Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) (31 page)

“Is it Ida?”

Morten looked up for a brief instant.

“She’s upset, but.…” He cut himself short. “How are you doing?” Nina felt a sense of relief along with a touch of confusion. Why was he asking her about it like that? Politely. As if he were a co-worker, or
a distant relation. She reached out with her hands and cautiously tried to pull him a little closer, but he resisted. At first it was subtle, a faint counter pressure, a tension in his neck muscles, but when she didn’t let go, he suddenly yanked himself free and backed away. And then he made eye contact for the first time. He looked tired and haggard. As if he had been crying, but Morten almost never cried. He got mad and swore, but he didn’t cry.

“Excuse me.”

A health care assistant in a white coat slid into the room with a broad smile. She closed the curtains, then stood by the window for a minute, shuffling her feet before she decided to fill Nina’s water glass. She took the glass and went to the small bathroom, and Nina could hear the water running. Morten didn’t say anything. He glanced impatiently at the open bathroom door in irritation.

“They don’t usually fill the patients’ water glasses in the bathroom.”

Nina said that more to herself than to Morten, and he didn’t respond. The assistant made a clattering noise with something or other in the bathroom, and Nina and Morten sat for a long moment waiting for her to finish up and leave. Then Morten gave up and started up the conversation again.

“I’m going to say something now,” Morten said, looking resolute. “And afterward I’ll leave so you can have some peace and quiet to … rest.”

Nina nodded slowly, attempted to smile, but a chilling fear begin to spread beneath her breastbone. This didn’t seem like one of the dressing-downs that Morten usually dumped on her when he was angry. This wasn’t like anything she had seen before.

“Ida was home by herself Saturday night,” Morten said, and his voice trembled a little. “She was home alone in the middle of the night in an apartment in Østerbro because her mother was in hospital.”

Nina raised her hand halfway to protest. It wasn’t correct that Ida had been home alone because Nina was sick. If Nina hadn’t gone to the Coal-House Camp, she would have been spending the night in a foul-smelling scout cabin with Anton. Ida was supposed to be spending the night with Anna. That was the agreement.

Morten brushed her aside with a tired motion.

“Ida’s mother wasn’t home because she had come down with radiation sickness. On multiple occasions, as I have learned, she visited a flock of
sick Eastern Europeans in Valby even though she had promised not to do that kind of work while I was in the North Sea.”

Morten’s tired eyes, red from crying, caught hers and held them.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Not Ida’s mother, you.
You
promised, Nina.”

She cringed under his gaze. The nausea was coming back now, and there was a faint rushing sound in her ears.

“While you were in the hospital, three men broke into the apartment, where Ida was alone with a boyfriend I’ve never heard of. They beat him, and Ida, who was half naked.…”

Nina looked down at her hands. Please, would he stop soon? Could she stand to hear any more?

“They took pictures of her. They humiliated her. Our little girl.”

Morten’s eyes looked exhausted, lifeless.

“I have no idea if the break-in was related to what you were doing in Valby. But, do you know what? I couldn’t care less, Nina. It doesn’t interest me anymore. Our apartment has been sealed off because of potential radioactive contamination. As has our car.”

Morten flung out his arms, almost helplessly, Nina thought, feeling something hard and painful lodged itself like a lump in her throat. Then he took another step away from the bed.

“If it was just you and me.…” he said. “But it isn’t. And I simply can’t understand … I simply can’t let you bring Anton and Ida along with you into … into that permanent war zone you insist on living in. We’ve moved down to my sister’s for the time being. That’s what I came to tell you.”

For the time being, she heard. For a while. Maybe he
could
live with this, maybe they would be okay again.

But he kept moving toward the door, and then he opened it, and he was almost all the way out in the corridor before he turned around and looked at her with an unrelenting determination that destroyed her illusion.

“This is it for me, Nina,” he said quietly. “It’s over.”

N
INA WOULD HAVE
called out to him, but she couldn’t think what to say to make him stay. He stood in the doorway for a microsecond. As if he wanted to give her a mental snapshot for the family album. His long, slightly stooped silhouette. His shoulders, which along with his narrow hips formed a perfect V under the loose T-shirt. She knew that body down to the smallest detail, and images of Morten from their sixteen
years together flickered through her mind. How he had stood at the foot of their bed a thousand times, tiredly pulling his T-shirt up over his head. The birthmark under his right shoulder blade, the soft armpits, the long muscular legs, and the soft, dark hair that covered his chest, arms, legs, and groin. His smile when he turned around and looked at her. But this time he didn’t turn around.

He didn’t even look back once as he turned down the corridor. Her diaphragm contracted painfully. As if she had been smacked in the stomach by a ball Anton had kicked. The realization that he was leaving her, that he had already left, struck in a single brutal blow.

In the bathroom the laggardly assistant clattered around, cleared her throat, and then finally reappeared with a full water glass in her hand that she passed to Nina.

“They don’t fill patients’ water glasses in the bathroom,” Nina said mechanically, and turned her sluggish eyes toward the assistant’s freckled face. She looked strangely guilty, Nina thought. As if she knew she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to. And her coat was white, not yellow. A faint suspicion crept to the front of Nina’s consciousness. Why was she even in the room? There was no reason for her to close the curtains. Nina hadn’t asked for any water.

The woman cleared her throat and pulled the corners of her mouth up into an expression that was supposed to resemble something halfway between perky and kindhearted.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “My name is Lone Walter, and I’m a journalist with
Ekstra Bladet
. Would you mind if I asked you a couple of questions?”

A little red spark of rage shot up through Nina. A journalist! Of course. No real health care worker had time to waste the way this woman had just done. Nina looked over at the empty doorway where Morten had disappeared.

