Invisible Murder (Nina Borg #2) (39 page)

Not until she shook his shoulder.

He grabbed the phone.

“Yeaaaaah,” he said, his throat feeling as if someone had tried to scrub it with a toilet brush.

“It’s Gitte.”

“Yes.”

“Jesper Due called from Rigshospitalet. The nurse is gone.”

“What do you mean gone?”

“We’re checking the video from the hospital security system. But it sounds like she left the hospital with a youngish man without saying anything to anyone. A nurse saw them together.”

He swore.

“And it wasn’t her husband? Or ex-husband, or whatever he is?”

“No. We called him.”

“And we don’t have anyone watching her?”

“No. By the time Jesper got up there, she had already walked out.”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“And the flight from Budapest is late so the NBH guy isn’t here yet.”

Well, that’s something, he thought, though he would still have to find time for him eventually. International cooperation was important and good and necessary and all that, but it also required a certain amount of diplomacy, and at the moment they just didn’t have the resources to be polite on top of everything else.

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” he said.

T
HE VIDEOS FROM
the hospital were a grainy mess. But there was a sequence, from the front entrance, where you could clearly identify Nina Borg. She was wearing a dark tracksuit, and yes, she was with a “youngish man.” They were walking side by side, with slightly more than a meter between them. The only thing he could see for sure was that it wasn’t Sándor Horváth.

“Is she leaving of her own free will?” Gitte asked. “What do you think?”

He shook his head faintly.

“If she is under duress, he’s too far away,” Mikael said. “That’s a public area, lots of people around. If he wanted to control her, he should be closer. And there aren’t any obvious signs that he has a weapon.”

“Well, a weapon could be any number of things, of course,” Søren said. “Get as good a still of him as you can, and send it around to all divisions. The NEC, too, you never know. Maybe somebody out there knows him. Did you get hold of the daughter? And her boyfriend, who was attacked?”

“She wasn’t at school,” Mikael said. “She had been, despite the attack. But of course they understood her wanting to go home again. I’ll head over to that address in Greve and talk to her.”

“Also the boyfriend, Ulf. Bring them in here. I want to talk to both of them. And Gitte, could you make sure someone from Transportation heads over to the airport to pick up our colleague from the NBH?”

“Transportation?” she said. “They’re at a training exercise. It’s going to have to be the cafeteria lady or me. Couldn’t he take a cab?”

ERY BEAUTIFUL.
”

The man nodded, looking out over the pancake-flat countryside, in rolling greens with small strips of brackish gray water in between. The sky hung low and dark over the water, and the clouds on the horizon painted dark-blue stripes across the sky.

Nina looked over at the man next to her. He seemed to be in a good mood and only had one hand on the wheel as they rumbled their way up the rough gravel road. He gesticulated with the almost finished cigarette in his other hand whenever there was something particularly exciting he wanted to show her. There and there and there. He had caught a sea trout on the other side of that strip of trees over there, with a lure. Just like back home in Finland. A bunch of wires were hanging out of a dangling plastic panel next to the steering column, presumably because he had stolen the green van, and the black phone with the pictures of Ida was on the dashboard, but the man acted as if he had already forgotten all about that. His mind was on other things now.

Nina felt strangely outside her body. It wasn’t just from the exhaustion and the recurring nausea. It was also the indiscriminate small talk that had been flowing unchecked from him from the second they got into the car and pulled out of Rigshospitalet’s parking lot. In the beginning she had tried to find out more about Ida. She’d asked how Ida was doing and where she was, but the man had either ignored her questions or told her to shut up. Eventually she just stared out the window and let him talk. She didn’t recognize the whole route, but right now she was guessing they were somewhere on the south end of Amager Island on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Farther up the gravel road, she could make out some kind of small holding. The skinny Finn sped up for the last few meters
and gave Nina a friendly smile as he spun his wheels in the smooth gravel. The 1970s-style windows of the farmhouse stared emptily out the U-shaped gravel drive in front.

The Finn jumped out of the van, letting the rest of his cigarette fall onto the gravel. Then he continued around the car, opened Nina’s door and yanked her out of the car so hard that she almost landed on her knees. The pea-sized gravel stung cruelly under her white sock-clad feet, and she still didn’t have any strength. Nothing to fight with, she thought. It was painfully obvious that the Finn had come to the same conclusion. He had already disappeared in the front door where he was impatiently banging doors and yelling something at someone. Of course he wasn’t alone, Nina thought sluggishly. There had been three men in their apartment, and now wherever they had Ida … maybe she was here.

Climbing the steps to the front door of the farmhouse was like climbing a mountain, and with each step she felt her pulse race at an insane tempo. The hallway, like the windows, was a relic from the ’70s. There was a pair of worn-out plastic clogs with no heels sitting on the threadbare green indoor-outdoor carpet. The door to what must have been the kitchen was open. The floor was crumbling yellow linoleum with a brown floral pattern, and all of the old kitchen cupboards and cabinets were missing. All that was left were faded patches along the walls where they used to be. Now there was just a card table pushed against the wall with an electric kettle and a stack of rolled up newspapers. A smashed picture frame was lying on the floor containing a picture of a naked girl, in a spread-eagle pose. She was pushing a pair of enormous breasts with pale nipples all the way up to her open lips.
Sabrina, eighteen years old
, Nina read.
Loves it rough, doggie style
.

Nina carefully stepped around the small shards of glass, which were strewn across the kitchen floor, and proceeded into the living room.

The first thing she saw was Ida.

