The Boy in the Suitcase

WHEN THE STOLEN Nokia beeped in his briefcase more than three hours later, Jan’s plane was still sitting on the pavement, and he was still in his business class seat, sweating like a pig. This time no flight attendant swooped down on him when he pulled out his phone. Cabin personnel had long since given up on that particular score, and at least twenty other people around him were engaged in multilingual phone calls, explaining why they would be delayed.

“Mr. Marquart.” In spite of the hiss and crackle of a bad connection, the man’s fury came through loud and clear, not so much in his words as in his tone of voice.

“Yes… .”

“I delivered. As agreed. The woman came and took the goods. But she left no money. You did not pay.”

What?

Jan protested. He himself was stuck in a plane, he explained, but he had directed his assistant to go in his stead, and he was sure she had followed his instructions.

“Mr. Marquart. There was no money.”

Jan tried to imagine what could have happened.

“There must be some misunderstanding,” he said. “As soon as I get back, I’ll clear it up.”

“That would be a very good idea,” said the man, and cut the connection. The very restraint of his phrase sent a chill through Jan even in the midst of the overheated cabin. It signaled that this was a man who did not have to resort to threats. A man best not angered.

Jan jabbed out Karin’s number with some ferocity. She didn’t answer, and he left no message apart from a curt “Call me!”

He stared sightlessly at the back of the seat in front of him. Sweated. Sipped the water, and the lukewarm gin and tonic he had accepted a few hours ago when he thought he had accomplished a feasible Plan B. It took him nearly half an hour to accept that he would have to call Anne.

“Have you seen Karin?” he asked. And listened, while Anne’s soft voice told him that yes, Karin had returned, but had left again rather quickly. She had been in her flat above the garage for only a few minutes.

“Was she carrying anything?” he asked. “When she arrived? And when she left?”

“I really don’t know,” said Anne vaguely. “Were you thinking of anything in particular?”

“No,” he said. “It’s nothing. It’ll have to wait till I get back.”

As the plane finally started to taxi out onto the runway, he leaned back against the blue leather upholstery, wondering feverishly how he could have been so wrong about her.

I should have done it myself, he thought bitterly. But that is just so typical. You make immaculate plans. You are in control. And then a f*cking seagull wrecks it all.





THE VILLA IN Vedbæk was perfectly situated, thought Nina.

It had neither ocean view nor idyllic woods in the background, but for privacy it couldn’t be matched. Neatly clipped hedges screened the sprawling redbrick and the graveled parking lot from prying eyes, and the surrounding well-to-do family homes oozed respectability. Whether that had been at the front of Allan’s mind when he chose to buy his way into this particular general practice in the northern suburbs was dubious, as it had never really been part of his plan to moonlight as a medical resource for illegal immigrants; but it suited Nina’s purpose beautifully.

She checked the rearview mirror. The boy hadn’t moved in all the time she had had him in the car, nor made a sound. The blanket was undisturbed, and only a few wisps of blond hair poked from its folds.

Tock, tock.

A measured rapping against the window glass made Nina jerk. It was Allan. His tall, gangly form cut off the sun as he bent to peer into the car. Then he rapped on the glass once more, but before she had time to react, he moved on, and was now trying to open the rear door, in vain. She must have locked it without thinking. She realized she was still gripping the steering wheel, fingers locked whitely around the rim, and it took her a second to make her hands unclench. She reached back and unlocked the rear door with stiff fingers, then got out of the car herself.

Allan had already lifted the boy gently out of the car, the blanket still wrapped around him. He held the child against his shoulder.

“What do you know?”

He was headed for the house, and Nina had to lengthen her stride to keep up.

“Nothing. Or almost nothing. Someone left him in a suitcase!”

Nina closed the door behind them and followed Allan as he strode towards his office. Jolly children’s drawings decorated the walls, and behind his computer sat a small gnome-like clown doll, obviously intended for the cheering up of young patients.

