Invisible Murder

AGNUS SWORE WHEN he saw her.

It had taken her more than half an hour to reach the Coal-House Camp because she had had to pull over by the Gladsaxe exit to throw up. After that she had sat for almost seven minutes with her forehead resting on the wheel before she had summoned up enough energy to drive on. Magnus had met her in the parking lot, stuck a long bear paw into the car, and practically scooped her out of the Fiat.

Now she was lying on the clinic’s examining table while Magnus, still cursing, tended to her.

“You have quite a high fever, thirty-nine point one, and your pulse is through the roof. I don’t understand how you even made it out here. I told you to take a cab. You’re acting like goddamn idiot, but I suppose there’s nothing new about that. Goddamn it all to hell.”

Nina didn’t respond. Magnus swore when he was worried, usually in his native Swedish; she was used to it, and even if she hadn’t been, she was beyond caring. She had spent the last of her energy getting here. Now she lay still, feeling the nausea settling over her like a heavy, cloying duvet.

“I could do some of the tests here, but we really need to get you into a hospital. I know someone in the infectious diseases ward at Rigshospitalet. I’m sure I could get her to admit you. She isn’t such a stickler for the rules, and if she can figure out what this is, she could probably do something for those children very quickly.”

Nina nodded and rolled over on her side. That reduced the nausea for a brief moment; then it came back with renewed vigor. She sat up and vomited into the basin Magnus had placed in front of her. He wrinkled his nose and took the basin away with a new torrent of cussing and swearing.

“As quickly as possible, Magnus.”

She lay there with her eyes closed while Magnus made the call. He talked for a long time, his voice was quiet and strained. Persuasive. But she wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying anymore. She drifted off for a few minutes but was forced to wake up again almost immediately as Magnus began the awful process of getting her to her feet and into his Volvo.

Some oversight must have occurred to him then, because he tossed her bag and jacket into the driver’s seat and left her sitting unsteadily in the other front seat, while he sprinted back into the clinic.

Only then did she notice that there were two jackets. Her own windbreaker and a man’s jacket that had definitely never been hers. The young man must have forgotten it in her car.

Magnus came back with his arms full of emesis basins, which he piled into her lap.

“Yeah, sorry,” he said. “But … you know. It’s the Volvo.”

Nina couldn’t help but laugh even though it mostly sounded like a long, hacking cough.

“My valiant hero,” she said weakly, feeling the fierce, familiar undertow of her longing for Morten. “What would I have done without you?”