The Boy in the Suitcase

ANNE AND SOME other woman were lying on the stone floor in the living room with their arms raised like the victims of a bank robbery. One of Jan’s own toolboxes had been upended on the coffee table so that pliers, bits of wire, screwdrivers and duct tape were scattered over the glass surface. It was only then he realized, in his daze, that Anne’s hands and feet had been taped to the floor so that she couldn’t move from her odd position. Her face was completely expressionless. She didn’t look frightened or angry, just … he wasn’t quite sure what to call it. “Determined” seemed too weak a word. Her eyes were the color of shadows on snow.

The other woman lay in much the same way, except that one arm was in a cast. That, too, had been forced to one side and stuck down with tape at a different angle. She looked a bit like Aleksander, he thought. And then a pounding shock went through his diaphragm as he realized who she must be. He had no idea how or why, but it had to be his son’s biological mother who was lying there.

He felt a trickle of blood from one nostril on his upper lip and wiped it away reflexively. He had to get a grip. He had to get control of this situation, not just let himself be dominated. He turned to the Lithuanian.

“This isn’t necessary,” he said, slowly and carefully in English, wanting to make sure the man understood. “What is it you want?”

“What you owe me,” said the man.

“Okay. But what about your end of the deal?”

The man stood still for a moment. Then he jerked his gun hand in the direction of the door. “That way,” he said.

The other woman, Aleksander’s Lithuanian mother, started to shout something incomprehensible. The man snarled at her, and she fell abruptly silent.

For a moment, Jan hesitated. But getting the man out of the room Anne was in had to be a good idea. If only he would also let go of Aleksander. He could see Aleksander was scared to the point of panic. His eyes looked huge in his pale, thin face, and there were tear tracks on his cheeks. Jan attempted a smile, but knew it came out wooden.

“It’s okay, Sander,” he said. “The man will leave in a minute.”

“Shut up,” said the Lithuanian. “Speak English. I don’t want you to say things I don’t understand.”

“I just told the boy not to be frightened.”

“Don’t do it again.”

“Okay. Okay.” Don’t anger him. Or … don’t anger him more. The man’s suppressed fury was vivid in every move he made.

They went into the hallway and down the stairs to the back door, which the man made Aleksander open. With his gun hand, he flipped the switch and turned on the light in the garage. There was an unfamiliar car in there, some kind of van. And inside, on the front seat, a child.

It was him—the boy from the photograph. Jan recognized him immediately. But what was he doing here? It wasn’t the child Jan had paid for. Just one of his kidneys.

“What is he doing here?” he asked the Lithuanian. And at that moment the truth began to dawn on him, like a series of flashes at the back of his mind. The Lithuanian had never meant to deliver a neat little transplantable organ. How could he? He didn’t have access to the doctors or the technology for an operation like that. The suitcase Karin was supposed to pick up at the railway station … it had never contained an organ box. It had contained a living child.

Karin.

No wonder she had freaked.

A rush of pain went through him, and a bizarre image invaded his mind. It was as if he had ordered a steak at a restaurant and had been presented with a cow and a meat cleaver instead.

“Not like that,” he said to the Lithuanian, hoarsely. “You didn’t say it was a living child.”

“Perfect match,” said the Lithuanian. “Same father, same mother. Now you pay.”

“Of course,” said Jan, somehow managing to keep any sign of tremor from his voice. “Let’s go upstairs again. You’ll get your money.”

The Lithuanian switched off the light. The child hadn’t moved at all, and Jan felt a stab of pity for the poor kid.

“DOLLARS,” SAID THE man. “Not … that.” He pointed the gun at Jan’s laptop.

“But I can transfer the money to an account only you have access to,” tried Jan, but he could see that it was useless. Glowing numbers on a computer display wasn’t money in the Lithuanian’s world. “I don’t have that much cash lying around!”

The man came closer, still with Aleksander in his grip. Casually, as though Aleksander were a toy he had almost forgotten about.

“You said you had the money ready.”

“And so I did. But Karin took it.”

