The Boy in the Suitcase (30 page)

“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.”

I
T 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.”

A
NTON 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?

S
HE 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.