The Boy in the Suitcase - By Lene Kaaberbol Page 0,17

stride to keep up.

“Nothing. Or almost nothing. Someone left him in a suitcase!”

Nina closed the door behind them and followed Allan as he strode towards his office. Jolly children’s drawings decorated the walls, and behind his computer sat a small gnome-like clown doll, obviously intended for the cheering up of young patients.

The clown would not serve them now. The suitcase boy hung limply in Allan’s arms, like one of Ida’s cast-off Raggedy Anns, thought Nina, with a familiar taste of metal in her mouth. It was her personal taste of fear. It always came to her when adrenalin rushed through her body, into every last cell of it, reminding her of the camps at Dadaab and Zwangheli and other hellholes in which she had lived and looked after the children of others. (And it reminded her of the day he died.)

Nina pushed away the thought as soon as it entered her mind and instead locked her focus on Allan and the boy. Allan had rolled the small, soft body gently onto the couch, his middle and index finger resting against the side of his neck. His face was alight with concentration, and she saw a single bead of sweat trickle down his throat and into the open neck of his white shirt. This was not the time to talk to him.

The sphygmomanometer sat on Alan’s desk, within handy reach, but the cuff was much too big for the boy’s thin arm. She found a smaller one and attached it. The child did not react to the highpitched whine, or to the pressure from the inflating cuff. 90/52. She turned the display so that the digital numbers were visible to Allan.

Allan frowned and slid his hand across the boy’s chest, setting the stethoscope against the smooth, white skin of the chest, and then, in a quick precise move, to the abdominal cavity. He then rolled the boy onto his side with a gentleness that, for a moment, caused a strange tender warmth in Nina’s own chest. He listened again, and finally let the boy slip down to his original position, resting on his back with his arms spread wide.

Still this disturbing lack of life, thought Nina. As if he were caught in some limbo, neither dead nor alive, simply a thing. Allan cautiously lifted one eyelid and shone his pen-sized flashlight at the boy’s pupil.

“He has been drugged,” he said. “I don’t know with what, but it doesn’t seem to be exactly life-threatening.”

“Should we give him naloxone?” asked Nina.

Allan shook his head.

“His respiration is okay. Blood pressure is a little on the low side, and he is somewhat dehydrated, but I think he will simply sleep off whatever it is and wake naturally. And in any case, we can’t give an antidote when we have no idea what the original substance was.”

Nina nodded slowly, dodging Allan’s gaze. She knew what he had to say next.

“You will of course take him to a hospital.”

“But you said he would wake on his own… .”

Allan gestured, indicating his collection of medical reference books.

“There’s a million drugs out there that someone could have given him, and I have no idea what is really wrong with him, nor do I have the facilities to do the proper tests. You simply have to take him to Hvidovre.”

Nina made no reply at first.

She had had so little time to look at the child. At first she had thought him to be barely three years old, but now, examining his face, she thought he was merely small for his age. Closer to four, perhaps. She touched his cheek gently, tracing the soft lines of the mouth. His hair was short and so fair it was nearly white, the skin parchment thin and almost bluish in the light streaming through the blinds.

“I don’t know where he’s from,” she said. “I don’t think he is Danish, and I know someone is looking for him. Someone who wants to … use him for something.”

Again, Allan frowned.

“Pedophilia?”

Nina shrugged, trying to recall as much as she could about the man who had been kicking at the locker. Huge. That was the main impression. Perhaps thirty years old, with hair so short it hardly left an impression of color. Brown, perhaps? Like the weatherinappropriate leather jacket. She tried to imagine the police issuing an APB and knew immediately that this description would match any number of large men. And she pictured the boy, alone in a hospital room, while some social worker or child care