Death of a Nightingale

She felt as if she had been beaten up. Nina’s ears were buzzing, her entire body ached and there was a point at the back of her neck, at the meeting of spine and skull, where it felt as if a burning needle had been inserted.

She held Rina close despite her uneasy awareness that she was the one deriving comfort from the gesture, like a child holding a teddy bear. There was no reciprocity; Rina might as well be a stuffed animal. If it hadn’t been for the loud, gasping wheezes that constituted the girl’s breathing, Nina might have been tempted to check for signs of life.

Magnus and Pernille arrived with the oxygen. Magnus maneuvered Rina out of Nina’s embrace with his usual calm authority. “Okay, Rina. Now we’re going to make it easier for you to breathe.”

Nina had to fight a spasmodic tension in her arms, forcing herself to let go. “She also needs salbutamol,” she said before she could stop herself.

Magnus just nodded as if there were nothing odd in a nurse attempting to dictate a treatment he had undertaken hundreds of times.

It was 2:03. Forty-six minutes had passed since she had heard a key click unsuccessfully in the walk-in door.

“Nina, are you in there?”

It wasn’t a voice she had immediately recognized. She was paranoid enough to hesitate for a second.

“Nina Borg? Police.”

“Yes,” she shouted. “We are here.”

It had taken another fifteen minutes to get the door open. The lock had been damaged by the attacker’s attempt to break it open, and in the end, they had to cut the hinges instead.

Outside there were people everywhere—or at least that was how it felt. There were probably only seven or eight, but the only one she knew was the camp’s technical director, Henning Grønborg, who had apparently taken charge of the blowtorch himself. The rest was a whirl of yellow police vests, black SWAT uniforms and young policemen’s faces wearing oddly nerdy protective glasses. Like well-behaved children at a New Year’s party, thought Nina.

They tried to take Rina from her at that point, but she resisted. “Get Magnus,” she had repeated, over and over again. “It has to be someone she knows.”

Now she had finally let go. Her arms hurt just as much as the rest of her, in spite of the fact that she had only suffered a handful of bruises from furniture and doorways and whatever else she had bumped into on her confused, unsteady flight from Rina’s room.

Pull yourself together. You are not exactly dying, she told herself.

A shiver went through her that had nothing to do with cold, though it felt that way. Right now she was deeply grateful for Magnus’s insistence on heating the clinic to a temperature that would do credit to a steam bath.

2:11.

The children were sleeping now, she thought, Anton under his Spider-Man comforter and Ida presumably in sheets that were as pitch black as most of her wardrobe. For a while she had had Legolas from The Lord of the Rings on her pillow, but lately she had been talking about “the cynical abuse of Tolkien’s work in merchandising,” and Nina had had to quietly exchange a few Christmas presents before they reached the tree. The first post-divorce Christmas. Only Nina’s first childhood Christmas without her father had been worse.

2:13.

Stop. She turned her watch so the face was on the inside of her wrist. It made it a little more difficult to check the time and normally helped her control her own personal mini-version of OCD. The improvement was relative—the compulsive checking of the time was replaced by involuntary movements in her lower arm every time she caught herself turning her wrist.

After her divorce, an exciting new development had occurred in the neurosis, she observed dryly. Now the checking of the time was often accompanied by an automatic picturing of what Anton and Ida were doing; she wasn’t quite sure if that was better or worse.

“Nina Borg?”

She looked up. Yet another unfamiliar face, this time a younger man in civilian clothes.

“Detective Inspector Asger Veng, North Zealand Police,” he introduced himself.

“Yes,” she said tiredly. She couldn’t even manage a politely encouraging question mark in her tone.

“May we take a few moments of your time? We have a couple of questions.”

Yes, of course they did. If he had asked her to crawl naked through icy mud, her enthusiasm might have been at much the same level, but it was probably best to get it over with.

“WHAT HAPPENED?”

The shout sounded across the parade ground from a small group of freezing people who were huddled in the doorway of one of the family barracks. Nina recognized one of the camp’s long-term inhabitants, a man from Eritrea, but she had to cast about for his name. Rezene, that’s what he was called. He suffered from violent reflux attacks, so they saw him relatively often at the clinic.

