Death of a Nightingale (Nina Borg #3)

by Lene Kaaberbøl

  Had he seen them? Did he know where they were? She strained her hearing to its utmost but couldn’t hear anything but Rina. At least not until something hit the door to the walk-in with such force that the glasses on the shelf behind her clinked against one another.

  She spontaneously tightened her grip on the girl’s head, much too suddenly and tightly. But Rina didn’t react. Said nothing, didn’t gasp, didn’t even alter the rhythm in her breathing. Not even when the second blow fell.

  Natasha didn’t even make it to the fence. A broad, dark figure came running toward her, and the camp behind him was no longer a sleepy and deserted landscape—there were shouts, lights, people standing in the snow in various stages of undress, from overcoats to pajamas to vests and jockey shorts.

  None of it mattered if he had killed Katerina.

  The thought alone made her black and dead inside. She stood still because it was all she could do. Just breathing seemed a near-impossible task.

  He ran past her, maybe forty of fifty meters away. Much, much too slowly she turned around, got her arms and legs to function, moved forward, a stumbling step and then another, until she was finally running, running as fast as she could, after the man who had perhaps murdered her daughter.

  It was as if he could see in the dark. He didn’t crash into the trees and branches as she did. And when an especially large branch hit her right in the throat, she collapsed and lay on her back gasping for a few seconds.

  He stopped. Maybe he had heard her. He turned, and instead of a human face, she saw an insect-like creature with three protruding eyes that glinted faintly in the dark.

  He can see me, she thought. Now he’ll kill me. And if Katerina is dead, we’ll meet in heaven. The thought did not offer any consolation.

  From the camp there were more shouts and dogs barking, and just then a light blinked on right behind him. The Witch had opened the car door, and the interior light shone out onto the snow.

  “Jurij?” she said. “Where is the child?”

  “It didn’t work,” he said. “Some woman dragged her into a walk-in refrigerator.”

  “A walk-in …”

  “Mm-hmm. I couldn’t get the door open before the other guards showed up.”

  There was more barking. Natasha wasn’t sure if it was from the handful of pets that lived in the camp or because the police had brought dog patrols. Possibly the man had similar doubts or else he hadn’t spotted her, after all. At any rate, he quickly slid into the driver’s seat and started the motor. The heavy car slid forward, headlights off, and within minutes the winter forest had swallowed car, man and evil Witch.

  Natasha sat up. Katerina was alive. With those words everything existed again. An entire universe could be turned on or destroyed that quickly; that was how frail the world was.

  THEY HAD BEEN living in Kiev for a few years when Natasha first discovered how easily everything could come apart. It began with a knocking on the door—loud, impatient raps, as if whoever was out there was irritated that the door hadn’t opened at the first knock. Katerina was in her high chair eating pierogi, which Natasha had cut into bite-sized pieces for her. She dropped one of them on the floor in fright. “Whooo?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, sweetie. But now Mama will go look.”

  On the landing stood an older man in a suit, a brown case under his arm. He smelled of licorice and had a yellow-black licorice stain at one corner of his mouth.

  “What is this?” he asked, waving a piece of paper in her face aggressively.

  “I don’t know,” said Natasha, confused.

  “The rent,” he said. “You haven’t paid the new rent.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she said. “My husband takes care of all that.”

  “Then you can tell your husband that he has to pay the same rent as everyone else in this house. It’s been in effect since March. But he hasn’t paid!”

  “That must … be a mistake,” she answered uncertainly. “I’ll tell him when he gets home. He’ll take care of it.”

  “I certainly hope so, little lady. If I have to come back, I won’t be coming alone.”

  As soon as he had left, she called Pavel, but even though she tried for several hours, she didn’t get hold of him. She felt as if the house had turned to glass. If anyone knocked on the door, it would all shatter and break. Natasha’s magical castle, her beautiful rooms and all the beautiful things in them, the view of the National Museum, the trees outside, everything could disappear because of an old man who smelled of licorice.

  Katerina sensed her anxiety and whimpered and fretted. Natasha attempted to calm them both.

  Pavel will take care of it. Pavel will fix it, she told herself.

  Finally Pavel did come home, exuberant and happy as usual. He kissed her on the mouth, deeply and hungrily, and lifted her up off the floor. This was when Natasha usually put her arms and legs around him, as if she were a child who needed to be carried. But not today.

  “I tried to call,” she said, and then the tears came rushing along with the rest of the story, even though she knew he hated crying. “A man came …”

  “Stop. Dry your eyes, my love. You’re scaring Katerina.”

  She sensed he was angry. She didn’t know if it was at her, and she definitely didn’t feel like making it worse, but she asked anyway.

  “Pavel, is it true? Are we behind on the rent?”

  “No,” he said. “We pay exactly what we are supposed to.”

  “But why isn’t it the same as what the others pay?”

  “You don’t need to worry about that, my love. I just need to make a call, then everything will be fine again.”

  And it was. Less than an hour later, there was another man at the door. He didn’t smell of licorice but of expensive aftershave, and his cuff links were shiny and black, with a leaping golden jaguar.

