Invisible Murder

OMETHING WAS BEEPING.

Nina detected it somewhere at the outer limits of her consciousness. First she tried to get away from the noise, burrowing back into the dim, gray semidarkness she had been inhabiting, but someone was moving around in the room again, and she reluctantly opened her eyes. There was a nurse next to her bed, fiddling with the machine that was beeping. She was wearing an aggressively yellow lab coat with a matching face mask of the type that meant “contagious,” but when she turned around Nina could see that she was smiling reassuringly behind the mask. Dawn was underway outside. A subdued, gray light filtered into the room through the voluminous, brightly patterned curtains.

“False alarm,” the nurse said. “Your pulse has just been a little too high for a little too long. It’s all over the place at the moment.”

Nina nodded and looked away. The nurse’s yellow coat made her feel sick to her stomach, or maybe she was just starting to notice the nausea again after her interval of dozing. She shifted uneasily, trying to see if she could move away from the discomfort, rolling halfway onto one side. That was as far as she could go because of the IV drip and the Venflon catheter in her left hand. She sincerely hoped the next round of vomiting would hold off for a while. She was unbelievably tired, and she didn’t know if she had the strength to sit up properly. It felt as if she hadn’t slept a wink, and that might not actually be an exaggeration. Since she had been admitted, she had thrown up twice every hour, on the hour. At least. She had stopped counting after 2 A.M. They took new blood tests, and two doctors had asked her the exact same questions. They had pressed on her abdomen, turned her over, made her stand up and sit down, and pulled up her hospital gown so they could study her skin. The piercing beeping from the machines in the room hadn’t made it any easier to sleep. They were monitoring her pulse, and the device made a noise as soon as it went over one hundred, which it frequently did. She had wanted them to turn all this crap off, but their response was a firm no, and she had given up arguing with them at 2:24 A.M.

Now it was 5:32 A.M. Nina could follow the minute hand as it staggered its way in loud clicks around the clock over the door. She had established that she wasn’t allowed to leave the room, at the moment a completely unnecessary admonition. She couldn’t even get out of bed by herself.

Magnus’s unshaven face appeared in the doorway. He didn’t look so good either, Nina thought, adjusting her position again. He was wearing the same clothes as the night before, a tattered plaid flannel shirt and Bermuda shorts. He had also been equipped with a toxic-yellow face mask, which made Nina consider a snide comment. But she decided against it. It might well make her throw up, and Magnus didn’t look like he was in the mood for banter, either. His eyes looked tired and worried, and probably not only because of her. Magnus worked himself ragged both at home and at the Coal-House Camp.

“First, the good news.” Magnus sat down on her bed, and she could tell from his eyes that he was smiling behind his face mask. It didn’t have quite the same reassuring affect as when his mouth was visible as well. “Your friend Peter called me a couple hours ago just as I was about to send in the cavalry. The mother of the sick child was able to sneak out with the boy while the father was asleep. She called Peter, and he picked them up somewhere along Roskildevej. I got them set up at Bispebjerg Hospital. The boy is doing reasonably well. Better than you in any case. I’m not too worried.”

“You could have fooled me,” Nina said, attempting a wry smile. Magnus didn’t smile back.

“Nina, I’m sorry to have to tell you this while you’re ill. Don’t be alarmed, but.…” Magnus moved in closer and cautiously rested a hand on her shoulder. “Morten just called me. Something happened. There was a break-in at your apartment. Ida was home at the time.”

It took a second before the words sank in. Then Nina straightened up with a jerk that made her IV stand teeter dangerously next to the bed. What was Magnus saying? She couldn’t make sense of it. A break-in. But Ida was spending the night at Anna’s. She wouldn’t have been home at all. Magnus must have made a mistake.

“Nothing happened to her, and Morten is on his way home.”

Nina sat there for a while, struggling to process the information she had been given. Then she remembered seeing the familiar-looking figure on the bicycle just as she had left Fejøgade. Maybe it had been Ida after all. She gave Magnus a questioning look. He wasn’t normally the type to mince words. He neither could nor wanted to sugar-coat things, and she was grateful for that when they were working together at the Coal-House Camp. But now that she had been reduced to a poor, pathetic invalid was there something he wasn’t telling her? What had happened to Ida? And where was she now?

“Morten’s sister picked her up, and Morten will be home in a few hours. There’s nothing to worry about.”

It was as if Magnus had guessed what she would be thinking and had already prepared an answer. Nina felt her short, labored breaths, and the machine started emitting a small, warning blip. Her pulse was on its way up again.

“Can I call her?”

Magnus looked away, a little too fast, and shook his head.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you. She’s waiting for Morten. But I was supposed to give you her best and tell you she hopes you get well soon.”

That last part was a lie, Nina thought dryly.

“Could I at least call Morten?”

Again Magnus’s eyes were strangely evasive.

“Nina, he’s probably sitting up on top of an oil rig, waiting for the next available helicopter. That kind of thing requires a man’s full attention. Give it a rest, and concentrate on getting better.”

Magnus’s voice was disturbingly light-hearted and devoid of swear words, but Nina was too exhausted to break through the Teflon surface of his concern. For the time being she was forced to let Morten handle it.

“And what else? Have you heard anything from the lab?”

Magnus nodded, visibly relieved at the change in topic.

“Some of the results came back, and they’re looking at them now. They’ll let you know as soon as possible, and apparently there’s also a team from the radiology department on its way up. I guess they’re not wild about the idea of moving you around right now.”

No, they didn’t want her potentially plague-inducing bacteria to contaminate the entire hospital. Nina knew the drill. They would X-Ray her thorax to assess the state of her lungs. Maybe there were signs of some kind of infection in the tests they had already done. “Have you seen my numbers?”

Nina tried to pull herself together as much as she could and give Magnus an authoritative look. The feeling of being cut off from the information that was available to her doctor made her fidgety.

“Your infection counts look a little suspect,” Magnus said, sitting down next to the bed. “They did a differential count, and your lymphocyte numbers look odd. They’re coming to ask you a few questions again in a half hour. I’m going to hang around until then.”

Nina sank back in the bed. A half hour didn’t give her enough time to sleep but was too long to stay awake. The nausea kept churning in her stomach, and small, flashing spots danced up over the white ceiling. And then it seemed she was, after all, able to fall asleep; the last thing she was aware of was Magnus’s heavy, dry bear paw on her forehead, cautiously stroking her hair.

SHE WOKE UP because someone was shouting. It was a woman, and her voice was high with surprise. Nina opened her eyes, her head still pounding, and looked at the clock over the door. 6:24 A.M. Everything was a little blurry. But it must still be morning, and there was a cluster of toxic-yellow gowns converging around her.

“Nina.”

Magnus’s voice sounded like he was standing on the other side of the room, but she saw him right beside her bed and moving in closer to bend over her.

“Nina. You’re going to have to wake up, sweetheart.”

She sat up too fast and felt a flood of vomit forcing its way up her throat. Someone held a basin for her, while Magnus patiently waited. When she was done, she looked up and met his eyes.

“There was a blip on the radiology nurse’s dosimeter.”

Nina shook her head. It was like Magnus was starting to slip out of focus again. What he was saying didn’t make any sense.

“You’ve been exposed to radiation, Nina. You have radiation sickness.”