by Alex Dahl
Showers hurtle loudly against the ancient lead windows and she doesn’t hear him knocking, but Boulette erupts into hysterical excitement. And then he is there, wrapping her in his arms, kissing her hard, running his wet hands through her hair and across the warm skin at the base of her skull. He tastes of herbs and mint, and she pulls away, burying her face in his neck, the stubble on his throat rubbing against her cheek. His left hand is inside her blouse, pinching her nipple gently, and she slips her hand into the back of his underwear, running it across his buttocks, pulling him even closer.
Upstairs, he is inside her before they have had a chance to remove all their clothing: Antoine kneeling in front of Jacqueline on the bed, his trousers bunching around one foot, her bra pulled down but still fastened. She’s barely conscious of the girls being just down the hallway and clamps her teeth down into the edge of the duvet to stop her urgent cries from growing even louder. He slows down for a while, pulling her carefully up to him, so that she is sitting at the very edge of the bed, her arms around his neck, her ankles touching below his buttocks, her nipples hard and dark in the dim light.
She stops him with a gentle hand and for a long moment they look at each other, in both awe and fear. What could you do to me? thinks Jacqueline. After all, nothing could be more dangerous to the heart than love. In this moment, she feels it, the very beginnings of it, when it can still be killed by a single word or a wrong look, and it is terrifying to her that the possibility exists that someone could make her feel something again. She breaks his gaze, needing to be in control. She moves down his body, feeling his fierce energy beneath her fingertips as she strokes his warm skin. She takes him in her mouth, feeling a thrill deep in her stomach at his low moans.
A powerful volley of rain crashes against the old shutters and the howling of the wind doesn’t sound far off the storms of the previous week. Jacqueline comes back up and positions herself across Antoine, but in this moment it’s all wrong: it’s no longer the present, it’s the night Mikko returned to Le Tachoué. The man beneath her is no longer a gentle, handsome Pyrenean man but an Estonian criminal who knew too much. The vision tears at her, like a sharp shard from a nightmare.
Antoine’s strong body, relaxed and trusting beneath her, becomes Mikko’s. Antoine’s head is thrown back, his mouth open in pleasure, but his face becomes Mikko’s face as he succumbed to the sedative, a thin line of drool emerging from his bottom lip, meandering into coarse stubble. Antoine, sensing she has grown still, takes control by pulling her down towards him, closing his hand around her neck. He pushes his tongue deep into her mouth, building a feverish rhythm, but to Jacqueline his hands are the hands of the dead man around her neck and she can’t help but unleash a wild cry. Antoine must have assumed it’s a cry of passion because he increases his pace, but she pushes him off hard and scrambles from the bed.
Somewhere in the house, Boulette is yelping. Jacqueline locks herself in the bathroom and splashes cold water on her face, her knees trembling violently. Her loose hair becomes drenched and she ties it back, revealing several red marks from Antoine’s fiery lovemaking on her neck. There are marks on her chest, too, and on the insides of her thighs. She liked it. She liked how his lovemaking felt as if it was both worship and punishment.
She meets her own icy blue gaze in the mirror. She’s tried to evade the memory of Mikko and what she did to him, but she realizes now that prison doesn’t have to be a physical place. These are the eyes of a murderer, she thinks, knowing that this will forever be true of her.
52
Selma
Selma starts up again, going harder this time, sharpening her mind with each heavy blow to the punchbag. Sometimes, isolating individual thoughts in her mind feels entirely impossible – it’s as though she’s forced to think all the thoughts one might have in a day at once. Other times, she’s able to channel a state of mind where things are not only crystal clear but where she can discern connections between seemingly unrelated information. This is what makes her a good reporter, and also what occasionally gets her into trouble. A gift, her mother used to say. But Selma knows it’s a gift that can also be a curse.