“Karin?”

“The one you—” he stopped himsef short of saying “killed.” It might not be a good idea to bring that up now. “The one at the cottage. She had it. It’s not my fault that you couldn’t find it.”

Out of the corner of his mind, he saw Anne stir. Don’t move, he thought, as if he could reach her telepathically. Don’t make him see you, don’t make him notice you right now.

The other woman said something in Lithuanian. She wriggled, trying to get free, he supposed. The man snapped something at her, and she stopped struggling. She too had been crying, he could see.

“She didn’t know where it was,” said the Lithuanian, facing Jan once more. “She would have said.” He raised the gun and pointed it at Aleksander’s head. “Last chance. Don’t f*ck with me.”

Jan opened his mouth, but no words came, no sound. Aleksander may die because this idiot doesn’t understand about money transfers, he thought, feeling his world shift beneath him. He crouched a little lower and considered a flying tackle; go for the gun, make him let go of Aleksander, something, anything, anything except this suffocating feeling of helplessness.

“I know where the money is,” said Anne suddenly, in crystal clear and perfect English.

The Lithuanian looked at her rather than Jan now. Possibly considering whether Anne might be telling the truth.

Dammit, Anne, thought Jan. Can’t you see that this is not the kind of man you can bluff?

“It’s not true,” he said quickly. “She doesn’t know anything about any of this.”

But the man had taken a box cutter from the tool box wreckage. He cut the duct tape so that Anne could sit up. Blood was trickling down one wrist from an accidental cut, but she didn’t even seem to notice it.

“Show me,” said the giant.

Anne nodded. “I’ll get it,” she said. “It won’t take a minute.”

A few moments later she was back with two heavy yellow manila envelopes. Jan looked on in disbelief as she upended them and let thick green bundles of thousand-dollar notes tumble out onto the floor.

Anne had taken the money. Not Karin. The discovery made the blood pound in his ears.

“Anne … what … why?”

The Lithuanian was staring down at the money, and for the moment, at least, didn’t seem to care that they were speaking Danish.

“It’s now been two years since I decided to leave you,” said Anne. “Do you know why I couldn’t go? Because of that bloody kidney machine in the basement. But when I saw that case on Karin’s bed with all that money inside, things just fell into place. I had no idea what you needed so much cash for, but I had the feeling you wouldn’t call the police if it disappeared. I could take it. And then I would be able to look after Aleksander without your help.”

“But.…”

“And you still don’t get it, do you? Right now you’re wondering if it is because of your pathetic little affair with Karin. Oh yes, I know. But that’s not why. Don’t you realize? You nearly killed Aleksander. You had to give him the kidney he needed. You would take care of everything. Because God forbid anyone should know. You nearly killed Aleksander because you didn’t want my father to know that you couldn’t give me a child. This marriage was always more about my family than about me, wasn’t it? My father was the one you really wanted. Well, fine. You can have him. But I’m getting out.”

Jan heard the words, but they didn’t really register. He saw the Lithuanian let go of Aleksander. The boy gave a sob and ran to Anne, who put her arms around him without noticing that the blood from her wrist smeared his fair hair.

“Pick it up,” ordered the Lithuanian. “Put it back into the envelopes.”

It took a moment before Jan realized that the order was meant for him. His whole body felt alien to him, as if everything was dissolving, inside and out. He took a step forward, not toward the money but toward Anne. He saw the man raise the gun, but it had ceased to matter. Even when he saw the flash from the barrel and felt the impact to his chest, it still didn’t really matter.





THE DANE FELL heavily, across the money. Jučas turned and raised the gun again, this time to aim at the wife. But she was gone. He could hear her running footsteps somewhere, in the hall perhaps. And, of course, she had taken her son with her.

He glanced down at the man to decide whether he should shoot him a second time, but he looked like a goner, and right now it was more important to get the wife and the kid before they succeeded in calling for help. Shooting the boy would be no fun at all, but he knew it was necessary now. He had to do some house cleaning here, make sure there was no one left who could identify him. The little one he could take with him, seeing that Barbara was so keen on it, but the older boy had to go. He had eyes in his head, he would be able to remember and tell others what he had seen. Jučas didn’t want to wake up one morning in Krakow to find the police pounding on his door.

