Death of a Nightingale (5 page)

The policeman by the closet cleared his throat. “It’s best for her to be where she usually is,” he said.

Nina stared at him with anger smoldering in the pit of her stomach. “Best?” she said. “For whom?”

“So that the mother can find her more easily.”

The anger burst into flame. Only concern for Rina made her control herself. Couldn’t he see that this was a child, a sick and tormented child, not just convenient bait for their trap?

“That’s a medical decision,” said Magnus very, very sharply. “And I’m the doctor.”

But Rina had lifted her head again and suddenly looked more present and alive than she had at any point since Nina got there. “I’d like an ice cream,” she said.

Oh, Lord, thought Nina. So that the mother can find her more easily. That was the only thing Rina had heard and understood. What if Natasha really did show up? And the police arrested her in front of the child? Nina didn’t want to think about what that would mean for Rina’s delicate balance and her grasp of reality here in non-Wonderland. She could see that Magnus was thinking more or less the same thing. But they couldn’t do anything—couldn’t even discuss it here and now while Rina was listening.

“Strawberry or chocolate?” asked Nina.

T
EN MINUTES LATER,
as she escorted Rina across the icy asphalt lot that had once been the barracks’ drill grounds, it was with two of the Mondeo brigade on her heels, though they maintained a certain discreet distance that presumably was supposed to make them look like civilian passersby. Rina held Nina’s hand, something she had otherwise stopped doing, and in her other hand she clutched the strawberry ice cream, which she dutifully sucked on every fourth or fifth step. At least it didn’t look as if her breathing was significantly more labored now that she was moving and even though the air was cold enough to sting Nina’s more resistant lungs. Pernille had done
all the right things, had administered Bricanyl and later prednisone, had measured the oxygen and attempted to calm the panic. Physically, the girl was improving. But right now Nina was much more concerned with what was happening in Rina’s mind.

In the middle of the grounds, Rina suddenly stopped. She gave a little tug on Nina’s hand.

“What is it, sweetie?”

“He’s dead,” said Rina.

It took Nina a moment before she managed to reply, quietly and calmly. “Who?”

“Poppa Mike.”

Poppa Mike? Did she mean Michael Vestergaard?

“Why do you think that?”

“That’s what they said. The police.”

The wind raced across the open square. Pin-sharp flakes that were more ice than snow bit Nina’s cheeks and forehead, and she suddenly felt as if she were standing in an arctic desert, icy and isolated, infinitely far from warmth, shelter and human contact. Rina stood next to her and stared with great concentration at the strawberry ice cream, as if conquering it were a task she had set herself. She wasn’t crying—in fact, her face was devoid of expression—but Nina was not fooled. She quickly checked the time—12:31—and looked up at the slate-grey sky with the apparently irrelevant thought that the weather would make it difficult to fly. Only a few seconds later did she understand why flying conditions suddenly seemed to matter. Whenever the situation had escalated from desperate to hopeless in one of the hellholes and disaster areas of her misspent youth, the skies had been her only hope. It was from above that help might arrive.

Unless Rina had misunderstood something, Natasha’s former fiancé was dead—the man Natasha had once tried to murder with a
hunting knife. And it had happened while she was on the loose after having brained a policeman with a cobble.

“Rina …”

“They are both dead,” said Rina and took a determined bite of the strawberry ice cream. “Poppa Mike and Daddy.”

Jesus. Poppa Mike
and
Daddy?

Nina realized that she knew absolutely nothing about Rina’s biological father. She had placed a single-mother-from-Ukraine label on Natasha without giving it a lot of thought. “Are you sure, sweetie?” she asked carefully.

“That’s what they said.” Rina’s voice shrank, got smaller and thinner, not because of Nina’s doubt, it turned out, but because the next thing was what had made her world shake. “They said Mama did it.”

“Mama?”

“Yes, that Mama killed them. Both of them.”

Suddenly the Mondeo brigade’s size made more sense. They weren’t hunting a woman found guilty of a single—relatively ineffective—homicide attempt. They thought that Natasha was a double murderer.

