time, her dissertation was gone.

The door to Professor Helland’s office was ajar. Anna tiptoed past it. Through the gap she could see part of Helland’s recliner, the last centimeters of two gray trouser legs, feet in socks and one shoe lying carelessly discarded with the sole facing up. Typical. When Helland was in his office, he spent most of his time lying in his recliner, reading, surrounded by a Coliseum-like structure of books and journals piled up in disarray around him. Even on the very rare occasions they had met, Helland had been reclining as if he were a nobleman receiving an audience.

Helland wasn’t alone. Anna could hear an agitated voice and she instinctively slowed down. Could it be Johannes? She tried to make out what they were talking about, but failed. She would have to find out later, she thought, and accelerated down the corridor.

Anna and Johannes shared a study. Johannes had finished his graduate degree, but he had been allowed to stay on because he was cowriting a paper with Professor Helland, who had been his supervisor as well. Anna could vividly recall her first day in the department last January when Helland had shown her into the study where Johannes was already working. Anna recognized him instantly from her undergraduate days and had spontaneously thought “Oh, shit.” Later she wondered at her reaction because, until then, they had never actually spoken.

Johannes looked weird, and he was weird. He had red hair and looked at her as though he were leering at her with droopy eyes behind his round, unfashionable glasses. For the first three weeks, she deeply resented having to share and office with him. His desk looked like a battlefield, there were half-empty mugs of tea everywhere, he never aired the room, never tidied up, every day he forgot to switch his cell phone to silent and though he apologized, it was still infuriating. However, he seemed delighted to have acquired someone to share the tiny study with and talked nonstop about himself, his research, and global politics.

During those first few weeks Anna deliberately kept him at a distance. She went to the cafeteria on her own, even though it would have been normal to ask if he wanted to join her, she gave curt replies to his questions to discourage him from striking up a conversation, and she declined his friendly suggestion that they take turns to bring cakes. Yet Johannes persisted. It was as if he simply failed to register her aloofness. He chatted and told stories, he laughed out loud at his own jokes, he brought in interesting articles she might want to read, he always made tea for both of them and added milk and honey to her cup, just the way she liked it. And, at some point, Anna started to thaw. Johannes was warm and funny, and he made her laugh like she hadn’t laughed in… well, years. Johannes was extraordinarily gifted, and she had allowed herself to be put off by his peculiar appearance. Nor were his eyes droopy, as she had first thought, they were open and attentive, as though he were making an effort, as though what she said really mattered.

“You’re wearing makeup!” she exclaimed one spring morning, not long after they had become friends.

Johannes was already behind his desk when Anna arrived. He was wearing leather trousers and a Hawaiian shirt, his hair was smoothed back with wax and his long white fingers were splayed across the keyboard. His glasses magnified his brown eyes by 50 percent, so when he looked at her, there was no way she could miss it.

“I’m a goth,” he said with a mysterious smile.

“You’re a what?” Anna dumped her bag on her chair and gave him a baffled look.

“And things got a bit wild last Friday. I was in drag,” he continued, surprisingly. “I thought I had got all that stuff off.” He waved her closer. “Come on over, I’ve got something for you to look at.”

He showed her some pictures on the web while he talked. The club he had been to was called the Red Mask and events were held the first Friday of every month. The club’s name was inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe short story The Masque Mask of the Red Death, and it was a meeting place for goths from all over Scandinavia. Goths were a subculture, Johannes explained when he saw the blank expression on Anna’s face and pointed to a photograph. Anna failed to recognize the slightly androgynous-looking woman with red hair, black lipstick, and dramatic eyes, wearing a tight black corset, a string vest, leather trousers, and studs. The caption below the photo read Orlando. Anna frowned.

“It’s me,” he said, impatiently.

“You’re kidding!” Anna exclaimed, thinking she really was an idiot. It was obvious: Johannes was gay!

“What does ‘Orlando’ mean?” she asked.

Johannes looked exasperated.

“Orlando is a reference to the eponymous hero of the novel by Virginia Woolf, obviously. Orlando starts off as a man and is later transformed into a woman. Like me, at nightfall.” He laughed. Anna gawked and said: “Okay.”

“But, no, I’m not gay,” he added, as though he had read her mind.

“So what are you then?” Anna asked, before she could stop herself.

“I’m into women.” He winked at her. “And, in addition, I’m a goth. From time to time I go to goth parties in drag; women’s clothing, that is.”

“So do you all have sex with each other or what?” Anna blurted out.

Johannes raised his eyebrows. “Sounds like someone’s interested in going?”

“Shut up.” Anna threw an eraser at him, but she couldn’t help smiling. “That’s not why I’m asking. I was just curious. You look like a…” she nodded in the direction of the screen. Johannes followed her gaze.

“Yes, I’m well and truly dolled up,” he said, pleased with himself. He drummed his fingers on the table and looked at Anna as though he was debating with himself whether or not he could be bothered to explain this to her.

“There’s no sex at the Red Mask,” he said eventually. “But quite a few people belong to the goth scene as well as the fetish scene. Me, for instance.” He gave her a probing look. “That club is called Inkognito, and events take place twice a month.” He scratched one eyebrow. “And yes, there we have sex. There are darkrooms, and people arrive dressed in latex and leather. Here you can be hung from the wall and given a damned good thrashing if that’s your thing.”

