Free Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg

might see forty murders. I've had fifteen hundred here in Copenhagen. And just as many in Germany and the United States. There are only maybe three people, tops, in Denmark who can call themselves experts in forensic medicine. Loyen and I are two of them."
    Next to his chair there is a cactus that looks like a tree stump in bloom: An explosion of purple and orange has risen out of the languid green, thorny, tree-like growth.
    "The morning after the boy was brought in, we were busy. Drunk drivers and Christmas parties. Every afternoon at four o'clock the fucking police are standing there waiting for a report. So at eight o'clock I start on the boy. You're not squeamish, are you? We have a certain routine. First an external examination. We look for cell tissue under the fingernails, for sperm in the rectum, and then we open them up and look at the internal organs."
    "Are the police present?"
    "Only under unusual circumstances, for instance if there is strong suspicion of murder. Not on this occasion. This was routine. He was wearing rain pants. I hold them up, thinking to myself that they're not what you would wear for doing the long jump. I have a little trick. The kind of thing you invent in any profession. I hold a light bulb inside the pant legs. Helly Hansen. Sturdy stuff. I wear them myself when I work in the garden. But near the thigh there's a perforation. I examine the boy. Purely routine. There I find a hole. I should have noticed it when I was doing the surface examination, I tell you that quite frankly, but what the hell, we're all human. Then I start to frown. Because there wasn't any bleeding, and the tissue hasn't contracted. Do you know what that means?"
    "No," I say.
    "It means that whatever happened at that spot occurred after his heart stopped beating. Now I take a closer look at his rain gear. There's a little indentation around the hole, and the whole thing rings a bell. So I get out a biopsy needle. A kind of syringe, quite big, attached to a handle. You plunge it into the tissue to get a sample. The way geologists take core samples. Used a lot by sports physiologists over at the August Krogh Institute. And damn if it doesn't fit! The circle on the rain gear could have been caused by someone who was in a hurry, who shoved it in with a good whack."
    He leans toward me. "I'll eat my old hat if someone hasn't taken a muscle biopsy from him."
    "The ambulance medic?"
    "I thought of that, too. It doesn't make any sense, but who the hell else could it be? So I call them up and ask them. I talk to the driver. And the medic. And to our orderlies who received the body. They all swear on a stack of Bibles that they did nothing of the kind."
    "Why didn't Loyen tell me this?"
    For an instant he seems about to explain. Then the intimacy between us is broken.
    "Must be a fucking coincidence," he mutters to himself.
    He turns off the grow lights. We have been sitting surrounded by night on all sides. Now it's becoming noticeable that, in spite of everything, there will be some sort of daylight, after all. The house is quiet. It's sitting there gasping soundlessly, trying to catch its breath before the next Armageddon.
    I take a short walk along the narrow pathways. There's something obstinate about cactuses. The sun tries to hold them down, the desert wind wants to hold them down, and the drought, and the night frost. Yet they thrive. They bristle, they retreat behind a thick shell. And they don't budge an inch. I regard them with sympathy.
    Lagermann reminds me of his plants. Maybe that's why he collects cactus. Without knowing his background, I can tell that he must have had several cubic yards of concrete to break through to reach the light.
    We are standing next to a bed with green sea urchins that look as if they've been out in a storm of cotton. "Pilocereus senilis," he says.
    Nearby there is a row of pots with smaller green and violet plants.
    "Mescaline. Even the big places-the Botanical Gardens in Mexico City,