The clown would not serve them now. The suitcase boy hung limply in Allan’s arms, like one of Ida’s cast-off Raggedy Anns, thought Nina, with a familiar taste of metal in her mouth. It was her personal taste of fear. It always came to her when adrenalin rushed through her body, into every last cell of it, reminding her of the camps at Dadaab and Zwangheli and other hellholes in which she had lived and looked after the children of others. (And it reminded her of the day he died.)

Nina pushed away the thought as soon as it entered her mind and instead locked her focus on Allan and the boy. Allan had rolled the small, soft body gently onto the couch, his middle and index finger resting against the side of his neck. His face was alight with concentration, and she saw a single bead of sweat trickle down his throat and into the open neck of his white shirt. This was not the time to talk to him.

The sphygmomanometer sat on Alan’s desk, within handy reach, but the cuff was much too big for the boy’s thin arm. She found a smaller one and attached it. The child did not react to the highpitched whine, or to the pressure from the inflating cuff. 90/52. She turned the display so that the digital numbers were visible to Allan.

Allan frowned and slid his hand across the boy’s chest, setting the stethoscope against the smooth, white skin of the chest, and then, in a quick precise move, to the abdominal cavity. He then rolled the boy onto his side with a gentleness that, for a moment, caused a strange tender warmth in Nina’s own chest. He listened again, and finally let the boy slip down to his original position, resting on his back with his arms spread wide.

Still this disturbing lack of life, thought Nina. As if he were caught in some limbo, neither dead nor alive, simply a thing. Allan cautiously lifted one eyelid and shone his pen-sized flashlight at the boy’s pupil.

“He has been drugged,” he said. “I don’t know with what, but it doesn’t seem to be exactly life-threatening.”

“Should we give him naloxone?” asked Nina.

Allan shook his head.

“His respiration is okay. Blood pressure is a little on the low side, and he is somewhat dehydrated, but I think he will simply sleep off whatever it is and wake naturally. And in any case, we can’t give an antidote when we have no idea what the original substance was.”

Nina nodded slowly, dodging Allan’s gaze. She knew what he had to say next.

“You will of course take him to a hospital.”

“But you said he would wake on his own… .”

Allan gestured, indicating his collection of medical reference books.

“There’s a million drugs out there that someone could have given him, and I have no idea what is really wrong with him, nor do I have the facilities to do the proper tests. You simply have to take him to Hvidovre.”

Nina made no reply at first.

She had had so little time to look at the child. At first she had thought him to be barely three years old, but now, examining his face, she thought he was merely small for his age. Closer to four, perhaps. She touched his cheek gently, tracing the soft lines of the mouth. His hair was short and so fair it was nearly white, the skin parchment thin and almost bluish in the light streaming through the blinds.

“I don’t know where he’s from,” she said. “I don’t think he is Danish, and I know someone is looking for him. Someone who wants to … use him for something.”

Again, Allan frowned.

“Pedophilia?”

Nina shrugged, trying to recall as much as she could about the man who had been kicking at the locker. Huge. That was the main impression. Perhaps thirty years old, with hair so short it hardly left an impression of color. Brown, perhaps? Like the weatherinappropriate leather jacket. She tried to imagine the police issuing an APB and knew immediately that this description would match any number of large men. And she pictured the boy, alone in a hospital room, while some social worker or child care specialist sat in the staff room filling out endless forms. Would they be able to protect the boy against the rage she had seen in the man’s eyes? Once he woke up, what would the Danish authorities do with him? Send him to some institution or refugee center like the Coal-House Camp? Nina suppressed a shudder. Natasha’s bastard of a fiancé had sauntered straight into the camp to pick up Rina without anyone even noticing she had gone. Far too many of the socalled unaccompanied minors simply disappeared from the camps after a few days. They were collected by their owners.

“I’m not letting them take him to the camps,” she snapped, glancing around the office. “Children vanish from them almost every day. He’s not going to any of those places.”

Finally she saw what she was looking for. Behind the matte glass doors of the cabinets by the door she made out the contours of Allan’s special emergency kit, which she knew to contain a couple of bags of IV fluid.

