Playdate

by Alex Dahl

  Could it be that she is still here, in little Sandefjord, the place I perceived as the safest place imaginable? Could it be that here, too, killers and kidnappers live under the radar, people who look and act just like everyone else, quietly biding their time, carefully selecting their victims? How hard would it really be to hand over a little girl to someone like that who would then keep her locked in a basement? Most Norwegian houses have raised basements containing either independent little apartments for au-pairs or tenants or simply lots of storage space. Who on earth would know if Lucia was being held in such a basement?

  The car turns onto the winding road which leads to our house at the end of the cul-de-sac. I try to work up the mental strength to face another night in that empty house, but my thoughts are churning with images of Lucia held in any one of Sandefjord’s thousands of basements and with the questions the police bombarded us with throughout the afternoon, questions that got more and more intense until I couldn’t be entirely sure of the truth.

  Who, why, where, what, why, why, why?

  *

  At home, we stand a long while in the kitchen in the dark, Fredrik taking his asthma medication, me just wringing my hands under the too-hot water – the pain feels good.

  ‘Do you think you can forgive me?’ asks Fredrik, finally.

  I don’t answer him.

  Another loaded silence fills the air and I wonder if this is how it will be from now on: secrets and half-truths crowding the spaces between us. Fredrik looks as though he might burst into tears again. I turn away, back to the running water, feeling a strong desire to just be alone and digest it all.

  ‘So,’ says Fredrik and I tense up, waiting for him to continue, but he doesn’t.

  ‘So what?’ I say eventually, when I can’t reasonably just keep standing here, scalding my hands.

  ‘Did you tell the police anything I don’t know about?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like. You know. Karoline Meister.’

  ‘What are you asking, Fredrik? Whether I’ve been indiscreet, too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I leave him waiting for a long moment. I could open my mouth and tell him some secrets of my own, but the difference between my secrets and his is that mine wouldn’t make a sliver of difference to Lucia’s case.

  ‘No, Fredrik. Look. I’m exhausted. Broken.’

  ‘It was pretty intense.’

  ‘Yes, it was. I feel like I’ve been put through a paper shredder.’

  ‘Yep, that just about sums it up.’ He remains very still. ‘It makes you wonder, doesn’t it,’ he says, keeping his eyes on mine, ‘whether past choices, and people we’ve come into contact with, even randomly, might suddenly bring something new to the investigation.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Which is why it is so incredibly important that we tell the whole truth. Every single little thing might make a difference.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘So you told them absolutely everything?’ His eyes are cool now.

  ‘Fredrik...’

  ‘Is it that unreasonable for me to ask? Really?’

  ‘Yes, it is. Really fucking unreasonable. Considering…’

  ‘Okay. I’m sorry. It’s just that, over the years, there have been times I’ve felt you were so far away I didn’t know if you’d come back to me.’

  ‘You don’t have anything to worry about.’ This is true. Now.

  He nods, then turns away from me and I see how tired and afraid he is, like me. He’s just a desperate parent who needs his child back. Like me. ‘Come here,’ I whisper, and he pulls me into his arms like I wanted him to.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Elisa,’ he says after a while. ‘Today was just so intense.’

  We break apart, and lean back against the kitchen counter. I rest my head on his shoulder and he touches his head softly against mine.

  ‘I blame myself, you know. I can’t believe I could have been so stupid as to post hundreds of pictures of the kids like that.’

  ‘So many people do, though. I guess I didn’t really think about it, either.’

  ‘Yes, but you kept your social media private.’

  ‘Yes, by chance. You mustn’t blame yourself, Elisa. This is nobody’s fault.’

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘I don’t, for what it’s worth. I love you, and we will get through this, no matter what.’

  ‘What do you mean, “no matter what”? There’s only one possible outcome here. We have to get her back – alive.’

  Fredrik nods, but he doesn’t look entirely convinced.

