Nina felt a sharp cold jab in her stomach. It was possible that Mr. Kitty had made illegal forays into the groceries and dragged his booty into the hallway, but the house was entirely too silent considering the distraught and loudly sobbing Karin that Nina had been talking to just ninety minutes ago.
She lowered the boy to the floor of the hallway and stood undecided on the threshold.
“Stay here,” she whispered, pointing at the floor. “Don’t go anywhere.”
The boy made no reply, only looked at her with solemn eyes. New cracks of black fear had begun to open in his gaze; he had been frightened to begin with, and her indecision was not improving matters. She had to do something quickly.
“Karin!”
Nina walked quickly through the kitchen and into the compact living room. Karin had turned on a small, green lamp above the settee. The television was on, but with the sound turned down. TV2 News. Nina recognized the scarlet banner headlines and the usual respectable suit of the anchor.
She strode across to the window, which overlooked the garden on the other side of the house. She could see very little, only the tall pines of the plantation behind the cottage, and an unkempt lawn littered with leaves and pine cones. Nina dug into her pocket for her mobile phone, pressed the recall button and waited for the call tone. Immediately, there was an answering trill from a real phone somewhere in the house. The sound seemed to be coming from behind a closed door that probably led to the bedroom, and although the distance couldn’t be great, it sounded oddly muffled, as if someone had dropped it into a bucket. A quick glance assured her that the boy’s small straight form was still standing motionless by the kitchen door. She looked at the phone again. 8:28.
The numbers on the pale blue display had a calming effect on her. She slid the phone back into her pocket and pushed open the bedroom door.
Karin lay curled on the bed, with her forehead resting against her knees, as though she had been practicing some advanced form of yoga. But Nina saw it the second the image was processed against her retina.
Death.
There was a peculiar quality about dead people. Little things that seemed insignificant on their own, but added up to an umistakable impact, so that Nina was never in any doubt when she encountered it. The slight out-turned wrist. The leg that had slipped limply from its orignal position, and the head resting much too heavily against the mattress.
Nina felt the first rush from her flight instinct. She forced herself to approach the bed, while new details flooded her senses. Karin’s fair hair spread around her head like a flaxen halo mixed with red and dark brown nuances. The sheet beneath her had soaked up far too much blood, and when Nina carefully turned Karin’s upper body, Karin’s mouth opened, and vomit mixed with blood sloshed over her lower lip and ran down her chin and into the soft folds of her throat. Two of her teeth were missing, and there was red and purple bruising on her face and neck. A lot of the blood seemed to come from a wound above the hairline, at her left temple, and when Nina probed it cautiously, the skull gave beneath her fingers, too soft and flat. Death had not been instantaneous, thought Nina. She had had time to curl up here, like a wounded animal that left the herd to die alone.
And now. So much blood.
She didn’t mind blood, she reminded herself soothingly. She was okay with it, had, as a matter of fact, been one of the most steadfast at nursing school when it came to dealing with bodily fluids. (Since that day twenty-three years ago she had become very good at it. She had decided to become good at it, and it had worked.)
Nina stepped back from the bed and managed to twist to one side before she threw up, in short, painful heaves. She had eaten nothing since this morning, and all that sploshed onto the clean wooden floor was dark yellow gall and grayish water.
It was then she heard the scream. A shrill, heart-rending note of terror, like the scream you hear in the night when a hare is caught by the fox.
S
IGITA WAS SITTING
on the stone steps by the river, waiting for the nausea and headache to subside enough so she could walk on. Her good hand was clenched around her mobile. It had to ring. It had to ring so that she would know Mikas was all right. Or so she knew at least he wasn’t what Gužas called the second category; those who were never found.
No. Don’t even think it. Don’t think about what strangers might do to the perfect, tiny body, don’t let the thought in even for a second. It would only make it real. It would break her, it would tear her open and rip out her heart so that she wouldn’t be able to breathe, let alone act. She clung to the phone like an exhausted swimmer to a buoy.
It didn’t ring. In the end she pressed a number herself. Mrs. Mažekienė’s.
“Mrs. Mažekienė. The man who took Mikas—what did he look like?”
