“I don’t know.” Nina considered. “If she was in contact with anyone while she was serving her sentence, then Vestre Prison must know. While she was here … Of course, Natasha spoke on the phone now and then, but I think it was mostly with Michael Vestergaard or perhaps with Anna. In English, at least, and in the bit of broken Danish she knew.”
“You haven’t heard her speaking Ukrainian with anyone?”
“I don’t think so. All I know is that she was terrified of being sent back. Most people here are, but with Natasha it was … unusually evident. And she was right to be afraid.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think it’s pretty obvious now. Someone is after Rina and her.”
Heide gave a little, irritated shake of her head, causing her gold earrings to dance. “Not much is obvious about this,” she said.
“We can at least agree that Rina is in danger,” said Nina. “What are you planning to do to protect her?”
Heide looked at her coolly. “It wasn’t the girl who was gassed,” she said. “It was the people trying to protect her. It appears as if it is pretty risky to stand between Natasha and her daughter.”
“Damn it. How many times do I need to say it? It wasn’t Natasha.”
Easy, easy, Nina told herself. She knew that swearing and yelling would not make this calmly collected woman listen any better to her—on the contrary.
“I think we’re done,” said the deputy chief inspector. “At least for now. If you remember other contacts Natasha may have had, we’d very much like to know, and we will naturally need to ask for a formal statement at some point.”
“So you’re not planning to do anything?”
“We have two colleagues in the hospital right now,” said Heide. “One of them is in critical condition. You may be sure that we are planning to ‘do something.’ ”
Nina’s stomach hurt. It was perfectly clear that Heide’s priority was the hunt for the gas man and Natasha—not Rina’s safety.
Veng had gotten up, a clear sign that Nina was supposed to do the same. He handed her a single sheet of paper. Nina glanced down at it automatically.
Victim support, she read. If you have been the victim of violence, rape, a break-in, robbery, an accident, etc., it is natural and completely normal if you experience reactions such as feelings of unreality or loss of control, the inability to act, hyperactivity, emptiness, memory loss, fear of being alone, fear of recurrence, stomach pain, an elevated heart rate, difficulty sleeping, nightmares, guilt, despair.
“They are very good,” he said. “And you are welcome to contact them.”
Nina snapped.
“What the hell makes you think,” she said in her most glacial voice, “that I am anybody’s victim?”
Natasha had parked the car in the forest on the other side of the camp this time. The view of the children’s barrack wasn’t quite as good—the depot shacks were in the way—but there were still searching figures with lights and dogs in the woods around her former hideout. The snow had finally stopped falling. It covered the roadblocks and the cars and created an almost unbroken surface between the fence and the barracks, more orange than white because of the sodium vapor in the camp’s streetlights. She couldn’t see Katerina or Nina anywhere. Of course not. It had to be at least at least ten degrees below zero, and it was only 4:30 in the morning. She rubbed her tired eyes. It was useless. Even if she did see Katerina, what was she going to do? Freezing to death was about the only thing she could accomplish by remaining here, if someone didn’t spot her and catch her first. It was unwise, but she couldn’t help herself.
When she realized that the nurse had saved Katerina from the Witch, Natasha had felt a relief and a gratitude so powerful that the darkness around her spun dizzyingly as if she had drunk too many of Robbie’s whiskey shots. The relief was still there, but the gratitude was receding. On the other side of the fence and the sodium lights and the police barricades, that skinny Danish woman was lying with her arms around Natasha’s child, and although she knew that it was neither reasonable nor sensible, Natasha had never for a second been as jealous of the women in Pavel’s life as she was of Nina right now.
YOU’RE TOO CLINGY with that child, Pavel had said. He had imagined that they would go on vacation together, just the two of them, maybe to Krim, or why not abroad? Why not Berlin? He spoke the language; there was so much he could show her. Or Paris or London if she preferred.
Seventeen-year-old Natasha would have been beyond thrilled. This was precisely the world she had hoped would be waiting out there once she had escaped from Kurakhovo. Nineteen-year-old Natasha, however, would rather sit on the grass in the park and stop Katerina when she tried to put ants or ladybugs in her soft little mouth. Kiev was enough. The apartment, Pavel, Katerina—why would she need anything else? Occasionally she had agreed to hire a babysitter so they could go to a restaurant, but she would be restless the whole time, constantly remembering something she had to call and tell the young sitter. It was someone Pavel knew. He said she was studying medicine and wanted to earn a little cash. Natasha would have worried less, she thought, if there had been a more grandparent-like person available, but Pavel’s mother had died several years ago, and it was too far from Kurakhovo for her mother to come for a single evening.
Gradually he stopped asking. If that was how it was going to be, he said, then he wanted to hear no complaints if he went out on his own. That was when her jealousy had crept up on her. She sniffed him like a dog when he came home and tried to smell where he had been. She looked at his cell phone when he was in the bath and found a lot of unknown numbers and messages from people she had never heard of. Some of them were women, and she noted every female name. She turned out his pockets meticulously before she did the wash. And she couldn’t help asking, “Who is the Anna you call so often?”
He looked astonished. “Anna? How do you know that?”
“Who is she?” she repeated.
“My God,” he said and laughed. “Now you’re being silly. It’s my mother’s old nanny. She’s almost eighty, and she lives in Denmark. See for yourself.” He showed her the number and then had to explain, and she was embarrassed and really did feel silly and stupid because she hadn’t known that there was a difference between the numbers abroad and the ones in Ukraine. But how was she to know? She had never known anyone who lived abroad.
“Why did your mother have a nanny from Denmark?” she asked.
“It’s a bit complicated,” he said. “Everything was complicated then—Poles, Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, Galicia was one big mess, and nobody knew what would happen from one day to the next. Anna ended up in Copenhagen and got married there. But Mother never forgot Anna, and they kept on writing to each other for many years, even back when half their letters were snatched up by the censors. I’ve visited her several times, and, yes, I call her now and then to hear how she is doing. I care a great deal about her, in fact.”
Nina put her arms around his neck. “That’s okay,” she said. “You are allowed to care for almost eighty-year-old ladies. Just as long as you love me the most.”
“Silly thing,” he said. He pulled her close, exactly hard enough that she knew he wanted to make love to her, and a powerful surge of heat exploded somewhere under her belly button, shot downward and then spread up to her breasts and neck. She gasped, and he laughed and let his hands slide down to cup her buttocks. They never made it to the bed.
IT WAS BECAUSE of Anna that she had chosen Denmark later, when all the bad things happened. When Pavel was dead, and Katerina and she could no longer be in Ukraine. Denmark was the only other country that Natasha had been to—Natasha, Pavel and Katerina had visited together twice—and Anna the only person she knew abroad. And when her caseworker began to look worried, and Natasha was terrified that it was her turn to be deported … then it was Anna who had made sure she got to meet Michael.