  ‘I think they might be right about it having something to do with social media, that someone random has seen my posts and become obsessed with her. She is, objectively speaking, an especially beautiful child – everyone’s been saying that – and if that’s the case, she’s more likely to be alive, right? They’ll be able to trace her by analyzing the traffic to my account. They’ll—’

  ‘Elisa. Stop. Please. Let’s go up, get some rest. All we can do is wait.’

  ‘You go up, then. I’m going to go through all my social media accounts one more time; maybe I’ll see something the police have missed.’

  Fredrik sighs, then gets up and goes upstairs. I go over to the sofa and open my Instagram, scrolling through post after post of my beautiful daughter and son, 742 of them, available for every single psycho child-snatcher out there to see. My eyes are twitching and burning with exhaustion and all the shed tears, but I won’t stop until I have read every single comment, until I have looked at every last person who’s liked an image of my children.

  11

  Selma

  It’s two days before Halloween and most of the shopfronts on Oslo’s upscale Bogstadveien are decked out with garish displays: skeletons hanging from wires, ghouls with empty eye sockets and evil smiles, porcelain pumpkins and jack-o’- lanterns, hairy spiders clinging to plastic webs, dolls with cracked faces, chocolates wrapped in eyeball foil. Selma stops absentmindedly in front of a hardware shop for a long moment, waiting for the light at the pedestrian crossing to turn green. Some creepy dolls have been placed inside the large gleaming stainless-steel pots, and a cartoonish witch sits atop a purple Le Creuset casserole dish. On a shelf, a huge chef’s knife has been plunged into a real pumpkin, with scarlet pomegranate seeds spilling from the ‘wound’. Selma crosses the street and continues towards downtown, bracing herself against the brisk wind, drawing in the autumn air, closing her hand hard around a ball of tissue in her jacket pocket.

  Her phone starts vibrating and she pulls it out, squinting at its screen in the sunlight as she reaches the House of Literature and the edge of the royal palace’s park. It’s a message from Olav.

  Morning. The police have just announced an unscheduled press conference at 11. Blix case.

  Selma half runs through the park, simultaneously scrolling through the newsfeeds of Dagsposten’s competitors, VG and Dagbladet. ‘Breakthrough in the Blix case?’ asks a VG headline, though when Selma clicks on it she realizes it doesn’t say anything new, rather only speculates about what will be announced at the unexpected press conference. Her right flank begins to hurt, and she slows down at the end of the park, grateful for the chance to catch her breath at the red light. Could it be that they have a breakthrough in the Blix case? It’s now ten days since Lucia was taken and the circumstances of her abduction have only seemed more and more bizarre with every passing day.

  ‘She’s either dead by now or she’s been hidden so well she’ll never be found,’ Olav said yesterday, staring intently at the blown-up picture of the little girl on Selma’s screen, as though she might suddenly come to life and reveal her whereabouts. It was genius, really, Selma thought, nodding at her boss’s words. The playdate. Buying all that time before anyone realized she’d been taken. She could be anywhere by now, anywhere at all. Or she could indeed be dead.

  Selma stops at Deli de Luca on Karl Johan, as she does every morning, even when she’s in a hu
rry, like she is now.

  ‘The usual?’ asks the girl behind the counter.

  Selma smiles and nods.

  She walks the last few hundred meters to the office, drawing in the delicious aroma of the double caramel spiced latte. It is her one and only luxury most days – it has to be at sixty-two kroner, but Selma knows she’s likely to be at work well into the night, like she has been every night since 20 October, when Norway suddenly had one of Europe’s most baffling abduction cases on its hands. She nods to her colleagues Kai-Marius and Lisbeth before sliding into her chair in the little pod they share by the floor-to-ceiling windows, her cheeks stinging from the icy wind.

  Olav saunters over as Selma waits for her computer to start up. ‘Hi there,’ he says, leaning against the flimsy partition wall that separates her pod from the rest of the open-plan office and placing a chocolate-chip cookie on her desk, like he does every morning.