She was sitting against the far wall in a weird, floppy position with one arm crooked, raised awkwardly over her head. A rag doll tossed aside by a bored child. Her dark eyes looked even darker than they usually did. Her mascara had run in long black smears so her eye sockets had turned into deep, black pits. But she was there, and she was looking at Nina with watchful eyes that were somehow still intact and defiant and teenagery. She was still Ida. Nina felt the ground disappear from under her feet in
a brief giddy second of relief. Then she sank down next to Ida, carefully running her finger over Ida’s black-striped cheek.

“Mom?” The wariness left Ida’s eyes, and she leaned her disheveled, black-haired head against Nina’s shoulder. “He came over during my free period. We just went to the bakery, and then suddenly he was there, and I didn’t have time to.…” Ida was talking so fast she was tripping over her own tongue. “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry. So sorry.…”

The sobs came like an earthquake, causing Ida’s whole body to tremble, and Nina tried to pull her in closer and enfold Ida’s gangly teenage body in her arms. But something was in the way. Only now did Nina realize why Ida was sitting so awkwardly on the floor. Her left arm was attached to the pipe feeding the radiator behind her with black plastic ties, but she clung to Nina with her free arm and kept mumbling about Ulf and Morten and school. Nina had stopped paying attention. She let one finger slide along the edge of the strip of black plastic around Ida’s wrist. It was tight, but not dangerously so.

Only now, as she stroked Ida’s hair, did she take in the rest. A young man was sitting on the floor on the other side of the radiator, tied to a pipe the same as Ida. Nina was startled to recognize him—the young man from Valby. The gash over his eyebrow still gaped a little, and he looked like he had taken several more blows in the interim. His right cheek was almost the same dark purple color as the wall behind him, and he had a deep, oozing sore on the hand that wasn’t tied to the radiator.

She didn’t feel sorry for him. Not anymore. No matter why he was sitting here on the floor with her daughter now, he deserved whatever beatings he’d gotten. She was only sorry that she hadn’t actually been the one to give them to him.

The Finn seemed to have completely forgotten about her. He’d pushed a cowboy hat down over his forehead, adopting at the same time a more swaggering gait. He opened up a can of beer, drank, and made a slightly disgruntled face when the beer can accidentally bumped his swollen nose.

“You. Gypsy boy. Sándor—isn’t that your name?” The Finn pointed to the Valby man with his beer can. “How do you say ‘cunt’ in Hungarian?”

The young Hungarian raised his head very slowly, but didn’t respond. The Finn casually kicked one of the guy’s legs.

“Come on, pal. How do you say it?”

“
Cuna
,” the Hungarian said, his face completely devoid of any expression. The psychopath in the cowboy hat furrowed his brow.

“How do you spell that?” he asked, as if it were an important detail he needed for a thesis on the Hungarian language.

Beyond the Finn there was another man, sitting on a black leather sofa in the middle of the room. A slightly overweight chocolate Lab was lying on the sofa next to him, hesitantly wagging its tail as it followed the Finn around the room with its eyes. The man on the sofa slowly shut the laptop in front of him. His shoulders were pulled all the way up to his ears, and he was scowling in irritation at the Finn, who had already fished a new cigarette out of his pocket and was pacing around the leather sofa with his beer can in his hand.

“Damnit, Tommi. Can’t you shut up and stand still for even a second?”

The Finn grinned. “Goes against my philosophy of life,” he said. “Moss and rolling stones and all that.” Then he suddenly stopped after all, eyeing Nina through narrowed eyes.

“Okay. Mother and daughter, touching reunion, cool, cool. Now we get down to business.”

Nina had a strange feeling of having gone straight from small-talk recipient to being a daddy longlegs in the hands of a boy armed with a magnifying glass and the desire to take revenge for a bunch of lost fights. She had no idea what kind of “business” he might have with her, but she had a chilling sense that it was going to be horrendous.

And she still couldn’t do anything. There was no chance she would be able to free Ida and slip out of the house. Even if by some miracle they managed to get that far, they were surrounded by fields and miles of unpaved roads, and the muscles in her thighs were trembling just at the effort it took to kneel down next to Ida. She was thirsty now. Her jaw clenched too tight, and her mouth felt both dry and pasty at the same time.

“What do you want?” Nina asked. She deliberately ignored the restless Finn—Tommi, the other guy had called him. Instead she looked directly at the man on the sofa. He looked more normal than the Finn. Actually he looked like he would fit seamlessly into any suburban Danish neighborhood, armed with a dog and a stroller and a sports bag and whatever else your average dad carried around. But some dads evidently dreamed beyond little league soccer practice with their sons. She had no idea what
connection these two men had to the source of the radioactivity in Valby. It was hard to imagine that either of them would personally go and set off a bomb; there was hardly a seething religious or political undercurrent to them or to this house. So what
did
they want? Maybe something to do with money and eighteen-year-old girls like Sabrina.

The man on the sofa didn’t answer her. He hardly seemed to see her. His pale blue eyes only rested on her for a brief instant before he looked back at Tommi.

“Okay, then. But you handle it.” The man spoke English with a heavy Danish accent. “I don’t want to have to deal with stuff like that right now.”

He opened his computer again and took a drink from a ceramic mug that was painted red and decorated with big, clumsy black letters. FOR DADDY, it said. Then she felt Tommi’s hard, thin fingers closing round her upper arm.

“T
HE JACKET
?”

The room he dragged her into was painted baby blue with little, white stars scattered over the walls and ceiling. A double bed covered with a worn quilt with a big floral pattern took up almost the entire room, but a rickety, white plastic lawn chair and some empty paint cans jostled for space in one corner. A flat screen TV was mounted over the bed, casting a blank blue glow over the room. The room had a faint barn-like smell, mixed with mildew and those little air fresheners people hung from their rearview mirrors. Tommi had taken up a straddling stance in front of her, and his face wore the same slightly indulgent look he had had when he pulled out his phone in the hospital.