Invisible Murder

INA DIDN’T WANT to talk to anyone anymore.

They had called from the children’s unit that morning while Nina was leading her class for new mothers, Infant Health. That was one of the more pleasant jobs at the Coal-House Camp. Women who had just given birth had an astounding ability to shut out the rest of the world. The five women sat on the floor of the clinic’s little waiting room with their babies in front of them on soft, brightly colored baby blankets as they followed Nina attentively with their eyes.

“Put your baby on its tummy as often as possible. After each diaper change, for example.”

Nina squatted down and carefully rolled a three-month-old boy onto his stomach, and couldn’t help but smile. The boy struggled to hold his big wobbly head, but gave up after a few seconds, resting his forehead on the blanket in front of him and squawking shrilly and angrily. The women laughed. The boy’s mother, a very young woman from Sudan, stroked him soothingly over his dusting of curly hair. Then she turned him around, picked him up in a quick and secure grip, and snuggled his little body to her chest. The boy instantly stopped his screeching, but was still whimpering at the affront when the phone rang. Rikke from the children’s unit made her brief report. Rina wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating, and refused to talk to anyone. Including the kids she actually knew well from the family section at Unit B.

They didn’t need Nina to come back, because as Rikke said, “the positive effect of Nina’s daily visits was obviously limited.” She was actually just calling because she wanted to talk to Magnus. He was going to have to get the girl some kind of psychiatric evaluation.

“Damn and blast it,” Nina said, aware of how her loathing of the system came sneaking in. She pictured Rina, sitting in the office in the children’s unit, spinning around hesitantly on a stool in front of the camp’s child psychiatrist. He was actually pretty good, a friendly middle-aged man with a little pot belly and a pair of narrow glasses mounted on his nose. But she wouldn’t be given more than an hour of therapy a month. Which was hardly better than nothing at all.

“What she needs is her mother,” Nina said, trying to rein in her frustration. After all, it wasn’t Rikke’s fault. But still … Nina wasn’t sure she liked the tone of Rikke’s voice. Wasn’t there a touch of blame in it?

“I’m not disagreeing, Nina,” Rikke said. “But neither you nor I can give her what she needs most of all now. You’re wasting your time over here. She’s totally out of it. I need to talk to Magnus. Now.”

“He’s not here.”

“Then ask him to call when he gets in.”

Nina said an overly hasty goodbye and put the phone back down on the desk with a hard bang. The babies’ mothers were still sitting on the floor in the next room, and she could hear their soft, cooing voices, their laughter, and the babies’ little grunts of satisfaction at the attention.

She waved a quick farewell to the women and then walked rapidly down the hallway toward the exit. She needed a break. It had started raining outside. Soft, heavy drops were falling from the gray May sky and had already soaked the lawn in front of the main building. Nina stood in the doorway watching the water run in little rivulets over the paved walkway, which was lined with old cigarette butts and gum wrappers. Spring spruced up the Coal-House Camp, no question. But there was no hiding the fact that both the residents and the Danish government were basically indifferent to the place. It was ugly and uncared for. Scratched up, scuffed, worn out. Being here made people gray, no matter how much paint they sloshed on the outside and how much IKEA furniture they stuffed inside.

She took a deep breath. The scent of wet dirt and grass and asphalt and summer. She made a decision. She would bring Ida, Anton, and Morten to Viborg with her this year, to stay with her mother. The kids really ought to spend a little time with their grandmother. Nina would just have to grit her teeth and smile her way through it.

Her phone’s protracted trills interrupted her, and she just managed to get it up out of her pocket before the ringing stopped.

“Nina?”

It was Peter. She recognized his voice after a brief delay. He didn’t sound the way he usually did. “Nina, I know Morten isn’t home yet, but I was really hoping you could make an exception. I’m.…” Peter was cut short by a protracted coughing fit, followed by long, labored gasps for breath. “I’ve come down with something,” he said. “I’m sure it’s the same thing the young Roma boy has. It’s really nasty. I’m so.…”

Again a protracted rattling cough that almost made Nina hold the phone away from her until the worst of the fit had passed. She lowered her voice.

