Invisible Murder

ERY BEAUTIFUL.”

The man nodded, looking out over the pancake-flat countryside, in rolling greens with small strips of brackish gray water in between. The sky hung low and dark over the water, and the clouds on the horizon painted dark-blue stripes across the sky.

Nina looked over at the man next to her. He seemed to be in a good mood and only had one hand on the wheel as they rumbled their way up the rough gravel road. He gesticulated with the almost finished cigarette in his other hand whenever there was something particularly exciting he wanted to show her. There and there and there. He had caught a sea trout on the other side of that strip of trees over there, with a lure. Just like back home in Finland. A bunch of wires were hanging out of a dangling plastic panel next to the steering column, presumably because he had stolen the green van, and the black phone with the pictures of Ida was on the dashboard, but the man acted as if he had already forgotten all about that. His mind was on other things now.

Nina felt strangely outside her body. It wasn’t just from the exhaustion and the recurring nausea. It was also the indiscriminate small talk that had been flowing unchecked from him from the second they got into the car and pulled out of Rigshospitalet’s parking lot. In the beginning she had tried to find out more about Ida. She’d asked how Ida was doing and where she was, but the man had either ignored her questions or told her to shut up. Eventually she just stared out the window and let him talk. She didn’t recognize the whole route, but right now she was guessing they were somewhere on the south end of Amager Island on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Farther up the gravel road, she could make out some kind of small holding. The skinny Finn sped up for the last few meters and gave Nina a friendly smile as he spun his wheels in the smooth gravel. The 1970s-style windows of the farmhouse stared emptily out the U-shaped gravel drive in front.

The Finn jumped out of the van, letting the rest of his cigarette fall onto the gravel. Then he continued around the car, opened Nina’s door and yanked her out of the car so hard that she almost landed on her knees. The pea-sized gravel stung cruelly under her white sock-clad feet, and she still didn’t have any strength. Nothing to fight with, she thought. It was painfully obvious that the Finn had come to the same conclusion. He had already disappeared in the front door where he was impatiently banging doors and yelling something at someone. Of course he wasn’t alone, Nina thought sluggishly. There had been three men in their apartment, and now wherever they had Ida … maybe she was here.

Climbing the steps to the front door of the farmhouse was like climbing a mountain, and with each step she felt her pulse race at an insane tempo. The hallway, like the windows, was a relic from the ’70s. There was a pair of worn-out plastic clogs with no heels sitting on the threadbare green indoor-outdoor carpet. The door to what must have been the kitchen was open. The floor was crumbling yellow linoleum with a brown floral pattern, and all of the old kitchen cupboards and cabinets were missing. All that was left were faded patches along the walls where they used to be. Now there was just a card table pushed against the wall with an electric kettle and a stack of rolled up newspapers. A smashed picture frame was lying on the floor containing a picture of a naked girl, in a spread-eagle pose. She was pushing a pair of enormous breasts with pale nipples all the way up to her open lips. Sabrina, eighteen years old, Nina read. Loves it rough, doggie style.

Nina carefully stepped around the small shards of glass, which were strewn across the kitchen floor, and proceeded into the living room.

The first thing she saw was Ida.

She was sitting against the far wall in a weird, floppy position with one arm crooked, raised awkwardly over her head. A rag doll tossed aside by a bored child. Her dark eyes looked even darker than they usually did. Her mascara had run in long black smears so her eye sockets had turned into deep, black pits. But she was there, and she was looking at Nina with watchful eyes that were somehow still intact and defiant and teenagery. She was still Ida. Nina felt the ground disappear from under her feet in a brief giddy second of relief. Then she sank down next to Ida, carefully running her finger over Ida’s black-striped cheek.

“Mom?” The wariness left Ida’s eyes, and she leaned her disheveled, black-haired head against Nina’s shoulder. “He came over during my free period. We just went to the bakery, and then suddenly he was there, and I didn’t have time to.…” Ida was talking so fast she was tripping over her own tongue. “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry. So sorry.…”

The sobs came like an earthquake, causing Ida’s whole body to tremble, and Nina tried to pull her in closer and enfold Ida’s gangly teenage body in her arms. But something was in the way. Only now did Nina realize why Ida was sitting so awkwardly on the floor. Her left arm was attached to the pipe feeding the radiator behind her with black plastic ties, but she clung to Nina with her free arm and kept mumbling about Ulf and Morten and school. Nina had stopped paying attention. She let one finger slide along the edge of the strip of black plastic around Ida’s wrist. It was tight, but not dangerously so.

