Read Death of a Nightingale for Free Online Page B

wheel, and even though the council did clear the paths of snow, they were still slippery and greasy with a grey-brown mixture of gravel, slush, goose shit and salt. He would have preferred the woods of Hareskoven or some other, less crowded place, but the snow made the forest paths more or less impassable, and when he had tried to exchange his running shoes for cross-country skis a few weeks ago, his old knee injuries had protested so violently that he’d had to toss the skis back up on the carport rafters again.
    The phone had gone quiet, long enough for his pulse to drop to around 140.
    “What can I do for you?” he asked at last.
    “Forget it,” she said suddenly. “I shouldn’t have called.”
    The background noise and the faint whistling disappeared. She had hung up.
    He stood looking at the phone for a few seconds. There was a limit to how long he could stand still. He was already getting cold, and a harsh wind blew over the lake’s frozen surface. An open hole in the ice was teeming with screaming, quacking, cackling waterfowl—mostly ducks and graylag geese, but there were also five or six swans and a raucously aggressive gang of black-headed gulls.
    He pressed the DIAL button. She answered at once. “You must have had a reason for calling,” he said.
    She still hesitated. “It was mostly because … you’re not an idiot.”
    An ironic “thank you” was about to slip out, but he stopped himself. Irony wasn’t what was needed here. “What’s happened?” he asked instead.
    “You are the twenty-six-year-old mother of a little girl,” she suddenly said, in a peculiarly rushed staccato tone. “You’ve escaped from Ukraine; you get engaged to a Danish man; he’s a sadistic bastard, but you tolerate it because you are more afraid of being sent back than of what he does to you. Not until you catch him with his fingers in your little daughter’s underwear do you snap. You buy a knife and stab him in the throat. He survives, but you are found guilty of attempted murder and sent to jail.”
    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