“What were you hoping I could do?”

Peter laughed hollowly into the phone.

“Nothing fancy. I’ve gathered a few supplies for that young man at the Valby garage. You know, fluids, Imodium, seasickness pills, and that rehydration powder you said he should have. What was that stuff called.…” Nina could hear Peter rustling around in some packages. “Well, it doesn’t matter.” He called off the hunt. “Now the problem is that I’m not up to driving out there to drop them off. I’ve been throwing up nonstop.”

His voice became high-pitched, almost childlike, as he said that last bit, and that made Nina hesitate with her refusal. She looked at her watch and considered her options. Anton was going to spend the night next door at Mathias’s. They had been planning that for a few weeks, so she wouldn’t need to feel guilty about defending that to Morten, and it was pretty much standard routine that Ida disappeared into her room the instant Nina walked in the door.

“I’m not driving out to Valby, Peter,” Nina said. “But I’ll come over and check on you. You shouldn’t be lying there all by yourself.” That wasn’t breaking her promise to Morten, she thought, painstakingly suppressing the sudden sense of relief she felt at not having to spend the evening ignoring Ida’s coldness.

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Peter?”

“Thanks, Nina. That’s really nice of you.” Peter’s voice caught a little over his own unaccustomed politeness. Peter didn’t usually thank people, Nina mused. Peter usually demanded her assistance for the Network and took it for granted that she would say yes. Nina furrowed her brow and let her phone fall back into her jacket pocket. Only then did the penny drop. Peter didn’t care if she went to Valby tonight. This time he had been calling to get help for himself.

PETER’S HOUSE WAS on a long, flat street on the borderline between two of Copenhagen’s less fashionable suburbs, Vanløse and Brønshøj. She had never been there before and had to double-check the house number on the little yellow slip of paper she had sitting next to her on the passenger’s seat. The street was lined with light-green beech hedges, and behind them she caught glimpses of gardens tended with varying degrees of enthusiasm, with small, crooked fruit trees, lilacs, birches, and chestnuts. The houses looked like they were from the 1950s, originally small, but now with add-ons and remodels on all sides and of generally doubtful aesthetic merits.

Peter’s house was no exception. A small, red-brick bungalow surrounded by a lawn, a couple of bushes, and a narrow garage at the end of the driveway. Peter had his own alterations underway, Nina knew. A little annex that would connect the garage to the bungalow. He had been talking about it for several years. Being able to bring people, unseen, into the house from the garage would make some of his work for the Network easier, but of course that hadn’t been an option while he was married. No self-respecting woman would have allowed the monstrosity Nina saw being added onto the end of the house. Not even if it was going to help save the world.

The foundation had been poured for the little add-on, and a hole had been knocked through the wall. That was as far as he, or the workmen, had gotten, and a perfunctory tarpaulin now covered the opening, flapping gently in the cool May breeze. Small, shiny pools of water sat on what would be the floor of the annex someday.

The divorce had taken its toll on him, Nina thought. He never mentioned it when they saw each other. He rarely talked about himself, just the “cases” and the “clients.” But Nina felt she could see the grim contours of the divorce in the construction mess—the sagging sacks of building rubble slumped at the corner of the driveway and the windows gaping emptily out at the garden. His wife must have taken the curtains, she thought with disapproval. That was the kind of thing women did to their ex-husbands, knowing full well that the poor slobs would never get around to fixing new ones. And on top of that, Peter now obviously didn’t have anyone besides her to call when he was sick.

It took Peter a while to open the door.

He was fully dressed, but unmistakably sick. His eyes were bleary and bloodshot, his face unshaven, and his hair was sticking out every which way, sweaty and disheveled. There was no mistaking the sour smell of sweat and vomit as he stepped aside and invited her in with a sarcastic, stewardess-like gesture.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” he chimed with a wan smile.

