Playdate

by Alex Dahl

  How terrible it would be for her, he thought, if she happened to walk into a shop only to come face to face with him. He mentioned his fears to one of his guides once, but the guide told him he had nothing to worry about because the victims’ next of kin were always informed before every such excursion. It then occurred to him that instead of making every effort to avoid him, she might roam the streets of the little town until she found him, perhaps browsing the aisles at H&M like a normal guy on a Saturday afternoon shopping spree, and drive a knife into him. Marcus imagines that’s what he’d want to do, if the tables were turned.

  Then, the widow came to see him at Tollebu.

  *

  Now, Marcus gets up from the desk and stands a while by the window. It’s a brilliant spring day and the forest beckons him with its vibrant new life after the long winter. He can evoke its smell even though the window is closed: moss, water, wildflowers.

  There’s a knock at the door.

  ‘Hi, Marcus,’ says Pål, one of the guides. ‘There’s no cause for alarm. It’s just, you have a visitor.’

  ‘A visitor?’

  ‘Yes. She’s in reception.’

  Pål winks at him, but Marcus frowns as he kicks off his slippers and pushes his feet into his trainers. He doesn’t get visitors. In fact, this is only the second time in all the years he’s been at Tollebu. She, Pål said. Could it be…? No, he tells himself, that would be impossible. But still, a sliver of hope stirs within him.

  65

  Selma

  ‘Hey there, Selma,’ says Olav. ‘Just returning your call.’

  She turns her back to the wind and cups the mouthpiece. ‘Hey. You’ll never guess where I am.’

  ‘Locked in Fredrik and Elisa Blix’s basement?’

  ‘Ha ha, very funny.’

  ‘Sorry, that was wrong.’

  ‘On so many levels.’

  ‘So, where are you? And what have you got?’

  ‘I just met with Elisa Blix’s mother.’

  ‘Ah. And?’

  ‘Get this, Olav – Elisa is estranged from her entire family. They are strict Jehovah’s Witnesses and she hasn’t been in touch with them since before 2012, when her father died.’

  ‘Hm. How come?’

  ‘I don’t know why. The mother is the most bizarre woman. Seriously, I’ve never met anyone like her. I got a really bad feeling.’

  ‘What kind of bad feeling, Selma?’

  ‘Well, she didn’t seem at all affected by the fact that her own granddaughter has been kidnapped, presumed murdered, by a trafficking network. That in itself is pretty damn weird.’

  ‘Yep. Weird.’

  ‘I mean, she even said that Lucia meant no more to her than any other randomly abducted child.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘She also insinuated that Elisa isn’t as squeaky clean as she seems.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Not sure. She shut the door in my face – literally. But there is something there, I can feel it. She’s been involved in something bad enough to cost her her relationship with her parents, and I’m convinced it’s linked to Lucia’s disappearance.’

  ‘Have you seen the news?’

  ‘Just quickly scrolled through. Why?’

  ‘Nothing major, but Scotland Yard mentioned Lucia’s case earlier today, saying there’s no evidence she died in Sainte-Ode other than the blood traces and the tipoff, and that it’s important to remain open to all possible scenarios. So, you keep digging, Eriksen. It’s not going to hurt, either way.’

  ‘Okay. I’m hoping Elisa will talk to me again. It didn’t go that well last time – maybe I pushed her too far.’

  ‘Knowing you, I’m sure she’ll talk to you. The question is whether you’re barking up the wrong tree. Time will tell.’

  ‘I don’t think I am.’

  ‘So, Selma, you mentioned you were going to bring me some other juicy stuff, too. What have you got? Or have things been a little, uh, one-track?’ Olav laughs, though not meanly. Selma has always seen him as a bit of an older brother figure.

  She’s started walking back up towards the train station and just as she’s about to go through the pedestrian tunnel under the tracks, she glances up at Lillehammer High-Security Prison. ‘Actually, there is a case I’m looking into. You might be interested. Have you heard of Marcus Meling?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Why?’

  ‘He’s the founder of iNovo. You know them? Made it big in app development a decade ago.’

  ‘Ah. Yeah.’

  ‘He’s been in prison for years, serving a long sentence for double manslaughter.’

  ‘Okay…?’

  ‘He’s just launched an appeal. I thought I might try to look into his case.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s something weird about it.’

  ‘Weird how?’

  ‘Well, first of all, he was way over the limit and hit a family out sledding, killing the father and one of the children.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Yeah. So far, so awful, right? What I find weird about it, though, is that Meling had no previous convictions, no known substance addictions and no reason to be in Lillehammer. He lived in Oslo and was a multimillionaire and philanthropist with everything to lose. So why would he be by himself in a random town far from home, driving too fast on icy roads, under the influence? It makes no sense.’

  ‘Yeah, that is weird.’

  ‘He got twelve years, which is the longest sentence being served for manslaughter in Norway. He refused to divulge his reasons for being there on that road and he refused to cooperate with the investigation, which is why he got such a long sentence.’

  ‘All right, well, have a poke around and keep me posted.’

