The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [113]
(He would have died no matter what she had done.)
NINA ASKED THE policewoman who had driven her home to leave her by the front door. She was sore and tired and hurt, and being polite to a stranger in her home was entirely beyond her. Pretty much everything was beyond her right now.
She knew Morten was waiting. The policewoman had told her as much. He had been notified right away and was reportedly “very happy and thrilled to have her back safe and sound.”
Nina grimaced at the phrase as she took the first step up the stairs. No doubt Morten was relieved, but “thrilled to have her back” might be overstating it, and “happy” was not really a word that applied to their relationship right now. In fact, he looked anything but happy, confirming her worst fears.
He must have seen her arrive through the window, because he was waiting in the open doorway, arms crossed. Nina slowed her progress involuntarily.
“So there you are.”
His voice was toneless and barely more than a whisper.
Not angry, not miserable. Something else she couldn’t identify, and the look he gave her made her duck as if he had thrown something at her. She girded her tired loins and continued up the last few steps to the landing.
She was so close that they were nearly touching, and she had to fight back an impulse to put her face against his neck in the little hollow place by his collarbone.
“May I come in?”
She tried to make her voice sound casual and self-assured, but her throat was closing into the tight and tender knot that usually led to tears. She fought them. She didn’t want to cry now; she needed to be the one to comfort him. She raised her head to catch his eyes, and in his gaze she saw something huge and dark come unstuck. His chest heaved in a single sob, then he grabbed the back of her head with both hands and drew her close.
Helplessness.
That was what she heard in his voice, and seen in his eyes. The total and abject feeling of powerlessness that she knew seized him when something took her away from him.
“Don’t,” he said, holding her so tightly that it hurt, “don’t ever do this again.”
SEPTEMBER
THERE WAS FLOUR all over the kitchen. Flour on the kitchen table, flour on the floor, greasy doughy flour on one tap, and even a few floury footprints in the hallway.
“What are you doing?” asked Morten, putting down his laptop bag.
“Making pasta!” said Anton enthusiastically, holding aloft a yellow-white floury strip of dough.
God help us, he thought. Nina must be having one of her irregular attacks of domesticity. And it was typical of her that she couldn’t just buy a package of cake mix and have done with it. He still shuddered to recall the side of organic beef that had appeared in the kitchen one day. The flat had looked like a slaughterhouse for the better part of twenty-four hours while Nina carved, filleted, chopped, packaged, and froze unsightly bits of bullock—or attempted to, because in the end they had to persuade his sister to take most of it. She lived in Greve and had an extra freezer in the shed.
Now here she was, hectic spots in her cheeks, running ravioli through a pasta machine he had no idea they possessed.
“Good job,” he said absently to Anton.
“Hey you,” said Nina. “What did they say?”
“Esben does it this time. But I’ve promised to take his next shift. I have to leave on the twenty-third.”
Normally, his job required him to do a two-week stint on the rigs in the North Sea every six weeks, but this time he hadn’t wanted to go. What he really wanted was for all of them to go on holiday. He had already managed to swap his way to a week’s leave from the mud-logging. But Nina refused.
“What I need is a big dose of normal everyday life,” she had said.
He had finally managed to drag her to the clinic so that Magnus could look at her. Magnus had stitched up the cut above her hairline, probed her battered skull with his fingers, and sent her on to the National for further check-ups.
“At the very least, you are concussed,” he had said, shining his penlight into her eyes. “And you know as