Nina smiled back, setting her grocery bag of fresh supplies—a loaf of bread, cola, and oatmeal—on the floor in the hallway.

“How bad is it?”

Peter sighed. “Well, I think it’s a little better,” he replied evasively. “I haven’t thrown up in over an hour, but I’m just completely wasted.”

Nina nodded.

“Well, let’s look on the bright side. Did you eat or drink anything when you were at the house?”

“Oh, it’s hardly a house. It’s an old auto mechanic’s shop. But, no. I don’t think I did. A cup of tea at the most.”

“Good. Then I don’t think it’s food poisoning. It sounds more like a stomach virus. They can be ridiculously contagious.”

Peter turned around and slowly made his way into the sparsely furnished living room, where he collapsed onto a faded sofa. A bucket and mop were in position next to him, and on a low table he had a stack of hand towels, a roll of paper towels, and a pitcher of water.

“I’m really sorry I called you like that,” he said. “But at one point I just got so … scared. I damn nearly blacked out when I tried to stand up, and I really freaked that something was seriously wrong. But now I risk infecting you, too.”

Nina shook her head dismissively.

“You help so many people, Peter. If for once you need someone to cool your fevered brow for you, that’s only fair.”

She quickly gathered up the used towels and located the washing machine in the bathroom. There wasn’t much that you could say about stomach bugs that was good, but at least it usually cleared up on its own.

“Have you had any diarrhea?”

“Not yet.”

“Fever?”

Nina snapped the washing machine closed and set it on hot. Peter responded something or other from the living room, but she had to go back in to hear what he said. He was lying back with his eyes closed and a limp hand resting on his forehead.

“No, no fever,” he repeated. “But blood. There was a little blood in my vomit.”

Nina was puzzled. Blood didn’t necessarily mean anything. It could have come from some small lesion in his esophagus or pharynx. It could easily happen if the vomiting was intense. And since he was improving.…

“How long have you been sick?”

Nina looked around the room. There were two empty 1.5-liter Coke bottles on top of the TV. Peter had amassed a whole little pile of mail on the shelf over by the door without apparently having had the strength to open it.

“Since last night,” he said with an uneasy, drawn out sigh. “I was supposed to head out to Valby with fresh supplies today.”

He nodded tiredly toward a couple big bags in the corner of the living room.

“Isn’t that a lot of shopping for one person?” Nina asked, recognizing an all too familiar sense of anxiety starting to move around somewhere in her stomach.

“Yes, plus now I’ve gone and drunk all the Coke myself,” Peter said in a voice that sounded a little choked up. “But they called me again after I talked to you. More people are sick now. They were worried about the little ones. The kids. So I bought a lot. They also called while I was sick, I could see. But I just wasn’t up to answering. I was throwing up nonstop.”

Peter sounded almost ashamed now, and Nina’s mild flutter of concern picked up. What if she were mistaken? Young children could get very sick very fast, and a group of Roma in Valby wouldn’t have any idea what to do here in Denmark if something went seriously wrong. Peter was probably their only Danish contact, apart from the bloodsuckers who were no doubt charging the group an arm and a leg for “rent” and other “extras” while they were in the country.

Nina quickly glanced at her watch. It was only 7:32 P.M.

THE OLD GARAGE sat in a long, narrow lot between a barn-like production shed with bright-red corrugated steel walls and a low, white building with a peeling sign that filled most of its façade—Bækgaard Industrial Technology. There were no signs of life in either of the neighboring buildings, but then it was well after closing time, Nina thought. 7:57 P.M. to be precise.

She got out of the car. The breeze had picked up. Small, strong gusts seemed to be coming from all directions at once, blowing cold cascades of rain at her. You could hear the faint whoosh of cars on the old southbound highway. A solitary blackbird sang softly and melodically from its perch in a stubborn elder bush that had found a way up through the cracked slabs of concrete right where they met the boundary wall. Apart from that, the silence outside the garage was total.