Only now, as she stroked Ida’s hair, did she take in the rest. A young man was sitting on the floor on the other side of the radiator, tied to a pipe the same as Ida. Nina was startled to recognize him—the young man from Valby. The gash over his eyebrow still gaped a little, and he looked like he had taken several more blows in the interim. His right cheek was almost the same dark purple color as the wall behind him, and he had a deep, oozing sore on the hand that wasn’t tied to the radiator.

She didn’t feel sorry for him. Not anymore. No matter why he was sitting here on the floor with her daughter now, he deserved whatever beatings he’d gotten. She was only sorry that she hadn’t actually been the one to give them to him.

The Finn seemed to have completely forgotten about her. He’d pushed a cowboy hat down over his forehead, adopting at the same time a more swaggering gait. He opened up a can of beer, drank, and made a slightly disgruntled face when the beer can accidentally bumped his swollen nose.

“You. Gypsy boy. Sándor—isn’t that your name?” The Finn pointed to the Valby man with his beer can. “How do you say ‘cunt’ in Hungarian?”

The young Hungarian raised his head very slowly, but didn’t respond. The Finn casually kicked one of the guy’s legs.

“Come on, pal. How do you say it?”

“Cuna,” the Hungarian said, his face completely devoid of any expression. The psychopath in the cowboy hat furrowed his brow.

“How do you spell that?” he asked, as if it were an important detail he needed for a thesis on the Hungarian language.

Beyond the Finn there was another man, sitting on a black leather sofa in the middle of the room. A slightly overweight chocolate Lab was lying on the sofa next to him, hesitantly wagging its tail as it followed the Finn around the room with its eyes. The man on the sofa slowly shut the laptop in front of him. His shoulders were pulled all the way up to his ears, and he was scowling in irritation at the Finn, who had already fished a new cigarette out of his pocket and was pacing around the leather sofa with his beer can in his hand.

“Damnit, Tommi. Can’t you shut up and stand still for even a second?”

The Finn grinned. “Goes against my philosophy of life,” he said. “Moss and rolling stones and all that.” Then he suddenly stopped after all, eyeing Nina through narrowed eyes.

“Okay. Mother and daughter, touching reunion, cool, cool. Now we get down to business.”

Nina had a strange feeling of having gone straight from small-talk recipient to being a daddy longlegs in the hands of a boy armed with a magnifying glass and the desire to take revenge for a bunch of lost fights. She had no idea what kind of “business” he might have with her, but she had a chilling sense that it was going to be horrendous.

And she still couldn’t do anything. There was no chance she would be able to free Ida and slip out of the house. Even if by some miracle they managed to get that far, they were surrounded by fields and miles of unpaved roads, and the muscles in her thighs were trembling just at the effort it took to kneel down next to Ida. She was thirsty now. Her jaw clenched too tight, and her mouth felt both dry and pasty at the same time.

“What do you want?” Nina asked. She deliberately ignored the restless Finn—Tommi, the other guy had called him. Instead she looked directly at the man on the sofa. He looked more normal than the Finn. Actually he looked like he would fit seamlessly into any suburban Danish neighborhood, armed with a dog and a stroller and a sports bag and whatever else your average dad carried around. But some dads evidently dreamed beyond little league soccer practice with their sons. She had no idea what connection these two men had to the source of the radioactivity in Valby. It was hard to imagine that either of them would personally go and set off a bomb; there was hardly a seething religious or political undercurrent to them or to this house. So what did they want? Maybe something to do with money and eighteen-year-old girls like Sabrina.

The man on the sofa didn’t answer her. He hardly seemed to see her. His pale blue eyes only rested on her for a brief instant before he looked back at Tommi.

