Below Zero

by Eva Hudson

  The two women looked at each other. “Sure. We’re playing in Denmark the day after tomorrow anyway.”

  “And tee-shirt. And a cap. And… what else you have?”

  The girl with the shaved head looked at her quizzically. “You sure you want all of it?”

  “Please,” Ingrid said. “I need. He is looking for me.” Ingrid hoped her face was pathetic enough to convince them. “Please. I need to get out of here without him knowing. He cannot find me. I need…”

  “OK, honey.” The American reached out a hand, her nails shiny and black, and placed it on Ingrid’s forearm, almost touching the Perspex tube. “You can have the lot for, what, I dunno, two fifty euros.”

  Ingrid nodded and placed her own hand on top of the girl’s. She made deliberate eye contact with her: “What I really want…”

  “Yes?”

  Ingrid pointed to her head. “Is that.”

  “What?”

  “Your hair.” Her accent was holding steady.

  “You want to shave your head?”

  Ingrid nodded.

  “Well, all you need are some clippers. You can do it yourself. Save a fortune at the salon.”

  Ingrid shook her head. “No, I want now. He must not find me.”

  “Now? You want to shave your head? Here?”

  Ingrid nodded. A change of clothes, a change of style, and she could slip out unnoticed. Might even be able to hitch a ride into the city with some of the stragglers, or wangle an invite to an afterparty somewhere. She could disappear for a few hours. A plan had emerged. An exit had opened up.

  “You sure?”

  Ingrid was very sure. “And some of… what you call this?” She pointed to her own eye.

  “Make-up?”

  “Yes. I want to look like you.”

  Her eyes widened. “Right now?”

  “Yes. I will pay. He is looking for me.” Ingrid pointed to her wound. “He cannot find me.”

  The girl pursed her lips in a display of concern, her eyes checking Ingrid’s to make sure she wasn’t a fruitcake. She turned to her friend. “You OK to pack up, Marta?”

  “Ja. Sure.”

  “OK then, honey, let’s do this thing.” She beamed at Ingrid, pushed an armful of merchandise at her and grabbed her hand. “Darling, you are soaked through. Let’s get you out of those things.” She led her through the lobby into the dark and empty auditorium toward the backstage area. Her name, she said, was Mary Jane, though everyone called her Mare. “As in nightmare.” In the space of less than two hundred yards Ingrid had Mare’s entire life story. She’d had evangelical parents who were too damn easy to shock and, although they’d threatened to disown her when she got her first tattoo, they still came to the wedding when she married the bassist in the band. Ingrid missed out on some of the details as she was too busy clocking the emergency exits and possible hiding places. She kept expecting to hear sirens.

  “So where’re you from?” Mare pushed open a dressing-room door.

  “Russia.”

  “Really? Whereabouts? Cos, I’m pretty sure we’ve got some dates lined up in Moscow.”

  “St Petersburg.”

  “I thought that was Florida.”

  Ingrid smiled at her and stepped into the dressing room, where three people were engrossed by their cell phones, all slumped in various stages of exhaustion.

  “Hi everyone, this is...”

  Ingrid had to think quickly. “Katja.”

  “And this is Andy, my husband. Say hi, honey.”

  “Hi.”

  “And Lizzie and Mustang. Guitar and drums.”

  They both nodded.

  Ingrid knew she needed to act like a fan. “I cannot believe this,” she said, looking at Lizzie. “So cool.” She cracked the biggest, dopiest smile she could manage.

  “What happened to your face?” Mustang asked in a slow Texan drawl.

  “Boyfriend,” Mare replied. “Where’s Antonio?”

  Lizzie, without looking up from her phone, said: “Groupies.”

  “The other dressing room?”

  “Guess so.”

  Mare turned to Ingrid. “Then we’ll take the restroom. Let me grab my stuff. Any of you know when the bus leaves?”

  Andy shrugged. “Stef said we’d push off at midnight. He wants to be in Malmö for the morning. Hey, you want me to get Martin to have a word with… with your boyfriend?”

