Death of a Nightingale

In a few quick frames of the footage, Rina slid down from the couch and under the coffee table. It took less than six seconds. Another camera had caught her at the garage and a ways down the sidewalk, a sequence of twenty-one seconds. Both recordings were almost two hours old.

“She’s alone,” said the Cud-Chewer and searched on among the not-an-iPad’s stored pictures. “It’s not a kidnapping.”

“I thought you were watching her,” said Nina. “I thought you were fucking professionals. What good is all that equipment if you can’t even keep track of one little girl? She’s eight, damn it!”

“The camera is set so that it registers ordinary movement in the room. I wasn’t expecting her to worm her way across the floor!”

“Did she see you place the camera?”

The Cud-Chewer was practically chewing his jaw off its hinges. “Maybe,” he admitted. “I thought she was asleep.”

“Why exactly is it that people think she is deaf, blind and dumb just because she doesn’t say very much?” Nina snarled.

Mikael Nielsen didn’t answer. He was making a call, presumably to his boss.

The trick of placing a couch pillow under the comforter so that it looked as if there were still a sleeping girl there—Rina might have picked that up from countless television films. The ruse with the stuffed socks was all her own—it had probably been easier for her than to make than something that looked like a head.

Nina stared blindly out the window at the snowflakes that glittered whitely in the light from the streetlamp. It was freezing out there. Pitch dark. And Rina was alone.

Mikael handed her the telephone. “He wants to speak with you.”

She took the phone silently.

“You know Rina,” said Søren. His voice sounded calm, almost as if the world hadn’t exploded around them. “Where would she go? Where would she think of going?”

Nina thought desperately. “The Coal-House Camp, maybe. One of the policemen out there was kind enough to point out that it was where her mother would look for her first.”

“Okay. How would she get out there? Does she know how to take the bus?”

“Maybe. She doesn’t know her way around the city as such, but she knows the right bus number.”

“Would she talk to strangers? Ask for help?”

“I don’t think so. You’ve met her. She barely speaks to people she’s known for years.”

“Other places?”

Nina tried to imagine Rina’s mental map of Denmark. Where had she actually been? Not a whole lot of places other than the camp.

“Vestre Prison. We visited her mother there. But she knows Natasha isn’t there anymore. Michael Vestergaard’s house, of course. Hørsholm. It’s close to Hørsholm.”

“I know. Other places?”

“Not a lot. Tivoli, that kind of place. The National Aquarium. I think they once did a project about fish with the Coal-House children. I don’t know!”

“That’s fine. That’s a good start.” She could hear the professional, calming tone she herself had often used. Praise made people relax—and it worked on her too, even though she knew perfectly well why she was being praised.

“What will you do?” she asked.

“We’ll check the places you have given us, and the routes there, focusing primarily on the camp and Hørsholm. We’ll send people out to look in nearby areas too—garden sheds, tree houses, that kind of thing. Does she have any money?”

“I think so. They get an allowance. Natasha has sent her a little as well, and she doesn’t really use it.”

“And she doesn’t have a cell phone other than the old broken one?”

“No.”

“Too bad.”

“Søren.”

“Yes?”

“She used your telephone.”

“Mine?”

“Yes, the one in the living room. I thought she was just dialing randomly; she said the old one didn’t work anymore. The policeman had said it was broken. I don’t know if it was you or … or your colleague she meant.”

“Okay.”

“I thought she just wanted to speak with her father, but what if that wasn’t what it was? What if she called someone? In real life, I mean.”

“Let me talk to Nielsen,” he said, and she handed the telephone back to the Cud-Chewer.

Nina zipped up her jacket. Luckily, she could open and close it with her left hand.

“Hello—where are you going?” asked the Cud-Chewer.

“I’m going to look for her in the neighborhood,” she said through clenched teeth. “She may not have been able to get very far.”

“Wait.” Magnus had followed her. “Wait a second, Nina. We can’t just run around randomly.”

“It’s urgent,” she said.

“Yes, but we need to be a bit systematic. You go this way”—he pointed toward Kløverprisvej—“and I’ll go this way. We’ll meet again at the corner in half an hour.”

Nina nodded, desperate to get started. Rina had run away before; they had done this before. And we found her then, she told herself. We will this time too!

She had spoken to two neighbors and looked in three garages when the realization hit her. You have reached Anna and Hans Henrik Olesen. We can’t come to the phone now … Because of the male voice she hadn’t put two and two together. But the wife’s name was Anna. Like Neighbor Anna. The Anna she had met, the Anna who had taken such loving care of Rina the night Natasha had decided to try to kill her fiancé.

“Olesen, that’s what she was called,” she said aloud to herself.

On the other side of the street, going in the direction of Hvidovrevej and Damhusdalen, was a taxi. The green FREE sign shone like a signal in the dusky gloom, and before she had time to think, she had leaped into the road with one arm in the air.