The Boy in the Suitcase

THE BOY WAS sitting with his eyes half closed and showed no reaction when Nina parked the car in Fejøgade. The police car had gone, and the windows of the third floor flat were empty and closed. Morten might not be home yet, thought Nina distractedly, or he could have taken the children to stay with his sister in Greve. He liked to get them out of the way when a crisis was brewing. He didn’t want them to see that there was anything wrong, didn’t want them to see him losing control. And at the moment, he was probably half out of his mind.

Nina closed her eyes and felt the worm of conscience gnawing at the back of her mind. Tonight, she would have to put everything right. Rest her head against his shoulder and run her hands over his face while she told him why there was nothing more to be afraid of now. They could let the children stay overnight with Hanne and Peter and pick them up in the morning.

She lifted Mikas from the car and carried him up the stairs. He was awake, but tired and limp, as if he had spent everything he had on the beach. He didn’t stir as she eased the keys out of her pocket. She could hear the muted roar of a video game the Jensen children were playing, and the rattle of pots and dinner preparations behind the Jensen door. But she didn’t feel like answering her neighbor’s curious questions—which would, no doubt, be endless—and so she unlocked her own front door soundlessly and slipped inside.

The flat was quiet and cool, and for the first time since she had picked up the suitcase yesterday, Nina felt a genuine pang of hunger. She kicked off her sandals in the hall and walked barefoot into the living room. Mikas slid willingly from her hip onto the couch and subsided there in a small heap of three-year-old exhaustion.

The remains of breakfast were still scattered across the little coffee table in front of the television. Two bowls of souring milk and soggy cornflakes. An unopened, unread newspaper. A meal on the run, diagnosed Nina, taking the bowls into the kitchen where she pitched the contents into the bin and loaded the dishes into the dishwasher. She put fresh cereal into a new bowl for Mikas, adding an extra spoonful of sugar. The boy had eaten only a couple of ice cream cones, a breakfast roll, and a few slices of untoasted bread in the time he had been with her. He had to be just as weak at the knees as she was. And she was acutely aware, now, of the lightheaded feeling that came from not having eaten for too long.

She cut herself two slices of dark rye and sandwiched a thick wedge of salami between them. Cornflakes bowl in one hand, glass of milk in the other, and her solid sandwich clenched between her teeth, she returned to the living room. A strange flickering feeling of happiness settled in her stomach. Home. It felt fantastic. Now all that was missing was Morten and the children.

But there was no rush, just as there was no need to hurry the necessary call to the police. She placed the cereal bowl in front of Mikas and dropped into the armchair next to the couch with a muted thud. Slowly, she chewed her way through the soft rye and the sharp spiciness of the salami, eyes closed, mind gently drifting. When she was done, she climbed to her feet and went into the bedroom, where she pulled off the damp, dirty T-shirt and put on a crisp, clean shirt instead. From the living room, she could hear the rattle of Mikas’s spoon against the bowl.



THE DOORBELL RANG.

It wasn’t the muted scale of the door phone, but the insistent ring of the old-fashioned push-button on the door frame itself. Anton used it when he wanted to announce his presence, though his usual noisy progress up the stairs generally made any other signal redundant. No, it was probably Birgit next door, who must have noticed her arrival after all.

She might even know that the police were looking for Nina. Birgit was nice enough, really, but her curiosity was boundless, and sometimes Nina wished the walls between the flats were just a little thicker. Particularly now, when she could have done with a few more minutes on her own with Mikas.

Resignedly, she reached for the lock catch, but something made her hesitate. It was too quiet out there, she thought. Anton would have been bouncing off the floor, if not the walls, and Birgit usually had the door to her own flat open, yelling over her shoulder at her own children. It was silent out there. No scrabbling feet, no throatclearing or nose-blowing. It was not a natural silence.

Automatically, she put the security chain on the door before opening it enough so that she could see whoever it was. A slender, fair-haired woman stood there on the landing, smiling politely, yet somehow reticently.

“Please,” she said, bending forward slightly. “I think you know my son. I am Mikas’s mother. May I come in?”

Instantly, Nina’s mind was flooded with the fantasies she had entertained earlier, in the car. Mikas’s mother, holding her hand and thanking her, as only one mother could thank another. Her happy ending. It was here, now.

But even as she slid the chain off the lock, she knew something wasn’t right. The woman pushed open the door herself, with a smile that had grown oddly apologetic. As if she didn’t really want to come in, thought Nina. And then she saw that Mikas had come into the hallway behind her. He stood there, still wearing his nice new sandals and holding the breakfast bowl, while a pool of dark yellow pee formed around his feet.

Smiling still, the woman held out her hand to him. He jerked from head to foot, and the bowl slid from his hands and hit the pine floor with a sharp clack.

