The Boy in the Suitcase (33 page)

“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.

T
HERE 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.)

N
INA 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.”

SEPTEMBER

T
HERE WAS FLOUR
all over the kitchen. Flour on the kitchen table, flour on the floor, greasy doughy flour on one tap, and even a few floury footprints in the hallway.

“What are you
doing
?” asked Morten, putting down his laptop bag.

“Making pasta!” said Anton enthusiastically, holding aloft a yellow-white floury strip of dough.

God help us, he thought. Nina must be having one of her irregular attacks of domesticity. And it was typical of her that she couldn’t just buy a package of cake mix and have done with it. He still shuddered to recall the side of organic beef that had appeared in the kitchen one day. The flat had looked like a slaughterhouse for the better part of twenty-four hours while Nina carved, filleted, chopped, packaged, and froze unsightly bits of bullock—or attempted to, because in the end they had to persuade his sister to take most of it. She lived in Greve and had an extra freezer in the shed.