She lowered the phone and smiled at him.
“Do you want a cup of coffee or are you just here to lie down? You look tired.”
“No more coffee.” He made a face at the mere thought. “But do you think it would be okay if I took a shower first?”
“Of course. You just do what you need to do. I’ll be in the sunroom grading papers if you need anything.”
They exchanged a civilized peck on the cheek. She looked good, he thought. Or more to the point, she looked like a woman who was feeling good. She wore her copper-red hair in a shoulder-length pageboy, which was probably not the height of fashion. But she’d been wearing it that way for a really long time, and it suited her heart-shaped face perfectly. She was round and comfortably plump all over, and her eyes were calm, clear, and warm. He had known her for more than thirty years. They had been high school sweethearts. They got married. They bought a house together—this house, where she still lived. But the children she had had weren’t his, and the man she was co-habiting with in lifelong devotion wasn’t him either. And even though she opened the door to him time and time again with the generosity that was one of her most pronounced character traits, there wasn’t the slightest risk she would be unfaithful to Ben.
Nor did he want her to be. That wasn’t why he came. It was more just for the … peace. A little dose of calm and normality before he returned to a world where people buried young men like Snow White in underground gasoline storage tanks and went around planning how to deploy a package of explosives contaminated with radioactive material so it caused the greatest possible number of fatalities.
He took a long shower in the bathroom in the basement. Then he lay down on the bed in the guest room that was actually Ben’s practice room—rows of vinyl records, amps everywhere, three different guitars, two keyboards, and a double bass in one corner—and fell asleep as if someone had just turned off a light.
SUSSE WOKE HIM up.
“Your phone is ringing,” she said.
And it was. Again and again, louder and louder. But he hadn’t heard it.
Not until she shook his shoulder.
He grabbed the phone.
“Yeaaaaah,” he said, his throat feeling as if someone had tried to scrub it with a toilet brush.
“It’s Gitte.”
“Yes.”
“Jesper Due called from Rigshospitalet. The nurse is gone.”
“What do you mean gone?”
“We’re checking the video from the hospital security system. But it sounds like she left the hospital with a youngish man without saying anything to anyone. A nurse saw them together.”
He swore.
“And it wasn’t her husband? Or ex-husband, or whatever he is?”
“No. We called him.”
“And we don’t have anyone watching her?”
“No. By the time Jesper got up there, she had already walked out.”
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“And the flight from Budapest is late so the NBH guy isn’t here yet.”
Well, that’s something, he thought, though he would still have to find time for him eventually. International cooperation was important and good and necessary and all that, but it also required a certain amount of diplomacy, and at the moment they just didn’t have the resources to be polite on top of everything else.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” he said.
THE VIDEOS FROM the hospital were a grainy mess. But there was a sequence, from the front entrance, where you could clearly identify Nina Borg. She was wearing a dark tracksuit, and yes, she was with a “youngish man.” They were walking side by side, with slightly more than a meter between them. The only thing he could see for sure was that it wasn’t Sándor Horváth.
“Is she leaving of her own free will?” Gitte asked. “What do you think?”
He shook his head faintly.
“If she is under duress, he’s too far away,” Mikael said. “That’s a public area, lots of people around. If he wanted to control her, he should be closer. And there aren’t any obvious signs that he has a weapon.”
“Well, a weapon could be any number of things, of course,” Søren said. “Get as good a still of him as you can, and send it around to all divisions. The NEC, too, you never know. Maybe somebody out there knows him. Did you get hold of the daughter? And her boyfriend, who was attacked?”
“She wasn’t at school,” Mikael said. “She had been, despite the attack. But of course they understood her wanting to go home again. I’ll head over to that address in Greve and talk to her.”
“Also the boyfriend, Ulf. Bring them in here. I want to talk to both of them. And Gitte, could you make sure someone from Transportation heads over to the airport to pick up our colleague from the NBH?”
“Transportation?” she said. “They’re at a training exercise. It’s going to have to be the cafeteria lady or me. Couldn’t he take a cab?”
The man nodded, looking out over the pancake-flat countryside, in rolling greens with small strips of brackish gray water in between. The sky hung low and dark over the water, and the clouds on the horizon painted dark-blue stripes across the sky.
Nina looked over at the man next to her. He seemed to be in a good mood and only had one hand on the wheel as they rumbled their way up the rough gravel road. He gesticulated with the almost finished cigarette in his other hand whenever there was something particularly exciting he wanted to show her. There and there and there. He had caught a sea trout on the other side of that strip of trees over there, with a lure. Just like back home in Finland. A bunch of wires were hanging out of a dangling plastic panel next to the steering column, presumably because he had stolen the green van, and the black phone with the pictures of Ida was on the dashboard, but the man acted as if he had already forgotten all about that. His mind was on other things now.
Nina felt strangely outside her body. It wasn’t just from the exhaustion and the recurring nausea. It was also the indiscriminate small talk that had been flowing unchecked from him from the second they got into the car and pulled out of Rigshospitalet’s parking lot. In the beginning she had tried to find out more about Ida. She’d asked how Ida was doing and where she was, but the man had either ignored her questions or told her to shut up. Eventually she just stared out the window and let him talk. She didn’t recognize the whole route, but right now she was guessing they were somewhere on the south end of Amager Island on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Farther up the gravel road, she could make out some kind of small holding. The skinny Finn sped up for the last few meters and gave Nina a friendly smile as he spun his wheels in the smooth gravel. The 1970s-style windows of the farmhouse stared emptily out the U-shaped gravel drive in front.
The Finn jumped out of the van, letting the rest of his cigarette fall onto the gravel. Then he continued around the car, opened Nina’s door and yanked her out of the car so hard that she almost landed on her knees. The pea-sized gravel stung cruelly under her white sock-clad feet, and she still didn’t have any strength. Nothing to fight with, she thought. It was painfully obvious that the Finn had come to the same conclusion. He had already disappeared in the front door where he was impatiently banging doors and yelling something at someone. Of course he wasn’t alone, Nina thought sluggishly. There had been three men in their apartment, and now wherever they had Ida … maybe she was here.
Climbing the steps to the front door of the farmhouse was like climbing a mountain, and with each step she felt her pulse race at an insane tempo. The hallway, like the windows, was a relic from the ’70s. There was a pair of worn-out plastic clogs with no heels sitting on the threadbare green indoor-outdoor carpet. The door to what must have been the kitchen was open. The floor was crumbling yellow linoleum with a brown floral pattern, and all of the old kitchen cupboards and cabinets were missing. All that was left were faded patches along the walls where they used to be. Now there was just a card table pushed against the wall with an electric kettle and a stack of rolled up newspapers. A smashed picture frame was lying on the floor containing a picture of a naked girl, in a spread-eagle pose. She was pushing a pair of enormous breasts with pale nipples all the way up to her open lips. Sabrina, eighteen years old, Nina read. Loves it rough, doggie style.