Four or five quick strides brought him to the door. The hallway was empty, the front door still closed and locked. Where had they gone? He opened another door and found a huge kitchen with shiny white cupboards and black marble work tops. But no woman and child. He withdrew to the hall again and wondered whether they had fled down the stairs to the garage. A good thing he had sabotaged the gate; they wouldn’t be able to get out in a hurry.

Then he heard a soft bump overhead. Excellent. Now he knew where to look. He headed up the stairs to the second floor.

The first room was a bedroom, probably the parents’. He switched on the light and looked under the bed. Checked the bathroom. Nothing. He continued along the landing to a sort of feminine office, with a blonde-wood desk and a small chintzy sofa by the window. Also empty.

In quick succession, he opened two more doors. A bathroom and a boy’s bedroom. He had to spend precious time opening wardrobes and knocking over a playhouse shaped like a medieval castle, but still no sign of the woman or the boy. Then he attempted to open the second to last door along the landing.

It was locked.

He raised the Glock and aimed at the lock. The shot rang in his ears but did less damage to the door than he had expected. Despite his temporary deafness he heard a muted cry, but it sounded as if it came from above. Possibly he was shooting at the door to the attic stairs? He fired one more round, and this time the door began to give way when he put his shoulder against the woodwork. One more shot ought to do it.

At that moment, something hit him from behind. Something heavy, sharp-edged and hard. It drew a line of fire across the back of his neck and made him stagger briefly. He was turning as the second blow came, but he was off-balance, and he didn’t even have time to raise his hands. The one shot he did get off went wild, smashing into the banister. Then the bloody toolbox hit him directly in the face.

He was lying on his back staring up at the little one’s mother. Her eyes looked completely wild, and a strip of duct tape still dangled from her plaster cast. She could only hold the toolbox with one hand, but she swung it as though it were a handbag.

This time it smashed into his right arm, and he lost all feeling in his fingers and couldn’t even feel the gun anymore. The crazy bitch dropped the toolbox and went for the Glock.

She’ll bloody kill me, he thought. If she gets hold of it, she’ll kill me.

He grabbed a handful of light brown hair with his left hand and pulled her all the way down to the floor. She wasn’t screaming, but she fought like a woman possessed. She kneed him in the chest, and he still couldn’t use his right hand. Then he felt something punch him in the leg, but it wasn’t till the bang registered that he realized that she had shot him. He had no idea how bad it was. He only knew that if he didn’t finish her right now, anything could happen. He rolled over so that his full weight held her pinned to the floor, and with his left hand—unfortunately more clumsy than his right—reached for her head in order to pull it sharply back and to one side, a swift jerk so that the neck would snap.

He didn’t understand why it didn’t work. He only felt another punch, this time on the side of the neck. From the wet heat he understood that he was bleeding. And from the manic racing of his heart, he understood that it was a lot. Strange. It felt almost like the throbbing pump he loved to feel in his body when he was training.

But the throbbing grew fainter. More distant. As though he was moving away from himself. Suddenly he saw the dream family quite clearly. The mother, the father, the two children. They were sitting around the dinner table, laughing. He wanted to call out to them, shout at them, but they couldn’t hear him. He was outside, and he could not get in.





EVEN BEFORE NINA pushed open the door to the hall, she knew the house was enormous. The stairs winding up through the stairwell would not have been out of place at some corporate domicile built to impress, and yet there were enough domestic details to suggest that this was actually a private home—a collection of outdoor boots, neatly lined up on a rack, winter coats and scarves on pegs in the wide space under the stairs, two footballs in a net.

Everything else was white, including the staircase itself, and Nina stood for a moment, trying to adjust to the glare of a multitude of halogen spotlights.