Last year, Allan had gone with her to attend an elderly man who had fled the Sandholm asylum center and was hiding with some relatives in the city. He had been due to be sent back to some refugee camp in Lebanon, but instead he was slumped on a mattress in a loft above an old tenement flat in Nørrebro. It was at least 115 degrees Fahrenheit up there under the rafters, and in other circumstances it might have been a rather trivial case of heat stroke. But because they didn’t have the range of equipment an ordinary ambulance would have had, they nearly lost him. Since then, the infusion sets had been a fixture in Allan’s emergency bag. As yet, he had not had to use them, as far as she knew. He wanted out. In fact, he had wanted out for a long time, but there was not exactly a waiting list for the unofficial post of MD to the illegal immigrants that the network struggled to aid, and Nina had hung on to his phone number. Just in case, she thought with a sardonic inner smile that didn’t quite reach her lips. Just in case she came across a three-year-old boy in a suitcase.

She grabbed the infusion set and the IV bag off the shelf and felt a sense of calm descend as the familiar equipment came into her hands. She had done this a thousand times. Torn the clear wrapping in a single jerk, freed the needle, uncoiled the plastic tubing. She cast around for something to place the bag on, so that it would be higher than the boy, and finally cleared a space for it on the shelf above the couch, where various toys resided. Then she took hold of the boy’s inanimate arm, exposed the veins under the white skin, and let the needle slide in.

Allan, standing next to her, shook his head and sighed.

“I’ll lose my license if they find out about this. If anything happens to him… .”

“They won’t. Why should they? And I’ll take good care of him,” said Nina. “He’ll be all right.”

Allan looked at her with a strange uncertainty Nina wasn’t sure she cared for. Then he turned to the boy again, this time completely removing the blanket, which until now had shrouded the boy’s lower body.

“Did you find him like this?” he asked.

Nina nodded.

“Would you be able to tell whether anything has been done to him?” she asked. “Whether he has been … abused?”

Allan gave a partial shrug and rolled the boy onto his side again, so that his back was turned to them. Nina again felt the sour metallic taste in her mouth, and turned to look out the window. There was a slight breeze now, and she could hear the leaves of the large chestnut tree outside rustle in the hot wind. Except for that, there was barely a sound. No voices, no cars, no children. People in Vedbæk obviously weren’t as noisy as those in the inner city, she thought, suddenly aware of the sweaty stickiness that made her T-shirt cling to her back.

Behind her, Allan spoke in carefully measured tones.

“I see no evidence of abuse, but one can never tell with complete certainty. People can be horribly inventive about such things.”

Allan pulled off the thin white plastic gloves with a snap, covered the boy to the waist once more, and gently stroked his forehead.

“This is my professional advice to you, Nina,” he said, looking at her directly for the first time. His eyes were the color of corroded steel. For God’s sake, thought Nina, the man might have stepped right off the pages of a Harlequin romance, fit and tanned in an affluent kind of way that spoke of tennis courts and long sailing trips in the boat she knew he kept in Vedbæk harbor. A note of casual ease was introduced by the dark blue denim jeans, trendily scuffed at the knees to just the right degree. A handsome, humane suburban GP who did everything right and proper, even running great personal risks by doing his bit for the network. His place in the practice was on the line, she thought. This was so obviously a good man.

And yet she felt a guttering animosity. In a minute, this nice, humane man would tell her that he couldn’t help her anymore. That there was nothing further he could do for the boy.

Allan sighed again, a mere exhalation of breath.

“My professional advice is that you take this boy to Hvidovre Hospital. And if anything goes wrong… .”

Nina knew what he was about to say, but now it didn’t matter, because she also knew she had won the essential victory: he wouldn’t call the police.

“If anything goes wrong, and questions are asked of me and this practice, then that is the advice I have given you. And I want to hear you accept it.”

She nodded quickly.

“I’ll take him to Hvidovre Hospital,” she obediently replied, with a quick glance at her watch.

3:09.

She had been there for more than thirty minutes.