Her heart is thundering in her chest, but she doesn’t stop until she has to, bending forward and letting big drops of sweat fall onto the mat. She is thinking about the Blix case, like she’s been doing most of her waking hours since she returned to Oslo. She doesn’t buy the theory that Lucia has been murdered. It’s one of the strangest cases she’s ever come across, and she still can’t get past the elaborate nature of the abduction. Why rent a house on Airbnb and engage a mysterious woman when they could have just snatched their victim off the street? And why take her from Sandefjord to Mölleryd to Sainte-Ode to somewhere else if the goal was to kill her?
She’s more convinced by the thesis that someone either within the Vicodius network or who enlisted their help spied on the Blix family on Facebook or Instagram – Elisa Blix had been a prolific user of both, frequently posing photographs of her son and daughter, both of whom were particularly good-looking children. If this were the case, the motive could be familial rather than sexual or murderous. Lucia Blix might have been taken to fill a childless void, which may increase the chances of the perpetrator being a woman. She might have been sold to a wealthy family, perhaps in the Middle East or Asia, where she could be being kept in a gilded cage. Even so, Selma can’t stop wondering how it’s possible to conceal, for months and years, a child whose photographs have been widely circulated, without someone alerting the authorities. How? Unless she’s being held somewhere virtually undetectable.
In the shower, Selma stands facing the wall, letting streams of slightly too hot water run off her body. She closes her eyes and tries to think about the mundane tasks she has to perform this morning before meeting with the Blix parents this afternoon: feed Medusa, start looking at her tax return, which is due in just over a week, write a thank you card to her Aunt Margot, who gave her money for her birthday earlier in the month. Her thoughts revert to Lucia Blix. How many times has she stared at that sweet, smiling face, imploring the little girl to somehow make her whereabouts known? Her muscles ache as she lifts her arms to refasten her necklace, which once belonged to her mother. She runs her fingertips absentmindedly across the cool moonstone as it rests in the little hollow where her ribs meet, below her breasts. Your decision-making place, her mother used to call it. That’s where your gut feeling sits. Your hunch. She smiles. What began as a strange, murky idea is growing clearer and clearer in her mind. Now she knows what to ask Fredrik and Elisa Blix.
It’s not yet 7 a.m., and outside it’s cold and clear. She smiles to herself at what the day holds. Olav had hardly been able to believe it when she messaged him saying she was going to be meeting with Fredrik and Elisa. It feels good to be back in touch with him again after so many months of self-imposed silence. She begins to walk fast down Torshovgata, bracing her thin body against the wind, her mind spinning with images of the missing little girl and her possible whereabouts.
*
He is a lot like Selma’s mental image of him, but his wife is not. Fredrik Blix has the easy, good-natured disposition of a kid, thinks Selma – he just doesn’t seem to carry that seriousness or tiredness most adults do, especially men working demanding jobs. He is an attractive man but in an unremarkable way, and he seems nervous and bewildered. He reminds her a little of Olav – a typical Norwegian who feels more at home running in the forest or skiing across barren plains than in a fancy hotel lobby, which is where they’ve agreed to meet. Though Selma walked past the Hotel Continental almost daily for years when she worked in central Oslo, she never went inside. Her eyes travel from Fredrik Blix to the sophisticated muted gilt of the interior and then back to Elisa Blix, who is sitting next to her husband, though at a noticeable distance from him.
Elisa is different from what Selma expected, based on her social media profiles and her interactions with the press. In the year and a half since Lucia was taken, she’s l
ost a lot of weight, lending her the appearance of a weary, hungry animal. Her eyes are intense and searching of Selma’s, and there’s something unsettling about the way she is constantly fidgeting – shuffling her feet, rubbing her thin red fingers, running a hand through her newly short bob. When Lucia first disappeared, Elisa came across as a golden girl: rich-girl pretty, with straight white teeth, glossy hair and the subtle tan of someone who holidays when they please. Now she looks like that woman’s less privileged older sister.