There was a strange silence, as if the house had swallowed everything living and was now busy digesting. She sensed movement, but the sounds that did reach her were muffled and diffuse. Running footsteps, a door being opened and closed, the muted clicking of heels or toes against floorboards. But there had been a shot. Straining to hear, Nina felt adrenalin invading every single tired cell in her body.

Nothing.

Or, no … something. Something closer than the footsteps she had heard. She went up the stairs as quietly as she could, and listened again. A liquid moan reached her through a set of double doors leading off the hallway. She recognized the sound of human pain and felt automatic emergency reflexes kick in, forcing her own pounding headache into the background. Someone was injured. She needed to know whether there was one or more, how critical the injuries were, the priority of treatment.

She checked her watch.

It was 9:37 p.m., later than she would have guessed.

She pushed open the door and entered an enormous living room.

A man and a woman lay on the floor. The woman was immobilized by wide strips of duct tape, but apart from an arm in a cast, which obviously had already been treated and was therefore irrelevant right now, she appeared to be uninjured. Frantic, but unharmed. Nina ignored her and focused on the man instead. He lay partly on his side, limbs outflung, like a fallen skater. Around him, a bizarre number of dollar bills lay scattered across the stone floor. Blood from the sternum area had soaked through his white shirt and run down to mix with the big wet stains of sweat under his arms.

ABC, she thought. Airways, Breathing, Circulation. She knelt next to him, tilting back his head a little to check his mouth. No blood, which was encouraging, and no obstructions. He blinked and gazed at her with eyes that might be unfocused and shocky, but still seemed reasonably present.

“What happened?” she asked, not only because she wanted to know but also to establish contact and to find out whether he could answer.

He didn’t even attempt to reply, just closed his eyes again, but it seemed more dispirited than actually comatose. He wasn’t unconscious, in her estimation; his breathing was fast and pain-afflicted, but unhindered, and his hands reasonably warm. There seemed to be no catastrophic hemorrhage going on, inside or out. She pulled the bloodied shirt to one side. He had been shot high in the chest, above the heart. The entrance wound was not enormous, but she could see no exit wound, which suggested that the projectile was still somewhere in his body, possibly lodged against the scapula. That, too, was to his advantage right now. Exit wounds were messy. Cautiously, she pushed back the lips of the wound. She could see splinters of bone in among the bleeding tissue. The man’s collarbone had been shattered. The sharp fragments worked like shrapnel inside his shoulder, increasing both the bleeding and the pain, but the shot must have missed all major arteries, and he was not lethally wounded. He was beginning to rock back and forth, probably in an effort to escape what was no doubt a significant level of pain.

“Hold still,” she said. “Moving makes it worse.”

He heard her. He stopped rocking, even though his eyes stayed firmly closed.

Nina glanced around for anything that might be used as an emergency compress, but this was not the kind of home that had tablecloths and cozy plaids and decorative cushions on the couch. In the end, she took off her own shirt and used it for a makeshift bandage; there was nothing she could cover him with to alleviate the effects of the shock, and the only thing she could use to pillow his head were the blood-spattered dollar bundles.

She had done what could be done for him. She turned her attention on the woman.

She was struggling feverishly against her bonds. Her smooth brown hair stuck damply to her forehead, and she had obviously been crying. There was something familiar about her, but Nina couldn’t quite pinpoint what.

Nina had pushed the cries of the younger woman from her consciousness while tending to the injured man, and this might have given her the impression that Nina didn’t care and wouldn’t help her. At any rate, she had stopped shouting. But now her eyes glittered wetly, and she spoke, in slow careful English.

“Please. Help me.”

Nina spotted a box cutter in the jumble of tools, wires, and whatnots scattered on the coffee table from an upturned toolbox. She used it to cut the tape that held the woman down. The minute she was free, the woman catapulted off the floor and exploded into motion with a speed that seemed out of sync with her short, square, unathletic figure. She seized the toolbox with her good hand and ran out of room.

At that moment, shots rang out from above. Two shots, close together.