  Ingrid shook her head, then looked away nervously, trying to behave like a starstruck fan. She had no idea how big a band River Sticks were. Maybe they played stadia in the States. Maybe they were big in Japan. Or maybe they’d just had some randomly successful YouTube hit in Scandinavia. She hoped they didn’t ask what her favorite track was.

  “So Malmö’s next, then Copenhagen. We’re going to Russia, right? Katja here just told me she is from St Petersburg.”

  Lizzie looked up, her make-up not quite removed, leaving dark circles under her eyes: “Think we’re gonna be there next week. Maybe you could show us around?”

  This was more contact with potential witnesses than Ingrid had anticipated. It was all taking too long. She needed to be less memorable.

  “I live in Stockholm.” She turned to Mare. “Please, hurry.”

  Mare looked surprised. “What’s the rush, kiddo?”

  Kiddo? Did she call her kiddo? Ingrid had to be a decade older than her. “Just, please.”

  Mare nodded. Ingrid hated how easily she was manipulating this woman. She was the kind of girl—she couldn’t be more than twenty-five—that Ingrid had interviewed too many times, the kind who’d wound up at the wrong party, or delivering drugs, or stealing a car because her boyfriend had suggested she would do it if she really loved him. “Sure.”

  Mare swiped a bag of cosmetics off the counter, grabbed Ingrid by the wrist and dragged her out into the hallway. At the end of the corridor were the women’s restrooms, a brightly lit space featuring a Formica vanity unit with three inset basins, and five cubicles, two of which were occupied. The women inside them were talking to each other, while a third fixed her make-up in the mirror. She looked at Mare, gave her a nod of approval as if to say how cool she thought she looked, then returned to her reflection.

  Ingrid caught a glimpse of herself. She looked almost feral. “I need…” Ingrid pointed to the cubicles. She didn’t need the bathroom at all—she had barely eaten or drunk anything for over twenty-four hours—but she needed not to be scrutinized by another potential witness. It was only when she got into the cubicle that she discovered her period had finally started.

  “Damn.”

  “You OK?” Mare asked.

  Ingrid looked around for her backpack, then groaned when she remembered where it was. “You don’t have tampon, do you?”

  Transcript from Riksdag Committee Hearing 23

  December 16 2015

  BILUNGS: Thank you for coming here today. I say this to all our witnesses. You are not on trial, we are not here to apportion blame, merely to reach an understanding of what happened on December 15th and 16th last year.

  FIGES: I understand.

  BILUNGS: If you would please give us your full name and your rank. Thank you.

  FIGES: I am Paul Figes. I am the Director of the Stockholm City Police.

  BILUNGS: And were you on duty on the night of December 15th?

  FIGES: Yes. Of course.

  BILUNGS: And can you explain to the committee what your priorities were that night?

  FIGES: [Pause] I suppose there were three main areas of operation. One was to recover as much forensic material as possible from the crime scenes, so that would be the explosion at the National Museum, the Republik café in Gamla Stan, the abandoned Volvo in Husby that Magnus Bildeburg had been abducted in, and the bank in Mårtensdal where Jens Luhrmann had been seized. And obviously getting witness reports—

  BILUNGS: This was still going on, late at night?

  FIGES: The forensics, yes. The witnesses, not so much. After those initial
few hours, we relied on the hotline. If members of the public contacted us, then obviously we would take their statements, but no, by the evening we were following up the lines of enquiry we already had. Which leads me to the second area of operation that night… trying to find the hostages.

  BILUNGS: Were you aware of the events unfolding at Järlåsa? The cabin?

  FIGES: Of course. Not in real time, but I received regular updates, you know, every fifteen minutes or so. Sometimes, the other constabularies are a little, how shall I put this, leery of sharing information with their colleagues in the city, but we had good channels of communication that night. With all police forces around the country. The entire nation was on alert.

  BILUNGS: Yes, I think we all have very clear memories of that night. But… Director, one of the, um, one of the reasons you have been asked to testify here today is to explain to the committee the significance of the operation at the Freedom Music Hall.