Nina was all at once extremely conscious of Rina’s hand resting in her own. The girl’s delicate fingers were trembling, not just from cold and fear, but because the asthma medicine was affecting her. Anton’s hand was different, more solid and square and usually more dirty.

Anton was with Morten now, in the apartment in Fejøgade. Maybe they had made pancakes; Morten sometimes did that when he had the time and energy and was in a good mood. Maybe they were all three still sitting at the kitchen table while Morten lingered over an extra cup of coffee and talked about music with Ida, and the checkered oilcloth got more and more spotted by Anton’s marmalade fingers. Only Nina was missing.

I’m not sure I can do this, she thought, without completely knowing what “this” was, just sensing that the war had started again, and she was too tired, too old and not suited to fight it. I wouldn’t mind if someone came to rescue us right now.

Rina gave her hand a little tug, this time because she wanted to continue. “I’m cold,” she said.

“No wonder,” said Nina. “It’s freezing out here. Let’s get you inside.”

Somewhere behind them, the two Mondeo men had halted. Now they started moving again. Was it one of them who had said that “Poppa Mike” was dead? And that Natasha had killed him? How could they say such things while Rina was listening? No hope of rescue from that quarter, that much was certain. But who else was there to turn to?

Søren recognized the number right away even though he hadn’t called it in over six months.

He stopped in his tracks, and another runner on the path had to swerve around him. His pulse was at 182 and his breathing so labored that he had to let the telephone ring several times before he took the call, but he didn’t for a second consider not answering.

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s Nina. I don’t know if you remember me. I was the one who—”

“Yes. I know who you are.”

He saw her with crystal clarity in his mind’s eye. The first time he had met her, she had been sick as a dog with radiation poisoning, frightened and furious. The hospital’s patient uniform didn’t fit her any better than it did anyone else; she was stick thin and smelled faintly of vomit, and her short, dark hair covered her scalp like a matt of shaggy and untended fur. Only her eyes had revealed that there was still life in the ruins—the intensity burned through clearly in spite of the fact that the rest of her had to be categorized as “more dead than alive.”

She had been difficult, uncooperative and suspicious, and he had to threaten her with prison, a moment during the interrogation that he wasn’t very proud of. She probably had no idea that he had later done his best to shield her—her and her pretty illegitimate network. In his
eyes, people like Nina were perhaps a bit too trusting toward some of the illegal immigrants and other borderline cases they supported with medical aid, shelter and other emergency essentials. But damn it, people should not be prosecuted for basically doing a good deed.

Another runner trotted by him in the tense staccato style people tended to adopt when the going couldn’t be trusted. Even on this disgustingly cold winter afternoon, there were lots of joggers on the path around Damhus Lake. The route was too short; he had circled the lake four times, which made him feel a bit like a hamster in an oversized wheel, and even though the council did clear the paths of snow, they were still slippery and greasy with a grey-brown mixture of gravel, slush, goose shit and salt. He would have preferred the woods of Hareskoven or some other, less crowded place, but the snow made the forest paths more or less impassable, and when he had tried to exchange his running shoes for cross-country skis a few weeks ago, his old knee injuries had protested so violently that he’d had to toss the skis back up on the carport rafters again.

The phone had gone quiet, long enough for his pulse to drop to around 140.

“What can I do for you?” he asked at last.

“Forget it,” she said suddenly. “I shouldn’t have called.”

The background noise and the faint whistling disappeared. She had hung up.

He stood looking at the phone for a few seconds. There was a limit to how long he could stand still. He was already getting cold, and a harsh wind blew over the lake’s frozen surface. An open hole in the ice was teeming with screaming, quacking, cackling waterfowl—mostly ducks and graylag geese, but there were also five or six swans and a raucously aggressive gang of black-headed gulls.

He pressed the
DIAL
button. She answered at once. “You must have had a reason for calling,” he said.

She still hesitated. “It was mostly because … you’re not an idiot.”

An ironic “thank you” was about to slip out, but he stopped himself. Irony wasn’t what was needed here. “What’s happened?” he asked instead.