Nina didn’t know what to answer. When it came to the spreading of rumors among the camps’ inhabitants, “wildfire” was an understatement, especially when the police were involved, and rumors were never harmless. They all lived with the threat of deportation as a constant stress factor. Even though Magnus did what he could to minimize it, there were a lot of sleeping pills and sedatives in circulation, and not so long ago, an Iraqi mother had shown up with three packs of nitrazepam that she had recovered from her sixteen-year-old son. When asked what he had been intending to use them for, he said that it was in case the police came to get them, because he would rather die in Denmark than in Iraq.

“It’s okay,” Nina shouted back in careful, simple English. “Someone tried to take a child. The police stopped them.”

It was important to keep statements clear and uncomplicated.

“What child?” shouted Rezene.

“Rina. The little Ukrainian girl.”

“Why ambulance?”

“Some policemen were hurt.”

Detective Inspector Veng put a gentle hand on her elbow. It was presumably meant as a polite reminder of their real errand, but the touch irritated her.

“Yes, all right,” she hissed. “It’s hardly surprising if some of them want to know what the hell is going on.”

“Your director has informed them,” said Veng.

Nina had no doubt. Birgit Mariager had been the camp’s director for almost five years now, and clear communication had quickly become one of her main concerns. But Nina also knew that even the clearest communication in the world couldn’t prevent speculation, questions, rumors and doubt.

“Are they okay? Your two colleagues?”

“We don’t know yet,” he said. “They used a pretty nasty form of gas.”

“There was only one person,” Nina corrected him. “A man.”

“Yes. I heard you said that.”

They had asked even before they managed to open the walk-in. Nina understood that they needed to know who and how many people they were searching for and what kind of resistance they could expect to encounter if they found them, but it had seemed almost brutal to have to bellow her answers through the thick steel door when every shout made Rina’s body start.

The ambulances were gone now, but the children’s barrack was still closed off. Powerful projection lights made the snow glitter, and technicians were busy picking up glass shards and photographing footprints.

“We’ve got permission to use the director’s office,” said Veng. “Let’s get you inside where it’s nice and warm, all right?”

He was trying to be friendly, Nina told herself. It wasn’t reasonable to hate him just because he was young, rested and professionally kind.

The two women who waited in the director’s office were remarkably similar as far as height, weight, dress and hair color were concerned. Slender, blonde, well-dressed and well-groomed. In spite of what must have been a very rushed departure, Birgit had had time to put on both makeup and a freshly ironed white shirt. A fine gold chain ringed her still almost unwrinkled neck.

“Nina. Are you okay?”

Nina nodded. Birgit was actually okay. Most of the time.

“Please let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

The other woman, the Birgit clone, presented herself as Deputy Chief Inspector Mona Heide. At least her white shirt didn’t look as if it had just come out of its cellophane wrapper. Her face didn’t either. In spite of the careful makeup, the exhaustion was evident.

“I’ll try to be brief,” she said. “But it’s important for us to find out as much as possible as quickly as possible.”

“Okay.”

“When did you first become aware that something was wrong?”

“I heard a crash. It must have been the gas grenade, or whatever it is they used, shattering the window.”

“And when was that?”

“Six minutes past twelve.”

Heide raised a well-plucked eyebrow. “You’re very precise.”

“I looked at my watch immediately after.” Nina didn’t think there was any reason to mention the OCD.

“Where were you?”

“By the coffee machine.”

“Not in the girl’s room?”

“No. But I had only been away for a few minutes.”

“What happened then?”

Nina explained her quick look in on the policemen, hurrying to Rina’s room, pressing the attack alarm, the clumsy flight to the walk-in.

“Why the walk-in?”

“It’s airtight. I was pretty sure there was gas.”

“And then?”

“And then he came in through the window in the lounge area.”

“You’re sure it was a man?”

“Yes.” She recalled her brief but definitive glimpse. “He was big—both tall and broad. Completely black, including his face—he must have been wearing some kind of mask or hood.”

“And it was just him?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Very sure. Listen, it wasn’t Natasha. I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t her. She’s a slight, slender girl. Smaller than I am—one meter sixty at the most, I would guess. And he was alone.”

Heide eyed her calmly. “People often perceive events in a distorted way in situations like this. Everything happens fast, it’s violent, you’re afraid … few people ever describe an attacker as small.”

“He was big.”

“Precisely where and for how long did you see him?”

“It was only a glimpse; I was busy trying to open the door to the walk-in. He was entering the cafeteria.”