Nina suffered a brief moment of doubt. She glanced at the injured man. She wasn’t sure how stable his condition was, but there was little else she could do for him now. She wiped both hands across her face. They were trembling, she noted, little sharp jitters she couldn’t control. She checked her watch again to steady herself, and at that moment her subconscious finally came up with the answer, and she knew who the woman must be.

It was 9:39 p.m. Nina gave the injured man one last look, then she got up and followed Mikas’s mother.





SIGITA COULDN’T GET clear. The man lay across her, pinning her to the floor, and one hand had closed around a handful of her hair. He was heavy. In a brief flash it reminded her bizarrely of sex with Darius, but this would not end in laughter and release. The gun had slipped from her hand, and she had no idea where it was. The massive body on top of her made it harder and harder to breathe. She knew people died in this way in nightclubs and football stands, but could one be crushed to death by the weight of a single person? It felt like it.

Where was the panicked strength that had driven her a moment ago? She had swung that toolbox at his head as if she meant to knock it clear off his neck. He had taken Mikas. And even though she had pleaded and begged, lying on the stone floor of that absurd ballroom of a living room, he had not told her where her child was. Not even when he took the Dane and returned so quickly that she understood Mikas must be nearby. He had just snarled at her that if she wanted the kid to survive, she had better shut up, and she had dared ask no more questions after that.

Now her head filled with the nightmare visions she had tried to keep at bay these last long days. What if Mikas had been hidden away in a box somewhere, or in the trunk of a car, every breath he took? Or worse. She saw his tiny body in the cargo hold of a refrigerated van, cold and blue and gutted like an animal. Who said he was even still alive? How could she trust anything the man had said? They only needed his kidney, they didn’t care about the rest— his dark blue eyes, his bubbly laugh, the eagerness in his face when the words came tumbling out so quick and jumbled even she could not make heads or tails of them.

The man didn’t move. Was he dying? She began to struggle again, even though she barely had breath left in her heaving lungs.

Then, suddenly, someone was helping her, rolling the heavy form to one side, so that she could sit up. She gasped and drew blessed air in long, shivery sobs, watching while the skinny shorthaired woman who had cut her loose knelt beside the big man’s trembling body. She had no shirt on, only a white bra, and it looked as is someone had sprayed her with red paint. No, not paint. Blood. There was blood on the wall, too, a long red arc like graffiti painted with a spray can. The woman was pressing her hands against the man’s neck, but Sigita could see how the blood spurted between her fingers. One side of the man’s neck had been torn open, and she slowly realized that this was something she had done. She had fired the gun blindly and felt it kick twice in her hand, but she had had no idea if she had hit him, or where. It seemed she had. In the leg, and in the neck. If he died now, she would have killed him.

“Mikas?” she asked, with what little breath she had.

“He is okay,” said the dark-haired woman without looking up, and Sigita had no breath to ask what do you mean, okay, where is he, is he hurt, is he scared?

The battered door eased open a fraction, and Anne Marquart poked her head out. It looked almost comical.

“Was anyone else hit?” asked the dark-haired woman sharply.

“No,” said Mrs. Marquart, staring at all the blood, and at the massive body on the floor. “We’re … we’re okay.”

The dark-haired woman bent even further over the man who had taken Mikas, and said something Sigita didn’t hear. He didn’t answer. After a while, a sound did come from him, but it was just a sort of hissing sigh. The blood was no longer spurting quite so forcefully. Sigita got up slowly. She realized that she was smeared with blood, too, covered with it, in fact, in her hair, on her neck, down the front of her shirt. His blood. It made her skin crawl. Somehow, it was worse than if it had been her own. She felt dirtier. She could hear Anne Marquart saying something in Danish, possibly to Aleksander, who was still somewhere on the other side of that shot-to-pieces door and, Sigita hoped, couldn’t see any of this.

“Is there anything we can do?” asked Sigita belatedly. The woman didn’t answer right away, just crouched there with both hands pressed against the man’s neck. Sigita could count every vertebrae in her curved spine, could see the effort that made the skinny, bare shoulders tremble.

Then the straining shoulders slumped, and the woman straightened.

