Playdate

by Alex Dahl

  The doorbell rings, and from the long-drawn-out buzz Selma can tell that it’s a child pressing it. She ignores it and returns to her thoughts. Lucia Blix has been missing for twelve days now and, statistically speaking, the chance of finding her decreases drastically as each day goes by. By now she’ll most likely have reached her intended destination, wherever that is, and her abductors will simply need to make sure she remains concealed. Because they had such a long head start before anyone knew she’d been taken, they’re so much less likely to get caught.

  Selma’s been working on the Blix case all day. She sat poring over Google Earth, following the road from the rental house in Sandefjord to where ‘Line’s’ phone was found near Strömstad just across the Swedish border, to the Shell gas station near Karlskrona where Lucia was captured on CCTV. The abductors had clearly taken her across to Sweden on one of the car ferries from Sandefjord to Strömstad and then headed south towards Karlskrona on the E20 motorway. The police are combing through the passenger lists for relevant ferries from Sandefjord, and from Karlskrona to Poland in the hours and days after Lucia was presumed to have gone missing, to try and establish any links to previously known offenders or persons connected to Mikko Eilaanen and his contacts.

  Police are urgently appealing for Mikko Eilaanen’s estranged girlfriend and mother of his six-year-old son, Silwia Truja of Riga, Latvia, to come forward for questioning. Sources close to Ms Truja say she hasn’t been seen in several weeks but that she has no contact with Eilaanen. Their son is in state care and has been for several years. Eilaanen was released from prison in December 2016 after serving eighteen months for GBH.

  Selma studies the picture of Silwia Truja published by police. She’s much younger than Eilaanen, still in her mid-twenties, and is posing in front of a rundown apartment building, presumably her home, crossing heavily tattooed arms in front of her chest, her dyed jet-black hair pulled sternly back from her face and gathered in a frizzy bun at the top of her head. Elisa Blix has been shown photos of Truja and insists she’s not the person to whom she handed over Lucia on the playdate.

  The doorbell rings again and again, several short, insistent bursts this time, and Selma swears under her breath. Medusa stands by the door, arching her back, hissing, readying herself for an intruder. Selma walks over to her and picks her slinky body off the floor, holding her close and planting a kiss on the top of her head. She lifts up the doorbell receiver and the video function starts up. A dark-haired little girl stands alone on the doorstep, staring straight into the camera. She’s around five years old and is dressed in a green dinosaur costume, a stegosaurus hood framing her little face and completing the unusual outfit. Something moves at the side of the frame and Selma can make out the shadow of an adult standing nearby.

  ‘Trick or treat?’ the girl whispers, her expression grave and nervous.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Selma, ‘I don’t have any candy.’

  ‘Okay,’ says the little girl.

  Selma replaces the receiver in its cradle and stands a moment looking at it, disturbed and distracted by the child. Again she thinks of Lucia Blix, not much older than this girl. She closes her eyes, and now it is Lucia she sees, dressed in dirty clothes, lying face up in the back of an empty van, her expression dejected and serious, listening to the rise and fall of her abductors’ voices drifting through the thin metal wall of the driver’s cabin. When the van goes over a pothole, Lucia is jostled and shaken on the bare floor. She cries silently. She throws up repeatedly in the corner of the van and when it lurches, her vomit flows towards her, making her cower in one corner, by the double-door. There is a tiny window high up, but it’s too dirty to look through, even if she were able to reach it.

  Selma puts Medusa back down on the floor and slips into her running shoes as if on autopilot. She remains in a dreamy, detached state as she takes the stairs down the four flights to street level and begins to run as soon as she’s outside. She crosses the street between two cars waiting on a red light, and across the road in the oncoming lane behind the lights stands a white van like the one she saw in her mind, blowing exhaust into the crisp October air. She stares at it, and at the two men in the front, both looking out the windows, one of them tapping out a rhythm on the wheel. These two men, or any men like them, could be carrying a little girl in the back. She begins to run faster when she reaches the park on the other side of the busy road, trying to root herself in the present with each slap of her foot on the paving stones. Still, the vision of Lucia stays with her.

