Invisible Murder Read Free Page A

translate the stream of Danish phrases. The young Ukrainian woman had been in custody for almost seven months now. Her daughter, Rina, had been sent back to the Danish Red Cross Center at Furesø, more commonly known as the Coal-House Camp, to creep along the walls like a ghost among the other more boisterous children.
    Sunlight flickered brightly through the courtroom’s high windows, tiny motes of dust swirling in the warm columns of light. The prosecutor was about to make her closing argument. She was a small, energetic woman in her mid-forties, impeccably dressed in a dark-blue skirt, matching suit jacket, blouse, with a slender gold chain around her neck and matte, skin-colored nylons.
    Nina focused on the plaster ceiling while the prosecutor slowly painted her way through the indictment and evidence. As if that were necessary. As if everyone in the courtroom didn’t already know exactly what would happen.
    “The defendant, Natasha Dimitrenko, walked into a hunting supply shop on Nordre Frihavnsgade.…”
    Restlessness was starting to spread through Nina’s body. It lurked like a strange bubbling tension just below her skin, forcing her to stretch, slowly and silently like a cat. The Russian interpreter sitting next to Natasha droned on, slowly, in a monotone, below the shrillness of the prosecutor’s voice.
    “… and bought a Sterkh-1, which is a twenty-four-centimeter-long traditional Russian hunting knife specially designed to efficiently gut and skin an animal.…”
    Nina turned and tried to look into Natasha’s eyes below the wispy bangs.
    “… and it was with this knife that the defendant stabbed her fiancé, Michael Anders Vestergaard, four times in his arm, shoulder, and neck.”
    Nina and everyone else at the Coal-House Camp knew that the man was a sadistic pig whose abuse had left Natasha with vaginal lacerations so extensive that Magnus had had to suture them. Even so, Natasha had gone back to him, choosing to put up with the abuse and the humiliation because he was the only thing standing between her and deportation back to Ukraine.
    Nina had testified on Monday, as had Magnus, who had had the unenviable task of patching up Natasha at the clinic the previous summer after what the prosecutor chose to describe as “consensual sex with elements of dominance.” Magnus had described Natasha’s injuries in nauseating detail, while the prosecutor flipped distractedly through the medical records, doodling in the margins.
    And, yes, Natasha had actually consented—or at least tolerated it. No,she hadn’t reported anything to the police. Not even her suspicions that the man was starting to take an interest in Rina. When she caught him slipping a finger into Rina’s light-blue Minnie Mouse underpants, she bought a knife instead. Natasha had called Nina, but not until afterward.
    It was a foregone conclusion, and everyone knew exactly what was going to happen. Initially Natasha would be sentenced for assault with intent to kill. Premeditated, of course, since several hours had elapsed from the time she bought the knife to the moment it was actually lodged in Michael Vestergaard’s neck, millimeters away from killing him. She would be stuck in a Danish prison cell while her application for asylum would plod along the winding paper trails of Danish Immigration Control toward almost inevitable denial. As soon as this occurred, swift deportation would follow, and Natasha would serve the rest of her sentence in a Ukrainian jail. Meanwhile, Rina would while away months or years of her childhood in the well-intentioned but inadequate care of the asylum system, most likely in the children’s unit at the Coal-House Camp. Once her mother had been deported, Rina too would be returned to Ukraine, to wait for her mother’s release, in whatever orphanage would take her. The whole nauseating story was as predictable as the prosecutor’s monotonous account and the dry rustle of paper being turned, page by page, as