Lene Kaaberbol - Invisible Murder

“Welcome to my humble abode,” he chimed with a wan smile.

Nina smiled back, setting her grocery bag of fresh supplies—a loaf of bread, cola, and oatmeal—on the floor in the hallway.

“How bad is it?”

Peter sighed. “Well, I think it’s a little better,” he replied evasively. “I haven’t thrown up in over an hour, but I’m just completely wasted.”

Nina nodded.

“Well, let’s look on the bright side. Did you eat or drink anything when you were at the house?”

“Oh, it’s hardly a house. It’s an old auto mechanic’s shop. But, no. I don’t think I did. A cup of tea at the most.”

“Good. Then I don’t think it’s food poisoning. It sounds more like a stomach virus. They can be ridiculously contagious.”

Peter turned around and slowly made his way into the sparsely furnished living room, where he collapsed onto a faded sofa. A bucket and mop were in position next to him, and on a low table he had a stack of hand towels, a roll of paper towels, and a pitcher of water.

“I’m really sorry I called you like that,” he said. “But at one point I just got so … scared. I damn nearly blacked out when I tried to stand up, and I really freaked that something was seriously wrong. But now I risk infecting you, too.”

Nina shook her head dismissively.

“You help so many people, Peter. If for once you need someone to cool your fevered brow for you, that’s only fair.”

She quickly gathered up the used towels and located the washing machine in the bathroom. There wasn’t much that you could say about stomach bugs that was good, but at least it usually cleared up on its own.

“Have you had any diarrhea?”

“Not yet.”

“Fever?”

Nina snapped the washing machine closed and set it on hot. Peter responded something or other from the living room, but she had to go back in to hear what he said. He was lying back with his eyes closed and a limp hand resting on his forehead.

“No, no fever,” he repeated. “But blood. There was a little blood in my vomit.”

Nina was puzzled. Blood didn’t necessarily mean anything. It could have come from some small lesion in his esophagus or pharynx. It could easily happen if the vomiting was intense. And since he was improving.…

“How long have you been sick?”

Nina looked around the room. There were two empty 1.5-liter Coke bottles on top of the TV. Peter had amassed a whole little pile of mail on the shelf over by the door without apparently having had the strength to open it.

“Since last night,” he said with an uneasy, drawn out sigh. “I was supposed to head out to Valby with fresh supplies today.”

He nodded tiredly toward a couple big bags in the corner of the living room.

“Isn’t that a lot of shopping for one person?” Nina asked, recognizing an all too familiar sense of anxiety starting to move around somewhere in her stomach.

“Yes, plus now I’ve gone and drunk all the Coke myself,” Peter said in a voice that sounded a little choked up. “But they called me again after I talked to you. More people are sick now. They were worried about the little ones. The kids. So I bought a lot. They also called while I was sick, I could see. But I just wasn’t up to answering. I was throwing up nonstop.”

Peter sounded almost ashamed now, and Nina’s mild flutter of concern picked up. What if she were mistaken? Young children could get very sick very fast, and a group of Roma in Valby wouldn’t have any idea what to do here in Denmark if something went seriously wrong. Peter was probably their only Danish contact, apart from the bloodsuckers who were no doubt charging the group an arm and a leg for “rent” and other “extras” while they were in the country.

Nina quickly glanced at her watch. It was only 7:32 P.M.

T HE OLD GARAGEsat in a long, narrow lot between a barn-like production shed with bright-red corrugated steel walls and a low, white building with a peeling sign that filled most of its façade—Bækgaard Industrial Technology. There were no signs of life in either of the neighboring buildings, but then it was well after closing time, Nina thought. 7:57 P.M. to be precise.

She got out of the car. The breeze had picked up. Small, strong gusts seemed to be coming from all directions at once, blowing cold cascades of rain at her. You could hear the faint whoosh of cars on the old southbound highway. A solitary blackbird sang softly and melodically from its perch in a stubborn elder bush that had found a way up through the cracked slabs of concrete right where they met the boundary wall. Apart from that, the silence outside the garage was total.

Nina picked up the bags of groceries and the first aid kit she kept in the car and quickly crossed the little parking lot in front of the garage doors.

They must have seen her coming.

The door to the garage was already ajar before she had a chance to knock, and a youngish man in a worn turquoise sweater was eying her suspiciously.

From the darkness behind him now came the sounds of muffled voices, children crying, and women shushing the littlest ones in soft voices.

“I am a nurse,” said Nina in careful English, enunciating each word slowly and clearly while pointing to her first aid kit with its discrete red cross on the white background. “Peter told me to come.”

The man, joined now by a slightly older, unshaven man in baggy sweatpants and shoes flopping open at the toes, peered at her skeptically. The older one said something that made the one in turquoise shrug. Nina peered up at the cloudy gray sky as she waited for the two men to reach some sort of consensus. It was by no means clear that they had understood what she had said, and even more doubtful whether they recognized Peter’s name. A child cried weakly in short bursts somewhere in the darkness. Nina fidgeted uneasily and gave the man a stern look.

“Please, if the child is sick.…”

Again the older man said something to someone in the shop, a couple of voices replied, and after yet another uncertain glance at Nina, both the one in turquoise and the older man stepped aside and let her into the semidarkness.

At first she couldn’t see much. The only source of light in the garage was a single fluorescent tube at the very back, which cast a weak bluish gleam over the room. The rest of the light fixtures hung empty under the rafters in the ceiling.

The older of the two men blurted out some kind of warning and pushed Nina a little to the side on the way in. She had been about to step into a splintered hole in the rotten plywood boards that covered the long inspection pit, which ran from the doors in front toward the rear wall. There were mattresses and sleeping bags on either side of the pit, and the heavy odor of cigarettes and too many people in too little space had mixed with the original smell of oil and rusty iron.

There were people everywhere. At least that was how it looked once Nina’s eyes finally adjusted to the dim light. Some of them were curled up on mattresses and seemed to have gone to bed early. Others were sitting in small groups on the floor, talking and smoking. The ends of cigarettes glowed orangey-yellow among the men. And they were mostly men. Nina counted about twenty of various ages. There were a handful of women and, Nina guessed, a small number of children. It was hard to see exactly how many people were sleeping between all the sleeping bags, mattresses, and backpacks. Peter had said there were about fifty people living in the shop, the rest were probably still downtown begging, collecting bottles, selling flowers, or running shell games among the crowds on the pedestrian streets.