The Dinosaur Feather(17)

At eighteen Søren left home and got his own place in Copenhagen. One day, a year later, when he returned home for a dinner with Elvira and Knud, a moving van was parked outside Jacob’s house, but there was no one around apart from four moving men carrying boxes and furniture. The next time Søren visited his grandparents, two unknown children were playing on Jacob’s old front lawn. Søren watched them and made up his mind to become a policeman.


Søren quickly became the family’s official detective, charged with finding lost items such as reading glasses, user manuals, and tax returns. He asked a lot questions, and nine times out of ten he would locate the missing object. Knud’s reading glasses lay on top of his shoes in the hall where he had bent down to scratch his ankle, the user manual for the coffee maker was in the trunk of the car, on top of a box of telephone books for recycling, and the tax return was found in the ashes in the fireplace because Elvira, in a moment’s distraction, had scrunched it up and thrown it there.

“How do you do it?” Vibe asked one evening when Søren, after a most unusual interrogation, reached the conclusion that her calculator had accidentally ended up in the garbage can in between some old magazines. He even offered to go downstairs to check—there was a chance that the trash might not have been collected yet. Five minutes later, he presented Vibe with her calculator.

“I knit backward,” Søren began. Vibe waited for him to continue.

“When you solve a mystery,” Søren explained, “you should never accept the first and most obvious explanation that presents itself. If you do that, it’s just guessing. You’ll automatically assume that the man with blood on his hands is the murderer and the woman with the gambling debt is the grifter. Sometimes that’s the way it is, but not always. When you knit backward, you don’t guess.”

Vibe nodded.


In December 2003 Vibe attended a course in Barcelona with her business partner, and Søren was home alone. While she was gone, he caught himself enjoying the solitude. Vibe had started to look at him with deeply wounded eyes, and Søren had felt guilty for weeks. The whole point was that he did not want to betray her. In her absence he went to work, organized old photographs, watched The Usual Suspects, which held no interest for Vibe, and read Calvin and Hobbes while sitting on the toilet. At the end of the week he played squash with his friend and colleague, Henrik.

At first glance, Henrik was the ultimate cliché. He pumped iron, had a crazy number of tattoos (including a prohibited one on his neck, which had nearly cost him entry to the police academy), and his hair was never more than a few millimeters long. A small, aggressive mustache grew on his upper lip; Søren thought it looked ridiculous. While still a recruit, Henrik had married Jeanette and they had two daughters in quick succession. The girls were older now, teenagers, and Henrik was forever moaning how there was no room for him in their apartment because of all their girly stuff, clothes, shoes, and handbags, and when they go to school, he ranted, they look like bloody hookers, the sort we keep arresting in Vesterbro, and Jeanette just tells me to shut up, it’s the fashion, she says, what’s that all about? And Jeanette had started going to yoga all the time and he wasn’t getting any, what the hell was that all about, no, he missed the good old days, when he was single, blah-blah-blah. His bark was infinitely worse than his bite. Søren knew perfectly well that Henrik loved his wife and daughters and would do anything for them.

Søren hadn’t mentioned to Henrik that he and Vibe were going through a rough patch and whenever Henrik tried to pry with his what’s up, you getting any these days? he deflected him. His private life was nobody’s business. Nor had he told Henrik he was home alone, but when they were cooling off in the locker room after their squash game, Søren blurted out that Vibe had gone to Barcelona. He could have kicked himself. Henrik lit up like a Christmas tree; the two of them were going to hit the town. He called Jeanette from the locker room, and Søren could hear an argument erupt—something to do with their younger daughter—and quietly hoped this would lead to their night out being canceled. But Henrik stood his ground. Bitch, he said, as he hung up, she can go to her power yoga some other fucking time. Time for them to have some beers.

“I don’t know,” Søren said, pulling his sweater over his head. “I was just going to get a pizza and watch a DVD at home. I’m bushed.”

“You’re a boring old fart, that’s what you are,” Henrik scoffed.