Death of a Nightingale Read Online Free PDF

effect on the black ice, and Nina had to fight a deep-seated urge to step on the brakes. The car sailed sideways into the curve and only fell into the track againseconds before it would have collided with the snow. She shifted down and waited for it to slow. Ahead of her, the back of Magnus’s Volvo disappeared around the next turn. Perhaps she should have come in the Volvo with him. But then there was the problem of getting home again, and they hadn’t exactly announced their … affair sounded completely wrong, relationship even worse—their mutual loneliness relief to the world. Maybe not arriving at the same time was a good move. But the adrenaline made her stomach burn, and the slow driving necessary on the slippery roads felt completely counterintuitive.
    Natasha had escaped custody. As unbelievable as it sounded, it was true. The authorities had concluded that she might try to get hold of Rina and had therefore sent police out to the Coal-House Camp, which was, Nina thought, not something she could really object to, except that they had apparently managed to provoke one of the worst anxiety and asthma attacks Rina had experienced in all the time she’d been in the camp. Nina understood why Magnus was rushing and cursed the Micra’s insufficiencies both mentally and out loud. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”
    When she finally rolled into the parking lot in front of the camp’s main entrance, she instantly spotted two almost identical dark blue Mondeo station cars. Two cars. Presumably at least four people. Apparently there was no lack of resources when the object was to catch single mothers with a foreign background found guilty of attempted murder, Nina thought dryly. It didn’t say POLICE on the side, but it might as well have. Did they really think Natasha was stupid enough to wander into the camp as long as they were parked there? The police had errands at the camp fairly regularly, and Natasha knew just as well as the rest of the camp’s current and former residents which car makes she should be on the lookout for.
    On the other hand, it wasn’t particularly intelligent to attack twopolicemen with a cobble. Nina had a hard time recognizing Natasha in the hurried description of events that Magnus had given her on their way to the cars. Of course, Natasha could be pushed to act violently; probably almost everyone could. But when she stabbed her fiancé with a hunting knife, it hadn’t been because he had physically abused her for months; it wasn’t until she caught him with his fingers in Rina’s panties that she had counterattacked. During all the time she had spent in Vestre Prison, she had been almost alarmingly silent and passive.
    Until now.
    “What the hell were you thinking?” Nina muttered to herself as she made her way up the barely shoveled walkway in the direction of the camp’s little clinic. Something or other had clearly brought this on, but what?
    She stomped the snow off her boots on the grate by the clinic’s main entrance. Weeks’ worth of frosty slush was packed in the metal grid so that it had had become like trying to dry your feet on an enormous ice cube tray. As she opened the door, though, the heat hit her like a hammer. Magnus consistently ignored all energy-saving suggestions on that point. “The people who come here are sick, depressed and hurt,” he had said when the chair of the camp’s conservation committee had protested. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them freeze as well!”
    Rina was half sitting, half lying on a cot in one of the two examination rooms. In the corner between the closet and the wall sat an aggressively clean-shaven young man in a hoodie that on him looked more like workout clothes than weekend wear. He had placed himself in such a way that he couldn’t be seen from the window, and Nina concluded that he had to be a member of the Mondeo brigade. There had been a moment of heightened alertness as she came in, but now he relaxed back into