There was a man behind the fair-haired woman. He must have been standing against the wall on the landing, out of sight until now. His massive shoulders in the too-hot leather jacket filled the doorframe, and she recognized him at once. The neo-Nazi haircut, the fury in his eyes, the huge, closed fists. In one hand he held a smooth black gun. There was no haste in the way he moved, noted Nina; it was all very calculated and precise, the routine actions of a man who had done this dozens of times. A single powerful stride brought him into the flat. He took the time to close the door behind him, and Nina heard the click of the latch with a peculiar lack of fear. She backed a couple of steps, and felt her foot slip in the puddle of warm urine, milk and cornflakes.

Idiot, she told herself, in the long stretched second that followed. Of course she’s not his mother. You didn’t have time to call anyone. Then the blow fell, and turned the world dark red and swirling. Then black.





BARBARA WAS CLINGING to his arm.

“Don’t hit her anymore,” she said. “Jučas. Don’t do it!”

Jučas.

Not Andrius.

He lowered the gun. The boy-bitch lay in a heap at his feet, one side of her face completely covered in blood.

“Don’t kill her!”

Barbara was as pale as a sheet. She didn’t look young anymore, and for the first time he considered what the difference in their ages would mean in ten years, or twenty. When she turned fifty, he would be only just past his fortieth birthday. Did he really want to come home to a fifty-year-old woman then?

“Don’t be silly. I’m not going to kill her,” he said, wondering what the hell he was supposed to do with her if he didn’t. He shook off Barbara’s hand and stepped across the crumbled form. Where had the kid gone?

Barbara found him crouched next to the toilet, squeezed into the corner as if he was trying to push himself through the wall. A sound was coming from him now, a sort of squeaky whine, with every breath he took.

“But baby,” said Barbara, kneeling down in front of him. “We’re not going to hurt you!”

The child didn’t buy that particular lie anymore. He screwed his eyes shut and whined even more loudly.

“Make him be quiet,” said Jučas.

Barbara glanced at him.

“He’s just scared,” she said.

“Then give him some of that damn chocolate. Do you have any eyedrops left?”

“No,” she said. But he thought she might be lying.

“Stay here,” he said. “And keep the damn kid quiet!”

THE BOY-BITCH HADN’T stirred. He grabbed her shoulder bag, the only thing she had had with her apart from the child, and emptied it into the kitchen sink. Wallet, Kleenex, a fuzzy old roll of mints, car keys, two other sets of keys, and a dog-eared diary. No mobile. He took all the keys with him, and went quietly down the stairs to look for the red Fiat. He found it half a block away, hidden behind a big green-plastic container meant for recycling glass. On the backseat was a smelly blanket and two shopping bags, one containing kid’s clothes, the other full of apple cores and bread and beach toys. That was all. The boot proved equally uninteresting; there was a plastic crate full of starter cables, sprinkler fluid, an aerosol can of puncture-repair foam, and other first-aid items for unreliable cars, a bin liner that turned out to contain empty bottles, a pair of gumboots, and a flashlight.

He took the blanket and left the rest, and locked up the Fiat once more.

She didn’t have the money. He felt the certainty of it in his gut. And the other one, the blond one with the boobs, she hadn’t had it either. She would have told him. In the end, she would have told him.

Which meant only one thing.

He was now completely sure that the Dane had lied to him.

There were still a number of things he didn’t understand— what the boy-bitch was doing with the kid, for instance. And how and why the blond one was mixed up in it at all. But he knew enough. And he knew how he was going to make the Dane pay what was owed.

HE DROVE THE Mitsubishi onto the pavement and parked it right by the front door. Upstairs, Barbara had at least managed to extract the boy from the toilet. She was crouched next to him and had her arms around him, gently rocking him back and forth. It seemed to be working; he was quiet again.

The boy-bitch was still lying where he had dropped her. But she was breathing, he noticed.

“She’s fine,” he told Barbara. “I’m taking her down to the car.”

Barbara didn’t answer. She just looked at him, and her eyes were almost as wide and frightened as the boy’s.

“I’m doing this for you,” he said.

She nodded obediantly.

He rolled up the bitch’s limp body in the disgusting blanket and eased open the door with his hip. The stairwell was still deserted. What would he say if he met someone—she’s had a fall, we’re taking her to the hospital? But no one came. He maneuvered her into the back of the Mitsubishi and covered her completely with the blanket, then parked the car in a more legal and less noticeable spot. So far, so good.

When he got back to the flat, he could hear Barbara murmuring to the boy. In Polish, not Lithuanian.

“Stop that,” he said. “He doesn’t understand a word you’re saying.”

