Invisible Murder

HERE WAS FRENETIC activity in Nina’s room. At least three doctors, each with an entourage of medical students, had been by over the course of the morning, and they had all looked at her with a mixture of concern and professional excitement. The team from the Danish National Institute of Radiation Hygiene in particular had a hard time hiding their enthusiasm as they filled out their paperwork, consulted, and issued instructions for the rank-and-file staff. Nina saw it happening, but didn’t have the strength to get worked up over it. She recognized their response. Professionals were always fascinated to encounter in real life things they had only read about in books. She was probably one of the few patients—if any—with radiation sickness they had ever seen, and she could hear their whispered, animated discussions out in the corridor. If she hadn’t been feeling so dreadful, she would probably have been just as curious, but she had other things to worry about.

It was a relief to be able to see people’s faces again. The staff no longer wore face masks—you couldn’t catch radiation sickness through inhalation.

An investigator from the Danish Emergency Management Agency had already been there at 7:40 A.M. He was middle-aged, short, and balding and had smiled politely as he opened his bag and took out a pad of paper and a pen. Then, without warning, he had launched into his barrage of questions.

Where had she been, who had she talked to, what had she seen?

She answered as best she could. She had told the hospital staff about the repair shop right away, and the Emergency Management Agency was presumably already turning the place upside down. She had every possible reason to cooperate. The boy was receiving treatment now, but the rest of the residents from the Valby garage had potentially been exposed to amounts of radiation that were just as serious as her own exposure, and they would have to be examined. Beyond that, of course there were other and very obvious reasons the Emergency Management Agency had turned up less than half an hour after the radiology team’s dosimeter had started beeping. A source of radiation in central Copenhagen must be Nightmare Scenario Number One for the PET, the police, and the Emergency Management Agency.

The man’s ballpoint pen scribbled things down on paper at a furious pace as Nina responded to his questions. Beyond her own address, he also asked for Peter’s and that of the Coal-House Camp.

“As far as I can tell,” she said, “everyone who got sick was down in the inspection pit, either briefly or for perhaps as long as an hour at a time. Maybe that’s where it came from?”

“Yes,” he said, with a single quick nod. “That’s what our people at the site reported. The radiation level down there is significant, and they found small amounts of radioactive sand.”

She remembered the feeling of small, sharp grains of sand digging into her skin, and instinctively rubbed her palms on the sheet, as if to brush them off. Her hour-long hunt for a possible source of poisoning, the cleanup she had done with such determination—it had all been in vain. Radioactivity. While she had been removing plastic bags, moldy cardboard, and old oil drums, there had been an invisible, imperceptible enemy down there the whole time.

“Where did it come from?” she asked.

“The main source had been removed by the time we arrived,” he said. “We can only speculate.” Then he started cross-examining her about the residents of the garage. She patiently listed everyone she had spoken to, but that wasn’t that many, and she hadn’t taken their names or collected any other useful information while she’d been there. The man smiled at her with a trace of contempt.

“A lot of things would have been easier if you had informed the authorities about the outbreak of a suspicious illness right away,” he said and started packing up his things. “Sometimes you need to think with your brain instead of your heart.”

Nina didn’t answer but sank back in the bed, silently fuming. There hadn’t been anything particularly suspicious about the outbreak until she herself had fallen ill, and as for the Danish authorities’ response to a group of Roma in Valby, not much thinking was likely to have been involved—with their brains or their hearts. Their Pavlovian reaction would have sent the whole lot back across the border, to scatter themselves and their contaminated luggage across half of Europe. Still, he had touched a nerve. How much radiation had they been exposed to? And what about her?

She threw up again, and there was no sign she was improving. They were treating her with a drug called ferric ferrocyanide, more commonly known as Prussian Blue, which was supposed to bind to any unabsorbed radioactive material inside her, which of course she was totally in favor of. The only snag was that it had to be administered through a thin, plastic tube that was inserted through one of her nostrils and then fed all the way down to her duodenum “to prevent any irritation of the stomach lining.” She could certainly have done without the effect the tube had on her already hypersensitive gag reflex.

The doctors said she was going to have to be patient. It was “unlikely” she had received a life-threatening dose, but “the course of the sickness could be extremely unpredictable.” She might feel better now or be sick for several days. After that she would recover quite quickly, they thought, but her fertility would be “problematic” and her immune system would be seriously compromised for a long time to come.

She believed them, especially on that last point.

She was so tired she could hardly feel her body anymore, and she desperately needed sleep, but the vomiting forced her to wake up several times an hour, and the traffic of people in and out of her room kept increasing. Unknown faces ebbing and flowing past the foot of her bed. Poking her, taking her blood pressure, pulling up her all-too-short hospital gown and letting their fingers run down over her ribs. Spreading her legs to look for any sign of a rash around her groin, on her buttocks, and on her back, as if she were a piece of meat on an autopsy table. As if she were dead.

And in the middle of all this, she missed Morten so much she couldn’t think straight. She imagined how he would enter the room and chase away all those toxic-yellow gowns. She would ask him to lie down on the bed next to her so she could bury her nose in his T-shirt and inhale the safe scent of North Sea winds and water and salt and Morten, instead of the smell of disinfectant soap and vomit. Maybe then her stomach would finally settle down a little.

The hospital had provided her with a phone next to her bed, but it remained silent. Morten hadn’t called, and he hadn’t answered his phone on either of the occasions she had tried calling him. On Ida’s voicemail she heard Ida’s soft, cheerful voice asking her to leave a message. It almost hurt to listen to that now, and Nina felt herself cringe inside as she contemplated a short message in a casual voice. “Hi, it’s Mom. Call me,” or “Hi, honey, just wanted to see how you were.”

She gave up, hanging up and setting the phone back down the nightstand. She didn’t want to leave a message. She shouldn’t have to. Her family knew exactly where she was, and a friendly nurse had made sure that Morten got a text message with her direct number.

Nina tried to breathe slowly and calmly. The sun colored the darkness a flickery red whenever she shut her eyes, but it helped. She would rest now, just a little. When she woke up again, Morten could come pick her up, and she could sort out this business with Ida and the break-in.