Anna held up her hand. “Yes, thank you, Johannes. That will do.”

“And prudes are very much in demand on the fetish scene. Very.” Johannes flung out his arms by way of invitation. Anna threw a notebook at him; Johannes parried by rolling his chair backward. He roared with laughter. Anna could restrain herself no longer and joined in. With Johannes, everything seemed so easy.

The only time the harmony between them soured was when the subject turned to Professor Helland. Shortly after they had become friends, Anna asked Johannes what was bothering Helland. In her opinion, he was always in a hurry; he was grumpy and vague. To her great surprise, Johannes seemed genuinely baffled. What did she mean? Helland had been a brilliant supervisor for him, he protested, beyond reproach.

“Don’t you find him distracted and apathetic?” she asked.

Johannes didn’t think so at all.

One day they almost had a fight about Helland. Anna happened to mention that she often fantasized about playing practical jokes on the supervisor; hiding his favorite reference book, for example, or removing a small, but vital part of his dissecting microscope, which was worth millions of kroner—just a tiny bolt so the lens wouldn’t focus or the eye pieces couldn’t be adjusted to fit the distance between Helland’s eyes. Or how about grafting mold onto his wallpaper? Or releasing a couple of mice in his office? Something that would wind him up without resulting in serious repercussions for her? They were enjoying a tea break and had discussed a film they had seen, they had been laughing, but Johannes paled when she shared her fantasy.

“That’s not funny,” he said. “Why do you say stuff like that? That’s really not funny.”

“Hey, relax,” Anna said, instantly embarrassed at suddenly finding herself isolated with an evidently highly inappropriate idea.

“You can’t go around playing tricks on people,” Johannes had muttered.

“It was just a joke,” Anna said.

“It didn’t sound like it,” Johannes said.

“Hang on, what are we really talking about?” Anna asked, defensively, and turned on her chair to face Johannes who was bent over his keyboard. “Are you saying you think I would actually hurt Professor Helland?”

“No, of course not.” But Johannes sounded unconvinced.

“It’s beyond me why you always have to defend him,” she continued, outraged.

“And it’s beyond me why you always have to attack him.” Johannes gave her a look of disbelief. “Honestly, Anna, just give the man a chance.”

“He’s not committed,” she said and could hear how ridiculous that sounded.

“And so he deserves mold on his wallpaper that will give him a headache, itchy eyes, and a runny nose?”

“It was a joke!”

Johannes studied her closely.

“Tell me, why do you have to be so harsh sometimes? Your tone… it can be really cutting. And Helland isn’t so bad. In many ways, he’s cool.”

Anna turned to her screen and hammered away at the keyboard. She was close to tears. Johannes reheated the kettle and made more tea.

“Here, gorgeous,” he said, affectionately, placing a cup on her desk. He nudged her softly.

“It was just a joke, all right?” she mumbled.

“But it wasn’t funny,” he replied and went back to his desk.

From that day on Johannes and Anna avoided discussing their mutual supervisor, even though Anna was finding Professor Helland’s behavior increasingly bizarre. One evening, after taking Lily to Cecilie’s, she cycled to the Institute to work. It was dusk and the parking lot behind the building was filled with dancing blue shadows. There was the leafy scent that carried the end to an unusually chilly summer. Pigeons were pecking at the ground by the bicycle stand. They scattered when her bicycle keeled over. Johannes had gone home hours ago, which was a shame.

Professor Helland materialized out of nowhere in the twilight. He stood with his back to her, completely rigid, right where the birds had just been congregating and he looked like a wax figure. He seemed unaware of the birds and didn’t turn around. Anna felt unnerved and carefully walked toward him. The light was fading, and she moved in a soft curve, hoping he would, at least, say “hi.” But still he didn’t turn. He remained with his back to her, apparently doing nothing. Anna looked for his car, but she couldn’t see it. She looked for his bicycle, but couldn’t see that either. Nor did he have car keys in his hand, or a bag slung over his shoulder, and he wasn’t wearing a jacket. She was just inside his field of vision now, so she cleared her throat. Helland turned his head and stared blankly at her; he opened his mouth to say something, but only a bubbling sound and some white froth emerged from the corner of his mouth.

“Are you all right?” Anna called out; she was frightened now.

“Gho whay,” he mumbled and lashed out at the air. He gave her a furious stare, but the blow had missed if, indeed, it had been Helland’s intention to push her away.

“Gho whay,” he repeated, a little louder. Some froth dripped from his mouth and disappeared into the darkness.

“You want me to go away?” Anna asked.

Helland nodded. “Yes, go away,” he said, very clearly this time.

Anna had left him there. Her heart had pounded all the way up to the second floor where she let herself into the photocopier room, which faced the parking lot. She stood in the dark window, watching Professor Helland. He stayed there for a while. Then he shuddered deeply, jerked his head, and shook first one, then his other leg and disappeared around the corner to the main parking lot.

She decided to tell Johannes about the incident the next day, and, to begin with, he looked annoyed with her for breaking their tacit agreement not to discuss Helland. But then, to Anna’s huge surprise, he admitted that he, too, had noticed that Helland wasn’t firing on all cylinders. Johannes and Helland were working on a paper based on Johannes’s dissertation and, to be honest, Helland hadn’t displayed his usual professional acuity.

All of a sudden Anna said: “And what’s that thing he’s got in his eye?”