Jučas didn’t either, and he didn’t like it when Barbara spoke in her native language. It gave him a feeling that there was a part of her he couldn’t access.

When they got to Krakow, she would be speaking Polish with everyone, he suddenly realized. Everyone except him. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? But he hadn’t. He had only been thinking about the house, about Barbara, and the life he imagined them having together.

The Dane would make it all possible. The Dane and his money. He could still recall the fizzy feeling of triumph when he had realized how easy it would be.

It had been Klimka who had told him to look after the Dane, and had emphasized that there would be no funny business. This man was a good client, with businesses not only in Vilnius but also a couple of places in Latvia, and he paid Klimka good money—very good money—to keep the other sharks at a distance. Now he was in Vilnius himself and wanted only a single bodyguard to follow him around. Discretion was essential.

And so Jučas had played the nanny from the moment the man got off the plane with his ridiculous little trolley that turned out to contain an unreasonable number of U.S. dollars. They had gone directly to some kind of private clinic, where the Dane tried to buy information about some Lithuanian girl or other who had apparently given birth to a baby. When Jučas had seen the sum he had offered the head of the clinic, he had begun to feel jumpy. It was as if the Dane had no idea what it was he was waving in the woman’s face. A tenth would have sufficed; would, actually, have been too much. People had been murdered for less.

He called Klimka to ask for backup. Klimka refused—the Dane had specified one bodyguard. Jučas would just have to handle it for now, but if things looked tricky, he could call, of course.

Yeah right, though Jučas. If the shit really hit the fan, he needed his backup with him, not a couple of phone calls away. He walked around with his senses tuned to max all day, paying precious little attention to whatever the Dane was saying and doing, because he was too busy scanning the surroundings. When the nurse more or less slammed the door in their faces and they had to return to the hotel, Jučas heaved a sigh of relief.

Premature, as it turned out. In a bout of depression, the man downed most of the contents of the minibar, then went for the hotel bar, already so inebriated that the bartender refused to serve him. After which performance the idiot staggered out the door, without the dollar trolley, thank God, but still with enough of a wad in his wallet to get into every kind of trouble. There was nothing Jučas could do except curse and follow.

That proved only the beginning of a very long night. But as the booze went in, the story came out, little by little, mixed with the drinks. And Jučas listened, at first indifferently, but then with growing interest. Fledgling plans formed in his mind. And the next morning, when he poured a sizeable but unbruised hangover onto the small private Danish plane, it was with almost tender feelings that he buckled the guy’s seatbelt for him and made sure a good supply of puke bags were in reach.

It had taken a little while to make the nurse tell him what she knew, but he had, after all, had some experience in making people do things they didn’t really want to do. And when he discovered that Sigita Ramoškienė actually had a second child, everything had fallen brilliantly into place.

He had sent his first package to the Dane, and made him an offer. The price was easy to remember, and non-negotiable: one million U.S. dollars.

HE STILL DIDN’T understand why things had come apart the way they had. But one thing, at least, was very clear. The Dane was not going to put one over on him now.

“I’ll take him,” he said to Barbara, reaching for the boy.

She hugged the child even closer.

“Can’t we take him with us?” she said. “He is so small. He could easily become ours.”

“Are you insane?”

“He’ll forget all the old stuff quickly. In a year, he will think he has always been with us.”

“Barbara. Let him go.”

“No,” she said. “Andrius. It’s enough now. We can take him and leave for Poland right now. You don’t have to hit anyone anymore. No more violence.”

He shook his head. The woman had gone completely insane. He should never have brought her here. But he thought she might get them into the flat without any fuss, and so she had. Now he wished he had just kicked in the door.

“The money,” he said.

“We don’t need it,” she said. “We can live with my mother, at least to begin with. And then you’ll find a job, and we can get a place of our own.”

He had to breathe very calmly and carefully to keep the rage at bay.

“You may want to live like a sewer rat for the rest of your life,” he said. “But I don’t.”

Resolutely, he seized the boy’s arm and tore him from Barbara’s grasp. Luckily, the kid didn’t scream. He simply went limp, as though he had suddenly lost consciousness. Barbara was the one doing the whining.

“For God’s sake shut up,” he said. “Not all the neighbors are deaf.”

“Andrius,” she begged. She looked as if she were dissolving. Tears and mucus made her look swollen, damp and unattractive. Yet some of the old tenderness returned.

“Hush,” he said. “Stop crying, can’t you? Go back to the hotel, and I will pick you up later. Once we get the money, Dimitri has a new car ready for us. And then we leave for Krakow.”

She nodded, but he couldn’t tell whether she believed him or not.



