Strangers: A Novel(81)

I wasn’t sleeping deeply, and it doesn’t take three seconds before the situation we’re in rushes back to my mind. Strangers were in our house last night. And they nearly found us.

I struggle to straighten up; it’s not just my neck that’s hurting, the rest of my body, too, is paying me back for the night on the hard floor, wool blankets or not.

I have no idea how late it is. Since we’ve been keeping all the curtains and shutters closed, we’ve lost all sense of time. But according to the display on my phone, it’s six thirty in the morning, so there’s less than twelve hours to go until the phone call that will save us.

With the pale light from the screen I see that Erik is awake too. Did he even sleep at all? Would he dare to, in my presence?

Just before I turn off the light again, I see him rubbing his eyes. I listen in the darkness. The sounds of the dawning day make their way in to us. Cars driving past, the wind. Deceptive normality.

“What time is it?” Erik’s voice sounds throaty, he must’ve slept after all.

“Almost half past six. We should…”

The sound of my phone vibrating interrupts me. I’m still holding it in my hand, and for one irrational moment I hope my father has somehow managed to defy the laws of nature, that he’s somehow made the plane arrive in Germany in half the time.

But it’s not his name which shows up on the display, it’s Ela’s.

I press the button to reject the call; I need to be properly awake before I can act well enough to convince her I still haven’t heard from Erik. And I want to be sure that there’s no one still in the house.

If there is, they will figure out now, as we push the shelving unit to the side, that they’re not alone.

But everything remains silent. No footsteps, no voices.

“Wait in the kitchen,” whispers Erik, as he takes a look in the living room. “I’ll check upstairs.”

He is back downstairs within five minutes, and finds me huddled up on the couch. “There’s no one here, I’ve checked everywhere.” He smiles at me, but his face is deeply lined with fatigue again. “Should I make us some breakfast?”

Before I can answer, my phone vibrates again. Ela again, this time I pick up.

“Morning,” I say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear the telephone earlier—”

“Jo!” Just one syllable, but even that is barely comprehensible. Ela isn’t just crying, she’s sobbing loudly into the phone, barely able to catch her breath. My first thought—that she has confirmation that Erik is one of the victims—is, of course, complete nonsense. After all, he’s standing right in front of me, with a questioning frown on his face, pointing at my phone.

It takes me a while to understand what he wants. The loudspeaker.

Now Ela’s despair fills the entire living room. “What happened?” I say tentatively, and then, even though it makes me feel bad: “Is it about Erik? Do you have any news?”

She gradually gets ahold of herself. “No. No, still nothing, but—” She struggles to breathe. “Nadine is dead. I just found out. Her mother called me.”

I can see Erik grasping for something to hold on to, his left hand finding the back of one of the barstools, putting his right hand over his mouth, as if he wants to make sure he doesn’t make a sound.

“Oh my God.” There’s no need for me to act devastated. I wasn’t particularly fond of Nadine, but then I hardly knew her … which brings me to the question of how the news could reach Ela. A moment later I answer my own question: Ela and Erik have been friends for years, and he was with Nadine for a long time—so of course they knew each other.

“How did it happen?” Boiler, car accident?

“She killed herself.” Ela begins to cry harder again. “She jumped out of her bedroom window. On the ninth floor. The doctors said she died immediately.”

I can’t drag my gaze away from Erik, who is clearly using all of his strength to keep his composure. Is he thinking of how he threw Nadine out of the house? Was that their good-bye, their last encounter? Hopefully not.

“That’s … unbelievable,” I stammer. “She was just here. Yesterday. She wanted to know if there was any news about Erik.”

At the other end of the line, Ela takes a shaky breath. “Her mother thinks that’s why she did it. Because she thought Erik was dead. Apparently she had been getting her hopes up again recently.”

I find myself wanting to turn the loudspeaker off, because it’s obvious how hard each of Nadine’s words is hitting Erik.

“I spoke to her on the phone myself yesterday,” she continues, “and she was … sick with worry, just like I was, but not despairing. Do you think she found out something about Erik during the night? Is it possible that she knows more than we do?”

Oh yes, that’s entirely possible, but in a different way to how Ela means it. I would even bet on it. “Was there a suicide note?”

“No. The police didn’t find one.”

Of course not. How could they have? Had our two nocturnal intruders made a stop at Nadine’s place after coming here? Or perhaps they had been there first.

I try to remember our conversation from yesterday—Nadine was afraid of the Islamists and was saying something about Project Phoenix … but I was far too busy trying to get rid of her to listen in any detail.