Playdate

by Alex Dahl

  Selma’s heart is beating so fast, she has to place a hand on her chest. She closes her eyes and for a moment she feels utterly calm and clear-headed. She realizes the train is approaching a station and she decides to get off it – she needs to take a chance on a wild hunch here. She stands up slowly, her hand still inside her sweater on top of her heart, and walks down the aisle and off the train. She rushes to the end of the platform and then up and over the rickety metal pedestrian bridge over the tracks. On the opposite platform she buys a single ticket back to Lillehammer, her fingers stumbling several times on the ticket machine screen. Her card payment has only just been approved when the red train that will take her back up the Gudbrand Valley appears, the sun shimmering in its bright red paint.

  73

  Selma

  Marcus looks agitated and confused. She knows she’s lucky he’s agreed to speak with her again, especially as she’s back at Tollebu with just thirty minutes to spare before the end of visiting hours. Hopefully that will be all she needs.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ he asks, his face partially hidden behind a steaming cup of coffee.

  ‘Thank you for seeing me again. Something occurred to me after our conversation earlier today.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I was wondering if you could tell me about when the widow came to see you.’

  ‘No,’ he says, his voice cold. But then he softens it. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I don’t see what good that would do. I shouldn’t have talked to you in the first place.’ He gets up, placing the paper coffee cup on the table.

  ‘You know, the most important forgiveness is the forgiveness you grant yourself.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It would be okay to forgive yourself, Marcus,’ she says.

  He sinks slowly back into his chair, staring emptily into the air. ‘It’s not possible,’ he whispers.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘What if I do?’

  ‘You can’t. Everything… everything is my fault.’ He begins to cry again, tilting his head back to keep the tears from falling, but they overflow down the sides of his face.

  ‘Forgive yourself, Marcus. Even if nobody else does.’

  ‘A two-year-old died. And a father, a man probably much better than me. A little girl has been taken. And it’s all my fault.’

  Selma’s hands grow slick with sweat and she is aware of holding her breath, willing Marcus to continue. When he doesn’t, she softly nudges him.

  ‘What do you mean, “a little girl has been taken”?’

  ‘Lucia Blix.’

  ‘How could that possibly be to do with you?’

  ‘When the widow, Jacqueline Thibault, came here, it wasn’t an apology she was after.’

  ‘What was she after?’

  ‘She wanted a confession.’

  ‘What kind of confession?’

  ‘She wanted the whole truth about what happened that night. She… she saw stuff that was disregarded in the investigation. She was made to seem crazy. She lost everything. One kid dead, the other taken into state custody after she attempted suicide and had a psychotic breakdown.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘You can perhaps imagine what it was like to sit across from this woman begging me for answers.’

  ‘And what did you tell her?’

  ‘The truth.’

  74

  Elisa

  I take the stairs slowly and stand a while on the landing outside our bedroom. The door is ajar, and the orange light from the streetlamps is filtering in through the blinds; it’s just gone 4 a.m. I can hear Fredrik’s soft, even breath. I step into the room and sit down on the edge of the bed. I place a hand on his bicep, and he jerks awake.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks, searching my eyes.

  I must be a real sight – I’ve been up all night, tears are slipping down my face in unstoppable streams, my hands are shaking. The tears are real – of course they are. In my hand I’m holding my phone and on the phone is a picture of Line.

  ‘Is this her? Is this “Karoline”?’ I whisper, holding my iPhone out to him, close to his face.

  He blinks, and sits up fast.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says, studying the woman’s face. ‘How did you—’

  ‘Is it her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jesus. We need to speak to the police.’

  ‘But how did you… how did you find her?’

  ‘It was never you she was after, Fredrik. It was me. It was me, all along.’ I’m crying harder now, and my husband is watching me, motionless and serious.

  ‘But why?’ I swallow hard. I need to get this entirely right. Then maybe, just maybe, Lucia can come home.

  ‘Because I took her husband.’

  75

  Elisa

  It’s late morning by the time Fredrik and I have finished. He reacted more or less as I knew he would. At first with anger, lashing out and breaking things, making me cower even though I know he’d never hurt me. He picked up the bedside lamp and smashed it against the wall until only metal splinters remained. I sat and watched silently, waiting for him to calm down. When eventually he did, we talked and cried and sat for long moments in silence, staring at each other, at the floor, at the dented wall.

  ‘I guess when Nicolai and Rose died, she felt she had nothing to lose. And she irrationally held me responsible for her life unraveling. Poor woman – she’s obviously genuinely insane.’

  ‘The whole thing seems completely unbelievable to me… I mean, the lengths she’s gone to for revenge…’ says Fredrik.

  ‘We need to call the police.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Fredrik. ‘Just… Jesus Christ, I don’t know if all this makes it more or less likely that Lucia’s alive. I just hope—’

  ‘Shhh,’ I whisper, pressing my fingers to his lips. ‘Shall I call Gaute or do you want to?’

  ‘You do it.’