  Selma’s been having vivid visions, like the one of Lucia Blix in the back of a van, ever since she was a young child. Sometimes all it takes is meeting a stranger’s eye and then it’s as though a separate dimension opens through which she sees that person’s life in intense detail. She doesn’t know if her visions are ever accurate or just a byproduct of an exceptionally active imagination, but she’s concluded that it doesn’t matter – they still contribute to her rich inner life, and they sometimes lead directly to her being able to guess at connections she wouldn’t otherwise have arrived at.

  At times, real or not, these visions have brought Selma great comfort. There’s a photograph of her mother as a young girl, likely in her early teens, and sometimes, if Selma stares at it intently enough, she is able to build the entire scene around the moment the photo was taken. The picture is in the matte, sepia colors of the sixties, and her mother is sitting at the kitchen table on a wooden bench. In front of her on the table is a plate of food. On the occasions when Selma is able to fully immerse herself in the picture, the food on the plate goes from a virtually indistinguishable dish to a fragrant, steaming lapskaus; delicious slices of vossakorv sausage floating in the broth of the stew, the potatoes slightly overcooked and crumbling. Selma can feel the spoon her mother is holding in her own hand, its cool, smooth silver snug in the crook of her thumb. She can run her hand across the waxy red-and-white checked tablecloth and angle her head to look out the window, onto snow-covered fields, dark pines crowding together on a little hillock at the edge of the field. Selma can also look the other way, to where her mother’s aunt Bodil stands at the stove, stirring the lapskaus, humming to herself, her apron straining across her broad back.

  Sometimes, after staying inside one of these imagined scenes for a long while, Selma feels depleted and strange, as though she has used up a large amount of mental energy to construct such detailed images of a moment in time. She is overwhelmed by that same sudden tiredness now, after running less than five minutes, and she has to stop to regain her breath. She looks up at the night sky, glowing russet at the edges from Oslo’s artificial lights, then at a tall oak tree, the last of its leaves on the ground around it, like a discarded dress, leaving a smooth naked body underneath.

  She tries to root herself in the moment, reestablishing a slow, even breathing pattern, but she can’t rid herself of the image of the little girl being flung from side to side in the back of a fast-moving van.

  Back at home, Selma stands a long while under the powerful water jet in the shower, rinsing herself of the mental images that bombarded her on her run. She needs to clear her thoughts and maintain focus on the facts at hand. You’re not going to find anything new in this case simply by imagining stuff, she tells herself and returns to her notes.

  20 October – at 06.08 a.m. Lucia Blix is caught on CCTV with a man, now identified as Mikko Eilaanen, an Estonian citizen, at a Shell gas station 20 km west of Karlskrona in south Sweden. The white modified Renault van, registration LY78 NJ8, was reported stolen from a building site in Andebu on 15 October and has not been recovered.

  Heiki Vilkainen, whose card was used to pay for the Airbnb in Asnestoppen, served a sentence for aggravated assault at Fosie Prison in Malmö, Sweden from 2000 to 2005.

  Mikko Eilaanen served a sentence for drug-related offenses in the same prison between 1999 and 2001, and again between 2003 and 2007. Eilaanen also served two separate nine-month sentences in 1996 and 1997 for assault and drug off
enses in Viru Prison in Estonia.

  Thug, working for someone? Who? Connection to Fredrik and Elisa Blix? (Unlikely.) Connections to Vicodius network (likely/established?), possible motive – trafficking. But why her???

  No further sightings of Lucia Blix or Mikko Eilaanen have been made.

  Where is Vilkainen?

  20

  Elisa

  In the morning a bright sun has replaced the milky fog of last night, but its sharp rays do nothing to soothe my mood – I feel even emptier. I think about how it felt to be held tight by Fredrik, but even though there wasn’t a single space between his body and mine, the distance between us is so vast he seemed light years away. I wish I was going to work today; it would at least give me something to pin my thoughts to, somewhere to rest my hands.

  I get up from the sofa and make a peppermint tea. I turn the teabag around and around in the mug, feeling almost hypnotized by the swirling movement, when I realize that my phone is ringing upstairs. I usually keep it on me, but I must have left it beside the sink in the bathroom. I take the stairs two at a time, but still, it stops ringing before I get to the upstairs landing. It immediately starts up again and my heart is hurtling around in my chest now, my blood rushing, and when I finally reach it my hands shake so hard I knock it to the floor, cracking the top of the screen into a fine web of glass shards.

