Invisible Murder

OD, I WISH she had done it properly,” Magnus said. “Finished him right off, the evil bastard.”

Nina glanced over at Magnus. His smile seemed forced and his morbid humor as awkward as his large body. He looked tired, she thought. Tired and wan, completely lacking his usual aura of a corn-blond Viking crusader off to fight dragons, infidels, and bureaucrats.

“Check out the judge’s hands,” he hissed. “They look like they were made from Play-Doh. What a waste of space. Fucking paper-pushers. Fuck the fucking system.” The last of the air inside him leaked out in an ill-tempered snort, and the flimsy chair groaned ominously under his weight as he slumped against the backrest, staring up at the ceiling in resignation.

Courtrooms had that effect on him, Nina knew. This wasn’t the first time she had seen her boss despair at Denmark’s foremost representatives of the “system.” Dueling with red tape and lawyers always wore him out.

Her own rage was different. It stayed bottled up, lurking somewhere near her diaphragm.

It was 1:24 P.M.

Natasha had been sitting in the same position for more than an hour now, her elbows resting lightly on the edge of the table, a distant look in her dry, blue eyes. She looked vague and unfocused, her interest sharpening only briefly when the Russian interpreter broke into the proceedings to translate the stream of Danish phrases. The young Ukrainian woman had been in custody for almost seven months now. Her daughter, Rina, had been sent back to the Danish Red Cross Center at Furesø, more commonly known as the Coal-House Camp, to creep along the walls like a ghost among the other more boisterous children.

Sunlight flickered brightly through the courtroom’s high windows, tiny motes of dust swirling in the warm columns of light. The prosecutor was about to make her closing argument. She was a small, energetic woman in her mid-forties, impeccably dressed in a dark-blue skirt, matching suit jacket, blouse, with a slender gold chain around her neck and matte, skin-colored nylons.

Nina focused on the plaster ceiling while the prosecutor slowly painted her way through the indictment and evidence. As if that were necessary. As if everyone in the courtroom didn’t already know exactly what would happen.

“The defendant, Natasha Dimitrenko, walked into a hunting supply shop on Nordre Frihavnsgade.…”

Restlessness was starting to spread through Nina’s body. It lurked like a strange bubbling tension just below her skin, forcing her to stretch, slowly and silently like a cat. The Russian interpreter sitting next to Natasha droned on, slowly, in a monotone, below the shrillness of the prosecutor’s voice.

“… and bought a Sterkh-1, which is a twenty-four-centimeter-long traditional Russian hunting knife specially designed to efficiently gut and skin an animal.…”

Nina turned and tried to look into Natasha’s eyes below the wispy bangs.

“… and it was with this knife that the defendant stabbed her fiancé, Michael Anders Vestergaard, four times in his arm, shoulder, and neck.”

Nina and everyone else at the Coal-House Camp knew that the man was a sadistic pig whose abuse had left Natasha with vaginal lacerations so extensive that Magnus had had to suture them. Even so, Natasha had gone back to him, choosing to put up with the abuse and the humiliation because he was the only thing standing between her and deportation back to Ukraine.

Nina had testified on Monday, as had Magnus, who had had the unenviable task of patching up Natasha at the clinic the previous summer after what the prosecutor chose to describe as “consensual sex with elements of dominance.” Magnus had described Natasha’s injuries in nauseating detail, while the prosecutor flipped distractedly through the medical records, doodling in the margins.

And, yes, Natasha had actually consented—or at least tolerated it. No, she hadn’t reported anything to the police. Not even her suspicions that the man was starting to take an interest in Rina. When she caught him slipping a finger into Rina’s light-blue Minnie Mouse underpants, she bought a knife instead. Natasha had called Nina, but not until afterward.

It was a foregone conclusion, and everyone knew exactly what was going to happen. Initially Natasha would be sentenced for assault with intent to kill. Premeditated, of course, since several hours had elapsed from the time she bought the knife to the moment it was actually lodged in Michael Vestergaard’s neck, millimeters away from killing him. She would be stuck in a Danish prison cell while her application for asylum would plod along the winding paper trails of Danish Immigration Control toward almost inevitable denial. As soon as this occurred, swift deportation would follow, and Natasha would serve the rest of her sentence in a Ukrainian jail. Meanwhile, Rina would while away months or years of her childhood in the well-intentioned but inadequate care of the asylum system, most likely in the children’s unit at the Coal-House Camp. Once her mother had been deported, Rina too would be returned to Ukraine, to wait for her mother’s release, in whatever orphanage would take her. The whole nauseating story was as predictable as the prosecutor’s monotonous account and the dry rustle of paper being turned, page by page, as the hearing wore on.