‘Thank you for meeting with me,’ Selma says, conscious of speaking slowly and clearly. When she gets too excited or nervous, all her words tend to come at once.
Elisa nods quickly and looks at Selma with suppressed impatience, as if she might at any moment throw her hands up in exasperation and ask her to get to the point. ‘You said in your email that you had some thoughts that might shed new light on what happened to Lucia?’
‘Yes. They are just thoughts at this stage, but I wanted to meet with you and see if you think I could be of any help at all. I want to help.’
Fredrik and Elisa exchange a glance. Everyone wants to help, and yet nobody has been able to. Until now, thinks Selma, and envisions the moment when Lucia Blix is back in her parents’ loving arms.
‘Did you say it’s Dagsposten you work for? Until the, uh, recent developments in Belgium, they hadn’t written anything about Lucia’s case in a long while, not even when that girl was found in Poland in January.’ Fredrik pauses and fixes Selma with his deep blue eyes. She sees then that he too has a tougher side that his happy-go-lucky persona doesn’t immediately reveal.
The girl Fredrik is referring to is ten-year-old Yanka Miloszewa, who was found half naked and running on bare feet down the side of a dual carriageway in eastern Poland at the beginning of January. She spoke in a foreign language, thought to be Scandinavian by the elderly couple who stopped their car, bundled her into blankets on the back seat and called the police. They saw the girl’s matted blonde hair, filthy scraps of clothing and dark, frightened eyes and remembered Lucia Blix, whose face had been plastered on signposts and billboards and across the national newspapers. As it turned out, Yanka was the child of a Polish mother and an abusive Swedish-Iranian father and had been held inside the family home near Lublin for over two years. Her mother has still not been found.
‘I used to work for Dagsposten. I’m freelance now.’
‘Have you worked on other missing child cases?’ Elisa asks, eyes sharp on Selma.
‘I worked a lot on Lucia’s case when I was still at Dagsposten, and at the time we were, of course, comparing your daughter’s case with some of the others. Madeleine. Therese. Those two in particular, due to the similarities.’
Lucia’s mother drops her gaze to her red, peeling hands and Selma imagines she’s probably prone to compulsive behaviors, like constantly washing or rubbing her hands. She knows the signs because she used to do the same thing herself. It’s Elisa’s sore hands and jitteriness that triggers the first real feelings of empathy in Selma. She can see why this woman has been called ‘strangely controlled’ and ‘unusually cold’, but meeting her in person it’s pretty clear that these are strategies to manage the chaos beneath the surface. What is each moment of each day like for this woman? How does she feel, catching her own gaze in the mirror as she brushes her teeth? Does she get a single moment of peace when she’s eating, sleeping, peeing, walking down the street?
‘Lucia’s case has always been special to me,’ Selma says, quietly now. Then she surprises herself. ‘I lost my mother when I was seven. And… it almost broke me. It has defined my life. So I find it unbearable to think of another little girl like me being without her parents. I’ve not been able to stop thinking about Lucia. And to me, there’s something not right about the investigation. Still now.’
‘What do you mean?’ asks Elisa, her eyes softer and bright with tears.
‘They just seem so set on the network theory, as if they’re almost disregarding any suggestion that the motive behind Lucia’s abduction could be much more complex.’
‘I think they have explored most avenues, Selma,’ Fredrik says, not unkindly. ‘And I hope they continue to do so.’
‘What are your thoughts?’ asks Elisa.
‘Well, take the Belgian situation. Someone calls in a tipoff saying Lucia died in Belgium. Why would they say that? To make the police raid that house and arrest Batz. But why? And why now?’
‘I’ve been wondering the same thing,’ says Elisa. ‘Why now, and who is the person who wants Batz arrested?’
‘Exactly. And I believe Batz when he says he had nothing to do with the abduction except for letting Mikko use the house in transit,’ says Selma.
Elisa nods excitedly. ‘I believe him too. I don’t think he has anything to gain by lying about it.’
