The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [103]
It helped.
The words sounded real in the darkness, and Nina raised herself up on one elbow and turned her head a little. It hurt to move. Particularly one side of her face and head, which felt heavy and tender at the same time. Something wet and sticky lay like plastic wrap over her cheekbone and throat. Blood, she thought dispassionately, and recalled how the man from the railway station had stormed into the flat, gun in hand. She felt vaguely surprised that he hadn’t killed her then, on the hallway floor. But for some reason, he must have decided to wait.
She turned her head the other way, and for the first time noted a slim crack of light in the middle of all the darkness. That, and a low, persistent whine, like that of a trapped animal.
Mikas.
She knew right away that it was him, but his crying was so muted that it sounded as if it was being transmitted to her from another planet. Where was he?
Nina fumbled with one hand in front of her, and came up against a smooth cool glassy surface. A car window. She was in the back of a van, she thought. The floor beneath her was covered with some kind of felt, prickly and new under her hands. She felt her way along the side of the van until her fingers closed around some kind of wire mesh. A dog barrier? Her eyes were getting used to the darkness, and she could just make out a seam of light around what looked like garage doors. A carpark or a garage, she thought, picking up the oily smell of tires and fuel. She had no sense that the man was here, but the sound of Mikas’s crying leaked back to her through the mesh.
He was afraid.
“Mikas!”
Nina listened in the darkness. Waves of nausea rolled over her, and her tongue felt huge and shapeless when she tried to talk.
She called again, shaking the mesh testingly.
“Mikas, don’t be scared. I’m right here.”
She reminded herself that he wouldn’t understand, but she hoped the sound of her voice would at least reassure him that he was not alone. Perhaps he did actually recognize it. He was silent for a few moments, as if listening. Then the faint, toneless weeping continued.
She got onto her knees and felt along the bottom of the car, probing and sliding her fingers into every space and crevice she encountered. A flattened ring caught her interest. She pulled at it, and felt the lining beneath her shift and move. There was a hatch beneath her, and she suddenly realized that this was the kind of car that had a spare wheel embedded in the bottom of the cargo space. She managed to pull back the lining and open the hatch, and there, beside the spare, was the folded plastic package she was hoping for. The car’s tool set.
She felt a rush of triumph. If the man from the train station thought she was just going to lie there and die with a badly tied shopping bag over her head, he was much mistaken. And he was also mistaken if he thought locking her in the back of a van would keep her captive much longer. Nina felt a pang of contempt mixing with the fury that was growing in her belly. Weren’t they all like that? The vultures that fed on the flesh of the weak. The pedophiles, the rapists, the pimps. All the damned lowlifes of this world. This was what they were really like. Such stupid little people.
This man was no exception. He wasn’t getting Mikas. And he wasn’t getting her.
She drew a wrench from the package and hefted it. She didn’t know where the man had gone, but leaving Mikas here presumably meant he was coming back. The boy was what he had come for. The property he had come to reclaim. Smashing the window might be too risky, and too noisy. Instead, she made her way back to the mesh. The screws that fastened it to the car were easy to find even in the dark, and in the tool kit was a screwdriver that was a close-enough match.
Suddenly, light flooded the garage outside the van, and she instinctively cowered to the floor. She thought she heard voices. If help was within reach, she ought to bang and kick the sides of the van; but somehow, she didn’t think that whoever was out there