Allan looked at her again with the skeptical expression that reminded her so much of her long, exhausted fights with Morten. Morten, who seemed to think that she could no longer be trusted to handle anything alone. Least of all the children. He didn’t say it outright, but she could hear it in the way he spoke when he gave her detailed instructions on how to make Ida’s lunch box, or how to dress Anton for school. He spoke slowly and clearly, enunciating each syllable, all the while trying to fix her eyes on him as though she were hard of hearing, or mentally defective, or both. More than anything, she could see it in his eyes when he packed his bags for his monthly shifts on the company’s North Sea oil rigs. Leaving her alone with the children had begun to scare him.

He no longer believed her. He no longer believed in anything she said.

Nor did Allan, it would seem. But at least he was not about to stop her. The suitcase boy was not his responsibility, and never would be. Only for that reason was he letting her go.

“Keep the IV going until the unit is empty,” said Allan. “After that, I want you gone. Don’t let anyone see you leave. And Nina… .”

He caught her eyes again, and she could see that his impatient irritation had returned.

“I’m through with this,” he said. “Don’t come back.”





AND IT is your claim that your husband has abducted Mikas?”

“Evaldas Gužas from the Department of Missing Persons looked at Sigita with visible skepticism.

“We are separated,” she said.

“But he is the father of the child?”

She could feel herself blushing. “Of course.”

The office was stifling in the summer heat, and a house fly buzzed desperately in the window overlooking the street, caught between the net curtain and the glass. Gužas’s desk looked to be a scarred veteran of the Soviet era, several years older than Gužas himself was. Sigita would have preferred an older policeman, not this young, black-haired, sharp-featured man of thirty at the most. He had doffed his blue-gray jacket and loosened his burgundy tie, so that he looked for all the world like a café patron on holiday. It didn’t give a serious impression, she thought. She wanted experience, steadfastness, and efficiency, and she wasn’t sure she was getting it.

“And this alleged abduction … you say it happened Saturday?”

“Saturday afternoon. Yes.”

“And you waited two days to come to us because … ?”

He left his unfinished sentence hanging in the humid air.

She nearly lowered her eyes, but resisted the impulse. He would only see it as uncertainty and become even more skeptical than he already was.

“I was in hospital until this morning.”

“I see. Can you relate to me the circumstances of the alleged abduction?” he asked.

“My neighbor saw my husband and a strange young woman take Mikas to a car and drive off with him.”

“Did the child resist?”

“Not … not as far as Mrs. Mažekienė was able to see. But you see, the woman has been spying on us for some time, at least two or three days, and she gave Mikas chocolate. That’s not normal!”

He clicked his ballpoint pen a couple of times, watching her all the while.

“And where were you when this happened?”

Now she could not keep the uncertainty from coming out in her voice.

“I … I don’t remember clearly,” she said. “I’ve suffered a concussion. Perhaps … perhaps they attacked me.”

The words felt odd in her mouth because she didn’t herself believe that Darius was capable of something like that. But the woman. She didn’t know the woman, did she?

“And at which hospital were you treated?”

Her heart dropped like a stone. “Vilkpėdės,” she said, hoping that would be the end of it. But of course it wasn’t. He reached for the phone.

“Which ward?”

“M1.”

She sat there on the uncomfortabe plastic chair, frustrated and powerless, as he was put through to the ward and had a brief conversation with someone at the other end. The fly kept buzzing and bumping into the glass. Gužas listened more than he talked, but she could guess what he was being told. Alcohol content in the blood, fall on the stairs.

“Mrs. Ramoškienė,” he said, replacing the receiver. “Don’t you think you should simply go home and wait for your husband to call?”

“I don’t drink!” She blurted out the words even though she knew they would only confirm his suspicion.

“Please go home now, Mrs. Ramoškienė.”

MECHANICALLY, SHE GOT on the number 17 trolley bus at T. Ševčenkos gatvė. Several stops too late, she realized that she had failed to get off at Aguonų gatvė to change lines. It was as if the city in which she had lived for more than eight years had suddenly become strange to her. The sunlight pierced her eyes like needles. Only once before in her life had she felt this helpless.