The old woman’s confusion was obvious, even over the phone.
“Look like? But it was his father.”
“No, Mrs. Mažekienė. It wasn’t. Darius is still in Germany.”
There was a long silence.
“Mrs. Mažekienė?”
“Well, I did think that he must have gained some weight. He looked bigger than I remembered.”
“How big?”
“I don’t know … big and tall, now that I think about it. And hardly any hair, the way it had been cropped. But that’s all the rage these days, isn’t it?”
“Why did you think it was Mikas’s father, then?”
“The car looked like his. And who else would be going off with the boy?”
Sigita bit down hard on her lip to avoid saying something unforgiveable. She is just an old woman, she told herself. She didn’t do it on purpose. But Mrs. Mažekienė’s mistake had cost them nearly 48 hours, and that was very hard to forget.
“What kind of car was it?” she asked, once she had regained some self-control.
“It was gray,” Mrs. Mažekienė answered vaguely.
“What make of car?” But she knew even as she asked that it was hopeless.
“I don’t know much about cars,” said Mrs. Mažekienė helplessly. “It was … ordinary, like. Like Mikas’s father’s car.”
The last time Sigita had seen Darius, he had been driving a darkgray Suzuki Grand Vitara. So presumably it was a gray SUV of some kind, or perhaps a station wagon. Or a van. If Mrs. Mažekienė couldn’t tell Darius’s rather slender form from what sounded like that of a crew-cut doorman’s, then there was no reason to think that she could distinguish between an off-roader and a Peugeot Partner. It wasn’t much to go on.
“It had a baggage box on the roof,” said Mrs. Mažekienė suddenly. “I remember that!”
Dobrovolskij’s eldest son, Pavel sometimes drove a silver Porsche Cayenne. It resembled the Vitara about as much as a shetland pony resembles a Shire horse, and she had never seen it with a baggage box on its expensive roof. But it was enough to make her call Algirdas.
“Hi,” he said. “Are you feeling better?”
She didn’t reply to that.
“How did the meeting with Dobrovolskij go?” she asked instead.
“So-so. He wasn’t happy that you weren’t there.”
“But there wasn’t any … trouble?”
“Sigita, what is it you want?”
She didn’t know how much to say. She had never told Algirdas much about her personal life, and it seemed awkward to start now. But what if? What if Mikas’s disappearance had something to do with her job?
“Mikas is gone.”
He knew, she thought, that she had a son. She had brought Mikas along to the Christmas pantomime last year, when Janus Corporation had suddenly decided it needed to do something for the children of its employees.
“Mikas? Your little boy?”
“Yes. Someone has taken him.”
There was an awkward pause. She could almost hear the gears click inside Algirdas’s mind as he tried to work out whether this would rock
his
boat in any way. Algirdas was a pleasant enough employer most of the time, friendly, informal, not a bully or a tyrant. But she sometimes thought that he felt the same way about his staff as she did about computers: they were just supposed to work—he didn’t care what was inside.
And now I don’t work anymore, she thought. And he doesn’t know whom to call in order to get me repaired.
“Does this have anything to do with your concussion?” he finally asked.
“Possibly. I don’t remember what happened. I thought Mikas was with Darius, but he isn’t.”
“But why are you asking about Dobrovolskij?”
“Pavel Dobrovolskij has a silver Cayenne. And Mikas was taken away in a gray or silver SUV.” She was aware that she was twisting facts to provide more substance for her suspicions than they really warranted. But if it was Dobrovolskij, then Mikas didn’t belong to the second category. If it was Dobrovolskij, one could find out what he wanted, and then do whatever it took to get Mikas back.
“Sorry, Sigita, but you’re off your head. Why the hell would Dobrovolskij take your boy? Besides, I think Pavel sold the Cayenne. He said it was easier to fit an elephant into a matchbox than to park that monstrosity in downtown Vilnius. Did you tell the police?”
“Yes.”
“Let them deal with it, then.”
“But they’re not doing anything! There’s just this one pathetic man clicking his bloody ballpoint pen!”
“What does his pen have to with anything?”