  FIGES: Sure. Of course. I mean, it is something we all wish we had handled differently. I’m sure the Uppsala force in particular would like to have that night over. Mistakes were made, obviously. But then again…

  BILUNGS: Director?

  FIGES: Well, they are only mistakes in hindsight. At the time… you need to understand that some officers had been on shift for almost twenty-four hours by that point. And the Freedom Hall? Well, it is right on the boundary between the city’s jurisdiction and the county’s. It is common to seek approval before carrying out such a major operation on the other’s patch. Obviously, on this occasion, I can see why the public would think that waiting for consent was… unwise. But that is protocol. That is how we work. We are a hierarchical organization. We always refer up.

  BILUNGS: But that doesn’t explain all of the mistakes—

  FIGES: You know as well as I that the officers who let the fugitive escape are deeply embarrassed, especially as we now know she drove right past them. But once the weapon had been recovered, I think they made an appropriate call. She was no longer, as far as we knew, posing a threat to the public, and to put all those resources into finding someone who had stolen and abandoned—without crashing or causing an accident—two cars would have been, well, questionable when there were so many other things to be focusing on. The beat officers blockaded the venue, questioned everyone inside, but no one had seen a woman meeting the description they were given. Those witnesses—primarily the members of the River Sticks band—who now say they did meet her that night, were asked if they had seen a blonde woman in her thirties. They all said they had seen a much younger woman, whose hair was wet and appeared dark, and whose most obvious feature was a cut in her eyebrow. This was a rapidly moving investigation. My officers were working with partial information.

  BILUNGS: If we can turn to the WP-638.

  FIGES: The missile component? [BILUNGS nods] With all due respect, we did not know about that for several more days, or at least until the following day. But I think you wanted me to tell you about our operational priorities that night?

  BILUNGS: Yes, but I—we—appreciate your perspective on what might have gone wrong. If we could just stay with the WP-638 for a moment. There is quite a discrepancy between whether you knew about it the following day or several days later. Which was it?

  FIGES: Oh, right. The Uppsala County officers obviously retrieved the suspect’s bag late on the 15th, the Monday night—

  BILUNGS: This is the Russell Athletic backpack?

  FIGES: Yes. The contents were looked at but not thoroughly examined—that would require a specialist forensics team—that night, and it’s clear from the initial reports that they did not know what the WP-638 was. I think it was later in the week when they shared it with academics at the university, Uppsala University, that it was first suggested it might be a military component. [Sighs] Of course, once we knew that, it changed everything. Turned everything upside down. All assumptions were thrown out the window.

  BILUNGS: Yes, and we’ll come on to that. You mentioned you had three priorities on the night of Monday 15th. You’ve told us about two of them—the collection of forensic evidence and locating the hostages. What was the third?

  FIGES: That would be setting up the observation points at the Christmas market in Stortorget. As you presumably know, we had recovered the burner phone from Republik, the place where the woman, the suspect, had been abducted from. We did not know then that the phone was definitely connected to her, but it had been found near the table where several witnesses said she had been sitting. It wasn’t locked or, you know, password protected or anything. It was too old, I think, to even have those features. And the fact that it only had one message on it, and that it was so, um, antiquated made us strongly suspect criminal activity. That single message said ‘9am, Stortorget’ or something like that. We had to assume that, even if she did not turn up there, we would intercept some kind of criminal activity, you know, given the profile of the phone.

  BILUNGS: And at the time did you think this was also related to the Abdullah Saladdin case?

  FIGES: Initially, no. We did not make the connection to Saladdin until the middle of the afternoon when we identified the link between the abductees, with the caveat, of course, that Anna Skyberg was not actually abducted. It would be understandable if—as would appear to be the case—the officers on the scene assumed, initially, that the phone belonged to one of the kidnappers, rather than one of the hostages. Especially as, at that time, we assumed the woman was the minister. So, yes, we thought the phone was linked to the perpetrators of the crime, not one of the potential victims.

  BILUNGS: What did you think the message on the phone meant?