WHEN HE GOT back to the car, he saw that the boy-bitch had moved. The blanket had slipped, so that one could see a little of her face and shoulder. Damn it. But it was best just to get out of here, now. He could always stop later and cover her up again. He put the boy into the kid’s car seat still fitted between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat. Just as well he hadn’t removed it yet. He fumbled with the straps and buckles—this had been Barbara’s department until now—but luckily the child made no move to resist him. He turned his head away and wouldn’t look at Jučas, but apart from that he was a life-sized doll, limp arms, limp legs, no more screaming defiance.

Barbara came out just as he was finishing, but he merely slid into his own seat and drove off, steadfastly ignoring her. He couldn’t bring her.

He knew that he would probably have to kill someone. The boybitch at the very least, but perhaps also the Dane. And he didn’t want Barbara to see.





JUČAS DROVE PAST the house twice just to get his bearings. There was a wall, but the wrought-iron gates were wide open, so there was really nothing to prevent him from driving straight up to the front door. Was it really that simple? It was hard to believe. In Lithuania, rich people had to guard their money better.

The third time, he turned into the gate and continued up the driveway. He let the car coast to minimize the noise of the engine and didn’t stop in front of the main entrance. Instead, he followed the driveway around the house and into a huge garage at the basement level. Here, too, the doors were wide open. There was space enough for five or six cars, but right now the only occupants were a dark blue Audi stationwagon and a low sportscar silhouette shrouded by dust sheets. He parked next to the stationwagon and turned off his engine.

The kid had stayed quiet during the ride, never looking at Jučas. Every once in a while he cried softly, with barely a sound. No screaming and sobbing, just this timid, hopeless crying, which was worse, in its way. Jučas felt like assuring the boy that he meant him no harm, but he knew it couldn’t be helped. He knew that from now on the monster in that little tyke’s nightmares would be him. And what about Barbara? The look she had given him back in the flat … as though she, too, were becoming scared of him. Hell. I’m not the kind of bastard who would hit a woman or a child, he told himself.

Completely unwelcome, the memory of the other one came back to him. The blonde. Crouched on the bed, with wide unfocused eyes that no longer understood he was in the room. The uncertain, labored voice, calling. “Ni-na. Ni-na.”

He sat motionless for a moment, still with his hands on the wheel. What’s the bloody use, he thought. What’s the use of running from Klimka and his world, where fear is a bludgeon you use to batter people into compliance. What’s the use of dreaming about Krakow and a house with a lawn and Barbara sunbathing on a quilt, when all this shit stays with you.

He got out of the car. Reached for the rage because it was the only thing that might get him through the next bit. He opened the rear door and looked down at the boy-bitch, still huddled in a boneless pile without any spark of consciousness. It was all her fault, he told himself. Her and the filthy swine who was trying to do him out of his money. It was them. They did it, and he was not going to let them get away with it. You don’t f*ck with me.

And the rage came. Like a wave of heat, it washed through his body, made hands and feet prickle and shake a little, but in a good way. It was best done now, while she was still just an object. He took the plastic shopping bag and emptied out all the stuff that Barbara had brought—bananas, lukewarm cola, some kind of soap she had liked because it smelled of roses and lily of the valley. Even though he didn’t really feel like touching her, he climbed into the back of the car to the bitch. He grabbed her shoulders and rolled her limp body into his lap. She weighed nothing at all, he thought. No more than a child. He pulled the bag over her head and then realized he had nothing to tie it with. Instead, he tied the handles themselves into a knot under her chin, which would have to do. When he saw the plastic cling closer to her face with each breath she took, he knew it was enough. By the time he came back, it would be over.

He pushed her away with disgust and wiped his hands on his trousers, as if touching her had somehow contaminated him. The bitch got what she deserved, he told himself carefully, clinging to the strength the rage gave him. And as he went to pull down the garage doors, it wasn’t her face that swam before his eyes. In the sudden darkness, other images forced themselves on him, the Pig, the Pig from the orphanage who pushed little boys up against rough, damp basement walls, down in the dim semi-darkness that smelled of pee and petrol and unwashed old man.

Filthy bastard swine, he thought, they were all filthy swine, and he was going to show them that nobody did such things to him. Hell, no. Not to him. He found a light switch and turned on the fluorescent overheads until he had found what he was looking for—the automated gate system that such a filthy rich bastard had to have. He yanked the wiring right out of the box with hardly any effort, leaving the bared copper threads bristling and exposed. So far, so good.

There was a door that had to lead into the house, but it was locked. He considered kicking it down, but decided that it was much simpler to ring the bell and wait for someone to let him in. He glanced back at the car. The boy sat there, still strapped to his little seat, staring at him through the windshield. Jučas slammed his palm against the light switch so that both boy and car disappeared in the garage darkness.