Please go home now, Mrs. Ramoškienė. But to what? Without Mikas, the whole thing made no sense—the flat, the furniture, all the clean and new things she had fought so hard for.

God’s punishment, a voice whispered inside her.

“Shut up,” she said under her breath, but it did no good.

She hadn’t attended mass since leaving Tauragė. Not once in eight years. She didn’t want to believe in God, but it was as if it wouldn’t let her go—the hot, waxy scent of the candles, the old women who could barely kneel but insisted on doing so all the same, the flowers on the altar, the sense of solemnity that had made her sit quietly even when she had been so young her legs dangled from the pews in white stockings and shiny black shoes—that one day of the week one should make the effort, her mother said, and dress in one’s best. Her first communion … she had felt so grownup, so important. She was old enough to sin. The word unfolded inside her, releasing a scent of darkness and sulphur, of guilt and lost souls. But above all, sin was interesting. Interesting like Mama’s sister, Aunt Jolita, who lived in Vilnius and had done things that no one would explain to Sigita. Sinners were far more interesting than ordinary people—it even said so in the Bible. Now this world of sin and confession had opened to her, too. It was peculiarly intoxicating to be a part of the chorus of response when the congregation murmured its “Esu kaltas, esu kaltas, esu labai kaltas.” I am guilty, I am very guilty. She went at it with a will.

“Shhhh,” said her mother, twitching her scarf into place. “Not so loud!”

By and by she learned the correct volume—not self-promotingly loud and shrill, nor so low that it sounded reluctant; a sincere murmur reaching the nearest without echoing through the dome. Esu kaltas. There was a beauty, a sweetness to it.

Until the day when she actually had something relevant to confess and couldn’t bring herself to say it. At first she had tried for teenage rebellion by stating flatly that she wasn’t going. Had it been only her mother, she might have carried it off. But when Granny Julija looked at her and asked her if anything was wrong, her weak attempt at mutiny collapsed. No, there was nothing wrong. Nothing at all. Granny Julija had patted her arm and told her that she was a good girl. It was all right to doubt a little sometimes, she said. God could take it. Then Sigita had had to hurry up and change into her Sunday best, so that they wouldn’t be late. On the outside, everything was the way it had always been. On the inside, the world had come to an end.

THE CHURCH OF St. Kazimiero was silent and nearly empty now. Two older women were busy cleaning. Volunteers, probably, like they would have been at home in Tauragė, thought Sigita. One of them asked if Sigita needed anything.

“Thank you, no,” said Sigita. “I just want to sit here for a while.”

They nodded kindly. The need to “sit for a while” was understood by any true believer. Sigita felt like a fraud. She was no longer a believer of any kind.

If that is so, what are you doing here? whispered the voice inside her.

She couldn’t explain it. She felt as if she was standing at the edge of an abyss, but she was in no way counting on God to rescue her. On the contrary. I don’t believe in any of it. Not anymore. But when she looked up at the image of the Holy Virgin, she could no longer hold it back. The Madonna cradled the Baby Jesus tenderly, her face aglow with love. And Sigita fell to her knees on the cold flag stones and wept helplessly, hard involuntary sobs that echoed harshly under the vaulted ceilings. Esu kaltas. Esu labai kaltas.

SHE HAD ONLY just left the church when her mobile phone started vibrating in her bag. She fumbled through the contents onehandedly, with the bag hanging from her plaster-encased lower arm, until wallet and makeup purse and throat lozenges tipped out onto the pavement and rolled in all directions. She had eyes for nothing except the phone. The call was from Darius, she noticed, as she snatched it from the ground.

“What’s up with you?” he said in his usual happy warm voice. “You’ve called about a mllion times.”

“You have to bring him back here. Now!” she snapped.

“What are you talking about?”

“Mikas! If you don’t bring him back, I’ll call the police.” She neglected to tell him that she had in fact already done so. They just didn’t want to know.

“Sigita. Sweetie. I have no idea what you’re talking about. What is wrong with Mikas?”

Years of training had made her an expert. She was able to tell, by now, if he was lying or telling the truth. And the confusion in his voice sounded one hundred percent genuine.

