Lene Kaaberbol - Invisible Murder

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.