SIGITA WAS SHAKING all over.

“You can’t!” she screamed, and for a few moments didn’t register that she was screaming in Lithuanian. She searched desperately for the English words this woman would understand.

“You can’t take a kidney from a three-year-old child! He is too small!”

Anne Marquart looked at her in astonishment.

“But Mrs. Ramoškienė. Of course not. We … we’re not going to.”

“Why did you take him, then? Why did people come to Vilnius and steal him from me, and take him to Denmark?” She didn’t know for certain, but it had to be that way. Didn’t it?

“I don’t know where your little boy is, or why he is gone. But I assure you, we could never ever harm… .” She broke off in the middle of the sentence and stared blankly out at the ocean for a while. Then she said, in a completely different tone of voice: “Would you excuse me? I have to call my husband.”

These people are rich enough to buy anything, thought Sigita. They bought my first child. And now they have paid someone to steal the second.

“He’s only three,” she said helplessly.

Di-di-da-da-di-di-diiih… . The unsuitably gay little tune from a different doorbell made them both freeze. There was the sound of child-light running feet from the hallway, and Aleksander’s voice called out something in Danish.

“He always wants to get the door,” said Anne Marquart absently. “With him in the house, there’s no need for a butler.”

Then, too quickly for natural speed, the door to the living room slammed back against the wall, and a man stood there, in the middle of the floor. He took up all the space, thought Sigita, and left no room for anybody else. It wasn’t just that he was big. It was his rage that made everything around him shrink. He held on to Aleksander with one hand. In the other was a gun.

“Get down on the floor,” he said. “Now!”

Sigita knew at once who he was, even though she had never seen him before. It was the man who had taken Mikas.

ALEKSANDER STRUGGLED AND tried to twist free of the man’s grip. The man grabbed a handful of his hair and jerked the boy’s head back, so the child emitted a thin sound of pain and fright and outrage.

“Don’t hurt him,” begged Anne Marquart. “Please.” She said something in rapid Danish to the boy, and he stopped struggling. Then she lay down on the floor, obediently.

Sigita didn’t. She couldn’t. She stood there, stiff as a pillar, with the noise of her own blood crackling in her ears like a bad phone connection.

“Where is he?” she asked.

The man didn’t like that she wouldn’t do as she was told. He took a step forward, then raised the barrel of the gun against Aleksander’s cheek.

“Who?” he said.

“You know damn well. My Mikas!”

“Don’t you care about this one?” he said. “Is the little one the only one that matters?”

No. No, it was no longer only about Mikas. It had never been only about Mikas, she knew that now.

“Lie down, bitch,” he said. “It will be better for all of us if I don’t lose my temper.”

He didn’t say it in any menacing tone of voice, he was just offering information. Like the little signs by the predator pits in Vilnius Zoo: Please don’t climb the fence.

Sigita lay down.

“What are you saying?” asked Anne Marquart in English. “Why are you doing this?”

The man didn’t answer. He merely forced Aleksander down onto the floor next to them, then slid his hands over Anne’s body, not in any sexual way, just professionally. He found a mobile phone in her pocket and bashed it against the stone floor till it broke. He then upended Sigita’s bag, fished her mobile from the wreckage, and treated it to a similar destructive bang.

“He took Mikas,” explained Sigita. “My son Mikas. I think your husband paid him to do it.”

The man looked up.

“No,” he said. “Not yet. But he will.”





IT WAS NEARLY half past eight in the evening before they let him go. Jan felt as if he had been run through a cement mixer.

“Go home and try not to think too much about it,” said his lawyer, as they shook hands in the parking lot.

Jan nodded silently. He knew it would be impossible not to think. Think about Anne, and about Inger and Keld. Think about Aleksander, and about an organ cooler box somewhere, with a kidney inside that had a maximum of twelve useful hours left before it became just so much butcher’s waste. Think about the Lithuanian and Karin, who was dead whether he could get his head around it or not.

They had shown him pictures. They had meant to shock him, he knew, and it had worked. Even though he had seen her at the Institute of Forensics, it was somehow worse to see her in the place where she had died, crouched on a bed, blood in her hair. Crime scene photos. It made the violence of what had been done to her too real and unclinical. You could see the power behind those blows, the force that had killed her. He thought of the Lithuanian and his huge hands, and the words on the phone when he had tried to end it. Not until you pay. Fear tore at his stomach.

Nor had the police lost interest in him. He hadn’t told them about the Lithuanian or about Aleksander and the kidney he so desperately needed. Even though Jan had rid himself of the stolen Nokia, the photo of the boy, and the blood sample with the perfect DNA match, he still clung to hope, irrationally and beyond all realism.