Nina picked up the bags of groceries and the first aid kit she kept in the car and quickly crossed the little parking lot in front of the garage doors.

They must have seen her coming.

The door to the garage was already ajar before she had a chance to knock, and a youngish man in a worn turquoise sweater was eying her suspiciously.

From the darkness behind him now came the sounds of muffled voices, children crying, and women shushing the littlest ones in soft voices.

“I am a nurse,” said Nina in careful English, enunciating each word slowly and clearly while pointing to her first aid kit with its discrete red cross on the white background. “Peter told me to come.”

The man, joined now by a slightly older, unshaven man in baggy sweatpants and shoes flopping open at the toes, peered at her skeptically. The older one said something that made the one in turquoise shrug. Nina peered up at the cloudy gray sky as she waited for the two men to reach some sort of consensus. It was by no means clear that they had understood what she had said, and even more doubtful whether they recognized Peter’s name. A child cried weakly in short bursts somewhere in the darkness. Nina fidgeted uneasily and gave the man a stern look.

“Please, if the child is sick.…”

Again the older man said something to someone in the shop, a couple of voices replied, and after yet another uncertain glance at Nina, both the one in turquoise and the older man stepped aside and let her into the semidarkness.

At first she couldn’t see much. The only source of light in the garage was a single fluorescent tube at the very back, which cast a weak bluish gleam over the room. The rest of the light fixtures hung empty under the rafters in the ceiling.

The older of the two men blurted out some kind of warning and pushed Nina a little to the side on the way in. She had been about to step into a splintered hole in the rotten plywood boards that covered the long inspection pit, which ran from the doors in front toward the rear wall. There were mattresses and sleeping bags on either side of the pit, and the heavy odor of cigarettes and too many people in too little space had mixed with the original smell of oil and rusty iron.

There were people everywhere. At least that was how it looked once Nina’s eyes finally adjusted to the dim light. Some of them were curled up on mattresses and seemed to have gone to bed early. Others were sitting in small groups on the floor, talking and smoking. The ends of cigarettes glowed orangey-yellow among the men. And they were mostly men. Nina counted about twenty of various ages. There were a handful of women and, Nina guessed, a small number of children. It was hard to see exactly how many people were sleeping between all the sleeping bags, mattresses, and backpacks. Peter had said there were about fifty people living in the shop, the rest were probably still downtown begging, collecting bottles, selling flowers, or running shell games among the crowds on the pedestrian streets.

“Ápolónö.”

The man walked over to a skinny young woman who was sitting, holding a child in her arms, and pointed at Nina.

“Ápolónö,” he repeated. The woman looked at her. The child in her arms whimpered, writhing in spite of her constant rocking motions. She looked tired, and when Nina got closer, she could smell vomit lingering in the air.

Nina cautiously eased the child away from the woman and laid him on one of the thin, shabby mattresses next to the inspection pit. She guessed the boy was about three. His face looked like a three-year-old’s, but his body had been small and light as a feather in her arms. He had probably eaten too little and too poorly most of his life, she was guessing. The boy winced a little when she pulled his shirt up and slid her hand over the taut skin on his belly. He didn’t have a fever, but his skin felt warm and dry, and when she gently pinched his skin between her thumb and forefinger, a soft little ridge remained on his arm for a second too long.

“How long?” Nina asked, looking questioningly at the mother. The woman was surely no older than twenty-five herself but was missing two of her top teeth. She nodded as a sign that she had understood the question and held up three fingers.

“And you?”

The young woman suddenly looked embarrassed. Then she nodded and made a gesture with her hands in front of her mouth. Vomiting, Nina interpreted.

“Throw up.”

One of the young men, who had been following along nosily, now stepped in to contribute his meager English vocabulary. The woman had been sick, like her child, he explained, but it hadn’t been quite as bad. It was the kids who were really sick. They fell ill a couple of days ago. Throwing up, having nosebleeds. The man pointed meaningfully at his nose and stomach.