“Okay, then. But you handle it.” The man spoke English with a heavy Danish accent. “I don’t want to have to deal with stuff like that right now.”

He opened his computer again and took a drink from a ceramic mug that was painted red and decorated with big, clumsy black letters. FOR DADDY, it said. Then she felt Tommi’s hard, thin fingers closing round her upper arm.

“THE JACKET?”

The room he dragged her into was painted baby blue with little, white stars scattered over the walls and ceiling. A double bed covered with a worn quilt with a big floral pattern took up almost the entire room, but a rickety, white plastic lawn chair and some empty paint cans jostled for space in one corner. A flat screen TV was mounted over the bed, casting a blank blue glow over the room. The room had a faint barn-like smell, mixed with mildew and those little air fresheners people hung from their rearview mirrors. Tommi had taken up a straddling stance in front of her, and his face wore the same slightly indulgent look he had had when he pulled out his phone in the hospital.

Nina didn’t understand what he meant. “What jacket?” she asked.

“Saturday evening you gave that little Gypsy shit in there a ride. He was wearing a jacket. Where is it?”

Nina began to see the light. The young Hungarian. She had taken off his jacket to check his rib when they were sitting in her car outside her apartment. And then what had happened to it? That evening wavered in her memory, half hidden in green clouds of nausea.

“In the car,” she said. “It’s in the car.”

“You’re lying,” the Finn said, staring at her expressionlessly. “I don’t believe you.”

Nina waited a few seconds for an explanation, but none came. The Finn slowly shook his head. Then he hit her. He struck her with the palm of his hand on her left cheek, and the blow wasn’t actually that hard. Just unexpected. Nina took an involuntary step back and bumped into the light-blue wall. The Finn’s eyes had that same glassy look they had had when he pushed her head down into the pillow. She was shaking both from exhaustion and anticipation of the next blow, but instead he suddenly turned his back on her and picked up the Mac laptop connected to the TV and put it on the bed. The big screen mounted on the ceiling flickered obediently and opened a page with a list of choices. Hotel whore gets pounded. Schoolgirl and teacher. And of course more Sabrina, eighteen years old, who apparently liked it all the time and in every conceivable position. He took his time, appearing to surf aimlessly around between the numerous flashy ads but finally ended up choosing a video with two Asian girls on a beach.

Nina had moved into high alert ages ago. The door behind her was still open and every single cell in her body was tensed for flight. She wanted out of here. Now. She wanted to go to Ida, get her free, and get her away from this place. From this man. What did he want that jacket for?

“If it’s not in my car, then I don’t know where it is.”

Tommi didn’t even look up from his computer. The sound of his rapid fingers on the keys was the only thing audible in the light blue room. Then a new picture appeared on the big screen. Ida. But not like she had seen her on his mobile phone. This was from Ida’s room. The video started, and Nina stood with her eyes locked on the screen over her, watching how Ida tried to escape from the camera at first. A man was holding her so she couldn’t, and Nina recognized the Finn’s gaunt face. He was the one holding her. And touching her. It took a hard grip to hold her in the picture, with his forearms pushed against Ida’s breasts, while he whispered something to her. In the beginning she was screaming and kicking him. She continued to struggle as he pulled down her panties, but eventually she was just crying. Standing there naked, hunched over in front of the camera with her shoulders shaking. It seems as if the guy holding the camera was starting to get bored, because the camera began to drift, pointing now at a couple of pale young men near Ida’s desk. Nina had time to recognize Ulf’s shocked face and shaved head. The young Roma guy from the car was standing next to Ulf with a strangely empty expression. As if he weren’t really there. Someone mumbled something. Maybe it was Ulf. Eventually, the man with the camera gave up on aiming it at anything.

“Shut up now,” he yelled. “Just shut up, you horny little bastard.” Then the image on the screen froze.

Tommi turned around and looked calmly at Nina.

“You’d be surprised how popular this kind of shit is on the Internet.… You can make a lot of money if you have the right material. Your daughter’s cute, photogenic. We could make a new video. Just her and me.”