  ‘Hi.’ She smiles at him then turns to the flurry of emails ticking into her inbox.

  ‘So, shall we walk over there at around ten thirty?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What do you think they’ve got?’

  ‘Well, I imagine it must be some kind of breakthrough,’ says Selma. ‘Maybe the kidnappers have made another demand? Or they’ve got a DNA match?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.’

  ‘It just seems so odd,’ says Selma, ‘for this to be a ransom case when Lucia Blix is obviously from such an average background. The kidnappers are clearly professionals, so why didn’t they target a kid from a loaded family, if it’s money they’re after? It makes no sense.’

  ‘No’ – Olav rubs at a raised red patch on his cheek – ‘it doesn’t.’

  ‘I’m going to write a bullet-point list of the case, right now.’

  ‘You do that every day, Selma.’

  ‘We’re missing something.’

  ‘That’s a job for the police.’

  ‘It’s a job for the hungriest reporter in town.’

  Olav laughs and walks away.

  Selma glances at Kai-Marius and Lisbeth, who are huddled together and watching a YouTube video of Ariana Grande doing an impersonation of Christina Aguilera, then plugs in her headphones, opens her long and carefully organized ‘Blix Case’ document and highlights the Swedish points in bold.

  The mobile phone, a Samsung Galaxy S7, used by ‘Line’ when she contacted Elisa on 19 October, was found in some shrubbery by the roadside just south of Strömstad, across the border in Sweden. It was most likely thrown from a moving vehicle and the SIM card and phone are currently undergoing analysis.

  The house at Asnestoppen 25 in Sandefjord was rented through Airbnb on 15 October, by a woman named Kathrine Sæther. This profile has been revealed as fake, using a stolen driver’s license and the hacked Facebook account of a woman of the same name for verification. The house was rented for a week for 9450 kroner and paid for with a Mastercard registered to a Heiki Vilkainen, a Swedish citizen of Finnish origin. Vilkainen is unaccounted for and on Interpol’s list for wanted individuals.

  ‘You ready?’

  Olav’s voice cuts into Selma’s highly concentrated state and it takes her a moment to recall where they are going. The press conference. She nods and gets up, shivering slightly in the warm editorial office at the thought of stepping outside into that cold wind.

  *

  ‘We can confirm that we have made an arrest in the Lucia Blix abduction case. A twenty-one-year-old man from Oppegård was apprehended yesterday afternoon and has been formally charged with perverting the investigation and falsifying case material. He has confessed to writing the ransom note of 21 October and delivering it to Fredrik and Elisa Blix. His confession is supported by our forensic findings. He is, however, not currently suspected of being involved in Lucia Blix’s abduction.’

  Police chief Hans Gundersen speaks in a low, monotonous voice, but he is a man of natural authority. He is broad-shouldered and has the physique of an aging military man, thinks Selma.

  The room explodes in a cacophony of shouted questions and flashing cameras.

  ‘Is the suspect connected to Fredrik and Elisa Blix?’

  ‘We don’t believe he is.’

  ‘Does the man have previous convictions?’

  ‘I am unable to say at present.’

  ‘Does he have an alibi for the 19th and 20th of October?’

  ‘Yes, he does.’

  ‘What is his motive for sending the letter?’

  ‘We have not yet established a motive.’

  Selma and Olav look at each other. Another dead end. Some weirdo who wanted attention and went to the lengths of crafting a threatening letter to the parents of an abducted child – sometimes Selma finds it almost impossible in her job to believe that humans are inherently good.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she says, eyeing the exit through the throng of journalists.

  ‘Yep. It’s pretty clear they don’t have anything else new.’

  They walk back to the office at speed and Selma almost has to jog to keep up with her very tall, lanky boss. Olav Hammel is the kind of guy who does a fifteen-kilometer forest run before work, or at least that’s the impression Selma has. His thick dark hair and deep dimples make him look boyish, though he must be well into his forties. Selma herself is more of a Netflix and takeaways kind of girl.