Johannes looked blank.

“He’s got something in his eye,” Anna said, pointing to the corner of her own right eye. “A small hard pouch of some kind. Do you think he’s ill?”

Johannes shrugged. Anna had been unable to figure out if Helland really did have something wrong with his eye, because the only times she ever caught a glimpse of him were when he hurried down the corridor, inevitably leaving mayhem in his wake, roaring “morning!” at the open door to their office before disappearing into the elevator.

Johannes bent over his keyboard again, and Anna decided to drop the subject.

Anna had moved to Copenhagen in 1999 when she was accepted into the biology program at the university. Jens, her father, was already living there, and he had helped her find the apartment in Florsgade. Jens and Cecilie had divorced when Anna was eight. Anna had stayed on the island of Fyn with her mother, in the village of Brænderup, just outside Odense, the largest city on the island. The village consisted of around fifty houses; the community was close-knit, and it was a lovely place to grow up. For years Anna was uncertain as to whether or not her parents had permanently split because Jens, like some hopeful suitor, never stopped visiting them. Anna knew it had been a source of friction to the girlfriends Jens dated after Cecilie; not that Jens and Anna spent much time discussing their feelings, but he had once remarked that it happened to be the case. His girlfriends resented that he would rather spend Christmas with Cecilie (and Anna), would rather go on vacation with Cecilie (and Anna), and never forgot Cecilie’s birthday (but managed, on two occasions, to forget Anna’s). Anna knew her father loved her, but he worshipped Cecilie. Anyone could see that.

Anna had once told her best friend Karen that she thought parents liked each other better than they liked their children. They had both been ten years old at the time. They were building a secret hideaway, and Anna had asked Karen why grownups seemed to like each other more, and why children seemed to come second, and Karen had said that was just not true. Karen’s mom said she loved Karen more than anyone on the planet. That grownups could choose whether or not they wanted to be together, but that you loved children all the time, for as long as you lived, and that you never regretted having them. Karen and Anna had almost ended up having a row. In the middle of it all, Jens called them into the kitchen for toast and chocolate milkshakes. Jens and Cecilie must have been divorced at that point but, nevertheless, Jens was there, in the kitchen, reading the newspaper by the window. And making toast.

The girls came in and Karen said to Jens: “You don’t really like Cecilie more than Anna, do you?” He lowered the newspaper, appearing shocked. Anna was small with dark hair; Karen’s hair was blond and curly.

“Why on earth do you want to know that?” he had replied, and Anna had blushed. She hadn’t wanted Jens to know about this, not at all, she hadn’t wanted Karen to ask him. Anna glared defiantly at the tablecloth. She couldn’t remember what happened next, only that she refused to play with Karen for the rest of that day and that she took back the special stamp she had given her, even though Karen said she couldn’t do that. However, that evening Jens told her something. When Anna had been born, Cecilie had been very ill, back problems of some sort. She was in great pain and had been in and out of hospital, Jens explained, and even though Anna only weighed six pounds, Cecilie hadn’t been allowed to lift her. That had made her feel really sad. Jens tucked Anna into bed and kissed her forehead.

“And that’s why I take good care of Cecilie,” he said. “Special care.”

Anna nodded. Anna, too, always tried really hard to please Cecilie.

“But I love you more than anyone, Anna,” he said, and suddenly looked very serious. “Parents just do. Otherwise something’s wrong.”

The next day Anna gave the stamp back to Karen. Along with a small rubber animal that could walk down the window all by itself.

When Anna told Jens in the spring of 2004 that she was pregnant by Thomas and they had decided to keep the baby, Jens’s response was, “Why?”

They were in a café in Odense and had just bought a luxurious dressing gown as a birthday present for Cecilie. They were having coffee before going to Brænderup where Cecilie was cooking dinner.

Anna gave her father a furious look.

“Do you want me to start with the birds and the bees, or how much do you know already?”

“I didn’t think you and Thomas were getting along very well.”

“It’s better now.”

“How long have you two known each other?”

“Almost five months.”

“How old are you?”

“Have you forgotten how old I am?”

“Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-six.”

“And how many years of your degree do you have left?”

“Three years.”

“Why do you want to keep the baby?” he asked for the second time. “The last time I saw you, you wanted to break up with Thomas because he… how did you put it?… only cared about himself. You weren’t sure you could cope with that. And he was working all the time. Have you forgotten that?”

“You don’t like him.”

“I don’t know him very well.”

“But what you do know, you don’t like.”

Jens sighed. “I do like him, Anna. He’s all right.”

A pause followed. Anna gritted her teeth. Her legs were itching, and she had to make a real effort not to scream out loud. Suddenly Jens hugged her.

“Congratulations,” he mumbled into her hair. “Congratulations, sweetheart. I’m sorry.”

Afterward they had made a beeline for a baby supply store and bought a dark blue stroller for Jens’s grandchild. A dark blue parasol was included, and Anna twirled it while Jens paid. The stroller was a display model and slightly faded on one side, but there was a waiting list to get a brand new one. And Jens didn’t want to wait, no sir. He said “my grandchild” ten times at least, while they were in the store. The cashier glanced furtively at Anna’s stomach, which was as flat as a pancake. Anna giggled.

When they came back to Cecilie, the aroma of roast lamb filled the whole house. Cecilie was standing on the kitchen table hanging a paper chain along the window. Jens rolled the stroller into the kitchen.