“You are the twenty-six-year-old mother of a little girl,” she suddenly said, in a peculiarly rushed staccato tone. “You’ve escaped from Ukraine; you get engaged to a Danish man; he’s a sadistic bastard, but you tolerate it because you are more afraid of being sent back than of what he does to you. Not until you catch him with his fingers in your little daughter’s underwear do you snap. You buy a knife and stab him in the throat. He survives, but you are found guilty of attempted murder and sent to jail.”

She stopped, but he just waited, his muscles getting stiffer, the cold creeping across his skin along with the sweat. He stood perfectly still. He sensed that if he as much as shifted his weight, she would fly away again.

“You spend sixteen months in Vestre Prison doing nothing but what they tell you to do. Passive. Easy to handle. And then you suddenly attack a policeman and escape. And this is where it gets really weird. You don’t go to get your daughter. Instead you head directly for your ex-fiancé, and then you kill him.”

He could hear her breathing now that his own was calmer. Hers was stressed and shallow. Forced.

“Does that make sense?” she said. “Is it logical?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Too much of the picture is missing.”

“But your first impression?”

“I can’t say,” he insisted. “It would be pure speculation.”

“Okay. Forget I called.”

“No, wait. I just said that I didn’t know enough.”

She sighed. “That’s something. The police here think that they know everything. They are apparently convinced that Natasha murdered both the sadistic bastard and Rina’s father.”

Rina’s father? Who the hell was that? Nina wasn’t making it easy to follow her.

“Where are you?” Søren asked.

“The Coal-House Camp. Rina—that’s Natasha’s daughter—she … Damn it, she can’t take this!” The anger rose in her voice. “They’re using her as bait in their Natasha trap, and they don’t give a shit if she’s up to it or not.”

He would probably have done the same thing—kept an eye on the girl with the assumption that the mother would contact her sooner or later. He didn’t tell Nina that.

“What’s Natasha’s last name?” he asked.

There was a pause.

“I don’t remember,” she admitted. “Something … something Ukrainian. Wait. Dimitrenko or something like that. I don’t remember how you spell it.”

The computer was not particularly forgiving of alternative spellings, but on the other hand, how many Ukrainian women could there be who had just escaped from Vestre?

“I’ll see what I can do,” Søren promised recklessly. “I’ll call you later.”

“When?”

“It’ll take awhile. At least a few hours.”

“But you’ll call?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

The tension in Nina’s breathing was gone. The relief made her voice younger and lighter, and he felt a prick of conscience. There probably wasn’t anything he
could
do, and his only reason for trying was deeply unprofessional.

He wanted to see her again.

Police. of course, there would be police.

Natasha felt Katerina’s proximity tug at her core. There she was, right on the other side of the fence, not in the family barrack where they had lived together before Michael, but in the rooms reserved for unaccompanied minors. She was there; she had to be there, even though Natasha couldn’t see her.

But the police lurked like big, fat barn cats, just waiting for the stupid mice to scurry out of the hay.

“As long as it’s light, you have no chance.” She once again heard Anna’s voice, a voice that calmly and sensibly forced her to listen even though Natasha wanted to run over and throw herself against the wire fence. She wasn’t sure when she had stopped thinking of Anna as a real-world source of solace and good advice, and instead turned her into this odd inner fairy godmother who kept an eye on Natasha and made sure she didn’t behave too stupidly. Perhaps it was since that night a year and a half ago when she had attempted to stab Michael in the throat with a knife. Was it then?

Natasha was glad Anna was there. It made her feel less alone.

She walked back through the deep snow, well over half a kilometer, to the little clearing where she had parked the dark blue Audi. She might as well try to sleep a little.

She brushed extra snow onto the car’s license plate to be safe. She
didn’t think Robbie would report it stolen for the time being. He was probably still asleep, and when he woke up, he would find the note she had placed next to his pillow:
I’ll be back. ♥, Katerina.

Right now she wished she had called herself something else.

In the Audi’s trunk she found a blanket and a thick tarp. She took them both into the backseat and cocooned herself inside. A sleeping bag would have been better, but she didn’t have a sleeping bag.