“And he says they will look for Mikas now, but I don’t think anything is really happening. They’re never found. Not the ones where it’s not personal.” She realized she was being incoherent. Knew, too, that this was entirely the wrong way to be with Algirdas, that it would only make him retreat. She forced herself to breathe more calmly, waiting until the words presented themselves in the proper order. “Algirdas, I have to know if you are involved in something that Dobrovolskij wouldn’t like. Or if any of the payments have been incorrect.”
“Bloody hell, Sigita. It’s your autistic head that’s keeping track of everything. I just pony up when you tell me to.”
Normally, she would be able to remember. Normally she would know if even a single litas was missing.
“Besides, you’re making him sound like a gangster. He isn’t.”
“But he knows people who are,” she said stubbornly. In the river below the steps, a black plastic garbage bag was floating past, buoyed up by the air trapped inside. For one horrible moment all Sigita could think about was that it was large enough to contain a dead child.
“Look, Sigita. I’m really sorry your boy has disappeared, but Dobrovolskij can’t possibly be involved. For God’s sake, don’t get him mixed up in this.”
She didn’t say goodbye. She barely managed to turn off the mobile before her abdomen contracted, and she threw up orange juice and warm stomach acids all over her skirt and bare legs.
N
INA TURNED JUST
quickly enough to see the boy’s shadow disappear from the doorway. She heard the rapid patter of his bare feet through the living room, then the creak of a door. Her own legs were momentarily paralyzed by a hot, melting sensation, and when she finally managed to move, her ankles and knees wobbled dangerously.
A couple of long strides took her through the door, and then into the kitchen. Out of the window above the sink she saw his flaxen head bobbing past in the darkness; he was running away. She continued her wobbly flight through the hallway and out onto the veranda. In the humid air outside, her face and throat felt flushed and pulsing with heat.
The black pines in the plantation behind the house were blurred by mist; she couldn’t see the boy anywhere, but she heard the snapping of branches as he fled among the trees. Following the sound, she took off at the fastest run she could manage.
Pine boughs whipped against her face, and the tall, dry grass at the forest’s edge was a rustling, prickly barrier, impeding her steps. Fortunately, she could now see the boy’s white hair like a will-o’-the-wisp among the black tree trunks in the gathering darkness. She was closing in on him.
She ducked the low branches as best she could, then had to veer sharply to one side to avoid the bristling remnants of a fallen tree. Her right ankle protested, but she did manage a second burst of speed. She snatched at the boy’s shoulder, but lost her grip again, and he stumbled on. Her next attempt was more succesful. She caught his arm and clung to it, forcing him to stop.
Wordlessly, she pulled him down onto the mossy grass and closed her arms around him. Under the twisted T-shirt, his heart was beating fast and hard against his bared ribs, and his breath was a hot flush against her neck.
Then she heard it.
It might have been a completely insignficant sound. A faint click, as of a door being cautiously closed, somewhere in the summer night. The sound could come from any of the other cottages skirting the forest’s edge, thought Nina, as she inched backwards into deeper cover, pulling the boy with her. She could no longer see Karin’s cousin’s cottage, but at the end of the winding drive her own red Fiat was perfectly visible.
More sounds. Footsteps, this time, and a rustling as if someone was moving through tall, dry grass. Nina saw the man from the railway station in her mind’s eye. The pale, narrowed eyes, the tense jaw, the ferocity of the kicks he aimed at the busted locker.
Had he found Karin and unleashed that fury in her?
Nina looked at her watch.
8:36.
Her watch was usually 29 seconds slower than the more accurate time given by her mobile. For some reason she hadn’t corrected that imprecision. She rather liked having to figure out what time it really was.
She hugged the boy tight against her chest. His little warm body was twitching, small jerks of protest, but he made no sound. Did he understand the need for silence, or was it merely traumatized resignation?
She listened again, but the rustle of the footsteps, if that was what they were, had stopped. Should she call the police? She fumbled at the pockets of her jeans, first on the right, then on the left.
No phone.
She checked again, but knew it was futile. She had dropped it. Where and when, she had no idea.
New little bursts of adrenalin exploded in her head. The phone had been her only line of contact to the real world—to Morten, to the network and her job, and now to the police. She was alone now. Completely alone with the boy.