“What’s that?” Cecilie said.

“What do you think it is?”

“A stroller.”

“Bingo!”

“I’m menopausal,” Cecilie said, and spat out the pins she had been holding in the corner of her mouth.

Anna started to laugh, and Jens did a round with the pram in the kitchen as he called out to Cecilie:

“Get down, Granny, roll your walker to the fridge and give me your best bottle of champagne. From now on I want to be known as ‘honored Granddad.’”

It wasn’t until then that it hit her. Cecilie dove off like a rock star and hugged Anna. Half an hour later, when they were sitting at the kitchen table and the champagne bottle was empty—Anna hadn’t had any, and Jens and Cecilie were in high spirits—Cecilie suddenly said:

“Who’s the father?”

Anna felt movement under the table and knew Jens had tried to kick Cecilie. Anna looked from one to the other.

“You’ll be the death of me, the pair of you,” she sighed and went up to her old room to watch TV.

The next morning when Anna got up, Jens and Cecilie were looking up something on the Internet.

“I’m moving to Copenhagen,” Cecilie announced. Jens carried on searching while Cecilie got up to toast some bread for Anna.

“You just sit down,” she said and put butter, milk, and cheese on the table, as well as her homemade jam and a cucumber. She made a fresh pot of tea and poured Anna a cup. When she had set down the teapot on the table, she looked at Anna and said, “I’m sorry I asked you who the father was. Of course it’s Thomas. I was just under the impression that things between you two weren’t good. That it was only a question of time before…”

“Well, you were wrong,” Anna interrupted her.

Cecilie smiled a fleeting smile.

“I like him very much,” she said, with emphasis.

The truth was that things between Anna and Thomas were a total nightmare. They had known each other only five months, and they didn’t live together. Obviously, they would live together now that they were having a baby.

It had started with a chance meeting in a bar in Vesterbro. He was way out of her league, she thought, when she spotted him by the window to the courtyard where he stood with his arms folded, feet at ten to two, with a very straight back and a cigarette in a clenched fist. His T-shirt was rather tight, but it was probably hard to resist the temptation to dress like that when you had a great body, which he did.

Smug, Anna had thought. Thomas was a doctor at Hvidovre Hospital, he was currently training in his specialty, and he was in his mid-thirties. His hair was short, almost white; his skin was fine and freckled, and his eyes were very intense. He left at ten to two; just like his feet, Anna thought, as she watched him exit the bar.

He called her two days later. She had told him her name, and he had found her on the Internet. Dinner? Okay. From then on, they were dating.

It had gone wrong almost immediately. Anna still couldn’t understand exactly how it had happened, but the fact was that she had never been so miserable in all her life, and how this was linked directly to her being madly in love got lost in the drama. Or it did at the time. Thomas loved her, he told her so. But she didn’t believe it. You’re a bit paranoid, he laughed. Anna, however, loved him to distraction. The more he kept her at arm’s length, the more she loved him. She didn’t have a clue what was going on. She didn’t know if they were a couple, if he loved her (he said he did), or if he didn’t (he behaved that way). He would arrive several hours late, or fail to show up altogether without a phone call of explanation. She didn’t know if they had a future together; she didn’t know where he was, why he said the things he said, why sometimes she was allowed to go out with him and his friends and other times not: “Why would you want to do that, sweetheart?” She could offer no reply. She just wanted to go.

Thomas told her to calm down. “Don’t ruin it, it’s fine as it is,” he would say. She tried, but it didn’t work. Thomas had only met Anna’s parents a few times, and none of the occasions had been a success. Anna had never met Thomas’s parents. In the spring Thomas wanted a two-week break; “I love you Anna, never doubt that, I just can’t have this pressure all the time,” he had said and looked irritably at her. In fact, he had been so exhausted after an all-night argument, which Anna had started, that he nearly gave a patient the wrong medication. During their two weeks apart, Anna did a pregnancy test.

“Looks like we’re having a baby,” he said and smiled when they met up again. Anna stared at him.

“Are you pleased?”

“I would have chosen a different time,” he said.

They moved in together shortly before Lily was born. That was nearly three years ago.

The Natural History Museum was an upward extension of the Institute of Biology, and it towered like a decorated ferry over the surrounding buildings. The top two floors of the museum were open to the public. The rest of the building consisted of laboratories and offices symmetrically arranged around a fireproof core where collections of insects, mollusks and vertebrates had been gathered, identified and preserved by Danish scientists for hundreds of years. The Vertebrate Collection on the third floor housed a vast amount of vertebrates; downstairs were two invertebrate departments with mollusks, and furthest down was the whale basement, which included the mounted skeleton of an adult baleen whale.

Anna’s external supervisor was Dr. Tybjerg. He was a vertebrate morphologist who specialized in the evolution of cynodont birds. He was Professor Helland’s polar opposite. He had brown, thinning hair, dark eyes, a small nimble body, and he wore pebble glasses at work that made Anna smile because he looked like a parody of himself. Dr. Tybjerg was shy and very earnest. He never canceled their meetings, and he always arrived well prepared, bringing with him any books he had mentioned at their previous meeting or a photocopy of an article he had promised her. His speech was staccato. He added impressive amounts of sugar to his strong black tea. To begin with he had found it hard to look her in the eye and had clammed up like an oyster on the few occasions Anna had asked him personal questions.

