The Dinosaur Feather by S. J. Gazan Page A

In addition, Søren was a skilled bluffer with the ability to ask seemingly innocent questions, only to suddenly come up with the answer to the whole mystery.
    When Jacob went off to boarding school, Søren felt awkward going to his house. Besides, he had started high school and met Vibe, and the riddle-solving faded into the background, except on Sundays when Herman washed the family’s Peugeot on the driveway. Søren would swing by for an update on the week’s events at the police station, and Herman would always have a mystery for him to crack. It wasn’t until Søren was an adult that he started questioning just how much of what Herman had told them had actually been true. After all, he must have had a duty of confidentiality.
    At eighteen Søren left home and got his own place in Copenhagen. One day, a year later, when he returned home for a dinner with Elvira and Knud, a moving van was parked outside Jacob’s house, but there was no one around apart from four moving men carrying boxes and furniture. The next time Søren visited his grandparents, two unknown children were playing on Jacob’s old front lawn. Søren watched them and made up his mind to become a policeman.
    Søren quickly became the family’s official detective, charged with finding lost items such as reading glasses, user manuals, and tax returns. He asked a lot questions, and nine times out of ten he would locate the missing object. Knud’s reading glasses lay on top of his shoes in the hall where he had bent down to scratch his ankle, the user manual for the coffee maker was in the trunk of the car, on top of a box of telephone books for recycling, and the tax return was found in the ashes in the fireplace because Elvira, in a moment’s distraction, had scrunched it up and thrown it there.
    “How do you do it?” Vibe asked one evening when Søren, after a most unusual interrogation, reached the conclusion that her calculator had accidentally ended up in the garbage can in between some old magazines. He even offered to go downstairs to check—there was a chance that the trash might not have been collected yet. Five minutes later, he presented Vibe with her calculator.
    “I knit backward,” Søren began. Vibe waited for him to continue.
    “When you solve a mystery,” Søren explained, “you should never accept the first and most obvious explanation that presents itself. If you do that, it’s just guessing. You’ll automatically assume that the man with blood on his hands is the murderer and the woman with the gambling debt is the grifter. Sometimes that’s the way it is, but not always. When you knit backward, you don’t guess.”
    Vibe nodded.
    In December 2003 Vibe attended a course in Barcelona with her business partner, and Søren was home alone. While she was gone, he caught himself enjoying the solitude. Vibe had started to look at him with deeply wounded eyes, and Søren had felt guilty for weeks. The whole point was that he did
not
want to betray her. In her absence he went to work, organized old photographs, watched
The Usual Suspects
, which held no interest for Vibe, and read
Calvin and Hobbes
while sitting on the toilet. At the end of the week he played squash with his friend and colleague, Henrik.
    At first glance, Henrik was the ultimate cliché. He pumped iron, had a crazy number of tattoos (including a prohibited one on his neck, which had nearly cost him entry to the police academy), and his hair was never more than a few millimeters long. A small, aggressive mustache grew on his upper lip; Søren thought it looked ridiculous. While still a recruit, Henrik had married Jeanette and they had two daughters in quick succession. The girls were older now, teenagers, and Henrik was forever moaning how there was no room for him in their apartment because of all their girly stuff, clothes, shoes, and handbags, and when they go to school, he ranted, they look like bloody hookers, the sort we keep arresting in Vesterbro, and