  My hand begins to shake violently so I place the phone down on the table and turn away from Fredrik. I can feel his eyes on me.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Elisa? What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing is going on, for fuck’s sake. I’m going to call Gaute now. Okay? But… I need to get some air. Today’s really taken it out of me.’

  ‘Out of you? How do you think I feel?’

  ‘Look, let’s not do this. The only thing that matters right now is that we get her back.’

  Fredrik nods thoughtfully and I go out into the hallway and shove my feet into the nearest pair of sneakers I see.

  ‘There’s something I need to know,’ Fredrik calls, louder than normal, as he comes towards me. ‘Elisa, stop. Look at me.’

  I glance up from where I’m fiddling with my laces.

  ‘I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that she’s mine. Is Lucia mine?’

  He stands blocking the front door. I try to duck underneath his outstretched arm, but he grabs me, hard, and pushes me up against the full-length mirror.

  ‘Answer me, goddammit. Is she mine?’

  I nod, at first hesitantly, then properly, but I must have hesitated for a second too long because Fredrik steps back and stares at me with a disgusted expression.

  ‘Yes,’ I whisper.

  ‘I don’t fucking believe you.’

  As I turn and make for the door, I trip over one of Lyder’s studded football boots in the cramped hallway and fall to the ground, hitting the side of my face against a metal umbrella stand. It feels as though my cheekbone has been pulverized and like I’ve been blinded in my left eye.

  ‘Jesus, Elisa,’ shouts Fredrik as I stumble from the house and woozily run towards the car.

  I lock the doors and sit in the driver’s seat, sobbing, clutching my face and wiping at the blood running from my nostril. Fredrik has followed me and is trying to open the car door, hammering on the window and crying. The neighbors must be watching in horror – they’ll think
he did this to me. I start the car and drive off, holding the wheel with one hand. I glance in the rearview and see my husband still standing in our driveway, his hands thrown up in surrender, his white shirt streaked with blood.

  I pull over in a layby and get out my phone. It’s time.

  76

  Elisa

  ‘Okay, let’s start from the beginning,’ says Gaute Svendsen, his handsome face bewildered and sympathetic.

  When I arrived at the police station, Kristine Hermansen was there and she gasped when she saw me. She took me into the women’s changing rooms and ran a warm, damp cloth across my cheekbone and down the side of my nose.

  ‘We need to take you to the emergency room,’ she said.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘This is very urgent.’

  So, here I am, in an interrogation room at Sandefjord police station with Gaute and Kristine. Haakon Kjeller and Jens Stenersen from Kripos are listening in to my testimony via video link.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, and take a deep breath. ‘The name of the woman who took Lucia is Jacqueline Olve Thibault. I’ve never met her before she took Lucia. I believe she is half French and that she lives in Lillehammer.’

  ‘Are you certain about this?’ asks Haakon Kjeller from the screen.

  ‘One hundred per cent.’

  ‘We’re putting the intel guys on Thibault immediately. We should get a profile up shortly.’

  ‘Continue, Elisa, from the beginning, please,’ says Jens Stenersen.

  I take a sip of the water on the table in front of me, but even forming my lips around the rim of the glass hurts, waves of pain spreading out from my fractured nose.

  ‘I have to start from very early on in my life to give enough context, but I’ll try to keep the less relevant details short—’

  ‘We’ll decide on the relevance, Elisa, so just tell us everything you can remember, completely uncensored.’ Again, it is Haakon Kjeller who speaks, and even through the screen his sharp eyes unnerve me.

  ‘I grew up in Lillehammer, in a very strict Jehovah’s Witness family. I basically hated my entire childhood. Always different, always excluded. As a teenager I became very rebellious. I refused to participate in family activities and started secretly meeting boys, things like that. I drank and did some drugs. Fairly normal stuff, but not in my family. My parents were exasperated and though my father was kind, my mother used to beat me. It was a shitty way to grow up, frankly.

  ‘Then, at sixteen, I got pregnant. I was terrified and didn’t know what to do. I told the school nurse, who told my parents. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in abortion and my parents were so ashamed of me, I actually worried they might kill me. The father was an older kid I smoked pot with and I refused to reveal his identity. My parents decided to send me to a Christian institution on the west coast where I would be “dealt with”. I pretended to agree, but just before I was due to travel there, the school nurse helped me to Oslo, where I had an abortion. I pretended that I’d lost the pregnancy, but my mother never really forgave me.

  ‘I became obsessed with winning her affection back – in spite of everything, she was my mother, and I loved her. My father always did what he could to please her, and he, too, was very devout. I guess I thought they didn’t know better and that they’d done what they thought was right. The summer I was seventeen, they insisted I go to a Jehovah’s Witness camp in Larvik. That was where I met my husband. He’s from a Jehovah family too, but much more moderate than mine, and they left the church around ten years ago. It wasn’t love, exactly, but I liked Fredrik very much. I still do.’

  Kristine Hermansen stares at my bloodied face and raises an eyebrow. She didn’t seem to believe me when I explained that I fell over. I bet she’s heard that one too many times before.