Vestergaard sat a little further back in the room, his Hugo Boss shirt open so everyone who felt like looking in his direction had an unimpeded view of the bright red scars on his neck and shoulder. His arm was around a young, dark-skinned woman—Nina guessed she was from South America. While the prosecutor spoke, Michael Vestergaard leaned against the young woman and tenderly held her chin. The woman pulled back slightly, but then looked at him and smiled as he ran his thumb over her lower lip, smearing a little of her lipstick over her chin.

He had stopped taking an interest in the proceedings long ago.

Magnus followed Nina’s gaze.

“God, I wish she’d finished him off,” he hissed.

RAGE WAS STILL running through her like a faint, pulsating current under her skin as Nina turned into the parking lot in front of the gates of the Coal-House Camp. Her shift was long since over, but this task just couldn’t be left to anyone else.

She sat in her car for a second, listening to her own forced breathing. The April sun made the air shimmer above the black shingles on the roof of the children’s unit. A couple of teenage girls lay on the lawn in front of the entrance, stretching their gangly legs in the sunlight as they casually flipped through a glossy magazine. Nina knew one of the girls was from Ethiopia. She hadn’t seen the other one before, but judging by her almost bluish-white legs, she was probably yet another Eastern European dreaming of richer pastures in the West. They were unaccompanied minors. At the moment the Coal-House Camp had about fifty of them housed here in the former barracks. This was where Rina had been staying while Natasha was in custody. There had been talk of putting her into care elsewhere, but Magnus had kicked up such a fuss that he ended up getting his way.

“I mean, honestly,” he had fumed. “The girl has been dragged halfway across Europe, then spends several months with that sick bastard. We’re the only people she knows in Denmark. She’s damn well staying here.”

Nina found Rina in her room. The seven-year-old girl was sitting on a brand-new, red IKEA sofa surrounded by a handful of half-dressed Barbie dolls with hopelessly tangled hair. She was holding an old, broken mobile phone, punching its buttons with intense concentration.

I just have to get this over with, Nina thought, trying to catch Rina’s attention.

“Hey, Rina. I saw your mom today.”

Rina’s nails were bitten down to the pink, fleshy tips, and her fingers kept rhythmically pressing the phone buttons as if she were working on an especially long text message. Nina cautiously laid her hand over Rina’s.

“It worked out the way we thought it would, Rina. Your mother’s going to be in jail in Denmark for a while. After that you’ll both be going back to Ukraine.”

Nina had been thinking she would make the Ukraine part of it into something good and hopeful—freedom and the future waiting on the other side of Natasha’s prison sentence. But at the moment she couldn’t think of a single word that would make the Ukraine sound like anything other than what she imagined it would be for Natasha and Rina: a bleak, poverty-stricken no-man’s-land.

Natasha had never told Nina why she came to Denmark with her daughter, and Nina hadn’t asked. She could have been fleeing anything from poverty or political harassment to the mafia or prostitution. Natasha had her reasons, and it would take more than an upbeat voice to convince Rina that Ukraine was the upside to this story. The girl sat motionless, her head lowered. Only her hands, still clutching the phone, quivered slightly.

“I know it’s tough, Rina.”

Nina scooted a little closer. She wanted to pick the girl up and carry her out to the car, bring her home to her apartment in Østerbro, and take care of her until.… Well, yes, until when? Even if she mustered all her energy, Nina would be able to solve only a fraction of the girl’s problems right now. Her mother was gone, and nothing in the world could change that. Natasha’s sentence was five years, totally incomprehensible to a seven-year-old girl. And if her mother wound up in a Ukrainian jail, the time Rina spent in the children’s unit at the Coal-House Camp might end up being the nicest part of her childhood.

Nina pushed the thought to the back of her mind. If it got to that point, they would have to think of something. Rina wasn’t going to languish in a Ukrainian orphanage as long as Nina could prevent it. She cautiously tucked a long, soft lock of Rina’s hair behind the girl’s ear. Her blue eyes were wide open but seemed strangely dull and vacant. As if the girl wasn’t seeing anything outside her own mind.

“You’re going to live here at the center, Rina. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

The girl didn’t respond.

“You’ll live here and go to school here, just like you have been doing. Ingrid and the other adults here will take care of you and make sure you get to visit your Mom.” Ingrid was the tough, middle-aged ex-teacher who ran the care program for the camp’s underage residents. “But I’ll be here, too. I’ll come almost every day, I promise.”

