The Dinosaur Feather(71)

Anna lost her temper and screamed. “You’re not picking her up, do you hear me?! Christ Almighty, why can’t you leave us alone? I’ll call you tonight.” She ended the call and stuffed her phone into her pocket.


The seal on Helland’s door had been broken, and as Anna walked past she could see crime scene investigators inside the office. She slowed down. They were wearing thin white boiler suits and spoke quietly to each other. The floor in the corridor was covered with dirty footprints, and Anna had an irrepressible urge to eavesdrop. Why had the police come back? When she entered her study, she saw that Johannes’s computer was gone. An official-looking form had been left on top of one of his piles of paper, briefly stating it had been confiscated by the police. Anna took out her mobile.

The police have walked off with your computer, she texted.

No reply.

Cecilie, too, stayed silent.


At noon Anna went to the cafeteria and bought two sandwiches and two cartons of juice before she made her way to the museum. She let herself into the Vertebrate Collection with her master key. The ceiling light was on and she found Dr. Tybjerg at a desk, writing on a lined pad. Several reference books and boxes of bones were beside him. Tybjerg looked up, startled.

“Oh, it’s you.” He sounded relieved.

“You slept here last night, Dr. Tybjerg, I know you did,” she said.

Tybjerg studied his hands and Anna noticed how his nostril had started to twitch. She placed a sandwich in front of him.

“Why don’t you sleep at home?” she demanded, losing patience with his paranoia. Dr. Tybjerg looked worried.

“Anna,” he begged. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone. Please!”

“Tell anyone what?”

“For the past eight months I’ve been living in my office,” he confessed. “To save money. Traveling to excavations . . . it all adds up. I lost my apartment. No one knows yet. The last few nights I’ve been sleeping in here. Is that for me?” He touched the sandwich hopefully.

“Yes,” Anna replied, and handed him a carton of juice. She was shocked to see Dr. Tybjerg rip off the wrapping and wolf down the food.

“You’re also hiding from Freeman, aren’t you?” she said.

Tybjerg was eating and didn’t reply. Anna snapped. She removed the lid from one of the boxes, took out a bone, and slammed it down in front of her supervisor.

“This,” she hissed, “is the hand of a bird. It has a half-moon-shaped carpus, which overlaps the basis of the two first metacarpal bones in the wrist common to all maniraptora, that is all birds, both ancient and modern. It’s a homologue feature, which underlines the close kinship of prehistoric birds to modern ones. Freeman disagrees. He thinks the dinosaur’s carpus may have had a feature that, at first glance, could be mistaken for a semilunar, but that the two bones only bear a superficial likeness, and this apparent similarity has no impact on their relationship.” Anna sent the bone skidding across the desk and stuck her hand into the box a second time.

“And this one—” she started.

“Stop,” Dr. Tybjerg implored her.

“—is the pubic bone.” Anna ignored him. “Those of us who know better, know that both theropods and Archaeopteryx and a couple of enantiornithine birds from the early Cretaceous had an enlarged distal on the pubic bone, i.e., another homologue feature. Of course, Freeman denies this. Further, there is the dispute about the position of the pubic bone. And the dispute about feathers, about phylogenetic methods, about the stratigraphic junction, about the ascending process of the talus bone, about everything.” Anna looked at Dr. Tybjerg.

“That’s why he’s come to Denmark, Dr. Tybjerg. To win an argument he has no chance of ever winning; not to kill Helland, or you, or me, or my daughter.”

“Stop it,” Tybjerg howled. His knuckles were white. He rose. “It’s pointless,” he said, taking the rest of his sandwich and disappearing down the dark aisles. She could hear him shuffle around and didn’t know what to do. She slapped her head with the palm of her hand.


Her cell rang on her way back to the department. It was Jens.

“Hi, Dad,” she said.

“Anna, hi.” He sounded breathless. “I’m on a job. In Odense, as it happens.”

“Right,” Anna said. She was walking down the glass corridor that connected the museum and the Institute of Biology.

“Listen, Anna,” he said. “Your mom just called me. She sounded quite upset.”

“Right,” Anna said again.

“What’s going on?” Jens asked. “I understand that you’re under a lot of pressure, but be nice to your mom, please? She does so much for you, Anna sweetheart.”