Dr. Tybjerg was the first person to take Anna to the Vertebrate Collection.

“You can’t learn about bones from books,” he said, as they walked down the corridor to the collection. “And you must never,” he added, giving Anna a stern look, “draw any conclusions about bones from drawings or photographs—never!”

Dr. Tybjerg unlocked the door and disappeared down aisles of cupboards. Anna stopped, overwhelmed by the unfamiliar smell of preserved animals, before venturing further inside. It was neither dark nor light. It was like a drug-addict-proof bathroom: you could see enough to find the toilet paper, but not a vein in your arm.

The Vertebrate Collection consisted of a large room divided by display cases with glass doors behind which stuffed animals were exhibited and cabinets with drawers containing boxes and cases in varying sizes, in which the boiled and cleaned bones were stored. Dr. Tybjerg marched down the aisles with familiar ease and stopped halfway.

“This is where the birds are kept,” he said, cheerfully.

The air-conditioning was making a strange noise, and there was an awful smell. Anna peered into the cabinets with their rows of birds, neatly lined up. Ostriches, a dodo skull, and tiny sparrows of every kind. Dr. Tybjerg moved down an aisle to the left and disappeared around the corner.

“This is a sacred place,” he said from somewhere in the twilight, and Anna could hear him rattling doors. She walked close to one of the display cabinets, pressed her nose against the glass, and tried to make out in the gloom what kind of bird was on the other side. It was large and brown, with a plump tail feather. Its wings had been spread out, as if the bird had been about to take off or land when it died, and Anna spotted a stuffed mouse that had been placed in its beak for illustration. Its wing span was six feet, at least, and the bird made all the others in the cabinet look like a flock of frightened chickens.

“A golden eagle,” Dr. Tybjerg said. Anna nearly jumped out of her skin. He had gone around the cupboards and come up behind her without her noticing. He held two long wooden boxes under his arm. She reached out her hand to support herself against a cabinet.

“Don’t touch the glass in the door,” he warned. “It’s genuine crystal. You’ll break it.”

“Does it have to be so dark in here?” Anna asked.

“Come on,” he said, ignoring her question. Anna followed him. Back in the corridor she realized her legs were shaking.

“Now, let’s take a look at this,” Dr. Tybjerg said, as he settled down at a table by a window. “This is a Rhea Americana.” Carefully, he lifted a bird skull out of the box.

“It’s a secondarily flightless bird and so has a skeleton that is quite like that of predatory dinosaurs, in that it has an unkeeled sternum. This makes it a good skeleton to practice on,” he explained, “because when it comes to flying birds, everything is welded together. The bones of secondarily flightless birds, however, are somewhat reminiscent of those of primitive birds. Now, let’s go through it together.”

Anna made herself comfortable and watched Dr. Tybjerg take out the bones from the box and spread them out on the table. A build-your-own-bird kit. He started pairing them up and Anna watched, fascinated. She had no idea where anything went, but she liked the gentle movements of his hands.

They remained at the window for nearly two hours. Dr. Tybjerg asked Anna to reconstruct the skeleton after having demonstrated it to her a couple of times. She had to be familiar with the many reductions and adaptations of the bird skeleton in order to appreciate the dispute that would be the subject of her dissertation, Dr. Tybjerg stressed. A group of expert ornithologists led by the well-known scientist, Clive Freeman—had Anna heard of him?—still refused to accept that birds were present-day dinosaurs. Anna nodded. Clive Freeman was professor of paleoornithology at the department of Bird Evolution, Paleobiology, and Systematics at the University of British Columbia, and he had published several major and respected works on birds.

“He is a very good ornithologist,” Dr. Tybjerg emphasized. “He really knows his stuff. And if you’re to have the slightest hope of demolishing his argument, you need to be conversant with those areas of avian anatomy and physiology to which Freeman constantly refers, and on which he bases his totally absurd claim that birds aren’t dinosaurs.”

Dr. Tybjerg stared into the distance. Professor Freeman and his team had no scientific grounds on which to base their argument, he went on, as fossils and recognized systems of taxonomy confirmed the close relationship between birds and dinosaurs.

“And yet they persist.” Dr. Tybjerg fixed Anna’s gaze, and his eyes narrowed. “Why?”

Anna sat with the coracoids and tried to figure out which one would fit into the sternum.

Dr. Tybjerg seemed to approve of her choice by passing her a scapula. As he gave her the bone, he looked at her urgently and prompted, “Two hundred and eighty-six apomorphies.”

“Sorry?”

“They dismiss two hundred and eight-six apomorphies.”

Anna gulped. Now what was an apomorphy again? Tybjerg twirled a small, sharp bone between his fingers.

“You need to review all of their arguments and all of ours,” he said. “Pair them up and go through them. Once and for all. Together we will wipe the floor with him.” Coming from Tybjerg, this expression sounded odd. Anna looked out at the University Park.

“We’ll publish a small book,” he added. “A manifesto of some kind. The ultimate proof.” He stared triumphantly toward the ceiling.

Anna had gotten up to leave when Dr. Tybjerg suddenly said, “By the way…” and tossed a key across the table. It seemed as if it had slipped out of his sleeve. Anna caught it and, without looking at her, Dr. Tybjerg said:

“I did not just give you a master key.”

