The Dinosaur Feather(55)

“The vast majority are work-related, apart from those he sent to his wife, Birgit Helland, who works at the Humanities College of the University of Copenhagen, and to his daughter, Nanna. The only interesting thing I discovered was that for the last four years Lars Helland exchanged twenty-two e-mails with a professor of ornithology at the University of British Columbia—a guy named Clive Freeman. Mean anything to you?”

Søren shook his head.

“They disagree about something,” Sten went on, “and they refer repeatedly to each other’s papers in various scientific journals, such as Scientific Today, which I’ve heard of, but also a range of other journals that I haven’t. To begin with, their correspondence is relatively balanced, but it changes in early summer. The tone of their e-mails shows they’re trying to maintain the illusion that they’re fine, honorable scientists engaged in a duel, but it becomes obvious on numerous occasions that Freeman is increasingly cornered and Helland is enjoying it big time. Twice, Freeman actually threatens Helland.” Sten handed Søren a printout with highlighted sentences.

“At the end of June, there is unexplained silence. Nothing in their correspondence up until then indicates why, and even though I did some searching on the Internet, I haven’t been able to find a plausible cause for their sudden ceasefire. However, shortly afterward, on the ninth of July, to be exact, Helland starts receiving anonymous e-mails.” Sten pulled out a new file and extracted a small pile of printouts. “And now the tone is brutal and blunt. Someone is threatening Helland.”

“Did Clive Freeman send them?” Søren asked.

Sten shook his head. “I’m fairly sure he didn’t. The tone is completely different. The person making the threats has only one aim: to scare Helland. The threats consist of one sentence only.”

Søren waited.

“‘You will suffer for what you have done.’”

Søren frowned. “Did Helland reply to them?”

Sten nodded. “And he seems to find the threats highly amusing. Perhaps he thinks they’re coming from Professor Freeman and are merely empty threats, or maybe . . . well, he just doesn’t take them seriously.”

“Sender unknown, you said?”

Sten nodded again. “A Hotmail address. Whoever created it registered themselves as ‘Justicia Sweet.’ Neat, eh? The person who threatened Helland could be anyone.”

Søren buried his face in his hands and groaned.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“There is. I don’t know how important this is, but Helland seems to have unfinished business with another colleague.” Sten narrowed his eyes. “In the ten days leading up to his death, there was a fierce exchange of opinions between the deceased and Johannes Trøjborg.” He paused to let the sentence take effect.

“However, in contrast to the exchange between Helland and Freeman, it was easy to figure out what the problem is. They appear to be cowriting a scientific paper and Johannes Trøjborg expresses dissatisfaction with Helland’s lack of effort. Johannes wants Helland to pull out, so Johannes becomes the sole author of the paper, and Helland is refusing.”

Søren nodded, and Sten carried on.

“There’s more. I only started noticing it in the e-mails Helland sent over the last five to six weeks. He became very careless. His e-mails are littered with typos, and those sent in the last three to four weeks are practically illegible. Have a look at this.” Sten handed Søren a printout which read:

I ca’nt elph yu bcase we d’nt argee. Soory, se yo tmorrrow at mu office a 10 a..m as arrrnged. L.

“You wouldn’t call that standard spelling, would you?” Søren remarked, and then he realized the obvious.

“Sten,” he exclaimed and looked utterly revolted. “Helland’s brain was teeming with parasites. No wonder he couldn’t type.”

When Sten had left, Søren called Professor Moritzen again to insist on a meeting. She was still in her cottage, she protested. Søren checked his watch, asked her for the address, and told her he would be there as quickly as the highway traffic would allow him. Reluctantly, she agreed.

Then he called Johannes Trøjborg. Søren’s intuition told him that the account given by the transparent Johannes was genuine. Still, he wanted Johannes to explain why he hadn’t mentioned his disagreement with Helland. The telephone rang repeatedly, but no one answered.


Søren found Professor Moritzen’s cottage, with great difficulty, in a resort at Hald Beach. It was a small, well-maintained cottage on a huge plot, like a building block on a football field. The cottage consisted of a single airy and sparsely furnished room, with a few Japanese-inspired objects placed directly on the floor. Hanne Moritzen served an almost white but surprisingly strong tea in Japanese cups and offered Søren something he thought was chocolate, but it turned out to be a foul-tasting Japanese concoction. She laughed when she saw the look on his face.