  ‘I realized quickly that Fredrik could be the ticket to winning my parents back. A squeaky-clean Jehovah boy wanting to marry me – it was a done deal. And it worked. My mother especially adored Fredrik and our relationship began to repair itself. Behind the scenes, though, things were different. We were both so young, only twenty when we married. And people don’t really change, do they? I didn’t suddenly become a calm, content wifey in a little house in a little town. I felt trapped and resentful.

  ‘We had Lucia, and it got even worse. And then I fell in love. You could say it was for the first time, and it caught me entirely off guard. It rocked the foundations of everything I thought I knew about myself and about marriage and family. It was passionate and incredible and painful in equal measure.’

  ‘Who was this man?’ asks Gaute.

  ‘Nicolai Olve Thibault, the husband of Jacqueline Olve Thibault,’ I say. ‘That’s why she must have taken Lucia.’

  ‘What I find impossible to understand is how you could not have mentioned this previously? It’s been eighteen months! Your daughter could be dead. If you knew all along who was likely to have taken her, how the hell could you have not said something?’ An angry vein is pulsating at Haakon Kjeller’s temple, but I force myself to maintain eye contact with him.

  ‘His wife never knew. He swore to me that she never knew. I believed that. And then he died. It meant that no one knew about us except me, so I just didn’t think it could be related in any way.’

  ‘Why now? Why did you suddenly think it could be her?’

  ‘I did briefly think of it back when Fredrik confessed about his Facebook fling. I almost said something then. But then Lucia was caught on CCTV with Eilaanen and the body turned up in Sweden and it seemed certain that she was in the hands of the Vicodius network. So it made no sense for me to make everything even worse by admitting that I’d had an affair, which only myself and one other person knew about. And that person was already long dead.’

  ‘But why now, Elisa?’

  ‘A journalist got in touch. She asked me some very pointed questions about revenge. And the only person I could think of who might truly hate me was Nicolai’s widow. So I started to seriously wonder whether there was any way she could have found out – and she must have done. How, I don’t know. Maybe he betrayed me, even though I never, ever thought he would.’

  I burst into tears again and just let myself cry silently. I’ll never say anything, no matter what. Never. Those were his words. I’ll love you forever, Elisa.

  A heavy silence momentarily settles on the room, thickening the air.

  ‘We should have some info on Thibault shortly,’ says Kjeller. ‘Let’s dial back in fifteen.’

  The screen goes black.

  ‘I was devastated by Nico’s death. I still am. It ruined my life,’ I say softly, wiping at the tears still streaming down my face. This, at least, is true.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ says Gaute. ‘That all along it was this woman. The wife of the man you had a relationship with. To go to such extraordinary lengths to punish you for having had an affair with her late husband. To take your child out of revenge…’

  I nod and wonder if they feel sorry for me now, or if they are full of judgment and condemnation. Either way, it feels good to have told them everything. Well, almost everything. For a moment I wish that Fredrik was here, but I needed to do this on my own. Besides, I’m not ready to face my husband again yet. I don’t know that I ever will be.

  77

  Elisa

  ‘We’re going to need a very careful strategy here,’ says Stenersen, rubbing his fleshy chin and staring hard into the camera. ‘Later today we’ll issue a wanted call – nationwide, and across Europe. We’ll keep all images out of the press to start with; this woman could be dangerous if she knows that we’re onto her. Our priority is to track her location and establish Lucia’s whereabouts. From what we gather, Thibault sold her apartment in Lillehammer in 2014 and her daughter Josiane has never been enrolled in school in Norway. We believe that she’s left the country and that very possibly she built a life somewhere else with the intention of taking Lucia there. We’re going to verify the information you’ve provided, Elisa, and we’ll need
you to supply us with as much supporting evidence as possible. Where were you on the night Nicolai Olve and his daughter were killed?’

  ‘At home in Sandefjord.’

  The three men watch me intently, Stenersen writing something on his notepad.

  ‘Did Nicolai, over the course of your relationship, discuss his wife with you at all? Do you remember anything about her that might be relevant – anything at all?’

  ‘He told me she was French, though I believe she grew up in Norway.’ It’s incredible, the things one can learn from Google, when one knows where to look.

  Stenersen writes something else on his pad.

  ‘We’ll look into whether she might have taken Lucia to France.’

  ‘What I fear the most is that she has killed Lucia for revenge. Or had her killed by Mikko Eilaanen or Batz? Or…’ Or… I stop.

  ‘Or perhaps she took Lucia as a way of trying to replace her own child, the girl that died,’ says Stenersen. ‘Rose.’

  Rose. A sweet, solid name. And yet, to me, her name feels like a dagger.

  ‘That seems really farfetched,’ I say.

  ‘Well, this is a woman who’s lost a child, so she might have a very compromised sense of reality. It’s something we see over and over. Most female abductors have, in fact, lost a child and are seeking to replace them. Given that Thibault is the mother of twins of a similar age to Lucia, she may have access to things that would make it easier for her to do something like this.’