Perhaps they sensed the lie and all the things he left unsaid. Perhaps that was why they kept coming at him for such a long time, even after he had sacrificed his self-respect and told them about Inger’s visit. And of course, they had sent someone to the villa in Tårbæk to check the usefulness of this alibi. Thinking about it was almost unbearable. He imagined Keld frowning and putting down his pipe. Getting up to perform polite handshakes with the cop. Hearing about Karin and the fact that Jan was a suspect. For a wild moment, he even thought that Keld might get into his old black Mercedes and drive directly to the house by the bay to take Anne away from him.

But of course, he wouldn’t do such a thing. They were married, and Keld had a lot of respect for that institution. Which didn’t mean he also had to respect the man his daughter had consented to marry, and Jan knew that that respect would now have evaporated. If it had ever really been there. In the midst of his general misery, that knowledge hurt with its own specific pain.

“You’ll be all right,” said the lawyer, patting him on the shoulder. “You have at least a partial alibi, and they have no physical evidence linking you to the scene. Almost the opposite, I believe. And the other thing … well, it will be very difficult for them to lift the burden of proof on that one.”

Jan nodded, and got quickly into his car.

“See you tomorrow,” he said, slamming the car door shut before the man had time to say anything else.

The other thing.…

It was the man in the blue pullover who had said it. The one that looked like a railway clerk. “People like you, Mr. Marquart. People like you don’t have to kill anyone themselves. After all, it’s so much easier to pay someone else to do it.”

That was an accusation that clung worse than a direct murder charge. Not least because it was much too close to the truth. He had tracked Karin. And he had offered the man money to go and get her. That he had never meant for the man to kill her—how does one prove that when she did in fact die?

THE WAY HOME felt long, even though he didn’t actually want to get there. After several weeks of clear skies and sunshine, clouds had begun to roll in from the west, darkening the twilight. A strong wind made the pine trees sway so that it looked as if they were trying to fall on top of the house. The automated garage door failed to work, again. He was too tired to get annoyed and merely left the car on the gravel outside. He could smell the sea even though he had smoked three cigarettes during the drive. The sea, and something else—the ozone-heavy damp smell of rain that hadn’t quite arrived.

He had barely inserted his key in the lock when the door slammed open, so abruptly that it tore the bunched keys from his hand. Something hit him in the face, and he was knocked backwards, ending up on his back in the gravel at the foot of the stone steps.

The Lithuanian stood there on the threshold, with the light at his back so that he looked barely human, a giant form towering above him, filling Jan’s entire field of vision. He had a gun in one hand. The other clutched the back of Aleksander’s head like the timber grab on a bulldozer. An involuntary sound shot up from the depth of his diaphragm. Please no. Not Aleksander.

“For God’s sake,” he whispered, not realizing that he was speaking Danish and that the giant would not be able to understand. “Let him go.”

The Lithuanian was looking down at him.

“Now,” he said, in a voice that made Jan think of rusting iron. “Now you pay.”





ANTON WAS TIRED and surly. “Peepy” was Morten’s mother’s idiosyncratic term for it—possibly an amalgam of peevish and sleepy, and in any case a word that admirably covered the fit-for-nothing-yet-unready-to-sleep state with which his son struggled on a regular basis.

If only Nina hadn’t taken the damn car, thought Morten. Today of all days he could have done without the trek from the daycare to the Fejøgade flat, dragging along an uncooperative seven-year-old. Anton considered it beneath his dignity to hold hands like a toddler, but he kept lagging behind if Morten didn’t chivvy him along. She had called her boss, but not him. Magnus had relayed her assurances, almost apologetically.

“She’s okay,” he said. “She said you shouldn’t worry.”

Of course it was nice to know she wasn’t lying dead in a thicket somewhere in Northern Zealand, but apart from that, it wasn’t very helpful. She was still out there somewhere, in that alternate reality to which he had no access, where violence and disaster always lurked just around the corner. He knew it was irrational, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Nina had somehow single-handedly managed to drag that world back with her to Denmark, disturbing the coffee-and-open-sandwiches tranquility of the family picnic he would have liked his life to be.

“I’m hungry,” whined Anton.

“I’ll make you a sandwich when we get home.”

“On white bread?”

“No. On rye.”

“I don’t like rye,” said Anton.

“Yes, you do.”

“I don’t! It’s got seeds in it.”

Morten heaved a sigh. Anton’s pickiness came and went. When he was rested and happy and secure, he cheerfully wolfed down fairly advanced foods such as olives and broccoli and chicken liver. At other times, his repertoire shrunk alarmingly, and he would balk at anything more challenging than cereal and milk.

“We’ll fix something,” he said vaguely.

“But I’m hungry now.”

Morten surrendered and bought him a popsicle.