Anna quickly pocketed the key and said: “No, you certainly didn’t.”

Dr. Tybjerg had entrusted her with a key that was normally forbidden to students. Now every door was open to her.

Anna’s curiosity was rekindled as she left the museum. She asked Johannes about Tybjerg.

“A lot of people don’t like him,” was his immediate reaction.

“Why?” Anna was genuinely surprised. Johannes suddenly looked as if he was having second thoughts.

“I don’t want to be seen as a tattler,” he said, eventually.

“For God’s sake, Johannes, give me a break,” Anna exclaimed.

He thought it over. “Okay,” he said. “But I’ll make it brief. Word has it Tybjerg is an insanely gifted scientist. He was hired by the museum to keep track of their collections when he was still a schoolboy. He’s supposed to have a photographic memory, but he’s socially inept and really quite unpopular. For years Tybjerg and Helland have been some sort of team…” He wrinkled his nose. “When he was younger, he taught undergraduates. In fact, he used to teach me. But there were complaints.”

“Why?”

“He can’t teach,” Johannes declared.

“That’s weird,” she said. “I’ve just spent all afternoon with him, and I thought he explained things really well.”

“Not to a classroom full of students. He gets nervous and he drones on as if he were reading aloud from some long, convoluted text he knows by heart. I think he’s a bit nuts, I mean, seriously. They only keep him on because he knows everything there is to know about the Vertebrate Collection. More than anyone in the whole world. It’s like hiring someone with autism to look after a vast record collection. He knows where everything is and what it’s called. But they would never offer him tenure. To be employed by the University of Copenhagen, you have to be able to teach.” He paused before he added: “Dr. Tybjerg is weirder than most.”

Anna rested her head on her keyboard.

“Lucky me, or what?”

“What do you mean?”

“One of my supervisors is useless and the other one is a weirdo.”

“Don’t start all that again,” Johannes said. “We’ve already been there. Helland’s all right.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Yes, and I would rather you didn’t.”

To begin with, every word and every scientific argument in the controversy about the origin of birds was watertight and unassailable. Anna accepted that, as her starting point, she probably had to take Helland’s and Tybjerg’s positions at face value in order to even begin to understand the vast network of scientific implications; later she could form her own opinion. However, she honestly couldn’t see why Helland and Tybjerg were right and Freeman, according to them, was wrong.

“Birds are present-day dinosaurs,” she wrote on a sheet of paper, followed by: “Birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs.” Then she drew two heads, which bore some resemblance to Tybjerg and Helland, on the paper and pinned it up on the wall. She took another sheet, drew another head—supposed to be Freeman’s—and wrote on it: “Birds are not present-day dinosaurs,” followed by: “Modern birds and extinct dinosaurs are sister groups and solely related to each other via their common ancestor…” Who was that again? She looked it up and added “Archosaur” to the paper and stuck it on the wall.

“‘An archosaur is a diapsid reptile,’” she mimicked her textbook, and shut her eyes irritably. Now what does diapsid mean? She looked it up. It meant that the skull had two holes in each temporal fenestra. As opposed to synapsids and anapsids which had…. She chewed her lip. What exactly was a temporal fenestra? She looked it up. The opening at the rear of the skull for the extension and the attachment of the jaw muscles; a distinction was made between the infratemporal and the supratemporal fenestra, and what were they again? Anna looked them up.

The days passed in a blur, and she could feel her frustration escalate. She was writing a dissertation, not some trivial essay. The whole point was that she would contribute something new, not merely summarize a well-known controversy by repeating existing material. She tried to explain to Cecilie that it had taken her three days to read four pages, and Cecilie stared at her as though she had fallen from the sky. But it was true. Every word was alien, and every time she looked up one word, more terms followed and eventually she had looked up so many terms in so many books and followed so many references that she could no longer remember what she had initially struggled with. There was never a one-word explanation; every term described nature’s most intricate processes, whose terminology she had learned as an undergraduate, but she could barely remember it these days, so she was forced to look that up as well. After one month, her frustration had evolved into actual fear. Was she plain stupid? The bottom line was she grasped so little of the controversy—which clearly enraged both Tybjerg and Helland—that it was embarrassing.

In a fit of despair she started reading Freeman’s book The Birds from start to finish. Dr. Tybjerg had mentioned it several times and dryly remarked that when Anna was capable of pulling it apart, she would be ready to defend her dissertation. Anna had had the book lying on her desk for weeks. Every day when she left, she put it in her bag, intending to read it, and every night she managed seven lines before falling asleep. Time to bite the bullet now. Suddenly spurred on by the promise that everything would fall into place once she had read it, she immersed herself in the book.

Freeman’s book was a masterpiece. It was filled with wonderful color photographs and illustrations, and throughout the text he argued seriously and soberly. He backed up his views with well-argued scientific conclusions, made references to existing literature, and allowed for doubt to remain where certain points had yet to be decided. Had it not been for Helland, and especially Tybjerg’s ardent assertion that Freeman was wrong, Anna would have bought Freeman’s sister-group theory on the spot. Freeman was without a doubt someone who knew what he was talking about, and this was the man she was supposed to “wipe the floor” with? When she had finished reading The Birds she had eighty-two pages of handwritten notes and hadn’t grown even a bit wiser; rather, she had become truly terrified of the task that lay ahead of her. With The Birds in her arms and her heart pounding, she decided to come clean with Dr. Tybjerg.

