The Considerate Killer Read Free

There was something about her stubbornness, her intensity, the too-slender body, and those eyes . . . particularly those eyes, dark grey like a sky before a storm, with an unfathomably vivid gazethat he felt compelled to meet, even at moments when it would have been wiser not to. Certainly, he had seen her, and been curious. Interested. But it was only after the knife had gone in that she had acquired this ability to hurt him. The ability to make his abdomen contract, the ability to make his hands turn into fists reflexively if he thought any kind of danger, imaginary or real, threatened her.
    Right now his fists were clenched so hard that his fingers were getting numb. With an effort, he unclenched them one by one.
    She lay on her side, probably so the weight of her head would not put pressure on the shaved area on the back of her head and the damage that was hidden under a white gauze compress as large as a standard sheet of paper. A raw and crusty abrasion covered most of one cheek, and the hollows of her eyes were so bruised and swollen that the eyes were just greasy slits. A bit of clear fluid leaked from one nostril and dripped down onto the flat pillow under her head, where there was already a damp spot.
    Søren was relieved to see that she was breathing on her own, but otherwise there wasn’t much to celebrate.
    â€œNina, damn it,” he said quietly, without any hope that she could hear him. “What have you gotten yourself in to now?”
    At that instant he recognized Morten’s anger and understood it completely. Nina had probably never had the occasion to force a kitchen knife into her ex-husband’s chest, but she had undoubtedly made him feel a similar pain every time she had thrown herself in front of an on-rushing catastrophe without considering the consequences. There had to be limits to how many stabs of that knife one could survive before one started to protect oneself.
    And Morten was not alone. He had Ida and Anton to consider.
    Søren hesitantly touched Nina’s hand and hardly knew himself whether it was to caress it or to register her symptoms. Chilled, he observed, but not ice-cold. Not the cold that comes when the blood is retreating from the body’s outer extremities because the inner organs are fighting off death.
    Stable, they had said. Not critical. She had been hit twice; the first blow had landed quite high and had bounced off the skull to a certain extent, but the second was of more concern—it had gone in at the base of the cranium, and the full unblunted force of it had made the brain slap hard against its bony case. And, yes, there was a crack. A fractured skull was now the official diagnosis—a so-called basilar skull fracture.
    â€œWe can see a bit of fluid from the nose and the ears, so there must be a lesion in the brain membrane,” a helpful intensive care nurse had explained. “Usually it stops by itself, but we have to keep an eye on it. And we’d like to see signs of consciousness soon. If you could just sit and talk to her, that would be very helpful. Hearing is often restored long before any of the other senses.”
    He obediently sat down, but at first could not get a word out. What was he supposed say? Should he scold her? Reassure her? Tell her that he “was here,” as if that circumstance alone would suddenly make all the horrors go away?
    â€œNina,” he said quietly, “it’s me, Søren.” He felt like a complete idiot. But if the nurse was right and it could in some way help Nina to hear his voice, then so be it. “I . . . came to see how you’re doing. So I’ll just sit here and . . . talk a little. So you know that I’m here.”

THE PHILIPPINES, FOUR YEARS EARLIER
    I t meant nothing. The interview. It was a formality of the kind that no one seriously worried about, except maybe his father, and of course Vincent himself. But his father had always doubted God too much, or so