The crunching of glass, Rina’s breathing, the sweet-and-sour taste in the mouth that was a mixture of adrenaline and gas. The figure behind them, a faceless monster with three shiny eyes …

Three eyes?

“I think … it looked to me as if he had three eyes.”

Veng and Heide exchanged a glance.

“Maybe he was using IR equipment,” said Veng. “Combined with a gas mask?”

Heide nodded. Nina noted that they had finally begun to say “he” and not “they” or “her.”

“Professionally done,” said Heide dryly. “If you can say that about a failed mission.”

“It wasn’t Natasha,” repeated Nina, just to make sure.

“I understand you’ve worked with the family for a few years?” said Veng.

Nina’s mind tripped over the “family” part. In her world, an isolated and traumatized girl with a dead father and a mother who was in prison wasn’t much of a family.

“Since they came here,” she said.

“What has Natasha told you about her life in Ukraine?”

“Nothing. She never talked about her background.”

“So you didn’t know that she was wanted in a criminal investigation there?”

“Of course not. I didn’t even know that she had a husband or that he was dead.”

“Did she have any confidantes here? Among the other inhabitants of the camp or in Denmark in general?”

“Not that I know of. She did get engaged and moved in with … Vestergaard.” At the last moment, she avoided calling him “that bastard” as she usually did. “The only other person I think she really spoke with was a neighbor. I don’t remember her name.”

“Anna Olesen?”

“Yes. That’s right. Neighbor Anna. That’s what Rina called her. I think she was kind to Rina while they lived there. At least I know that Rina liked her, and it usually takes her a long time to attach herself to a new person. I also got the impression that Anna was one of the few people Natasha trusted.”

“And you don’t know anyone else? Anyone from Ukraine, for example?”

“No.” She thought about it. “We have had other Ukrainians here, but I think … I think Natasha avoided them on purpose. It’s a little unusual; often they are very happy to have each other. Have the chance to speak their own language with someone who understands them.”

“Letters? Emails? Telephone contact?”

“I don’t know.” Nina considered. “If she was in contact with anyone while she was serving her sentence, then Vestre Prison must know. While she was here … Of course, Natasha spoke on the phone now and then, but I think it was mostly with Michael Vestergaard or perhaps with Anna. In English, at least, and in the bit of broken Danish she knew.”

“You haven’t heard her speaking Ukrainian with anyone?”

“I don’t think so. All I know is that she was terrified of being sent back. Most people here are, but with Natasha it was … unusually evident. And she was right to be afraid.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think it’s pretty obvious now. Someone is after Rina and her.”

Heide gave a little, irritated shake of her head, causing her gold earrings to dance. “Not much is obvious about this,” she said.

“We can at least agree that Rina is in danger,” said Nina. “What are you planning to do to protect her?”

Heide looked at her coolly. “It wasn’t the girl who was gassed,” she said. “It was the people trying to protect her. It appears as if it is pretty risky to stand between Natasha and her daughter.”

“Damn it. How many times do I need to say it? It wasn’t Natasha.”

Easy, easy, Nina told herself. She knew that swearing and yelling would not make this calmly collected woman listen any better to her—on the contrary.

“I think we’re done,” said the deputy chief inspector. “At least for now. If you remember other contacts Natasha may have had, we’d very much like to know, and we will naturally need to ask for a formal statement at some point.”

“So you’re not planning to do anything?”

“We have two colleagues in the hospital right now,” said Heide. “One of them is in critical condition. You may be sure that we are planning to ‘do something.’ ”

Nina’s stomach hurt. It was perfectly clear that Heide’s priority was the hunt for the gas man and Natasha—not Rina’s safety.

Veng had gotten up, a clear sign that Nina was supposed to do the same. He handed her a single sheet of paper. Nina glanced down at it automatically.

Victim support, she read. If you have been the victim of violence, rape, a break-in, robbery, an accident, etc., it is natural and completely normal if you experience reactions such as feelings of unreality or loss of control, the inability to act, hyperactivity, emptiness, memory loss, fear of being alone, fear of recurrence, stomach pain, an elevated heart rate, difficulty sleeping, nightmares, guilt, despair.

“They are very good,” he said. “And you are welcome to contact them.”

Nina snapped.

“What the hell makes you think,” she said in her most glacial voice, “that I am anybody’s victim?”