Dr. Tybjerg was waiting for her in the cafeteria at the Natural History Museum, and Anna didn’t even have time to sit down in the chair opposite him before her misgivings poured out of her.

“Dr. Tybjerg, I fail to see why Professor Freeman’s scientific position is wrong… I think his argument sounds convincing.”

Dr. Tybjerg pursed his lips.

“Well, then you haven’t read enough,” he said with zen-like calm.

“It’s taken me three weeks to read The Birds,” Anna groaned.

“Why on earth did you read all of it? You can flip through it. That’s more than enough for anyone.” Dr. Tybjerg took the book from her.

“This book is a flash in the pan, nothing more.” He quickly thumbed the pages. Then he smiled. “But I do understand why it can seem a little overwhelming. Freeman appears convincing because he has convinced himself. Such people are always the worst.” Dr. Tybjerg paused and then looked as if he had come up with a plan.

“Drop the book,” he ordered her. “Instead, read at least fifteen papers written by people who argue that birds are present-day dinosaurs, and fifteen papers by people who disagree. This will make everything clear to you. And stay away from books for the time being. Many of them are good and you can return to them later, but this one,” Dr. Tybjerg slammed The Birds on the table, “is nothing but whorey propaganda.”

Anna exhaled through her nostrils.

“And one final thing,” he added, giving her a short, sharp look. “You need to assume I’m right. You’ll be convinced in time, but until that happens you need to accept my position. Otherwise you’ll quite simply lose your way.”

Dr. Tybjerg’s face told her the meeting was over. Anna nodded.

Anna spent the next three days searching the database for published papers at the University Library for Natural Science and Health Studies in Nørre Allé. She kept reminding herself Tybjerg was right.

The first day was an exercise in futility. There were tons of papers for and against, but she didn’t come across anything that convinced her that Helland and Tybjerg’s argument was more valid than Freeman’s. It wasn’t until day two that things improved. She had compiled over forty papers at that point, she had photocopied them and spread them out on the table in front of her, and she was just about to give into frustration again when a tiny flicker of light appeared in the darkness.

If Tybjerg was right, if it really were the case that the kinship of birds to dinosaurs was as well supported as Tybjerg and Helland and… she did a quick count… around twenty-five other vertebratists from all over the world agreed it was, then it had to follow that their scientific position was the stronger, at least for now, as Dr. Tybjerg maintained. If that were true, well, then it was indeed remarkable that reputable journals such as Nature, Science, and, in particular, Science Today, which owed their existence to their scientific credibility, continued to assign column inches to it. Anna still was not convinced that this was the case, but that seemed secondary now. The situation would have been different if a sliver of doubt remained. If birds might have been dinosaurs, if fossilized evidence had yet to be discovered, which Anna could see had been the case in the 1970s and 1980s, if the feathered Sinosauropteryx hadn’t been found in 2000 or the feathered Tyrannosaurus in 2005. But there was plenty of fossil evidence. The feathered dinosaur was a reality, and it was clear in every single paper that argued in favor of the close kinship between birds and dinosaurs that the authors were convinced birds were dinosaurs. Utterly convinced.

Anna stared into space.

Dr. Tybjerg had told her that the editorial committee of a scientific journal typically consisted of five people with a science background, which, broadly speaking, meant that fifteen people from the three leading journals, Nature, Science, and Science Today, were in supreme command of which scientific topics would reach the public. Fifteen people. That’s not many, Anna thought, and in order to avoid giving preferential treatment to certain subjects or areas of research, those fifteen people had to consider very carefully if what they published did, in fact, reflect the actual work being carried out across the world. And this was where things didn’t add up. Even though experts agreed that birds were present-day dinosaurs, Anna found in every other journal, at least, new contributions to the debate. She could feel the excitement pump through her body. Quick as lightning she sorted the papers into two piles, then she highlighted the names of the authors in yellow, and when that was done, she leaned back and smiled. There were twenty-four full-length papers and minor contributions in the pile that supported the kinship of birds to dinosaurs; there were twenty-three contributions in the pile that didn’t believe that birds were present-day dinosaurs. Together, Dr. Tybjerg and Professor Helland accounted for five of the articles in the one pile; the remaining nineteen had been written by sixteen other vertebratists from universities all over the world. It was a rather convincing spread.

Then she went through the pile with twenty-three papers. These were written by three different authors. Clive Freeman, Michael Kramer, and Xian Chien Lu. Clive Freeman and Michael Kramer were responsible for nineteen out of the twenty-three articles. Anna got up and found a computer with Internet access. First she looked up Xian Chien Lu and discovered that the Chinese paleontologist had died the previous year. That left only Clive Freeman and Michael Kramer. It took Anna eight clicks to learn that Michael Kramer had completed his graduate degree at the department of Bird Evolution, Paleobiology, and Systematics at the University of British Columbia in March 1993, been awarded a PhD grant in 1993 by the same department, and had written his thesis there from 1997–2000, after which he had been employed as a junior professor in June 2000. Anna’s eyes scanned his résumé and soon found what she was looking for: his MSc and his PhD supervisor was Professor Clive Freeman, his internal PhD examiner was Professor Clive Freeman, and the Senior Professor at the department of Bird Evolution, Paleobiology, and Systematics was Clive Freeman. For the first time since Anna had started her graduate work, she felt she had made a breakthrough.

