The Boy in the Suitcase - By Lene Kaaberbol Page 0,18

specialist sat in the staff room filling out endless forms. Would they be able to protect the boy against the rage she had seen in the man’s eyes? Once he woke up, what would the Danish authorities do with him? Send him to some institution or refugee center like the Coal-House Camp? Nina suppressed a shudder. Natasha’s bastard of a fiancé had sauntered straight into the camp to pick up Rina without anyone even noticing she had gone. Far too many of the socalled unaccompanied minors simply disappeared from the camps after a few days. They were collected by their owners.

“I’m not letting them take him to the camps,” she snapped, glancing around the office. “Children vanish from them almost every day. He’s not going to any of those places.”

Finally she saw what she was looking for. Behind the matte glass doors of the cabinets by the door she made out the contours of Allan’s special emergency kit, which she knew to contain a couple of bags of IV fluid.

Last year, Allan had gone with her to attend an elderly man who had fled the Sandholm asylum center and was hiding with some relatives in the city. He had been due to be sent back to some refugee camp in Lebanon, but instead he was slumped on a mattress in a loft above an old tenement flat in Nørrebro. It was at least 115 degrees Fahrenheit up there under the rafters, and in other circumstances it might have been a rather trivial case of heat stroke. But because they didn’t have the range of equipment an ordinary ambulance would have had, they nearly lost him. Since then, the infusion sets had been a fixture in Allan’s emergency bag. As yet, he had not had to use them, as far as she knew. He wanted out. In fact, he had wanted out for a long time, but there was not exactly a waiting list for the unofficial post of MD to the illegal immigrants that the network struggled to aid, and Nina had hung on to his phone number. Just in case, she thought with a sardonic inner smile that didn’t quite reach her lips. Just in case she came across a three-year-old boy in a suitcase.

She grabbed the infusion set and the IV bag off the shelf and felt a sense of calm descend as the familiar equipment came into her hands. She had done this a thousand times. Torn the clear wrapping in a single jerk, freed the needle, uncoiled the plastic tubing. She cast around for something to place the bag on, so that it would be higher than the boy, and finally cleared a space for it on the shelf above the couch, where various toys resided. Then she took hold of the boy’s inanimate arm, exposed the veins under the white skin, and let the needle slide in.

Allan, standing next to her, shook his head and sighed.

“I’ll lose my license if they find out about this. If anything happens to him… .”

“They won’t. Why should they? And I’ll take good care of him,” said Nina. “He’ll be all right.”

Allan looked at her with a strange uncertainty Nina wasn’t sure she cared for. Then he turned to the boy again, this time completely removing the blanket, which until now had shrouded the boy’s lower body.

“Did you find him like this?” he asked.

Nina nodded.

“Would you be able to tell whether anything has been done to him?” she asked. “Whether he has been … abused?”

Allan gave a partial shrug and rolled the boy onto his side again, so that his back was turned to them. Nina again felt the sour metallic taste in her mouth, and turned to look out the window. There was a slight breeze now, and she could hear the leaves of the large chestnut tree outside rustle in the hot wind. Except for that, there was barely a sound. No voices, no cars, no children. People in Vedbæk obviously weren’t as noisy as those in the inner city, she thought, suddenly aware of the sweaty stickiness that made her T-shirt cling to her back.

Behind her, Allan spoke in carefully measured tones.

“I see no evidence of abuse, but one can never tell with complete certainty. People can be horribly inventive about such things.”

Allan pulled off the thin white plastic gloves with a snap, covered the boy to the waist once more, and gently stroked his forehead.

“This is my professional advice to you, Nina,” he said, looking