Strength drained from her legs like water from a bath tub, and she dropped to her knees for the second time, in the middle of the sidewalk, surrounded by the debris from her bag. A distantly tinny Darius-voice was shouting at her from somewhere: “Sigita. Sigita, what is it? Where is Mikas?”

She was no longer at the edge of the abyss. It had already swallowed her. Because if Darius did not have Mikas, who did?





5:10 P.M.

Whose turn was it to pick up Anton today? Suddenly Nina couldn’t remember, and felt a long, cold tug in the pit of her stomach, as though she was about to be pulled under by some deep, chill current. The after-school child care program provided by the city would have closed at 5:00. Her son might be standing by the gate right now, accompanied by a seriously cross member of the staff.

She had seated herself on the couch with the unknown boy half in her lap, his bare white body curled against her. A few damp streaks had appeared in his hair. His skin felt warmer now, and after the fluid had begun to run into him, he seemed more alive. Not awake, but alive, at least. Once, he whimpered in his sleep, turned a wrist, moved his leg a bit. It had to be a good sign, thought Nina. She had done the right thing in staying away from the hospital, and even though she had felt her resolution firm every time she thought of the furious man at the railway station, it was still an enormous relief. The boy hadn’t died. He lived, and she could tell by the tiny twitches beneath his eyelids that he was on his way back up from the deep darkness he had rested in.

Yet mixed with the relief was a new sense of panic, as thoughts beyond mere survival started to surface. What on earth had she been thinking since she fled from the railway station?

Not a damn thing, she thought sardonically, running a finger under the strap of her wristwatch to ease it away from the overheated skin underneath. There hadn’t been a single thought in her head apart from the panicked urge to get away. Bring him to safety. And now she would soon have a wide-awake naked boy in her arms, and absolutely no idea what she was going to do with him.

She needed to buy time. She leaned over and tugged her bag toward her, fumbling inside for her mobile. Thank God Morten was home this week. He would have to deal with things until… .

Her finger hovered over the Place Call-button for a few seconds while she prepared herself as best she could. She had never been particularly good at lying to Morten, and time hadn’t improved her skills, despite frequent practice. It wasn’t that she wanted to be able to lie to him about important things. Just little everyday fibs that would make life run so much more smoothly. Like being able to say that her new top had cost 200 kroner rather than 450, or that it hadn’t been she who had forgotten the picnic invitation from Anton’s school. Other people got away with such things, why couldn’t she? She was an adequate liar with everyone but Morten, she thought. But Morten saw through her feeble attempts in seconds. Somehow, she lacked her usual protective coloration when she was with him. It seemed to her that he could look directly into the bubbling mass of unfinished thoughts churning inside her. It was why she had fallen in love with him, and why he was so hard to live with now. Sometimes a lie would go by without comment, but it didn’t feel like success; it was more as if he couldn’t really be bothered to discuss it with her. He let her off the hook.

Nina touched the call button tentatively; the phone was already damp from the heat of her hands. Then she pressed it, and raised the phone to her ear, careful not to disturb the boy with her shift of position.

There was a tiny click as he answered, followed by a faint, surf-like noise. She could hear Morten’s fumbling with the phone, and distant children’s voices in the background. Thank God. He was picking up Anton, then. It might even be his turn today. Her mind felt curiously blank when she tried to remember.

“Yes.” Morten’s voice succeeded in being angry and resigned at the same time. “Where are you?”

It was the voice of a man who felt that she no longer deserved to be talked to as an equal. Or even as an adult.

Nina moistened her lips, looking down at the child in her arms. She had to come up with something not too far from the truth, she thought, or he would slice her explanations into ribbons before they were half finished.

“Karin called me, earlier today,” she finally said. “She wasn’t feeling very well. She really needed help. I’ve had to stay with her so that I can take her to a doctor if it becomes necessary.”

Silence at the other end. Then she could hear shouting again, and Anton’s thin voice asking for something.