“Yesterday.…” The man began, his eyes lighting up as he put on a theatrical smile. “Yesterday everybody fine, happy, eating. Today everybody sick again.”

He shrugged and pointed to the little boy on the mattress. “My son. Yes. Very sick again.”

The boy on the mattress moaned slightly but continued to follow Nina with his wide, wary eyes.

Nina stood up and peered further into the room. Two heavy, yellow tarpaulins were hanging from the ceiling so they served as a makeshift curtain in the middle of the room, maybe in an attempt to make some sort of division between women and men, but right now the two tarpaulins were pulled to the side so that what little light there was could reach both sections.

She spotted a couple of doors at the back of the room and guessed one of them must be a lavatory and maybe even a shower room. They might well have had something like that in an auto repair shop. She started walking back along the edge of the inspection pit.

The men went quiet, and she could feel their hostile eyes peering at her from all sides, following her as she moved through the room. The young man who had let her in when she arrived slid up next to her, so close that his shoulder touched hers with each swaggering step he took.

“I need to wash my hands.” Nina held her hands up to illustrate. Irritated, she maneuvered herself a little farther away from him and sped up. She didn’t understand why they needed to get all macho on her right now, but it wasn’t the first time she had been forced to put up with puffed up chests and threatening gestures before she was permitted to do her job. Sometimes there was a whole pantomime to get through, complete with jutting chins, bumping chests, heated discussions, and ultimately an ostentatious granting of permission to approach their child, sister, mother, or little brother. Nina had long since realized that it rarely had anything to do with her or what she did, it was more that to certain men she provided a welcome opportunity to demonstrate their glorious manliness and the accompanying ability to defend their family. However crude it might be.

All the same, she had started sweating a little.

No one, apart from that young mother, had seemed particularly pleased to see her, and she didn’t like the way the men were starting to fill the space behind her. As if they were moving in on her. She didn’t want to turn around to see if she was right.

She opened the door and stepped into a white-tiled lavatory. There was a toilet on the back wall that was missing its seat and lid. There was also a sink with a cracked mirror and a small shelf for the soap, and in the back corner there was a shower coated in lime scale, shower head barely attached to the wall. Otherwise the room was cold and bare. Nina cast a quick glance into the toilet bowl and noted that it was actually clean despite this being the only facility for the large number of people out there in the shop. Someone had employed soap and scrubbing brush with a will.

She washed her hands slowly, making a show of it for the young father, who had hung back in the doorway. Like a watchdog behind a fence, Nina thought, and felt it again. The anxiety. Something wasn’t right. They were the ones who contacted Peter for help, but now it almost seemed like they couldn’t wait to get rid of her. The child she had seen was very obviously sick, but so far everything still indicated it was a relatively benign stomach virus.

“Please,” the young man said, now adding a smile and an urgent hand motion. “More children sick. Please look.”

He remained there while Nina carefully edged past him through the doorway back into the garage. She hesitated. Where was Peter’s sick young man? After all, he was the one the whole thing had started with. She tried to ask, still in slow, clear English.

“What about the young man? The one who was sick. Where is he?”

The young father smiled, revealing a row of teeth marred by little black flecks.

“Fine,” he said. “He fine.” He looked away, and his eyes lingered a second too long on a door to the right of the bathroom.

“Where is he?” she asked again. “In there?”

“No, he fine. Gone now.”

He exposed his teeth again in a wide smile that finally convinced Nina that he was lying. They must have the room stuffed full of stolen flat-screen TVs, she thought, which would also explain the strange mix of aggressive macho attitudes and faint, shivery nervousness that filled the room. It was possible that the sick man was still in the garage somewhere, but they clearly weren’t interested in letting her talk to him, and that was all there was to it. She would be allowed to see the children, and that was also the most important thing. They were the only reason she had come.

She nodded quickly.

“Where are they? Where are the children?”

NINA DROVE HOME at 8:52 P.M.