“He is dead,” she said.

Sigita stared at the big, heavy body.

“I shot him,” she whispered. She wasn’t quite sure how that made her feel. She suddenly remembered what she had promised herself if they harmed Mikas. If you hurt my boy, I will kill you. Does an act have to be conceived in the mind before it can happen? And once one had thought of it, did that bring it closer to reality? She had thought it. And now, she had done it. The calm she had felt then seemed very distant now.

“I think you are wrong,” said Anne Marquart quietly, bending to pick up the gun. “I think I was the one who shot him.”

Sigita stared at her in confusion. What did she mean by that?

Anne looked utterly calm. She raised the gun carefully.

“Watch out,” she said. And fired a deliberate shot into the doorframe.

“It might be better that way,” said the dark-haired woman thoughtfully. “The police will have no trouble believing her statement.”

Finally Sigita understood. She was a stranger here, a foreigner without credibility, money, or connections. She remembered how hard it had been to make Gužas believe her at first, and they at least spoke the same language.

“I had to do it,” said Anne, nodding at the big motionless body. “It was self defense.”

Sigita swallowed. Then she nodded.

“Of course,” she said. “You had to defend your child.”

Something happened when they looked at each other. A silent agreement. Not a trade-off, more a sort of covenant.

“Not Mikas,” said Sigita. “But me. He can have mine. If it’s a good enough match.”

“You had better leave now,” said Anne. “But I hope you’ll come back. Soon.”

“I will,” said Sigita.

Suddenly, the dark-haired woman smiled, a brief intense smile that made her dark eyes come alive and banished all the jagged seriousness.

“He is downstairs in the garage,” she said. “In the gray van.”

MIKAS WAS STANDING in the doorway with the darkened garage behind him. He was holding on to the doorframe with one hand, as if he had only just learned to walk. When he caught sight of her, an expression slid across his face that was neither happiness nor fear, but a mixture of both. She couldn’t lift him, the stupid cast was in the way. But she squatted down beside him and pulled him into her embrace with her good arm. His little body was warm, and smelled of fear and pee, but he clung to her like a baby monkey and hid his face against her neck.

“Oh, my baby,” she murmured. “Mama’s little baby.”

She knew there might be bad dreams and difficult times. But as she crouched here, feeling the warmth of Mikas’s breath against her skin, she felt that something—life, fate, maybe even God—had at last forgiven her for what she had done.





THERE WASN’T MUCH time, thought Nina. In a little while, it would all begin—police, ambulances, paramedics, all the things that followed in the wake of death and disaster. They had exactly the time it would take for the first cars to reach them from Kalundborg.

Anne Marquart had made the emergency call, from her son’s mobile. She had lent her own dark-blue stationwagon to Mikas and Mikas’s mother. It would be better if they simply weren’t here when the authorities arrived, she had said. Jan Marquart was still lying on the living room floor, but now as comfortable as she could make him, with pillows, blankets and proper bandaging.

Anne Marquart might look as if a rough wind could snap her in half, but there was an unexpected strength beneath the pastelcolored fragility. That she had a dead body in a pool of blood on her upper landing seemed not to shake her, and she stuck to her decision to claim responsibility for his death with no apparent effort. She and Nina had covered the body with a bedspread, mostly out of consideration for Anne’s son Aleksander, and Anne had politely offered Nina the loan of a cream-colored shirt to replace the one that had served as emergency bandaging for her husband’s gunshot wound. The label said Armani, Nina noticed with a pang of guilt as she stuck her haphazardly washed arms into its expensive sleeves.

Anne took her out of the house, around the corner, to a separate entrance at the back.

“This is it,” said Anne, tapping a code into the digital lock. “Up the stairs. Just go in. I’ll keep an eye on Jan until the ambulance gets here.”

Nina merely nodded. The door to Karin’s flat had been sealed with yellow police tape, but Nina opened it anyway, ducking beneath the seal. The light in the small hallway came on automatically as she entered—there had to be a photo sensor somewhere. She located the switch and turned on the light in the living room as well.

