The Boy in the Suitcase - By Lene Kaaberbol Page 0,36

led to the bedroom, and although the distance couldn’t be great, it sounded oddly muffled, as if someone had dropped it into a bucket. A quick glance assured her that the boy’s small straight form was still standing motionless by the kitchen door. She looked at the phone again. 8:28.

The numbers on the pale blue display had a calming effect on her. She slid the phone back into her pocket and pushed open the bedroom door.

Karin lay curled on the bed, with her forehead resting against her knees, as though she had been practicing some advanced form of yoga. But Nina saw it the second the image was processed against her retina.

Death.

There was a peculiar quality about dead people. Little things that seemed insignificant on their own, but added up to an umistakable impact, so that Nina was never in any doubt when she encountered it. The slight out-turned wrist. The leg that had slipped limply from its orignal position, and the head resting much too heavily against the mattress.

Nina felt the first rush from her flight instinct. She forced herself to approach the bed, while new details flooded her senses. Karin’s fair hair spread around her head like a flaxen halo mixed with red and dark brown nuances. The sheet beneath her had soaked up far too much blood, and when Nina carefully turned Karin’s upper body, Karin’s mouth opened, and vomit mixed with blood sloshed over her lower lip and ran down her chin and into the soft folds of her throat. Two of her teeth were missing, and there was red and purple bruising on her face and neck. A lot of the blood seemed to come from a wound above the hairline, at her left temple, and when Nina probed it cautiously, the skull gave beneath her fingers, too soft and flat. Death had not been instantaneous, thought Nina. She had had time to curl up here, like a wounded animal that left the herd to die alone.

And now. So much blood.

She didn’t mind blood, she reminded herself soothingly. She was okay with it, had, as a matter of fact, been one of the most steadfast at nursing school when it came to dealing with bodily fluids. (Since that day twenty-three years ago she had become very good at it. She had decided to become good at it, and it had worked.)

Nina stepped back from the bed and managed to twist to one side before she threw up, in short, painful heaves. She had eaten nothing since this morning, and all that sploshed onto the clean wooden floor was dark yellow gall and grayish water.

It was then she heard the scream. A shrill, heart-rending note of terror, like the scream you hear in the night when a hare is caught by the fox.

SIGITA WAS SITTING on the stone steps by the river, waiting for the nausea and headache to subside enough so she could walk on. Her good hand was clenched around her mobile. It had to ring. It had to ring so that she would know Mikas was all right. Or so she knew at least he wasn’t what Gužas called the second category; those who were never found.

No. Don’t even think it. Don’t think about what strangers might do to the perfect, tiny body, don’t let the thought in even for a second. It would only make it real. It would break her, it would tear her open and rip out her heart so that she wouldn’t be able to breathe, let alone act. She clung to the phone like an exhausted swimmer to a buoy.

It didn’t ring. In the end she pressed a number herself. Mrs. Mažekienė’s.

“Mrs. Mažekienė. The man who took Mikas—what did he look like?”

The old woman’s confusion was obvious, even over the phone.

“Look like? But it was his father.”

“No, Mrs. Mažekienė. It wasn’t. Darius is still in Germany.”

There was a long silence.

“Mrs. Mažekienė?”

“Well, I did think that he must have gained some weight. He looked bigger than I remembered.”

“How big?”

“I don’t know … big and tall, now that I think about it. And hardly any hair, the way it had been cropped. But that’s all the rage these days, isn’t it?”

“Why did you think it was Mikas’s father, then?”

“The car looked like his. And who else would be going off with the boy?”

Sigita bit down hard on her lip to avoid saying something unforgiveable. She is just an old woman, she told herself. She didn’t do it on purpose. But