The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [112]
Still further down came the baby pictures of Ida and Anton. She and Morten had sent them out like picture postcards of holiday attractions, post-partum snapshots of rather purplish-looking wrinkled little creatures, supplemented by tiny black fingerprints.
My life is hanging here, thought Nina, and has been stuck to this door year after year, alongside pictures of nephews and nieces, dental appointments and holiday postcards. Here, where she might look at it every day if she wanted to.
A hodgepodge of feelings assaulted her, a sticky dark mixture of loss, grief, self-hatred, and guilt. It would take time to sort it out, more time than she had at the moment. She switched off the lights. Closed the door and heard the electronic lock click. As the sirens came closer, she plopped herself down on the front steps to wait. She really ought to go check on Jan Marquart, but right now she couldn’t contemplate looking at him. It wasn’t his hands that had beaten Karin to death, but he had paid the man who had done it. Karin’s fears had been well-founded.
Her head hurt like hell, and she knew she probably should be hospitalized, but she just wanted to go home. At long last, and if at all possible. She had washed her arms and hands as best she could, short of soaking them in a tub for hours, but despite her scrubbing, she could still feel the Lithuanian’s blood as a stickiness between her fingers and under her nails.
She hadn’t been scared. Or not of him, at any rate.
He had been lying in a pool of blood that grew bigger and bigger around his head. He hadn’t moved of his own volition, but faint spasms went through the big body, as though he were cold, and seeing him like that made it hard to feel anything except pity. That was how he looked—pitiful.
When she rolled him away from the woman, she had seen at once how the blood spurted in rhythmic jets. In that second, she knew he was dying. Yet she still instinctively knelt next to him, sticking two fingers into the messy neck wound. She had been able to feel the rubbery toughness of the torn artery, but although she tried to clamp it, blood still bubbled and spurted around her fingers, in a hot and uncontrollable flow.
The man had looked at her with a gaze already distant and milky. As if somene had drawn a curtain. She knew that look. She had seen it before. Of course she had. Nurses saw people die.
Yet this was different.
The smell of hot blood and the sticky, scarlet flow of it down her arms dizzied her.
(Don’t let go of time, Nina. Stay awake. Don’t forget time again.)
She’d shaken her head irritably and tried to catch the man’s gaze once more. There was something she needed to know.
“Did you kill her?”
The man blinked, and his breath sounded wet and soggy. Perhaps the trachea had also been damaged? He wasn’t looking at her, but she couldn’t tell whether he had heard her or not.
“Karin. The woman in the summerhouse. Did you kill her?”
His lips parted, but it could be anything from a snarl of pain to an attempt at speech. His eyes were glazed, like dark dry rocks on a beach. He hadn’t answered her. And yet she felt completely certain.
I could let him die now, she thought, looking down at her own hands. I could just let go and stop trying. He killed Karin, and he does not deserve any better.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she slid her fingers further into the wound. Perhaps, if she got a better grip, if she squeezed harder … she was using both hands now, but blood still gushed up her forearms. And when it finally did ease off, it was not because she had succeeded in stemming it. It was because there was nothing left to pump.
The sternum heaved towards her, then fell in a sudden collapse of breath. She stayed as she was for a while, fingers still uselessly clutching, and an ache of ancient grief in her chest.
She would not have been able to save him no matter what she had done, she thought, and as the knowledge hit her, it eased a deeper