  FIGES: We had an open mind but my main concern was, obviously, that this wasn’t to be the location of a second explosion in as many days. We started the surveillance almost immediately—it is only a short walk from Republik so we already had officers in the vicinity—and, over the course of the day, we made sure we had plain-clothes officers in all the buildings overlooking the square; we had several posing as stallholders, several more as shoppers and diners. A huge uniformed presence too.

  BILUNGS: And there was also an armed response?

  FIGES: Yes, the firearms teams were deployed, as was the dog unit. Snipers at the windows with the best vantage points, armed officers working on the crepe stall, that sort of thing. And, of course, we installed cameras too. We were ready for whatever would eventuate.

  BILUNGS: I’d like to pick you up on something you just said, Director. You just referred to the abducted woman as a, er, I believe you said she was a ‘potential victim’. By the following morning, by the time everything was in place in Stortorget, you were referring to her as a ‘suspect’, is that correct?

  35

  A hand bearing two applicator tampons appeared from under the cubicle wall.

  “Here you go.”

  “Tack. Thank you.” Ingrid gratefully took them from the anonymous woman’s grasp.

  “No problem,” she said. Yet again Ingrid marveled at how readily, and fluently, Swedes spoke English then suddenly remembered Nick Angelis’ instructions to only speak Russian or Italian. In the privacy of the cubicle, Ingrid allowed herself a tiny smile: given how disastrously the mission was panning out, her linguistic failings seemed minor.

  “Katja, you want to get changed in there?” It was Mare’s voice. “I can hand you the sweatshirt.”

  “Thank you. That would be…” Ingrid struggled to stop herself from saying ‘great’ in case it was too American, “…very nice.”

  The girl in the next cubicle unlocked the door, shared a brief conversation with her friend at the mirror and then shouted out a goodbye.

  “Thanks again,” Ingrid said as she pulled up her sodden jeans over her pruned thighs. She slid the bolt on the cubicle door and opened it a crack.

  “Guess it ain’t your day, huh?” Mare said, handing her a tee-shirt and a sweatshirt still in their clear plastic sheaths.

  You don’t know the half
of it. “No, guess not.” Ingrid closed the door and unzipped her padded jacket. She carefully peeled it off, tugging gently on the cuffs, desperate to keep the Perspex tubes inside their hiding places. Changing her sweater for something with the band’s logo—a three-headed dog and a crossed pair of drumsticks—wasn’t nearly as helpful as a change of jacket. “You don’t sell jackets?”

  “Wow, you really are a fan, ain’t you?” Mare said from the other side of the door. Ingrid heard a buzz as she tested the clippers. “We had a few tour jackets made, but we don’t have any left. You might be able to order them from the website.”

  Ingrid’s sweater and thermal under layer had survived her ordeal well. Apart from being a little wet around the neckline, they were the items of clothing she did not need to change. She pulled the hoodie on over her sweater. At least now she could cover her head; protection from both the elements and cameras. Her jeans were soaked from mid-thigh to the hem. She bent down and peeled the left leg up and pulled out a few hundred euros from her ankle pouch. She shoved the wet cash into her jeans pocket then picked up her jacket from the floor, carefully grabbing the elasticated wrists. She slid her left arm in, navigating past the Perspex tube, then twisted to get her right arm into the sleeve, but when she let go of the cuff, the component slipped out, clattering on the tiled floor.

  “Govno!” Swearing in Russian came naturally. She dropped to her knees and reached a hand under the cubicle wall.

  “What was that?” Mare said. “Everything all right?”

  “I, uh,” Ingrid’s heart pounded so hard it hurt. “I dropped something.”

  “Can I help?”

  Ingrid watched as the tube rolled out of view. She bent forward, pressing her wet hair against the wet floor and looked toward the component. It hadn’t cracked. It hadn’t fallen out of its case.

  “No, thank you.” Ingrid stretched out and her fingers touched the Perspex, but she couldn’t grasp it.

  A footstep. A brightening of the light as Mare opened the adjacent cubicle door. “I got it.”

  “No! Really.”