This was Karin’s home. Her coats and shoes in the hallway, her perfume still in the air. Her specific blend of chaos and tidyness. Piles of papers and books were allowed to grow abundantly, because Karin did not consider such things mess. But Nina knew that if she checked the laundry basket in the bedroom, she would find even the dirty clothes neatly folded.

She recognized Karin’s old rocker, an heirloom that had followed her since their dormitory days. But apart from that, it was clear that styles had changed as her bank balance swelled. Conran and Eames rather than Ikea. A genuine Italian espresso maker in the open kitchenette. Original modern art on the walls.

On Karin’s desk was a compact little printer, but no laptop. Presumably, the police had taken it away, along with some of the piled papers—you could tell, somehow, that there were gaps in the arrangement, and one drawer had been left slightly ajar.

Nina dropped into the rocking chair. She hadn’t come to pry. She was here to say goodbye, as best she could.

Karin’s fear. That was what kept coming back to her. It had been obvious that Karin had been terrified during the last hours of her life, even before the Lithuanian found her. Had it been Jan Marquart who scared her? He hadn’t seemed particularly terrifying to Nina, but then, that might be because she hadn’t met him before a nine-millimeter projectile had made a mess of his shoulder and left him shocked and bleeding on his own living room floor.

Karin knew him better. Well enough for her to be shit scared of going against his orders. And it had even been she who had taken the dollar bundles still lying on the stone floor next to Jan Marquart. What had Karin imagined Jan would do? Why had she fled this lovely flat so precipitously, to hide out in an isolated summer cottage?

She was afraid of people who put little children into suitcases, thought Nina suddenly, and of the people who pay them to do it. She thought I might be able to save Mikas. And I suppose I did. But there was no one around to save Karin.

She heard distant sirens now. Time was running out. She got up to turn off the lights and leave, but as she reached for the switch, she noticed the various postcards, Post-its, and photographs that Karin had stuck to her refrigerator door.

There was an entire Nina-section, she realized. Top left was a picture of her and Karin, an ancient one taken at a concert at the Student Union Hall way back in a former century when they had been at nursing school together. Karin’s hair looked huge, teased into a festive post-eighties pile on top of her head; her eye-liner would have done Cleopatra proud, and her earrings almost reached her shoulders. Her eyes were laughing at the camera, with familiar sparkling warmth. Nina, of course, wore black, but for once she had been able to muster a smile for the photographer, albeit somewhat less exuberant.

She has kept this for seventeen years, thought Nina. I wonder how many fridge doors it has been stuck to?

Below it was Nina’s wedding picture, somewhat hastily taken in front of the sow-and-piglets sculpture by the Registry Office. Nina had forgotten who had had that particular flash of artistic inspiration, but both she and Morten looked ridiculously young, eyeing each other with an earnest intensity that almost looked like somber premonition. Nina’s dress could not quite disguise the four-months bulge that was Ida.

Still further down came the baby pictures of Ida and Anton. She and Morten had sent them out like picture postcards of holiday attractions, post-partum snapshots of rather purplish-looking wrinkled little creatures, supplemented by tiny black fingerprints.

My life is hanging here, thought Nina, and has been stuck to this door year after year, alongside pictures of nephews and nieces, dental appointments and holiday postcards. Here, where she might look at it every day if she wanted to.

A hodgepodge of feelings assaulted her, a sticky dark mixture of loss, grief, self-hatred, and guilt. It would take time to sort it out, more time than she had at the moment. She switched off the lights. Closed the door and heard the electronic lock click. As the sirens came closer, she plopped herself down on the front steps to wait. She really ought to go check on Jan Marquart, but right now she couldn’t contemplate looking at him. It wasn’t his hands that had beaten Karin to death, but he had paid the man who had done it. Karin’s fears had been well-founded.

Her head hurt like hell, and she knew she probably should be hospitalized, but she just wanted to go home. At long last, and if at all possible. She had washed her arms and hands as best she could, short of soaking them in a tub for hours, but despite her scrubbing, she could still feel the Lithuanian’s blood as a stickiness between her fingers and under her nails.

