Free Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg

the sleeper up toward the recognition that it cannot go on like this much longer. People are as vulnerable as newborn infants at that hour. That’s when the big wild animals hunt, and when the police show up to demand payment of delinquent parking fines.
    And that’s when I take bus number 2 out to Brønshøj, to Kabbeleje Road at the edge of Utterslev Marsh, to pay a visit to forensic medicine expert Lagermann.
    He recognized my voice on the phone before I had time to say my name and rattled off a time. “Six-thirty,” he said. “Can you make it?”
    So I arrive a little before six. People hold their lives together by means of the clock. If you make a slight change, something interesting nearly always happens.

    Kabbeleje Road is dark. The houses are dark. The marsh at the end of the street is dark. It’s freezing cold, the sidewalk is light gray with frost, the parked cars are covered with a glittering white fur coat. I’ll be curious to see the sleepy face of the forensic medicine expert.
    There is one house with lights on. Not merely with lights on but illuminated, and with figures moving behind the windows, as if a gala ball has been going on since last night and it’s not over yet. I ring the bell. Smilla, the good fairy, the last guest before dawn.
    Five people open the door, all at once, and then wedge themselves tightly into the doorway. Five children, from very small to medium-sized. And inside there are more. They’re dressed for a raid, with ski boots and backpacks, leaving their hands free to punch somebody. They have milky-white skin, freckles, and copper-red hair under hats with earflaps, and they exude an air of hyperactive vandalism.
    Right in the middle stands a woman who has the children’s skin and hair color, with the height, shoulders, and back of an American football player. Behind her the forensic medicine expert comes into view.
    He’s a foot and a half shorter than his wife. He is fully dressed and inveterately red-eyed and chipper.
    He doesn’t raise an eyebrow at the sight of me. He lowers his head, and we plow our way through the shouts and through some rooms that show signs of barbarian migration, as if the wild hordes had passed this way and back again on their way home; then through a kitchen where sandwiches have been prepared for an entire battalion, and out through a door. He closes the door; it’s suddenly quiet, dry, very hot, and there’s a purple glow.
    We’re standing in a greenhouse built onto the house as a kind of winter garden. Except for a couple of narrow pathways, a little terrace with white wrought-iron furniture, and a table, the floor is covered with cactuses in beds and pots. Cactuses of all sizes, from a fraction of an inch up to six feet high. In all stages of prickliness. Lit by ultraviolet grow lights.
    â€œDallas,” he says. “Great place for putting together a collection.
Otherwise I don’t know whether I’d recommend it; hell if I know. On a Saturday night we could have up to fifty murders. We often had to work downstairs next to the emergency room. It was set up so we could do the autopsies there. It was practical. I learned a lot about gunshot wounds and stab wounds. My wife said I never saw the children. Hell, she was right, too.”
    As he talks, he stares steadily at me.
    â€œYou’re early, all right. Not that it matters to us; we’re up, anyway. My wife got the kids into the nursery school in Allerød. So they could get out in the woods a little. Did you know the little boy?”
    â€œI was a friend of the family. Especially him.”
    We sit down across from each other.
    â€œWhat do you want?”
    â€œYou gave me your card.”
    He ignores my remark. I sense that he’s a man who has seen too much to waste time on pretenses. If he’s going to reveal anything, he expects honesty.
    So I tell him about Isaiah’s fear of heights. About the tracks