The Finn stuck an almost comically pink, pointy tongue out between his tobacco-pale lips and slid it in and out suggestively. That was enough. Nina stared into his slightly bloodshot eyes and for a long, happy moment pictured herself digging her fingers into his eyes. Scratching, biting, kicking. Ferociously, over and over, until she was sure he would never move again. Would never again be able to hurt her and Ida. Ever.

But in reality she didn’t do anything. Just stood there, frozen on the grease-stained gray carpet. Her whole body felt ice-cold, and it was hard to even turn her head. To breathe.

Nina thought about the radiation from Valby. About the rays that had penetrated everything, her and the children. And she knew that she ought to think it was important. But instead she closed her eyes and tried to picture the jacket. She had set it in the back seat along with the first aid kit and then.…

She tried to remember everything from that evening. The nausea, the headache. The precarious drive to the Coal-House Camp. And then it hit her. There had been two jackets. When Magnus drove her to the hospital, he had scooped her stuff out of the Fiat and moved it over into his beloved Volvo. And there had been two jackets. Her’s and that young Hungarian’s.

“Magnus Nilsson,” she said, swallowing. “My boss at the clinic. It was all in his car when we left the Coal-House Camp.” She let her head fall back, recalling the feeling of total weightlessness when Magnus had lifted her up and carried her into the hospital. Magnus, big, strong, and occasionally hot-tempered. She hoped to God he wouldn’t be there when the Finn came looking.

AFTER THAT SHE was allowed to sit on the floor next to Ida. The Finn carefully secured her left arm to the heating pipe the same way, and after a fair amount of maneuvering they managed to get themselves into a more or less comfortable sitting position, with Nina’s arm behind the back of Ida’s head. Then the Finn disappeared out the door. Nina could hear the car on the gravel and guessed he was headed for the jacket in Magnus’s Volvo. Mr. Suburbia was still sitting on the living room sofa, staring fixedly at the computer screen in front of him while Ida dozed, her head resting on Nina’s shoulder.

Nina couldn’t sleep.

Even though the fatigue sat in every muscle of her body with a paralyzing weight. Now she was worried about Magnus. Magnus and Ida. Because there was nothing to indicate that this was the end of it. It worried her that the Finn hadn’t done anything to hide his identity or keep the location of this property a secret.

Nina looked down at Ida’s tear-stained face as it rested heavily against her shoulder and again felt the same corrosive sense of impotence that had flooded through her when Tommi showed her the clip from the apartment. She should never have given them Magnus. She shouldn’t have helped them find the fucking jacket. She may have postponed the unpleasantness for Ida by giving them Magnus, but that was all she had done. Postponed and delayed something, although she didn’t quite know what.

The man on the other side of the radiator moved his uninjured hand a couple centimeters up the pipe and moaned softly as he tried to push himself into a more upright position. Then he cleared his throat and out of the corner of her eye Nina saw that he was looking right at her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Nina shifted slightly so she could see him. He looked terrible. His shirt was damp and filthy and covered with bloodstains presumably from both his face and his injured hand. His eyes were dull and washed-out.

“I was in your apartment. I should have stopped them,” he continued. His English was easier to understand than the Finn’s, possibly because he spoke more slowly. It took him a long time to find the right words. Nina couldn’t be bothered to respond. She didn’t have the energy to provide him with water, soap, and towel so he could wash his hands of the whole thing. She had seen the video. No one had been holding a gun to his head. No one had forced him to watch while someone ripped off her daughter’s underwear. He was a free agent.

“She’s fourteen years old,” she said, noting much to her own irritation how the exhaustion and the seething rage made her voice tremble slightly.

The young man winced, and Nina knew that she should feel sorry for him. But she just didn’t care.

“I would have stopped them,” she snarled. “I would have stopped them no matter what.”

Ida moved fitfully against Nina’s chest, raising her obstinate head and looking over at the young man.

“Mom,” she said, with a little of the old Ida’s arrogant tone. “It wasn’t Sándor. He couldn’t help it. They had his brother. They killed his brother.”

Nina sat there in total silence. She didn’t react. Didn’t make any doubting or shocked or sympathetic comments. She just felt the weight of her daughter’s living body and tried not to think about the implication—that they had killed someone. That that was a line they had already crossed.