The next thing he wanted to know was if Helland had seemed all right lately.
Anna replied: “I tended to avoid him, but he was always quite odd. The strangest thing recently was his eye. Whatever it was, it was bad.”
She had first seen it in the early summer and thought little of it, but recently she had noticed that the growth had…
“Bigger isn’t the right word,” she said. “But it grew more visible, as though it was changing character and hardening.” She fell abruptly silent.
Søren thanked her and asked her to remain at the department from where she would be driven to the police station. Anna demanded to know why and looked most unhappy when Søren explained it was procedure. When he left and closed the door between them, he could feel himself sweating.
The two professors were next on his list. They were speaking quietly in Professor Ewald’s office and exuded an atmosphere of profound trust. When Søren knocked, they both rose and asked him to take a seat in a stylish, but rather uncomfortable chair with a metal back and a thin seat pad. Professor Jørgensen was the doyen of the department and had, Søren quickly realized, partly retired, but was still working on a range of research projects.
At first glance, Professor Ewald came across as the most normal of the four biologists. She was petite, but she had the edge over the rest of them—expensive, well-fitting clothes, a good haircut, modern glasses, and discreet makeup. At second glance, however, he realized that she was fundamentally a worrier. While they spoke, Søren unobtrusively checked out her airy office where every surface was covered with biological specimens. Her subject was invertebrates, she told Søren, and when he looked baffled, she said: “Animals with no spine,” and gestured in a way Søren took to indicate that the numerous animals decorating her shelves and window sills were all such unfortunate creatures.
The professors were terribly upset. Professor Ewald admitted openly that she was plagued by horrible guilt, and Professor Jørgensen nodded in agreement: they had both loathed Helland. Unequivocally. Helland and Ewald had worked in the department for over twenty-five years, Jørgensen even longer, and when they looked back at their careers, the only obstacle had been Helland. He had poisoned the working environment and prevented joint and targeted research by constantly looking out for number one. Further, he was a member of several administrative committees and Professor Ewald and Professor Jørgensen strongly agreed this was the equivalent of giving a baby a razor. Helland had no administrative skills whatsoever, and yet he got himself elected chair of several university bodies, with chaotic consequences for the department every single time. Once, for example, Helland forgot the submission date for joint grant applications, despite the fact he had been reminded of the approaching deadline on an almost daily basis in the preceding six months. The department had been forced to survive a whole term on the remains of the previous year’s grants, students had to pay for photocopied handouts, the annual field trip was canceled, and they had been forced to use faulty microscopes.
Two years ago, Helland had been elected head of the department, which meant he was given overall responsibility for the two units that made up the department of Cell Biology and Comparative Zoology, and in those two years he had practically brought the department to its knees. Helland’s incredibly poor performance and his cavalier treatment of students as well as budgets had sparked a lot of friction, not only among Jørgensen, Ewald, and Helland, but also between Helland and several of the cell biologists who worked on the floor above. The corridors had frequently echoed with arguments, and Professor Ewald said she had come close to resigning on numerous occasions. Unfortunately, having tenure as a scientist at the college of Natural Science was a dream job and she knew she would never get another post like it. Then there was the responsibility toward the students. Morphology was a popular subject, and she felt duty-bound to educate new morphologists—a task that fell almost exclusively to her because Helland quite simply didn’t appear to share her sense of duty, even though teaching was a compulsory part of their employment contract with the university.
Søren failed to understand the latter; as far as he had been informed, the department had only two postgraduates, Anna Bella Nor and Johannes Trøjborg, and surely Helland was supervising both of them?
“Yes…” Professor Ewald hesitated. “But they are his only postgraduate students in the last ten years. During the same period, Professor Jørgensen and I have supervised at least forty postgraduates, of which the vast majority finished their PhDs long ago and are now in full-time employment. Those students are our only hope, and even though it’s undeniably tough to teach undergraduates, supervise postgraduates, and deliver new groundbreaking research that maintains our international reputation as a nation of scientists, you have to take your job seriously, not only as an employee of the college of Natural Science, but also as a human being.” Professor Ewald’s eyes were fiery.
“The truth is, we were both surprised. At Johannes and Anna. Pleasantly surprised, I hasten to add.” She stopped and looked at Professor Jørgensen.
“But…” Søren prompted.
“Neither of them needed a laboratory to do their work,” Professor Jørgensen answered for her. “Johannes wrote a theoretical dissertation, and Anna has done the same.”
“What does that mean?”
“They didn’t spend time with Helland in the laboratory; he didn’t have a student trailing after him for years, which meant he didn’t need to do any research because there was no one to keep an eye on him. Johannes and Anna based their dissertations on existing literature, and though that’s almost certainly twice as hard as writing a practical dissertation, it undoubtedly represented a minuscule effort, if any, on Helland’s part. Of course it troubled us. It was the principle of it.”
A pause followed. Then Professor Ewald said, “Still, it’s dreadful what’s happened. You wouldn’t want that for your worst enemy.” She looked as if she was about to say something else, but stopped and exhaled lightly.
“Was that what he was?” Søren probed. “Your worst enemy?”
“No,” Professor Ewald replied firmly. “He was frequently a pain in the ass, he really was. But after twenty-five years, you learn to live with it.”
Søren cocked his head. At the same time, the light outside changed and the office grew darker, almost black. Professor Ewald leaned forward and switched on a lamp on a low trolley. The base of the lamp was a brass octopus twisting its tentacles up a gnarled stick as though it was trying either to climb out of the sea or pull the white silk shade into the sea with it. Søren wondered if the creature were an invertebrate, too. When Professor Ewald had settled back into her chair, Søren continued.
“Speaking of pain… have you any idea what the problem with Helland’s eye might have been?” he asked innocently, and looked from one to the other. The professors seemed genuinely baffled.
“There was something wrong with his eye?” Professor Jørgensen frowned.
“Johannes and Anna both mentioned a growth of some sort in Helland’s right eye, they said it had become more noticeable in recent months. Did you see anything?”
The professors considered this. Then Professor Ewald began, tentatively: “This may sound odd…” she sighed, “but I never actually looked at him. Not closely. We would say hello in passing, but since Helland, in his year as head had practically handed over the head of department job to Professor Ravn upstairs, I hadn’t needed to discuss administrative issues with him. That was last spring, wasn’t it?” She looked to Professor Jørgensen for confirmation. He nodded.