The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [79]
She felt too much, and she knew it. Especially where the children were concerned, her skin felt tender and brittle, like the thin, pink, parchment-like new growth that spread to cover healing wounds. It had been bad after Ida’s birth, but when Anton arrived, her sensitivity to the children of the Coal-House Camp had taken on monstrous proportions. It was her imagination, of course, but sometimes it felt as if their gazes clung to her, spotting her vulnerablity, tearing through her pitiful defenses and into her soul.
Unaccompanied children would usually be older than the boy from the suitcase, thought Nina, from about ten years of age and up. Often, the staff would have time to form only the most fleeting of impressions. Some of them, particularly the Eastern European ones, had been sold by their parents and trained by backers to beg and steal, and they were instructed to escape the refugee centers at the first opportunity if they were picked up on the streets. The moment their mobiles rang, they were off on the next suburban train, disappearing back into the metropolitan underworld they had come from. Other children might continue on to Sweden or England, where relatives awaited. Still others were obviously alone in the world, brought to Denmark for the sole purpose of making money for their owners. All in all, more than seventy percent would disappear from the camps without anyone ever really knowing what became of them.
But the suitcase boy was surely too young to be of use to even the most cynical gang of thieves. Might he be some kind of hostage? Or was he meant to be part of a social security scam? That had happened before, particularly in the UK, she had heard.
He was beautiful, thought Nina suddenly. She didn’t know how much that meant among pedophiles, but somehow it made him seem more vulnerable. It was all too easy to imagine that some pervert bastard somewhere had ordered a small European boy for a night’s pleasure. Or several nights. She looked at the boy standing in front of her with his T-shirt back to front and the new sandals carefully strapped to his small, narrow feet, and the thought of him sharing a bed with some unknown adult man was sickening and utterly unbearable.
Nina forced herself to smile at him.
Where would he end up if she delivered him to the police? Some orphanage in Lithuania? Or perhaps with a relative who would merely sell him again to the highest bidder? Perhaps with a crewcut, bear-shouldered stepfather, whose huge hands had beaten Karin to death? Nina felt a shudder deep in her abdomen. She had to know more. She had to know.
She pushed open the changing-room door and took the boy’s hand in a firm grip. She must find them some breakfast, and then work out which church might be the one the girl from Helgolandsgade had meant when she talked about the Sacred Heart.
THE ADDRESS WAS in Denmark. Naturally. Sigita didn’t know why she had assumed that the Dane lived in Lithuania. She stared down at the carefully penned block capitals and wondered what to do.
Gužas had called half an hour before Julija did. He wanted to know whether she had changed her mind about the TV appeal, and whether there had been any attempt at contact from the abductors. She had told him no. And she had said nothing about Julija and the Dane.
I’ll have to go to Denmark, she thought.