  Selma presses ‘End call’ and walks across the parking lot to the station, where her train is scheduled to leave in ten minutes. At the other end of the lot is First Hotel Breiseth, a charming Jugendstil building with little towers flanking its sides. What if she were to stay in town and probe a little further? Medusa has enough food and water in her bowls and most likely won’t care if Selma returns today or not. She could spend the evening on her laptop doing some more research and tomorrow she could try to get Kari Samuelsen to speak to her again, or perhaps Elisa’s sister, Elin. She can get in touch with Marcus Meling’s prison officers, and perhaps she can interview him, too. It would be like a little holiday.

  Selma goes into the hotel and stands a moment admiring the giant chandelier that hovers low over the reception area like a spaceship about to land on a newly discovered planet. She feels a deep thrill in the pit of her stomach to be here, in Lillehammer, alone.

  66

  Elisa

  The drive takes over five hours and when I finally pull up in front of our house, it’s almost ten. The light is off in our bedroom upstairs. I don’t know how I can do what I have to do – wash my face and clean my teeth and lie down next to my husband. But I don’t want to lose even more of this life; I want to piece it back together, and I will pay almost any price for it. I want it to be Fredrik and me and Lucia and Lyder again, and forever. It worked on so many levels, and no family is perfect.

  There’s a light tap on the car window. Fredrik must have heard me pull up and now he’s standing outside in the tatty grey T-shirt and stripy pajama bottoms he sleeps in. In spite of everything that happened today, I feel a rush of affection for him and step into his embrace.

  ‘How was Rome?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh, you know Rome. It was fine. Airport life, huh?’

  ‘What was the weather like?’

  I pull back slowly and look at Fredrik, keeping a neutral expression, trying to gage whether he is innocently interested in the Roman weather or if he is suspicious of something. My heart is thundering wildly in my chest.

  ‘It was normal Rome weather. Slightly overcast, mild.’

  He nods and turns to walk back inside the house. Before he goes upstairs, he says, ‘Don’t for
get that we have a meeting with Kripos in Oslo on Friday.’

  A lot needs to happen between now and then.

  Fredrik goes up to bed, tense and exhausted, and the night is mine. Before he went up, I smiled at him, rubbed his arm. He blinked, perplexed, like this morning. It’s as if he doesn’t quite trust my words or my actions. I wonder if he thinks I will divorce him eventually. But what I want is the exact opposite. I want my child back and I want to live in this house with my family. In the years after I had Lyder everything went to hell, but I got used to pretending, and it got easier and easier until it became real: I was a happily married wife and mother of two.

  Now, in the early hours, my head is beginning to clear. I sit down to do some research. I need to get all the facts straight before I speak to Fredrik and the police. The only way to get my life back is to face the past. I just need to tweak it a little.

  67

  Lucia

  It’s a Wednesday and that means we come home from school on a bus before lunch. It drops us off at the bottom of the hill and Monsieur Chabanne waves at us and then Maman picks us up from there. But today she doesn’t come.

  ‘She’ll be here soon,’ says Josie and I nod.

  We wait and a few cars drive past. We wait some more, but it’s cold and we get tired of the little word games we play.

  ‘Want to play Funky Lady?’ asks Josie, but I shake my head.

  I think about the other night when Maman came to my bedroom. Even after she left, I couldn’t sleep and when I was sure she wouldn’t come back I got out of bed and stood by the window looking out. I remembered the first night at Le Tachoué and the way Maman held me close when I screamed. I was afraid then because I didn’t know The Truth. But what if The Truth isn’t The Truth for real? Adults aren’t allowed to lie, but sometimes they do it anyway.

  ‘She isn’t coming,’ says Josie.

  ‘We could walk,’ I say.

  Josie looks afraid and probably so do I because it’s very far to get home. If we follow the road, we’ll get to a row of stone houses, but only two of them are lived in by people. In one of them lives François, a shepherd. We only meet him when we play down at the bottom of Le Tachoué, by the river, because his property begins on the other bank and we aren’t allowed to cross the river. After François’ stone house we’ll have to walk up the track for a long time, and then there’s a very small road full of mud and potholes which leads to our house.

  ‘We could go through the woods,’ I say. It’s a better idea, because it’s shorter.

  Josie stares at me like it’s a crazy thing to do, but she follows when I start to walk. The nice thing about having a twin sister is that there is always someone to play with and someone who helps you. Many other children go home after school and then they’re on their own. That doesn’t happen to me because me and Josie are always together. It wasn’t always like that, but now I don’t remember it that well anymore. I remember The Other People, but it’s like Josie must have been there too, because I can’t totally remember not having her. I know she wasn’t, but maybe when I lived with The Other People I remembered deep down that I’m a twin even if I’d forgotten many things. Twins are special and can feel things other people can’t feel.

  Anyway, I can’t remember it all now. Josie went to live with Other People too because Maman had to live in a hospital for a long time. Her heart was sick. It’s because of what happened to our dad. He was killed and we were almost killed too, that’s why Josie has a big scar on her cheek, and it’s why my head hurts sometimes and I can’t remember stuff, like all the French verbs. It was so hard for Maman that she had to go to the hospital to learn how to be happy again. When she came back out, Josie came back to her, but The Other People wouldn’t give me back because they pretended I was theirs. So Maman had to take me.