THERE WAS A smell in the hallway that warned him the second he was about to cross the threshold. He stopped. Two floors below, Anton was making his way up the stairs by a method that involved taking two steps up and hopping one step down. Apparently, it was essential to perform the hops with maximum noise.

Morten switched on the lights. The semi-twilight of the hallway fled, and dark huddled silhouettes became coats, scarves, shoes, boots, and a lonely-looking skateboard. But on the worn wooden floor, there was an alarming pool of congealing blood. And a little further on, a cereal bowl lay on its side in a puddle of spilled milk and cornflakes. And something else—the something that caused most of the smell: urine.

“Anton,” he said sharply.

Anton looked up at him from the landing below without answering.

“Go and see if Birgit is in. Perhaps you can play with Mathias.”

“But I’m hungry.”

“Do as I say!”

Anton’s eyes widened in alarm. Morten wanted to comfort and reassure, but at the moment he simply couldn’t. The fear that rose inside him left room for little else. He closed the door to the flat and rang the doorbell on his neighbor’s side of the landing. Mathias opened, but Birgit was hot on his heels.

“Hi,” she said. “Have you been burgled?”

“Why do you ask that?” said Morten, his fear still crouched right behind his teeth.

“I saw a police car parked outside this morning.”

“Oh. I see. Er, could Anton stay with you for an hour or so? It’s quite a long story, but I’ll tell you all about it later.” He deliberately dangled the tale in front of her like a steak in front of a hungry dog, because he knew that curiosity was one of the more powerful driving forces in Birgit’s life.

She wasn’t thrilled that she would have to wait for her titbit, but perhaps she sensed his curbed tension.

“Okay,” she said. “Mathias, you can show Anton that new game of yours.”

“Yessss!” said Mathias, and Anton brightened too. They scurried along the corridor to Mathias’s room.

“Thanks,” said Morten.

Birgit remained in her doorway, discretely trying to look past him and into the flat as he opened the door again, but he didn’t think she saw much before he closed it behind him.

He avoided the bloodstain and stepped across the milk and pee puddle. Glanced into the kitchen and the living room. No one there. Ida’s room was also deserted; she was with her classmate Anna this afternoon, he remembered. But in the bedroom a dirty T-shirt had been tossed across the bed. Nina’s T-shirt. She had been here.

He stood very still, trying to collect his chaotic thoughts. What had happened? The bloodstain was ominously large. It could not have come from some trivial injury like a cut finger. And pee—where did that come from? Vague memories of a forensic TV series rose in his mind. Something about traces of urine and feces because all muscles let go at the moment of death.

Moment of death. No.

No.

He fumbled for his mobile. He had to call the police.

Then he heard a faint sound. A heave, or a sobbing breath. He tore open the door to the tiny bathroom.

On the lid of the toilet sat a woman he had never seen before in his life. She looked a wreck. She had obviously been weeping hard, and there was a quality of surrender about her. Her shoulderlength fair hair had slipped from what looked to be an immaculate chignon, but even under these circumstances, there was an unconscious elegance to the slender neck and the long legs.

Morten stood there gaping.

“Where is Nina?” he asked.

The woman looked up at him. Her eyes were swollen with grief.

“Juz po wszystkim,” she said. And then in uncertain English, “Is over. Everything is all over.”

Morten’s pulse roared in his ears. Nina. What the hell had happened?





SHE WOKE BECAUSE she was drowning. She couldn’t breathe. Something wet, black and sticky clung to her mouth, nose, and eyes, and with each breath she tried to take, she drew in only crackling darkness. No air. There was no air.

Panic had already seized her body before she had come completely to her senses again. Her hands clawed purposelessly at the darkness in front of her and encountered something soft and heavy. A blanket, perhaps. She tried to pull it off her body, but it tangled around her shoulders and arms, and she struggled like a trapped diver trying to get back to the surface.

Her chest hurt now. And still the darkness clung to her face. She gasped for breath in hard short heaves, and some part of her brain registered a perfumed smell of roses. An omen of death, it seemed. The smell of roses and lilies always reminded her of burials. Finally, she freed one hand from the blanket and raised it to her face.

A plastic bag.

First she tried to rip it. Then to claw holes in the plastic with her fingers, so that she might breathe. Air. Everything in her was screaming for oxygen, and her lungs cramped painfully. Again, she clawed at the bag, and this time, something gave. The bag loosened enough so that she felt a touch of air.

Easy. Breathe slowly.

Her thoughts slipped and wandered, and she had to struggle to get a grip on them in the curious black and milky gray place that was her brain.

Someone had pulled a bag over her head. All she needed to do to be able to breathe again was pull it off. She reached above her head and yanked the bag all the way off, and finally, she could breathe freely, in long noisy gasps.

