Free Death of a Nightingale by Lene Kaaberbøl Page A

wasn’t an act-like-the-grown-ups game. She was listening in earnest. For the first time, Nina wondered what it was Rina expected to hear.
    She sat down on the desk chair and pretended to look out the window, but she was really keeping an eye on Rina’s expression, and that was why she saw it.
    Suddenly the girl’s face opened, and she smiled. A completely open smile that, for some reason, gave Nina the chills. She felt like grabbing the phone out of the child’s hands but held herself back. As the psychologist said, it was good for Rina to attempt to communicate with someone.
    But what did you do if this “someone” began to answer?
    There was no doubt in Nina’s mind that Rina had indeed heard a reply, and it was highly unlikely to be because the defective phone had suddenly started working.
    There was a quiet knock on the door. The young policeman stood outside.
    “I’ve spoken with the chief,” he said. “She says that it’s okay for us to be in the room next door on the condition that you and your colleagues have someone with the girl at all times. Press this if you notice anything alarming.”
    He handed Nina a little black box with a red button. A personal attack alarm. Nina remembered that not long ago, they had discussedwhether the night shift at the center should be equipped with them.
    “Okay,” she said. Not an insignificant victory. “Thank you.”
    Rina looked at the policeman with her animal gaze until Nina closed the door again. The cell phone had disappeared into her pink backpack. The psychologist would probably consider that a step backward, but Nina couldn’t help feeling relieved.

 
    The walls were a calming dove blue; the chairs and tables of light wood and lacquered steel all looked like something you might find at a high school from the ’70s. But the fact that the tall patrician windows were covered with bulletproof glass cooled the atmosphere a bit, Søren noticed, and made it impossible to characterize the police headquarters’s combined coffee-and-lineup room as cozy.
    “He speaks almost no English,” said the detective inspector, discreetly flipping his thumb in the direction of a young man who sat drumming his fingers impatiently on his jean-clad thigh. “And the other one, the one we could at least speak to, seems to have vanished into thin air.”
    “The other one?” asked Søren. Until now he had heard only about one man.
    “Yes, there were two of them. They came to speak with the fugitive—well, at that point she wasn’t a fugitive yet, but …”
    “So you’ve lost both an inmate and a foreign police officer?” Søren spoke with a certain coolness. He knew that the safety involving the transport of inmates wasn’t ironclad, at least not unless the so-called “negatively strong” inmates were involved. If one of the more peaceful ones got away, it was usually pretty anticlimactic. They often turned up on their own when they had taken care of whatever it was that was so important to them, or if not, you could collect themundramatically a little later in the day at the home of a much-missed girlfriend or at the birthday celebration of some family member. The system responded with an extra thirty days and the revoking of a few privileges, and that was that.
    But this was different. Natasha Dmytrenko didn’t miss her fiancé—she had done her best to kill him once before, and now he was dead. It also worried Søren considerably that a member of the not ill-reputed Ukrainian militia appeared to have given his hosts the slip.
    The DI grew defensive. “We can’t just lock our foreign colleagues in a cage,” he said. “He got pretty upset when he heard that she had escaped, and suddenly he was gone as well.”
    Søren regarded the one Ukrainian policeman they still had under control. The man had short brown hair and a face broader than the average Scandinavian ones Søren was used to seeing. There was a restless, coiled energy in the drumming fingers and the