She stopped, but he just waited, his muscles getting stiffer, the cold creeping across his skin along with the sweat. He stood perfectly still. He sensed that if he as much as shifted his weight, she would fly away again.
“You spend sixteen months in Vestre Prison doing nothing but what they tell you to do. Passive. Easy to handle. And then you suddenly attack a policeman and escape. And this is where it gets really weird. You don’t go to get your daughter. Instead you head directly for your ex-fiancé, and then you kill him.”
He could hear her breathing now that his own was calmer. Hers was stressed and shallow. Forced.
“Does that make sense?” she said. “Is it logical?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Too much of the picture is missing.”
“But your first impression?”
“I can’t say,” he insisted. “It would be pure speculation.”
“Okay. Forget I called.”
“No, wait. I just said that I didn’t know enough.”
She sighed. “That’s something. The police here think that they know everything. They are apparently convinced that Natasha murdered both the sadistic bastard and Rina’s father.”
Rina’s father? Who the hell was that? Nina wasn’t making it easy to follow her.
“Where are you?” Søren asked.
“The Coal-House Camp. Rina—that’s Natasha’s daughter—she … Damn it, she can’t take this!” The anger rose in her voice. “They’re using her as bait in their Natasha trap, and they don’t give a shit if she’s up to it or not.”
He would probably have done the same thing—kept an eye on the girl with the assumption that the mother would contact her sooner or later. He didn’t tell Nina that.
“What’s Natasha’s last name?” he asked.
There was a pause.
“I don’t remember,” she admitted. “Something … something Ukrainian. Wait. Dimitrenko or something like that. I don’t remember how you spell it.”
The computer was not particularly forgiving of alternative spellings, but on the other hand, how many Ukrainian women could there be who had just escaped from Vestre?
“I’ll see what I can do,” Søren promised recklessly. “I’ll call you later.”
“When?”
“It’ll take awhile. At least a few hours.”
“But you’ll call?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
The tension in Nina’s breathing was gone. The relief made her voice younger and lighter, and he felt a prick of conscience. There probably wasn’t anything he could do, and his only reason for trying was deeply unprofessional.
He wanted to see her again.
Police. of course, there would be police.
Natasha felt Katerina’s proximity tug at her core. There she was, right on the other side of the fence, not in the family barrack where they had lived together before Michael, but in the rooms reserved for unaccompanied minors. She was there; she had to be there, even though Natasha couldn’t see her.
But the police lurked like big, fat barn cats, just waiting for the stupid mice to scurry out of the hay.
“As long as it’s light, you have no chance.” She once again heard Anna’s voice, a voice that calmly and sensibly forced her to listen even though Natasha wanted to run over and throw herself against the wire fence. She wasn’t sure when she had stopped thinking of Anna as a real-world source of solace and good advice, and instead turned her into this odd inner fairy godmother who kept an eye on Natasha and made sure she didn’t behave too stupidly. Perhaps it was since that night a year and a half ago when she had attempted to stab Michael in the throat with a knife. Was it then?
Natasha was glad Anna was there. It made her feel less alone.
She walked back through the deep snow, well over half a kilometer, to the little clearing where she had parked the dark blue Audi. She might as well try to sleep a little.
She brushed extra snow onto the car’s license plate to be safe. She didn’t think Robbie would report it stolen for the time being. He was probably still asleep, and when he woke up, he would find the note she had placed next to his pillow: I’ll be back. ♥, Katerina.
Right now she wished she had called herself something else.
In the Audi’s trunk she found a blanket and a thick tarp. She took them both into the backseat and cocooned herself inside. A sleeping bag would have been better, but she didn’t have a sleeping bag.
THE BED IN the apartment in Kiev had been a revelation in several ways. Clean and white and delicious smelling, full of pillows, comforters and smooth, light sheets—Egyptian cotton, Pavel had said, and she just nodded. She had never before lain on a mattress that received the body in this way, firm and soft at the same time. At home in the room in Kurakhovo, you could feel the bed slats through the worn foam rubber.
And Pavel, Pavel, Pavel, Pavel.
He had driven into her life in a shiny red Alfa Romeo one day as she was trudging along the road between Dachne and Kurakhovo. She had missed the bus and would rather walk to the next stop than stand waiting in the cold. When he slowed down and asked if she wanted a lift, she had ignored him at first. She didn’t want him to think she was one of those girls. But he had kept rolling along next to her, apparently indifferent to the trucks that roared by him honking and all the vulgar gestures and shouts from the passing drivers. He had spoken to her just as if they were walking along next to each other on the sidewalk, although they did, of course, have to shout more loudly. He was a journalist, he said, and was writing an article about safety in the coal mines. Did she know anyone who worked there? Or anyone who once had? “Everyone does,” she said. There were practically no other places you could work in Kurakhovo; it was the mines or the power plant or unemployment. Her father had lost his job two years ago; her mother still worked in the plant cafeteria. “And what about you?” he had asked. It had gone on like that all the way to Kurakhovo, and finally when they had reached the outskirts of town, she had gotten into his car. Because by now her feet hurt and because she was getting hoarse from shouting, and because … because Pavel was Pavel.
She had insisted on a church wedding so that everyone could see that she had married well, to a husband who had both money and culture. An intellectual, as her father said, at once contemptuous and satisfied. Pavel didn’t drink vodka. Not even at the wedding party, where he wore a dark Armani suit. Few of the guests could appreciate such details, but that wasn’t important. Pavel looked like what he was. A success. At the same time, he had shown everyone else up for what they were and would always be. A bunch of drunken, shabby bumpkins with foolish grins and yawning gaps in their teeth. Uncles and aunts and cousins, and girlfriends from school who arrived on the back of their boyfriends’ scooters.
None of them drove an Alfa Romeo. And none of them had an apartment in Kiev with a view of the National Museum.
The first night in Kiev, she had felt like the princess in a fairy tale.
“Come on. There’s something I want to show you!”
Pavel smiled at Natasha, and she couldn’t help smiling back. Genuine smiles that could be felt all the way to the heart, and she thought that it felt precisely like love in the movies and that she adored every detail of his face. The nose, which curved slightly, and the blond hair she knew he had inherited from his Galizien mother, who had been ethnic German. Pavel himself spoke fluent German and also English, and earlier in the evening, he had ordered in a restaurant with the same confidence as the men in the American movies.
“What is it?” she asked.
On purpose she let herself stumble clumsily into his arms. Her breasts under the new bra and the soft silk blouse grazed his chest, and she wanted to get closer, feel his weight and the strength of his arms. In fact, she thought, and felt shameful and happy at the same time, she would undress him all the way tonight and look at him before they did it. In the big white bed, on the sheets of crackling Egyptian cotton. She didn’t know if it was normal to think like this, but she didn’t care. The night sky turned above them, and she laughed lightly and giddily.