The Boy in the Suitcase - By Lene Kaaberbol Page 0,91

the first time he considered what the difference in their ages would mean in ten years, or twenty. When she turned fifty, he would be only just past his fortieth birthday. Did he really want to come home to a fifty-year-old woman then?

“Don’t be silly. I’m not going to kill her,” he said, wondering what the hell he was supposed to do with her if he didn’t. He shook off Barbara’s hand and stepped across the crumbled form. Where had the kid gone?

Barbara found him crouched next to the toilet, squeezed into the corner as if he was trying to push himself through the wall. A sound was coming from him now, a sort of squeaky whine, with every breath he took.

“But baby,” said Barbara, kneeling down in front of him. “We’re not going to hurt you!”

The child didn’t buy that particular lie anymore. He screwed his eyes shut and whined even more loudly.

“Make him be quiet,” said Jučas.

Barbara glanced at him.

“He’s just scared,” she said.

“Then give him some of that damn chocolate. Do you have any eyedrops left?”

“No,” she said. But he thought she might be lying.

“Stay here,” he said. “And keep the damn kid quiet!”

THE BOY-BITCH HADN’T stirred. He grabbed her shoulder bag, the only thing she had had with her apart from the child, and emptied it into the kitchen sink. Wallet, Kleenex, a fuzzy old roll of mints, car keys, two other sets of keys, and a dog-eared diary. No mobile. He took all the keys with him, and went quietly down the stairs to look for the red Fiat. He found it half a block away, hidden behind a big green-plastic container meant for recycling glass. On the backseat was a smelly blanket and two shopping bags, one containing kid’s clothes, the other full of apple cores and bread and beach toys. That was all. The boot proved equally uninteresting; there was a plastic crate full of starter cables, sprinkler fluid, an aerosol can of puncture-repair foam, and other first-aid items for unreliable cars, a bin liner that turned out to contain empty bottles, a pair of gumboots, and a flashlight.

He took the blanket and left the rest, and locked up the Fiat once more.

She didn’t have the money. He felt the certainty of it in his gut. And the other one, the blond one with the boobs, she hadn’t had it either. She would have told him. In the end, she would have told him.

Which meant only one thing.

He was now completely sure that the Dane had lied to him.

There were still a number of things he didn’t understand— what the boy-bitch was doing with the kid, for instance. And how and why the blond one was mixed up in it at all. But he knew enough. And he knew how he was going to make the Dane pay what was owed.

HE DROVE THE Mitsubishi onto the pavement and parked it right by the front door. Upstairs, Barbara had at least managed to extract the boy from the toilet. She was crouched next to him and had her arms around him, gently rocking him back and forth. It seemed to be working; he was quiet again.

The boy-bitch was still lying where he had dropped her. But she was breathing, he noticed.

“She’s fine,” he told Barbara. “I’m taking her down to the car.”

Barbara didn’t answer. She just looked at him, and her eyes were almost as wide and frightened as the boy’s.

“I’m doing this for you,” he said.

She nodded obediantly.

He rolled up the bitch’s limp body in the disgusting blanket and eased open the door with his hip. The stairwell was still deserted. What would he say if he met someone—she’s had a fall, we’re taking her to the hospital? But no one came. He maneuvered her into the back of the Mitsubishi and covered her completely with the blanket, then parked the car in a more legal and less noticeable spot. So far, so good.

When he got back to the flat, he could hear Barbara murmuring to the boy. In Polish, not Lithuanian.

“Stop that,” he said. “He doesn’t understand a word you’re saying.”

Jučas didn’t either, and he didn’t like it when Barbara spoke in her native language. It gave him a feeling that there was a part of her he couldn’t access.

When they got to Krakow, she would be speaking Polish with everyone, he suddenly realized. Everyone except him. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? But he hadn’t. He had only been thinking