  It’s The Truth.

  It’s very difficult walking up the hill inside the woods. It’s warm now, but it isn’t that long since big storms came and knocked trees over and made floods. We have to climb over trunks and brambles and lots of sticks piled on top of each other, and by the time we reach the river and the bottom of our fields, we are so tired we can’t talk at all. Josie’s foot slips on one of the stepping stones we use to cross the river and she hits her knee on a sharp rock. She’s wet and bleeding and she’s crying loudly. I tie a strap from my backpack around her leg with one of my socks underneath it to stop the blood. We keep walking, slowly, and I hope that soon we’ll be able to see the house.

  ‘Why didn’t Maman come?’ Josie cries loudly. ‘What if she’s dead, dead like Daddy?’

  What if she is dead? I picture Maman on the stone floor of the hallway, dead, with lots of blood splattered around her. Or on the sofa, still and beautiful like Sleeping Beauty. If Maman died, what would happen to us? We wouldn’t have anybody. Only each other and Boulette. Or… or maybe me and Josie could go and live with The Other People in that house and we’d have Lyder as a little brother and the mamma who wore a uniform with shiny gold buttons, and we’d have a daddy too.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ asks Josie.

  ‘Because your knee hurts.’

  This makes her laugh and cry at the same time. We rest on a tree stub and eat our snack, which today is some sliced apple and a yogurt.

  ‘Let’s take that shortcut,’ I say.

  ‘We can’t,’ says Josie. ‘Maman says we aren’t allowed.’

  ‘But it’s shorter. Come on!’

  There’s a path that cuts across the field that belongs to François and reaches Le Tachoué from the back. I’ve seen it from the bottom of the garden when I take Samba there to play. After François’ top field the path goes straight through a very thick bit of forest and after that you’re at Le Tachoué. We’ve never been in that part of the forest because Maman says we can’t and that it’s easy to get lost there, but we’ve walked around it on the outside, and it isn’t very big, so I think we’ll be okay.

  We have to walk slowly because Josie’s knee is still bleeding; it’s gone through the sock and is running down the side of her leg like a muddy red-brown stream. We hold hands and go into the forest. It’s true what Maman said – the forest is very thick here. The trees stand so close together that we have to squeeze past some of them to get through. Our feet catch on thick roots and we keep tripping over twigs and fallen branches, so it takes a long time to move forward. It’s kind of exciting to be here among trees we don’t know. In the forest at the top of the hill, where we usually play, we know all of the trees now, and I think I could find my way through it in the dark. But here everything is new. After a bit, the trees get more spaced out and I think we must be near our garden. Instead, the forest opens up like a kind of room and we’re in a little clearing. It’s like a bubble of air in the middle of all the trees.

  Josie and I look at each other and step into the center of it.

  ‘Woah,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Woah.’

  She laughs, even though her leg must still hurt, and I laugh too. Now that we’ve discovered this place, we’ll have to come back here to play. We just won’t tell Maman.

  We turn to leave, carrying on in the same direction we were going, when I notice something strange on the ground. It’s a big stone, on its own, held snug by wild lavender, heather and moss. The stone looks like it’s been brought there from somewhere else because it’s clean and square. On it, letters have been carved and painted gold.

  It says:

  Rose Olve Thibault

  21.01.2010 – 27.01.2012

  ‘Come on,’ says Josie. ‘I’m scared.’

  I’m scared too, because the stone is the kind of stone they give to dead people. We turn around and run and run.

  68

  Jacqueline

  She hadn’t planned on going all the way to Toulouse. After dropping the girls at school, she had intended to go to one of her usual haunts, Cybercafé Roc in Saint-Gaudens. But on the way there, driving through Salies-du-Salat, she felt an
overwhelming sadness as she passed the turnoff to Antoine’s street. She glanced down the Rue des Bains in the hope of catching a glimpse of him or his car, but the road was deserted, still glinting with the morning’s rain. Potholes had filled with murky water and the asphalt had split in the recent storms, long cracks running along the tarmac. At the end of Antoine’s road fields rolled out into the distance, swelling into hills, then mountains. In spite of her somber mood, Jacqueline had felt overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of it all and drew in the crisp air through her open window, denying herself the sight of Antoine’s house in the rearview mirror as she turned the corner.

  Four nights have passed since she last saw him, and she’s spent each one of them lying motionless in bed, not even attempting sleep, her thoughts racing with frightening, intense images. On her mind have been Mikko, Nicolai, Antoine, her mother, Lulu-Rose, Mikko again, the future… Things seemed to be going well until Mikko came back, and then there was Lulu-Rose’s strange behavior at school, and now her plans have suddenly become soured and hazy.

  As she comes up to the big roundabout at Saint-Martory, a dull ache spreads through her stomach at the thought of the Cybercafé Roc’s depressing mock-kitsch velour chairs, watery coffee, and shifty, leering customers who never hide their ogling. On a whim, she turns right for Toulouse instead of left for Saint-Gaudens.