She hadn’t been scared. Or not of him, at any rate.

He had been lying in a pool of blood that grew bigger and bigger around his head. He hadn’t moved of his own volition, but faint spasms went through the big body, as though he were cold, and seeing him like that made it hard to feel anything except pity. That was how he looked—pitiful.

When she rolled him away from the woman, she had seen at once how the blood spurted in rhythmic jets. In that second, she knew he was dying. Yet she still instinctively knelt next to him, sticking two fingers into the messy neck wound. She had been able to feel the rubbery toughness of the torn artery, but although she tried to clamp it, blood still bubbled and spurted around her fingers, in a hot and uncontrollable flow.

The man had looked at her with a gaze already distant and milky. As if somene had drawn a curtain. She knew that look. She had seen it before. Of course she had. Nurses saw people die.

Yet this was different.

The smell of hot blood and the sticky, scarlet flow of it down her arms dizzied her.

(Don’t let go of time, Nina. Stay awake. Don’t forget time again.)

She’d shaken her head irritably and tried to catch the man’s gaze once more. There was something she needed to know.

“Did you kill her?”

The man blinked, and his breath sounded wet and soggy. Perhaps the trachea had also been damaged? He wasn’t looking at her, but she couldn’t tell whether he had heard her or not.

“Karin. The woman in the summerhouse. Did you kill her?”

His lips parted, but it could be anything from a snarl of pain to an attempt at speech. His eyes were glazed, like dark dry rocks on a beach. He hadn’t answered her. And yet she felt completely certain.

I could let him die now, she thought, looking down at her own hands. I could just let go and stop trying. He killed Karin, and he does not deserve any better.

But she didn’t.

Instead, she slid her fingers further into the wound. Perhaps, if she got a better grip, if she squeezed harder … she was using both hands now, but blood still gushed up her forearms. And when it finally did ease off, it was not because she had succeeded in stemming it. It was because there was nothing left to pump.

The sternum heaved towards her, then fell in a sudden collapse of breath. She stayed as she was for a while, fingers still uselessly clutching, and an ache of ancient grief in her chest.

She would not have been able to save him no matter what she had done, she thought, and as the knowledge hit her, it eased a deeper and older pain inside her.

(He would have died no matter what she had done.)





NINA ASKED THE policewoman who had driven her home to leave her by the front door. She was sore and tired and hurt, and being polite to a stranger in her home was entirely beyond her. Pretty much everything was beyond her right now.

She knew Morten was waiting. The policewoman had told her as much. He had been notified right away and was reportedly “very happy and thrilled to have her back safe and sound.”

Nina grimaced at the phrase as she took the first step up the stairs. No doubt Morten was relieved, but “thrilled to have her back” might be overstating it, and “happy” was not really a word that applied to their relationship right now. In fact, he looked anything but happy, confirming her worst fears.

He must have seen her arrive through the window, because he was waiting in the open doorway, arms crossed. Nina slowed her progress involuntarily.

“So there you are.”

His voice was toneless and barely more than a whisper.

Not angry, not miserable. Something else she couldn’t identify, and the look he gave her made her duck as if he had thrown something at her. She girded her tired loins and continued up the last few steps to the landing.

She was so close that they were nearly touching, and she had to fight back an impulse to put her face against his neck in the little hollow place by his collarbone.

“May I come in?”

She tried to make her voice sound casual and self-assured, but her throat was closing into the tight and tender knot that usually led to tears. She fought them. She didn’t want to cry now; she needed to be the one to comfort him. She raised her head to catch his eyes, and in his gaze she saw something huge and dark come unstuck. His chest heaved in a single sob, then he grabbed the back of her head with both hands and drew her close.

Helplessness.

That was what she heard in his voice, and seen in his eyes. The total and abject feeling of powerlessness that she knew seized him when something took her away from him.

“Don’t,” he said, holding her so tightly that it hurt, “don’t ever do this again.”