Lene Kaaberbol - Death of a Nightingale

Mikael handed her the telephone. “He wants to speak with you.”

She took the phone silently.

“You know Rina,” said Søren. His voice sounded calm, almost as if the world hadn’t exploded around them. “Where would she go? Where would she think of going?”

Nina thought desperately. “The Coal-House Camp, maybe. One of the policemen out there was kind enough to point out that it was where her mother would look for her first.”

“Okay. How would she get out there? Does she know how to take the bus?”

“Maybe. She doesn’t know her way around the city as such, but she knows the right bus number.”

“Would she talk to strangers? Ask for help?”

“I don’t think so. You’ve met her. She barely speaks to people she’s known for years.”

“Other places?”

Nina tried to imagine Rina’s mental map of Denmark. Where had she actually been? Not a whole lot of places other than the camp.

“Vestre Prison. We visited her mother there. But she knows Natasha isn’t there anymore. Michael Vestergaard’s house, of course. Hørsholm. It’s close to Hørsholm.”

“I know. Other places?”

“Not a lot. Tivoli, that kind of place. The National Aquarium. I think they once did a project about fish with the Coal-House children. I don’t know!”

“That’s fine. That’s a good start.” She could hear the professional, calming tone she herself had often used. Praise made people relax—and it worked on her too, even though she knew perfectly well why she was being praised.

“What will you do?” she asked.

“We’ll check the places you have given us, and the routes there, focusing primarily on the camp and Hørsholm. We’ll send people out to look in nearby areas too—garden sheds, tree houses, that kind of thing. Does she have any money?”

“I think so. They get an allowance. Natasha has sent her a little as well, and she doesn’t really use it.”

“And she doesn’t have a cell phone other than the old broken one?”

“No.”

“Too bad.”

“Søren.”

“Yes?”

“She used your telephone.”

“Mine?”

“Yes, the one in the living room. I thought she was just dialing randomly; she said the old one didn’t work anymore. The policeman had said it was broken. I don’t know if it was you or … or your colleague she meant.”

“Okay.”

“I thought she just wanted to speak with her father, but what if that wasn’t what it was? What if she called someone? In real life, I mean.”

“Let me talk to Nielsen,” he said, and she handed the telephone back to the Cud-Chewer.

Nina zipped up her jacket. Luckily, she could open and close it with her left hand.

“Hello—where are you going?” asked the Cud-Chewer.

“I’m going to look for her in the neighborhood,” she said through clenched teeth. “She may not have been able to get very far.”

“Wait.” Magnus had followed her. “Wait a second, Nina. We can’t just run around randomly.”

“It’s urgent,” she said.

“Yes, but we need to be a bit systematic. You go this way”—he pointed toward Kløverprisvej—“and I’ll go this way. We’ll meet again at the corner in half an hour.”

Nina nodded, desperate to get started. Rina had run away before; they had done this before. And we found her then, she told herself. We will this time too!

She had spoken to two neighbors and looked in three garages when the realization hit her. You have reached Anna and Hans Henrik Olesen. We can’t come to the phone now … Because of the male voice she hadn’t put two and two together. But the wife’s name was Anna. Like Neighbor Anna. The Anna she had met, the Anna who had taken such loving care of Rina the night Natasha had decided to try to kill her fiancé.

“Olesen, that’s what she was called,” she said aloud to herself.

On the other side of the street, going in the direction of Hvidovrevej and Damhusdalen, was a taxi. The green FREE sign shone like a signal in the dusky gloom, and before she had time to think, she had leaped into the road with one arm in the air.

Sometimes when you have to do a really hard thing, you can’t let yourself think. No looking down and discovering how deep the drop is beneath your feet, and no looking ahead either. You balance on a wire, and it can be ten or a hundred meters long. It doesn’t matter, because you can’t run anyway, and you can’t jump the last bit to make it across the abyss. You can’t cheat. All you can do is place one foot in front of the other. One step at a time.

Natasha was kneeling in the snow between the dense bushes, gazing out at the parking lot. The afternoon darkness had turned the snow grey. The sky above her was dark blue with faint, glowing streaks of light in the west, and she could feel the temperature dropping in the air around her, burning her fingers and toes.

She hadn’t made a real plan. She knew it, but the simplicity of her idea still gave her a kind of solace, because she only needed two minutes. Maybe less.

One hand rested lightly on the tire iron from the car’s trunk. It was heavy enough. More than heavy enough, she thought. And the wait would soon be over.

A group of half-grown boys crossed the farthest end of the parking lot. They ducked in turns, shoveling little piles of frosty snow together with clumsy mittens and throwing loose handfuls of it at one another in fun. The snow was probably too powdery for real snowballs. The sound of their shouting and laughter cut through the clear air, but besides that there was no sound except the faint rush of cars on the distant main road. Kastrup Fort, with its old fortifications and dungeons, lay deserted and empty in the winter dusk.

She knew the place from her time with Michael. He liked to bring them here when the weather was good, her and Katerina. There was a playground at the bottom of the grounds and a few beat-up, green-painted toilets with lots of graffiti. A bit higher up lay the restaurant with the large green clover lawn and the view over the ramparts, where weeds grew dense and wide-leaved in the summer and smelled sharp and sweet at the same time.

Michael and Katerina had played hide-and-seek on the steep stairs and labyrinthine paths that wound through the thicket of whitethorn and bramble on their way to the top of the fort. Once there had been lookouts here, soldiers and cannons. Now only bare cement circles were left. Natasha knew that it would be a good place to meet your enemies, exactly as it had been in the past. There were only two real bridges over the moat, but today that didn’t matter, because the moat was frozen and covered with snow, so she could theoretically disappear in any direction. Theoretically. Whether she got away or not was of little importance. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other.

THE CAR ROLLEDinto the parking lot ten minutes before the agreed-upon time. Natasha recognized it from the woods behind the Coal-House Camp, long and black and shiny, like a hearse. The license plates were no longer Ukrainian but Danish, she noticed. The Witch might be a queen in Kiev, but here in Bacon Land, her power was reduced, and she had to hide like the freak that she really was. Natasha felt a fleeting sense of cold triumph as she crouched even lower behind the cover of the bushes. She hoped that her tracks in the snow wouldn’t be too visible in the dusk and that the man and woman in the car would not be too on their guard.

A broad, slightly hunched figure got out and remained standing for a long moment with his hands on the car roof, looking around. She knew exactly what he could see because she had paced the parking lot herself several times: On one side, naked trees and dense shrubbery sloping down to a snow-covered moat. On the other, the old dungeon which Michael had said once held ammunition for the fort’s four cannons. The stairs up to the meeting place she had suggested were narrow and icy, and as the man took the first step, he slipped and had to grip the steel railing in order not to fall.