  ‘You know, I don’t know what it is – call it gut feeling or intuition or whatever – but I feel as though they’re looking in the wrong places,’ she says.

  Olav stops walking and looks at her. ‘What do you mean, Eriksen?’

  ‘I’m not really sure,’ she says, letting her eyes rest for a moment on a plane flying low above them, rocking visibly in the fierce wind. ‘It’s just a feeling I have. That the answer is simpler than it seems, but the investigation is heading in the wrong direction.’

  ‘Well, I’ve learned not to mess with your intuition, Selma.’ Olav starts walking again, though slowly now, a thoughtful look on his face. ‘Why don’t you just go with whatever hunch you have and see what you come up with?’

  Selma nods. ‘I’m going to really focus on the parents,’ she says. ‘Look deep.’

  Olav grunts his approval and Selma turns her face into the wind jostling through the gap between two tall buildings; it claws at her hair, slicking it back like a jet of water. For a moment she closes her eyes, allowing herself to be taken over by the feeling that’s become familiar to her over the years, the sense that she’s detaching from the outside world and getting sucked deep inside herself, held there as if within an impenetrable cocoon.

  *

  It’s close to midnight and Selma is the last person left in the office, by several hours. Olav sent a message a couple of hours ago: ‘Go home, Eriksen. It’s bedtime!’

  She isn’t tired, not really. She might close her eyes for an hour or so on the sofa in the meeting room, but she’s not going to go home. Not when she’s like this – when she’s managed to step into that zone where it feels as though her attention and insights have been sharpened to lethal incisiveness. It is in this zone that Selma is sometimes able to see the connections and inconsistencies missed or overlooked by others. Hyperactive, scatterbrained, classic ADHD – Selma has been labeled with all of that. But the upside of her kind of neuro-wiring is the extreme singular focus that she brings into play when she turns her attention to something she is really interested in; that and her ability to remember vast amounts of small details. Concentrating on dull tasks can be tricky unless she takes her meds, but if she’s really taken with something, she can devote herself to it so completely that it’s as if she’s tapping into a secret sense. She discovered her talent and love for writing in high school, and she’s ploughed every last bit of energy and focus into that ever since. As a journalist, the way her brain works finally became useful – applauded, even. She looks around the empty editorial office. She deserves to be here, but who would have thought that back in school?

>   She returns to her screen, which is filled by Elisa Blix’s Facebook cover photo, the one from Christmas. The perfect family. She stares at Elisa’s features, at the wide, red-lipped smile that doesn’t seem to quite reach her eyes – or maybe Selma is imagining that.

  ‘Who are you?’ she whispers. ‘Why you?’

  12

  Lucia

  19 October 2017

  Josephine and I turn the lights off and sit in the tent. I wish I had a tent in my room too. She holds the torch and I turn the pages. I read out loud – I’m better at reading because she says the same word many times in a row. We laugh because it’s a funny book about a dog that lives in a family with lots of children who all love him so he gets taken for so many walks his legs get tired.

  ‘When do we have to go to bed?’ I ask.

  ‘Mamma will let us stay up late because it’s a special occasion.’

  My mamma said I can call her when I want if I want to go home. I won’t, at least not now. Now is nice. But I might when we have to go to sleep, if I feel scared. Minky is here in the tent with us too, and Josephine’s cuddle toy, a pink stuffed pig called Troof.

  We finish the book and Josephine holds the torch underneath her chin so her face gets spooky and I laugh and then I say, ‘Josephine, stop.’

  ‘Just call me Josie.’

  We leave the tent and decide to do some drawing, so Josie looks through lots of drawers for pencils, but they’re empty. My drawers are full of junk and my mamma always says I have to sort them out or else. She finds the pencils in her bag and then we sit close together on the warm wooden floor and start. I draw the dog from the book. He’s hiding from one of the family children behind a sofa, his long black tail showing.