‘Well, if he’s… if he’s done something to her, then he does have something to gain,’ says Fredrik.
‘He hasn’t,’ whispers Elisa, and Selma sees then how fragile the mother’s hope is.
Selma nods. ‘I believe that someone is trying to make it look like a murder in order to ensure that there’s less focus on or speculation about other scenarios. And I believe that the reason they’re doing this now is because they feel threatened somehow. Lucia may no longer be certain as to who she really is at this point – a vulnerable nine-year-old is extremely susceptible to manipulation. Her kidnappers have managed to avoid being caught for a long while and perhaps they’ve got bolder and have been taking her out and about and perhaps someone’s recognized her. Or they could have been threatened by someone – Batz, for example. And that’s extremely concerning: a nervous kidnapper will be much more dangerous than one who believes they’re safe.’
‘Right,’ says Fredrik.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ asks Selma.
Fredrik glances at Elisa, but Elisa’s gaze doesn’t move from Selma’s. ‘Of course.’
‘If, for a moment, we entertain the possibility that Lucia was taken to order by someone, what do you think their motive might be?’
‘I guess… I guess… because they might have seen her on the internet.’
‘But there are millions of children on the internet. Why her?’
‘Because… I don’t know. I’m not sure I understand the question.’
‘What I’m asking is, just supposing that someone wanted Lucia, and very specifically her, what could that person’s motive be? Entirely hypothetically, of course.’
‘To punish me,’ Elisa says softly, and looks immediately stricken, like she wants to take it back.
She glances at her husband, who, at the exact same moment, says, ‘For revenge.’
‘Revenge for what?’ asks Elisa, eyes quick and hard on her husband.
‘Punish you for what?’ asks Fredrik.
Selma watches them carefully.
‘I’m sorry, but what you’re asking doesn’t make any sense,’ says Elisa, her face flushed. ‘What I meant was that if I try to imagine why someone might take someone else’s child, the only reason I can think of is that they might be doing it to punish someone.’
‘And is there anyone that could hate you so much, with or without reason, that they could have taken your daughter?’
Fredrik makes a show of seeming completely bewildered, as though Selma is speaking a foreign language. Elisa looks angry – a vein has appeared at the side of her temple and Selma can tell she is clenching her teeth, trying to regain her composure. She releases a little incredulous laugh, as if to signal how utterly ridiculous Selma’s question is.
‘Of course not,’ she says.
‘Well, Mrs Blix, lots of people do hate other people. You said it yourself – punishment is the motive that comes to mind. Revenge is one of the most common motives for crime.’
Elisa has managed to regain some composure and to Selma it seems as though she is consciously summoning a meek, hurt look. There is something about this woman that doesn’t feel quite genuine, a
nd Selma realizes she felt more for her when she seemed angry – at least that felt real. She pictures Elisa with Medusa – would she run her hands down the cat’s back and would the cat lean into her touch, flattening her ears and purring, or would she arch her back and skulk away?
‘I’m afraid your question has thrown me a little. I can’t think of anyone who would hate me or have such negative feelings towards me that they would consider taking my child. I actually think that’s a really crazy suggestion.’
‘The thing is, someone might hate you intensely without your knowledge. They might have watched you for years.’
‘But why?’
‘Only you can answer that.’
‘Look,’ says Fredrik, ‘the police have thoroughly investigated the possibility of personal motives. They are highly competent and they’re continuing to spend a great deal of time, money and expertise on our daughter’s case, so I really can’t think that we’ll suddenly stumble across something new at this point.’
‘Highly competent, but they still can’t find her,’ Selma says, her eyes not leaving Fredrik’s.
‘I’m not sure I entirely understand why you wanted to meet with us?’ he says.
‘My view is that this is, without a doubt, personal, and that whoever has Lucia has targeted her specifically to get at one or both of you. I also think that the Vicodius network was just used for transporting her and that if the police could find the woman who took her, they’d get much closer to the perpetrator.’
