Free Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg Page A

on the roof. About my visit with Professor Loyen. About Investigator Ravn.
    He lights a cigar and looks at his cactuses. Maybe he hasn’t understood what I’ve been telling him. I’m not sure I understand it myself.
    â€œWe have the only real institute,” he says. “The others have four people fumbling around and they can’t even get money for pipettes or for the white mice they need to graft their cell tests on. We have an entire building. We have pathologists and chemists and forensic geneticists. And the whole warehouse in the basement. Teach students, too. And we’ve got two hundred fucking employees. We get three thousand cases a year. If you’re sitting in Odense you 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.
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œAre the police present?”
    â€œOnly 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?”
    â€œNo,” I say.
    â€œIt 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.”
    â€œThe ambulance medic?”

    â€œI 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.”
    â€œWhy didn’t Loyen tell me this?”
    For an instant he seems about to explain. Then the intimacy between us is broken.
    â€œMust 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