The darkness around her was still deep and black. For the first few dizzy seconds she was unsure whether she actually had her eyes open, and an absurd impulse led her to feel her eyelids, just to check.

“You’re not dead, Nina. Take a breath, and get a grip.”

It helped.

The words sounded real in the darkness, and Nina raised herself up on one elbow and turned her head a little. It hurt to move. Particularly one side of her face and head, which felt heavy and tender at the same time. Something wet and sticky lay like plastic wrap over her cheekbone and throat. Blood, she thought dispassionately, and recalled how the man from the railway station had stormed into the flat, gun in hand. She felt vaguely surprised that he hadn’t killed her then, on the hallway floor. But for some reason, he must have decided to wait.

She turned her head the other way, and for the first time noted a slim crack of light in the middle of all the darkness. That, and a low, persistent whine, like that of a trapped animal.

Mikas.

She knew right away that it was him, but his crying was so muted that it sounded as if it was being transmitted to her from another planet. Where was he?

Nina fumbled with one hand in front of her, and came up against a smooth cool glassy surface. A car window. She was in the back of a van, she thought. The floor beneath her was covered with some kind of felt, prickly and new under her hands. She felt her way along the side of the van until her fingers closed around some kind of wire mesh. A dog barrier? Her eyes were getting used to the darkness, and she could just make out a seam of light around what looked like garage doors. A carpark or a garage, she thought, picking up the oily smell of tires and fuel. She had no sense that the man was here, but the sound of Mikas’s crying leaked back to her through the mesh.

He was afraid.

“Mikas!”

Nina listened in the darkness. Waves of nausea rolled over her, and her tongue felt huge and shapeless when she tried to talk.

She called again, shaking the mesh testingly.

“Mikas, don’t be scared. I’m right here.”

She reminded herself that he wouldn’t understand, but she hoped the sound of her voice would at least reassure him that he was not alone. Perhaps he did actually recognize it. He was silent for a few moments, as if listening. Then the faint, toneless weeping continued.

She got onto her knees and felt along the bottom of the car, probing and sliding her fingers into every space and crevice she encountered. A flattened ring caught her interest. She pulled at it, and felt the lining beneath her shift and move. There was a hatch beneath her, and she suddenly realized that this was the kind of car that had a spare wheel embedded in the bottom of the cargo space. She managed to pull back the lining and open the hatch, and there, beside the spare, was the folded plastic package she was hoping for. The car’s tool set.

She felt a rush of triumph. If the man from the train station thought she was just going to lie there and die with a badly tied shopping bag over her head, he was much mistaken. And he was also mistaken if he thought locking her in the back of a van would keep her captive much longer. Nina felt a pang of contempt mixing with the fury that was growing in her belly. Weren’t they all like that? The vultures that fed on the flesh of the weak. The pedophiles, the rapists, the pimps. All the damned lowlifes of this world. This was what they were really like. Such stupid little people.

This man was no exception. He wasn’t getting Mikas. And he wasn’t getting her.

She drew a wrench from the package and hefted it. She didn’t know where the man had gone, but leaving Mikas here presumably meant he was coming back. The boy was what he had come for. The property he had come to reclaim. Smashing the window might be too risky, and too noisy. Instead, she made her way back to the mesh. The screws that fastened it to the car were easy to find even in the dark, and in the tool kit was a screwdriver that was a close-enough match.

Suddenly, light flooded the garage outside the van, and she instinctively cowered to the floor. She thought she heard voices. If help was within reach, she ought to bang and kick the sides of the van; but somehow, she didn’t think that whoever was out there had come to rescue her.

If he came back, could she pretend she was still unconscious? She reached for the plastic bag, but couldn’t bring herself to pull it over her head again.

Then the lights went out, and darkness descended once more. She crouched, still waiting. But no one came.

Loosening all the screws took a while, and she had to pause twice to fight back nausea. But finally the mesh came free, and she slid it to one side.

“Mikas?”

Silence reigned up there. She wormed her way past the head rest of the driver’s seat and tumbled forward into the cabin. She could feel the boy move beside her, in trembling jerks, but she couldn’t see him properly. Quickly, she opened the driver’s door, and light from the overhead bulb flooded the cabin and revealed Mikas’s face, frightened and blinking. Did he even recognize her? She wasn’t sure. He had been strapped into a child’s car seat, the way one would normally secure a three-year-old child for a trip to visit a grandmother, or an outing in a park. Nothing else was necessary. Mikas’s soft short fingers picked at the buckle, which he couldn’t undo, and his lips moved in a murmur of weeping.

She undid the buckle for him, with a soft click.

Then she heard the shot.