Now Rina finally nodded, but Nina had trouble deciding if that was because she understood what Nina was saying or if she just wanted to be done with this conversation. The girl pulled back on the sofa, reached for one of the Barbie dolls, and started dressing the doll with her clumsy fingers.

“Okay,” Rina said. “That’s okay.”

THERE WASN’T MUCH going on in the camp this late in the afternoon. Most of the full-time staff were on their way home and would soon abandon the Coal-House Camp’s six hundred resident souls to their own personal darkness. A small group of men and women were queuing outside Admin, waiting to pick up meal vouchers for dinner, and from the family units on the other side of the former parade ground came the quiet hum of voices and the muffled cries of children. While the days at the camp were strangely stagnant and sleepy, the nights were filled with a wary restlessness. Dinner was served at 6 P.M., and after that the doors to the office were locked. The employees returned to civilization. Only a few nighttime guards remained to patrol the hallways and make sure the Pakistanis, Indians, and Iraqis didn’t kill each other overnight. The few single women hid, and families with children withdrew to their rooms behind locked doors with their TVs on loud enough to drown out the drunken cries of young men and their neighbors’ incessant haranguing and bickering.

In the afternoon, people waited for night.

Nina looked at her watch. 4:04 P.M. She just had time to stop by the clinic. She asked the carer on duty to be a little extra attentive to Rina, knowing full well that the other children housed in the children’s unit weren’t in much better shape. Then she quickly walked across the grounds and up the flagstone path to Ellen’s Place, the old, brick wing that housed the clinic and infirmary.

From the state of the waiting room, it was painfully clear that her and Magnus’s absence during the week-long trial had left gaps in the clinic’s defenses against chaos. Marie and Berit, the secretary and the other nurse, were both capable people, but running things on their own was an uphill job. Clearing away magazines, candy wrappers, and other debris came a poor second to registering complaints, monitoring sore throats and distressed mental states, and generally stemming the incoming tide of would-be patients, many of whom still had to leave dissatisfied because “the Doctor”—Magnus—wasn’t there to see them.

The door to the clinic itself was locked, so both Berit and Marie must have left already. There was a yellow Post-it note on the doorframe, written in a hurried, nearly illegible scrawl that didn’t seem to belong to either of them. Nina peered at the jumbled letters. It would seem that the family in Room 42 had asked for a doctor or a nurse to stop by.

She checked her watch again. 4:07 P.M. She had promised to buy Anton new soccer shoes on the way home. But if she scrapped any idea of catching up on her paperwork today, she could just fit in this one visit. She remembered Room 42 quite clearly. The family had arrived from Iran three months ago—the mother was a doctor herself, but at the Coal-House Camp that meant nothing. The past was erased, along with any pretense at skill, confidence, and independence. Nina had seen it happen many times before. Eventually, people could barely tie their own shoelaces.

The door to Room 42 was already ajar when she got there. A loud game show was flickering from the farthest corner of the dark room. Two pre-teens were glued to the screen, but the mother was sitting on the edge of the family’s bed, stroking her husband’s forehead. She looked up with a worried frown when she saw Nina standing in the doorway.

“Headache again,” she said, pointing at her husband who was lying down with his eyes closed, panting dramatically. “I think maybe meningitis.”

Nina pulled a chair over next to the husband and placed a hand on his forehead. Still no fever. The man’s wife had also summoned her the week before. That time she thought it was a brain tumor, but Magnus had said it was more likely a migraine.

Nina shook her head and cautiously took the woman’s hand. “It’s nothing serious. Please, don’t worry.”

The woman shook her head skeptically.

“Do you have the pills the doctor gave you? Did you take them?” Nina asked.

“Yes,” the man mumbled despondently. “I take them.”

Nina sat there for a bit. She could get a new job, she thought suddenly. A job that didn’t make her feel the way she felt right now. Mortal fear. That was what was wrong with him. Chronic anxiety that was turning into permanent state of panic. How could she be expected to treat that with a few platitudes and a couple of aspirins? It was wrong. No, it was more than wrong—it was reprehensible.

Nina forced a reassuring smile. “See you tomorrow, okay? Don’t worry. Everything is just fine.”

The woman didn’t respond, and Nina knew perfectly well why not. Her husband probably didn’t have meningitis, but apart from that, nothing was fine, or even remotely okay. While Nina went to buy soccer shoes for her son, night would soon be falling over the Coal-House Camp.

Nina tilted her head in a nod and shut the door a little too firmly behind her as she left.