“No,” said Morten without putting down the phone, “No ice cream. It’s Monday, and you know the rules.” In the background Nina could hear Anton’s voice rising, getting ready for the full campaign. Which might be her good luck.

“Okay,” said Morten. “But I didn’t think the two of you were that close anymore?”

He didn’t sound angry anymore, just a little tired.

“I’ve known her for fifteen years. With history like that, you don’t just turn your back on people.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “But perhaps you might have called me, instead of leaving that to the staff here.”

Damn. Nina shrunk a little. It had been her turn, had to have been, and somehow she would have felt better about it, more secure, if Morten had thrown a fit. Now there was just the unrythmic rattle of the receiver and the indistinct snatches of a new heated argument between Morten and Anton. Morten had already forgotten she was there.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, trying to press her ear more closely to the phone. “I just forgot.”

“Yes, I suppose you did,” he said, his voice cold and weary. “I thought things were better. I thought you were going to stop forgetting your own family. Any idea when you will be home?”

Nina swallowed. The boy had turned slightly, and one small hand opened and then closed around her arm. His eyes were still closed.

“Oh, I suppose I can leave here around eight,” she said, trying to sound carefree and unworried. “It won’t be very late, I promise.”

Again the static hiss of wind and a connection on the point of breaking up.

“I’ll see you when I see you,” said Morten, the last few words nearly lost in the roar of the wind and the sound of Anton’s eager pestering. “Or not. It’s up to you.”

Morten’s voice had gone dark and distant. Then there was just silence, real silence, as the connection was finally severed.

Nina exhaled soundlessly and let the phone slip back into her bag on the floor. Then she eased herself away from the boy and stood up. Her heart beat a hard, cantering rhythm, and she needed to move, as if the disquiet she felt could be dispelled by mere motion. She stooped to snatch up the phone once more and pressed a new number while pacing up and down, imposing her own restlessness on the whole room.

He was listed merely as “Peter” in her phone book, and actually that was almost as much as she knew about him, except that he lived somewhere in Vanløse. He was the only contact in the network whose number she had. Normally it was the other way around—they called her. The people the network looked after could not saunter into the office of their local GP, or take their children to the emergency room if they were ill. Could not, in fact, approach authority in any form. So when there was need, Nina was sent for, or Allan. Or so it had been. Might she perhaps ask Magnus to step in, if Allan was serious about quitting? Unfortunately, though, Magnus did not have access to a handily secluded private practice in Vedbæk.

“Hi, this is Peter,” announced a happy-sounding voice, and Nina nearly said “Hi” herself when the voice went on without pausing: “I am on holiday from the fifteenth of August to the twenty-ninth, so you’ll just have to do without me!”

Bloody hell. Nina rested her forehead against the wall, closing her eyes for a minute. She had never done this bit before. Not with an unaccompanied child. The network would sometimes find some basement room or empty summerhouse for a family to stay in, or help them across to Sweden—that wasn’t too complicated. Such people could, after all, look after themselves in most respects. But was there anyone out there who would take on an abandoned three-year-old? And if there was, how would she find them?

Nina opened her eyes, examining the boy in a slightly different way. He could come from anywhere, she thought. Anywhere in Northern or Eastern Europe. Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Germany. She drew a hand through her own short, dark hair, which felt sticky and damp in the humid air. She would be wiser once the boy woke up, she supposed; meanwhile, she just had to get hold of Karin. She was the one who had started all this, and Nina had no doubts that Karin knew more than she had been willing to say when she’d sat there in Magasin’s cafeteria, nervously twisting her coffee cup.

This time, she let the phone ring until it stopped, but Karin still didn’t answer, and Nina brushed at the faintly lit display with a restless finger, as if to clear away invisible dust.

The boy stirred, and the blanket slipped to reveal a naked shoulder.

Clothes, thought Nina, and felt relief at having a practical solution to focus on. She had to get some clothes for the boy so they wouldn’t draw any more attention than they had to. She peered at the IV bag. Nearly empty, which meant she would be able to get out of here soon.

She tried Karin once more. Same depressing lack of results.

Why the hell couldn’t the woman just answer her phone?