  Pavel did not invite him in even though it was terribly rude to leave him standing there in the doorway. “Natasha, this is Vasilij Ivanovitsj, who owns this beautiful house. Vasilij, this is my even more beautiful wife.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Doroshenko. And I regret that you were subjected to that unfortunate incident this morning. It was, of course, a mistake, and it will not happen again.”

  Natasha nodded silently. The man bowed gracefully, turned and left.

  “You see,” said Pavel and kissed her. “There’s nothing to be worried about. Worrywart.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I don’t understand why we pay less than the others.”

  “Because Vasilij is a good friend,” said Pavel. “That’s all.”

  Natasha wanted so badly to believe it, and she almost succeeded. But if they were such good friends, then why hadn’t Pavel invited him in? And why had Vasilij Ivanovitsj turned when he was halfway down the stairs and stared up at Pavel with eyes that were narrow and dark with hate?

  THE DOGS BARKED. Natasha got up as quickly as she could. If she stayed here, she would be found. Katerina was once again out of reach, but at least she was alive.

  She felt as if she had been beaten up. Nina’s ears were buzzing, her entire body ached and there was a point at the back of her neck, at the meeting of spine and skull, where it felt as if a burning needle had been inserted.

  She held Rina close despite her uneasy awareness that she was the one deriving comfort from the gesture, like a child holding a teddy bear. There was no reciprocity; Rina might as well be a stuffed animal. If it hadn’t been for the loud, gasping wheezes that constituted the girl’s breathing, Nina might have been tempted to check for signs of life.

  Magnus and Pernille arrived with the oxygen. Magnus maneuvered Rina out of Nina’s embrace with his usual calm authority. “Okay, Rina. Now we’re going to make it easier for you to breathe.”

  Nina had to fight a spasmodic tension in her arms, forcing herself to let go. “She also needs salbutamol,” she said before she could stop herself.

  Magnus just nodde
d as if there were nothing odd in a nurse attempting to dictate a treatment he had undertaken hundreds of times.

  It was 2:03. Forty-six minutes had passed since she had heard a key click unsuccessfully in the walk-in door.

  “Nina, are you in there?”

  It wasn’t a voice she had immediately recognized. She was paranoid enough to hesitate for a second.

  “Nina Borg? Police.”

  “Yes,” she shouted. “We are here.”

  It had taken another fifteen minutes to get the door open. The lock had been damaged by the attacker’s attempt to break it open, and in the end, they had to cut the hinges instead.

  Outside there were people everywhere—or at least that was how it felt. There were probably only seven or eight, but the only one she knew was the camp’s technical director, Henning Grønborg, who had apparently taken charge of the blowtorch himself. The rest was a whirl of yellow police vests, black SWAT uniforms and young policemen’s faces wearing oddly nerdy protective glasses. Like well-behaved children at a New Year’s party, thought Nina.

  They tried to take Rina from her at that point, but she resisted. “Get Magnus,” she had repeated, over and over again. “It has to be someone she knows.”

  Now she had finally let go. Her arms hurt just as much as the rest of her, in spite of the fact that she had only suffered a handful of bruises from furniture and doorways and whatever else she had bumped into on her confused, unsteady flight from Rina’s room.

  Pull yourself together. You are not exactly dying, she told herself.

  A shiver went through her that had nothing to do with cold, though it felt that way. Right now she was deeply grateful for Magnus’s insistence on heating the clinic to a temperature that would do credit to a steam bath.

  2:11.

  The children were sleeping now, she thought, Anton under his Spider-Man comforter and Ida presumably in sheets that were as pitch black as most of her wardrobe. For a while she had had Legolas from The Lord of the Rings on her pillow, but lately she had been talking about “the cynical abuse of Tolkien’s work in merchandising,” and Nina had had to quietly exchange a few Christmas presents before they reached the tree. The first post-divorce Christmas. Only Nina’s first childhood Christmas without her father had been worse.

  2:13.

  Stop. She turned her watch so the face was on the inside of her wrist. It made it a little more difficult to check the time and normally helped her control her own personal mini-version of OCD. The improvement was relative—the compulsive checking of the time was replaced by involuntary movements in her lower arm every time she caught herself turning her wrist.

  After her divorce, an exciting new development had occurred in the neurosis, she observed dryly. Now the checking of the time was often accompanied by an automatic picturing of what Anton and Ida were doing; she wasn’t quite sure if that was better or worse.

  “Nina Borg?”

  She looked up. Yet another unfamiliar face, this time a younger man in civilian clothes.

  “Detective Inspector Asger Veng, North Zealand Police,” he introduced himself.

  “Yes,” she said tiredly. She couldn’t even manage a politely encouraging question mark in her tone.

  “May we take a few moments of your time? We have a couple of questions.”

  Yes, of course they did. If he had asked her to crawl naked through icy mud, her enthusiasm might have been at much the same level, but it was probably best to get it over with.

  “WHAT HAPPENED?”

  The shout sounded across the parade ground from a small group of freezing people who were huddled in the doorway of one of the family barracks. Nina recognized one of the camp’s long-term inhabitants, a man from Eritrea, but she had to cast about for his name. Rezene, that’s what he was called. He suffered from violent reflux attacks, so they saw him relatively often at the clinic.