There was almost no traffic on Jagtvej, but the rain ran down the windshield in thin, gray rivulets and made everything inside the car fog up. The de-mister no longer worked in Nina’s old Fiat, and she had to lean forward at regular intervals to wipe the inside of the windshield with her sleeve.

There was a certain sheepish feeling lurking in the back of her mind. Like an alcoholic on the wagon who had snuck a drink after work, she thought. It had almost been okay, what she had done. Visiting Peter wasn’t strictly speaking part of her work with the Network. The fact that she had gone out to Valby afterward was harder to justify. And now she felt strangely cheated. The children she had examined had stopped vomiting. The biggest ones, who were around Anton’s age, had been sleeping peacefully on the thin mattresses, and she hadn’t even needed to wake them up to determine that they were getting better. Their color was good, they were breathing calmly and steadily, and there were no immediate signs of dehydration. The smallest ones, the three-year-old boy and two twin girls who were slightly older, had moaned a little when she pressed on their stomachs. She had instructed the mothers thoroughly on how to add sugar and salt to bottled water and make sure the children got plenty to drink, and she had left a few packets of antiemetics that could help a little with the nausea. All in all there was nothing to worry about, and maybe there never had been. She had gone there out of her usual irrational anxiety, knowing full well that Morten wouldn’t be very understanding about her breaking her promise because of a couple of half-sick kids in Valby. Nina wasn’t sure if the severity of their condition made any difference to Morten, but it mattered to her.

Nina pulled into Fejøgade and glanced up at the windows on the second floor. The living room lights were on, so Ida must have crawled out of her cave while Nina was out and was probably happily enjoying the brand-new flat screen and having the whole sofa to herself. Nina had sent her a text message that she would be home late from work. She hadn’t given a reason, and Ida hadn’t asked. Just sent a laconic “OK”—without a smiley, of course. Ida considered emoticons tween, and if she ever did use them it would never be in a text message to Nina.

Nina left the first aid kit on the back seat and slammed the car door. She had no desire to go inside. Damn it. How had they ended up like this?

She left the question unanswered in some corner of her mind as she carefully pushed open the door to the apartment. The TV or stereo was on in the living room. “Let me rot in peace,” thundered the lead singer from Alive with Worms, an iconic Copenhagen Goth-rock group. Nina recognized both the singer and the Goth style from her own distant youth and felt annoyance starting to boil in her. Why did teenagers have to be such damned clichés? Did parents really only get to choose between pop chicks who wore lip gloss that reeked of strawberry, watched Paradise Hotel on TV, and had a stack of glossy magazines on their desk, or self-pitying mini-Goths who painted the insides of their heads black, romanticized anarchy and evicted squatters, and dug around in small, obscure shops for tattered clothes and narrow-minded music that would put them in an even worse mood? The latter was perhaps marginally better than the former, but hardly original, and it was ridiculously difficult to take it seriously while it lasted.

“Hi.”

She opened the door into the living room and stood there reeling slightly at the unexpected sight.

Ida was sitting on the sofa. Nina’s guess had been right about that part of it. However, there was a young man sitting next to her, holding one of Ida’s oversized teacups in his hands. He had just been saying something to Ida, but now they both turned around to face her. The guy smiled, hurriedly placed his cup on the table, and shyly ran a hand up over his clean-shaven scalp.

How old was he? Sixteen, maybe seventeen?

Nina looked over at Ida, who stared back with a mix of defiance and embarrassment. Then she obviously decided that offense was the best defense. Her posture became professional and self-assured.

“I thought you said ‘late.’ ”

“Uh, yes,” Nina mumbled, reminding herself how easy it was for mothers to stumble and turn into clichés right alongside their teenage daughters. “It’s almost nine o’clock.”

The boy on the sofa stood up and quickly wiped the palms of his hands on his trousers, which were hanging dangerously low on his hips.

“Hello,” he said politely. “I’m Ulf.”

Nina tamely extended her hand to him, weighing her options. When it came right down to it, she really had only one, she decided.

“Hi, Ulf,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”