The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [102]
She wasn’t thrilled that she would have to wait for her titbit, but perhaps she sensed his curbed tension.
“Okay,” she said. “Mathias, you can show Anton that new game of yours.”
“Yessss!” said Mathias, and Anton brightened too. They scurried along the corridor to Mathias’s room.
“Thanks,” said Morten.
Birgit remained in her doorway, discretely trying to look past him and into the flat as he opened the door again, but he didn’t think she saw much before he closed it behind him.
He avoided the bloodstain and stepped across the milk and pee puddle. Glanced into the kitchen and the living room. No one there. Ida’s room was also deserted; she was with her classmate Anna this afternoon, he remembered. But in the bedroom a dirty T-shirt had been tossed across the bed. Nina’s T-shirt. She had been here.
He stood very still, trying to collect his chaotic thoughts. What had happened? The bloodstain was ominously large. It could not have come from some trivial injury like a cut finger. And pee—where did that come from? Vague memories of a forensic TV series rose in his mind. Something about traces of urine and feces because all muscles let go at the moment of death.
Moment of death. No.
No.
He fumbled for his mobile. He had to call the police.
Then he heard a faint sound. A heave, or a sobbing breath. He tore open the door to the tiny bathroom.
On the lid of the toilet sat a woman he had never seen before in his life. She looked a wreck. She had obviously been weeping hard, and there was a quality of surrender about her. Her shoulderlength fair hair had slipped from what looked to be an immaculate chignon, but even under these circumstances, there was an unconscious elegance to the slender neck and the long legs.
Morten stood there gaping.
“Where is Nina?” he asked.
The woman looked up at him. Her eyes were swollen with grief.
“Juz po wszystkim,” she said. And then in uncertain English, “Is over. Everything is all over.”
Morten’s pulse roared in his ears. Nina. What the hell had happened?
SHE WOKE BECAUSE she was drowning. She couldn’t breathe. Something wet, black and sticky clung to her mouth, nose, and eyes, and with each breath she tried to take, she drew in only crackling darkness. No air. There was no air.
Panic had already seized her body before she had come completely to her senses again. Her hands clawed purposelessly at the darkness in front of her and encountered something soft and heavy. A blanket, perhaps. She tried to pull it off her body, but it tangled around her shoulders and arms, and she struggled like a trapped diver trying to get back to the surface.
Her chest hurt now. And still the darkness clung to her face. She gasped for breath in hard short heaves, and some part of her brain registered a perfumed smell of roses. An omen of death, it seemed. The smell of roses and lilies always reminded her of burials. Finally, she freed one hand from the blanket and raised it to her face.
A plastic bag.
First she tried to rip it. Then to claw holes in the plastic with her fingers, so that she might breathe. Air. Everything in her was screaming for oxygen, and her lungs cramped painfully. Again, she clawed at the bag, and this time, something gave. The bag loosened enough so that she felt a touch of air.
Easy. Breathe slowly.
Her thoughts slipped and wandered, and she had to struggle to get a grip on them in the curious black and milky gray place that was her brain.
Someone had pulled a bag over her head. All she needed to do to be able to breathe again was pull it off. She reached above her head and yanked the bag all the way off, and finally, she could breathe freely, in long noisy gasps.
The darkness around her was still deep and black. For the first few dizzy seconds she was unsure whether she actually had her eyes open, and an absurd impulse led her to feel her eyelids, just to check.
“You