Without the child, she would be going nowhere. He knew that.
“He’s asleep now,” he said when he returned from upstairs. “Now tell me, what’s going on?”
“You want to know what’s going on?” She turned her head deliberately. “Shouldn’t I be the one asking that question?” she replied with darkness in her eyes. “What do you do for a living, exactly? Where do you get all that money from? Is it crime? Do you blackmail people?”
“Blackmail? What makes you think that?”
She turned away from him again. “It makes no difference. I want you to let me and Benjamin go. I don’t want to stay here any longer.”
He frowned. She was asking questions. She was making demands. Was there something he had overlooked in all this?
“I’m asking you, what makes you think that?”
She gave a shrug. “What doesn’t? You’re always away. You never tell me anything. You’ve got boxes piled up in a room like a shrine. You lie about your family. You…”
It wasn’t because he interrupted her. She stopped of her own accord. Stared down at the floor, unable to retrieve the words that should never have passed her lips. Scuppered by her own overweening confidence.
“So you’ve been through my boxes?” he asked calmly, though the realization seared his flesh as though he were on fire.
She knew things about him, things she wasn’t supposed to know.
If he didn’t get rid of her now, he would be done for.
His father looked on as he gathered his belongings in a pile outside his room. Old toys, books by Ingvald Lieberkind with animal pictures in them, odds and ends he had collected. A good stick to scratch his back with, a jar full of crab’s claws, fossilized sea urchins and belemnites. He put everything into the pile. And when he had finished, his father pulled his bed away from the wall and tipped it onto its side. And there lay all his secrets beneath the moth-eaten mounted weasel. The weeklies, the comic books, and all his hours of carefree pleasure.
His father surveyed them briefly. Then he gathered them together in a stack and began to count, wetting his finger occasionally to facilitate the process. Each magazine was a voice of dissent, each voice one lash of the belt.
“Twenty-four. I won’t ask where you got them from, Chaplin, because I don’t care. Now you will turn your back to me and I shall lash you twenty-four times. And when we’re done, I wish never to see such filth in my house ever again, do you understand?”
He did not reply. He simply stared at the pile in front of him and bade farewell to each and every one of his magazines.
“Failure to reply. That doubles the punishment. Perhaps it might teach you a lesson.”
It never did. Despite the weals all down his back and the bloom of bruises at his neck, he uttered not a word before his father again fastened his belt. Not a whimper.
The hardest part was not to burst into tears ten minutes later when he was ordered to set fire to his possessions in the yard outside the house.
That was what really hurt.
She cowered in front of the packing cases. Her husband had spoken as he dragged her up the stairs, an incessant flow of words, but she was saying nothing. Nothing at all.
“We need to get two things straight,” he said. “Give me your phone.”
She took it out of her pocket, safe in the knowledge that it would provide him with no answers. Kenneth had shown her how to delete calls.
He pressed some keys and studied the display, only to find nothing incriminating. She was glad that she had outwitted him. What would he do now with all his suspicions?
“You’ve learned to delete your calls, haven’t you?”
She did not reply, but twisted the phone from his hand and returned it to her back pocket.
And then he gestured toward the small room in which his packing cases were stacked. “Very neatly done, I must say.”
She breathed rather more easily now. He would find nothing here to give her away. Eventually, he would have to let her go.
“But not quite good enough, I’m afraid.”
She blinked twice as she scanned the room. Weren’t the coats put back in place? Was the dent in that one case really noticeable?
“Look at the marks here.” He bent down and pointed. On the front edge of one of the cases a small notch had been made. And one exactly the same on another. Almost aligned, but not quite.
“When you remove boxes like these and then restack them, they’ll settle in a different way.” And then he indicated two more notches that weren’t aligned. “You took the boxes out and put them back again. I can see that you did. And now you’re going to tell me what you found inside them, do you understand?”
She shook her head. “You’re insane. They’re just cardboard boxes, why should they interest me? They’ve been there ever since we moved in. They’ve just settled some more, that’s all.”
It was a clever move, she thought to herself. A neat explanation.
But he shook his head. Not neat enough.
“OK, so let’s check, shall we?” he said, pushing her back against the wall. Stay there or else, his frigid eyes told her.
She glanced about the landing as he began to remove the first of the boxes. There wasn’t much for her to make use of in the narrow space: a stool by the door of their bedroom, a vase on the windowsill, the floor polisher against the sloping wall.
If she could deliver a clean blow to his neck with the stool, then perhaps…
She swallowed and clenched her fists. How hard was hard enough?
And as she stood there, her husband backed out of the doorway and dropped a packing case at her feet with a thud.
“Right, let’s have a look, shall we? In a moment, we’ll know for sure if you’ve been poking your nose in.”
She stared as he opened the lid. It was one from the front, almost in the middle. Two cardboard flaps revealed the burial chamber of his innermost secrets. The cutting of her at the show-jumping competition in Bernstorffsparken. The wooden filing box with the many addresses and information on all those families and their children. He had known exactly where it was.
She closed her eyes and tried to breathe calmly. If there was a God, then He would have to help her now.
“I really don’t see what all this is about. What have all those papers got to do with me?” she said.
He planted one knee on the floor, took out the first pile of cuttings, and put it to one side. He didn’t want to risk her seeing the cutting about herself in case he was unable to prove her guilt.
She had worked him out.
Then, carefully, he took out the filing box. He didn’t even need to open it. Just lowered his head and said in the softest of voices: “Why couldn’t you leave my things alone?”
What had he seen? What had she overlooked?
She stared down at his spine, glanced at the stool and then again at his spine.
What was it about, the information in that wooden box? Why did he clench his fist so that his knuckles showed white?
She drew her hand to her throat and felt her jugular throbbing.
He turned toward her, his eyes narrowed to slits. A terrifying glare. His contempt so ferocious it almost prevented her from breathing.
The stool was three meters away.
“I haven’t touched any of it,” she said. “What makes you think I have?”
“I don’t think. I know.”
She moved slightly in the direction of the stool. He didn’t react.
“Look!” He turned the front of the wooden box toward her. She didn’t know what she was supposed to see.
“What?” she asked. “There’s nothing there.”
When snow falls as sleet, you can see its flakes evaporate in their descent toward the ground, their beauty absorbed back into the air whence it came, their magic gone.
She felt exactly like such a snowflake as he lunged at her legs and swept them from underneath her. Falling, she saw her life disintegrate and everything she had ever known turn to dust. She never felt the crack of her head against the floor, only that she was locked in his grip.