Anna had just taken off her jacket, shaken thoughts of Lily’s upsetting meltdown at the nursery school from her mind, and switched on her computer when she pricked up her ears. She knew every sound in the department. The groaning extraction system, the shrill smoke alarms, the Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday noises of students conducting experiments, the sound of Helland’s busy footsteps, of Johannes’s snail’s pace shuffle, of Svend Jørgensen and Elisabeth Ewald, the other two professors in the department, who wore soft rubber soles and clicking heels, respectively. However, the sound Anna was now hearing didn’t fit in. Someone was running, then they stopped, and she heard Johannes call out for Professor Ewald in a half-strangled voice followed by the sound of running feet again, and then Professor Ewald’s voice and then Professor Jørgensen’s. Frowning, Anna rolled back her chair and stuck her head out into the corridor. Johannes was standing in front of Professor Jørgensen’s lab, his arms flailing.

“He’s just lying there… I think he’s dead. He looks dreadful. They’re coming, emergency service said, they’re coming right away; they said I wasn’t to leave him, but I can’t look at him. His tongue… it’s his tongue.” Anna stepped into the corridor and joined the trio, who started moving away from her before she reached them. They were running now. Anna started running too, and ten seconds later they stopped in front of Helland’s open door.

For a moment they all froze. Professor Helland was lying in his recliner. He was still wearing the gray trousers that Anna had seen only minutes earlier through the gap in the door when she arrived. He slumped slightly, his arms hung rigid to either side, and his eyes were wide open. In his lap, as though he had been reading it, lay Anna’s dissertation. There was blood on it. Then she noticed his tongue.

It was lying on his chest. One end of it looked like an ordinary rough, flesh-colored tongue, the other was a severed, bloody limb, elongated and shredded like prepared tenderloin. Johannes was standing behind them, whimpering, and Anna, Professor Ewald, and Professor Jørgensen reacted simultaneously by retreating to the corridor.

“Jesus Christ!”

They had arranged to meet to discuss their paper, Johannes stammered, his hands and eyes fluttering. “I was on time,” he said. Helland had failed to answer the door, so he had pushed it open, and there was Helland, rattling, his tongue had fallen out of his mouth, that was how it had looked, as though it had let go of Helland’s mouth at that very moment and dropped down onto his chest. Johannes had grabbed him, only the whites of Helland’s eyes were showing; Johannes had panicked, run to the back office and called 911.

Professor Jørgensen went to the men’s room across from Helland’s office and threw up.

“We have to go back inside,” Anna said. “What if he’s still alive? What’s if he’s not dead yet? We have to help him.”

“I’ll go,” Professor Ewald declared.

“We mustn’t touch anything,” Johannes called out. “They told me not to.”

“Calm down, Johannes,” Anna said. She felt dizzy. Professor Jørgensen emerged from the men’s room white as a sheet. Then they heard the sound of the approaching emergency vehicles.

“Bloody hell,” Professor Jørgensen said, rubbing one eye with the palm of his hand.

The emergency vehicles were close now, and soon they heard people thunder up the stairs. Two uniformed police officers and an ambulance doctor arrived; the doctor disappeared immediately into Helland’s office and thirty seconds later another pair police officers arrived. One of the officers entered Helland’s office and the other three started asking questions. Professor Jørgensen and Professor Ewald talked over each other and Anna fixed her eyes on a button on the floor. The two professors disappeared down the corridor with one of the officers, and Anna stared at the button until a warm spot on her head told her Johannes was looking at her.

“Right, we had better have a chat,” a police officer said to Anna and Johannes. They spoke for five minutes. Johannes repeated what he had already said, and Anna explained who she was and said she had seen Helland’s trousers through the gap in the door as she passed on her way to her office, that she had heard agitated voices coming from inside, and yes, it might just have been one agitated voice, and no, she hadn’t heard exactly what had been said. Johannes kept staring at her. Anna tentatively held out her hand to see if it was trembling. It was.

The doctor emerged in the doorway and quietly briefed the two police officers, who nodded. One officer took Anna and Johannes a little farther down the corridor, where he told them to sit down.

“Please wait here. We’ll be a few minutes,” he said and returned to Professor Helland’s door. Anna watched as the two officers cordoned off the entrance to Helland’s office and a section of the corridor with red-and-white police tape.

More police officers arrived, uniform and plain clothes. Two of the plain-clothes officers put on thin, white boiler suits and face masks and disappeared into Helland’s office. A tall man came over to Anna and Johannes and introduced himself as Superintendent Søren Marhauge. He had brown eyes, freckles, and short hair, and he looked kindly into Anna’s eyes.

At Anna’s suggestion they went to the small library, which lay between Professor Jørgensen’s and Helland’s laboratories. Søren Marhauge had a soft voice with a strange, slow drawl, as though he struggled to articulate his thoughts. Anna grew impatient. She thought he asked her the same question over and over, and by the time there was a knock on the door twenty minutes later, she had nicknamed him the World’s Most Irritating Detective. An officer poked his head around the door, whispered a message, and the meeting was over. The World’s Most Irritating Detective disappeared down the corridor and Anna returned to her study. The corridor was teeming with police. She groaned to herself. In two weeks exactly she would defend her dissertation which, at this very moment, lay in Professor Helland’s office, soaked in blood.