  Nina didn’t know what to answer. When it came to the spreading of rumors among the camps’ inhabitants, “wildfire” was an understatement, especially when the police were involved, and rumors were never harmless. They all lived with the threat of deportation as a constant stress factor. Even though Magnus did what he could to minimize it, there were a lot of sleeping pills and sedatives in circulation, and not so long ago, an Iraqi mother had shown up with three packs of nitrazepam that she had recovered from her sixteen-year-old son. When asked what he had been intending to use them for, he said that it was in case the police came to get them, because he would rather die in Denmark than in Iraq.

  “It’s okay,” Nina shouted back in careful, simple English. “Someone tried to take a child. The police stopped them.”

  It was important to keep statements clear and uncomplicated.

  “What child?” shouted Rezene.

  “Rina. The little Ukrainian girl.”

  “Why ambulance?”

  “Some policemen were hurt.”

  Detective Inspector Veng put a gentle hand on her elbow. It was presumably meant as a polite reminder of their real errand, but the touch irritated her.

  “Yes, all right,” she hissed. “It’s hardly surprising if some of them want to know what the hell is going on.”

  “Your director has informed them,” said Veng.

  Nina had no doubt. Birgit Mariager had been the camp’s director for almost five years now, and clear communication had quickly become one of her main concerns. But Nina also knew that even the clearest communication in the world couldn’t prevent speculation, questions, rumors and doubt.

  “Are they okay? Your two colleagues?”

  “We don’t know yet,” he said. “They used a pretty nasty form of gas.”

  “There was only one person,” Nina corrected him. “A man.”

  “Yes. I heard you said that.”

  They had asked even before they managed to open the walk-in. Nina understood that they needed to know who and how many people they were searching for and what kind of resistance they could expect to encounter if they found them, but it had seemed almost brutal to have to bellow her answers through the thick steel door when every shout made Rina’s body start.

  The ambulances were gone now, but the children’s barrack was still closed off. Powerful projection lights made the snow glitter, and technicians were busy picking up glass shards and photographing footprints.

  “We’ve got permission to use the director’s office,” said Veng. “Let’s get you inside where it’s nice and warm, all right?”

  He was trying to be friendly, Nina told herself. It wasn’t reasonable to hate him just because he was young, rested and professionally kind.

  The two women who waited in the director’s office were remarkably similar as far as height, weight, dress and hair color were concerned. Slender, blonde, well-dressed and well-groomed. In spite of what must have been a very rushed departure, Birgit had had time to put on both makeup and a freshly ironed white shirt. A fine gold chain ringed her still almost unwrinkled neck.

  “Nina. Are you okay?”

  Nina nodded. Birgit was actually okay. Most of the time.

  “Please let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  The other woman, the Birgit clone, presented herself as Deputy Chief Inspector Mona Heide. At least her white shirt didn’t look as if it had just come out of its cellophane wrapper. Her face didn’t either. In spite of the careful makeup, the exhaustion was evident.

  “I’ll try to be brief,” she said. “But it’s important for us to find out as much as possible as quickly as possible.”

  “Okay.”

  “When did you first become aware that something was wrong?”

  “I heard a crash. It must have been the gas grenade, or whatever it is they used, shattering the window.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Six minutes past twelve.”

  Heide raised a well-plucked eyebrow. “You’re very precise.”

  “I looked at my watch immediately after.” Nina didn’t think there was an
y reason to mention the OCD.

  “Where were you?”

  “By the coffee machine.”

  “Not in the girl’s room?”

  “No. But I had only been away for a few minutes.”

  “What happened then?”

  Nina explained her quick look in on the policemen, hurrying to Rina’s room, pressing the attack alarm, the clumsy flight to the walk-in.

  “Why the walk-in?”

  “It’s airtight. I was pretty sure there was gas.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he came in through the window in the lounge area.”

  “You’re sure it was a man?”

  “Yes.” She recalled her brief but definitive glimpse. “He was big—both tall and broad. Completely black, including his face—he must have been wearing some kind of mask or hood.”

  “And it was just him?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Very sure. Listen, it wasn’t Natasha. I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t her. She’s a slight, slender girl. Smaller than I am—one meter sixty at the most, I would guess. And he was alone.”

  Heide eyed her calmly. “People often perceive events in a distorted way in situations like this. Everything happens fast, it’s violent, you’re afraid … few people ever describe an attacker as small.”

  “He was big.”

  “Precisely where and for how long did you see him?”

  “It was only a glimpse; I was busy trying to open the door to the walk-in. He was entering the cafeteria.”

  The crunching of glass, Rina’s breathing, the sweet-and-sour taste in the mouth that was a mixture of adrenaline and gas. The figure behind them, a faceless monster with three shiny eyes …

  Three eyes?

  “I think … it looked to me as if he had three eyes.”

  Veng and Heide exchanged a glance.

  “Maybe he was using IR equipment,” said Veng. “Combined with a gas mask?”

  Heide nodded. Nina noted that they had finally begun to say “he” and not “they” or “her.”