Death of a Nightingale

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.