“Did you get all that?” Nina tried to make her voice sound cool and collected as she turned her eyes to the woman by her bed again.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

The woman’s fake smile persisted, unflappable, and Nina finally felt the nausea regaining the upper hand. She reached for the basin next to her bed and vomited in long, pink jets. Blackcurrant juice, Nina thought, and looked up at the now slightly flustered journalist.

“Get the hell out of here,” she said. “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

ÁNDOR DIDN’T UNDERSTAND
a word of what the nervous looking television commentator said, but his two captors obviously did. “Fuck,” Frederik hissed, slamming his can of beer onto the glass top of the coffee table with a bang. “Shit, shit, shit.” In a flash he snatched the can back up again and hurled it at the window, where it hit the plastic covering the window with a soft, dissatisfying sound before clattering to the ground. The smell of top-fermented beer filled the room.

Tommi didn’t say anything. He just kicked the TV console so hard that the flat screen tipped over backward and hit the floor with an ominous crunch. Despite the fall, the TV kept displaying footage of the garage in Valby surrounded by yellow-and-black striped tape and people in yellow spacesuits.

Sándor remained motionless in his black leather recliner without saying anything, without drawing any attention to himself, without providing any provocation.

They weren’t in the city anymore, but some distance outside, Sándor didn’t have any real sense of where. The sound of planes taking off and landing could be heard at regular intervals not that far away, but when they arrived in midmorning after a long and frustrating night, he had seen grazing horses and flocks of wild geese. From the outside it looked to be just a fairly ordinary, red-brick farmhouse sitting alongside a derelict stable, and a dilapidated garage structure. Sándor didn’t know what they were doing here, and no one told him. Tamás wasn’t here.

“You don’t get to see him until we have the jacket,” Frederik had said.

The inside of the house was bizarre. The wallpaper in what must at one time have been the living room was painted a lurid egg plant purple, and on the walls was a series of equally lurid posters in clip frames. They
weren’t there just for their entertainment value, they were a sales catalog. The girls, holding their breasts out provocatively at the viewer with both hands or suggestively rubbing their crotches, were accompanied by texts in German and English and a third language he assumed was Danish. “Russian Katarina, twenty-three, loves oral, anal, and gentle dominance; Anna from Riga, only fifteen years old—do you want to be her first?” But neither Anna nor Katarina nor any of their colleagues were in evidence, and some of the frames had already been taken down to make room for a half-hearted normalization of the room involving a lot of white paint, some wood paneling, and several plastic-wrapped bales of rock wool insulation.

In the middle of all that, there was an arrangement with a three-seater sofa, love seat, and armchair, as well as a glass-topped coffee table and TV console, a little island of bourgeois conventionality in the midst of the brothel ambience. Frederik had slept on the longer sofa for a few hours, Tommi on the shorter one, while Sándor had been left to curl up in the armchair.

In the twenty-four hours that had elapsed since the break-in on Fejøgade, Tommi and Frederik had become increasingly frustrated. They hadn’t been able to find the nurse or her car, in spite of all the information they had frightened, threatened, and shaken out of the teenage girl and her boyfriend. Sándor still felt a deep stab of guilt when he thought of those terrified teenagers; of the boy’s pretended cockiness as he nerved himself up to defend his girlfriend, of the sound it had made when Tommi nonchalantly whacked his head into the doorframe. Of the girl who had let go of the blanket and tried to kick Tommi with her bare feet, of how she yelled and screamed and lashed out at him even though all she had on was her panties. Of Tommi who had held her, just held her from behind, while Frederik grabbed the mobile phone and took pictures of her both with and without her panties on.

“Sweet little pussy,” Tommi had whispered in the girl’s ear, but loud enough that they could all hear it. “Just let us know when you get tired of the boy wonder over there, and we’ll get you a real man.”

Then she got scared, Sándor could tell. Until that point she had been shocked, anxious, upset, and furious, but only then did terror set in. She curled up in his grasp, trying to protect her body from the violation of the camera.

Don’t give up, Sándor had wanted to tell her. Don’t let go of your
defiance and your rage. But to her he would have just been one of the attackers, the only one of her assailants whose face she could describe. My God, how old had she been? Fifteen? Sixteen? Maybe even younger. She was definitely still in school; Tommi had stolen her school bag.

And you did nothing, Sándor told himself caustically. You just stood there and did nothing. His passivity was a crime, and he couldn’t think of any way he could atone for it.

Frederik stood the flat screen back up. The picture flickered a little and disappeared, along with the sound, in a storm of multicolored pixels.

“Can they trace Valby to us?” Tommi asked. Still in English, in that strangely broad, rolling accent that sounded so wrong to Sándor’s ears.

“Not right away,” Frederik said. “It depends on how long Malee keeps her trap shut.”

“She won’t say anything,” Tommi said.

“They always do at some point or other.”

“Not Malee. She was one of the strong ones. She was in the tank three times before she gave up.”

“And you think that is going to make her love you?”

“No. But she remembers me. And after that lot, she won’t cave just because the police ask her a couple of polite questions.”

Frederik grumbled. “What are we going to do?” he said. “We can’t leave that thing out there for ever. And the car. You think it’s radioactive, too?”

Tommi shrugged dubiously.

Suddenly Frederik jumped up and went outside.

“Where are you going?” Tommi yelled.

“To get Tyson. He shouldn’t be out there.”

Tommi rolled his beer can back and forth between his palms.

“He spoils that mutt,” he told Sándor. “A wife and two point five kids in Søllerød, but sometimes I think he loves the dog more.”