  It’s a private number, meaning the police are calling.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Elisa? It’s Gaute here.’

  ‘What is it? Have you found her?’

  There’s a slight hesitation on the other end and for a moment I’m convinced Gaute Svendsen is going to tell me they’ve found her. Dead. But then I remember that if she was found dead, they definitely wouldn’t let me know by phone – there’d be a knock at the door.

  ‘We haven’t found her. But there are some developments. We’ve had a tipoff from a member of the public. Someone spotted the van not far from where the CCTV image of Lucia with Eilaanen was captured in south Sweden. Do you want to come here and I’ll run through all the details and what happens next?’

  *

  Gaute ushers me into his office and offers me coffee. I shake my head. I feel as though I am itching inside and I just want him to tell me what’s going on. Fredrik is in Bergen for work today and I feel angry with him for not being here, even though that isn’t rational. I think I am angry with him, deep down, for returning to work. How does he even manage to perform his minute routines? Walking over to the coffee machine, smiling at someone, blinking in the bright overhead lights, writing an email, scrutinizing a case file. How?

  ‘Kalle Josefsson, a local farmer, was out in his field with his twelve-year-old son, August, on the morning of 20 October,’ begins Gaute. ‘Josefsson runs a poultry farm ten kilometers from the Shell station and they were testing a drone that the boy had received for his birthday. They flew it towards the edge of the land they own, where it borders another farm, some state-owned forest and a few private properties at the top of a track. It would seem Kalle only realized that they’d captured the van with the Norwegian plates when he looked back through the images and remembered the police appeal. The police down there are waiting for a search warrant as we speak.’

  ‘A search warrant for where?’

  ‘Kalle and August’s picture shows the van pulling into the driveway of a private property. The place is called Mölleryd.’ Gaute opens an envelope on the table in front of him and slides two photographs across to me. They are slightly blurred and taken from a distance, but in the first one I can clearly make out the white van, noticeable by its narrow and tall body, turning off a road onto a track. In the second image, the van can be seen again, from further away, with a little yellow house in the background. Next to the house is a dark shape that I can’t immediately make out.

  Gaute seems to have followed my gaze. ‘Another car in the driveway,’ he says.

  I swallow hard, taking in the nondescript yellow house, so like other modest Swedish houses I’ve seen on our many drives to Sweden. Like so many Norwegian families, we make several trips a year across the border to buy meat and alcohol at significantly discounted prices.

  ‘Do you… do you think she could be being held there?’

  ‘It’s a real possibility. If she isn’t still there, we might at least find clues that could lead us to her current whereabouts.’

  I’m about to open my mouth to speak again when Gaute motions for me to wait a moment and pulls a vibrating mobile phone from his pocket.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. Then, ‘Uh huh. Okay. Yep.’ He hangs up and places the mobile phone back in his pocket.

  ‘That was the team over in Sweden. They are on their way over to Mölleryd now and intend to do a full search of the house and grounds. We should hear back from them within an hour.’ I nod, but inside I’m crumbling.

  ‘Why don’t you try your husband again? Perhaps he could wrap up whatever he’s doing and head back here sooner rather than later.’

  ‘I… Shouldn’t we maybe go there or something? To that place? In Sweden, I mean. In case she’s there. She’ll need me—’

  ‘Elisa, we know very little at this stage. All we know at the moment is that the van she was photographed next to arrived at that house later. Chances are she’s no longer being held there.’

  There is a long uncomfortable silence between us, and I’m certain we are both thinking the same thing. What if she died there?

  *

  Fredrik comes rushing into the room, beads of rainwater studding his suit jacket and more scattering from his hair as he runs a hand nervously through it. I’ve been by myself for a long time, panic rising and falling in me like giant swells on a black ocean. Gaute asked if I’d like to go and sit with the police psychiatrist, but I felt like I needed to be by myself, to gather all my strength.

  Fredrik holds me close. I press my face into the familiar curve of his neck, drawing his scent deep into my lungs – Dior, rainwater, faint eucalyptus.

  ‘I do this thing,’ I whisper, my voice hoarse after all the crying last night. ‘I place all the memories and experiences that could hurt me into this imaginary box. And I never open it.’

  He stiffens momentarily in my embrace. ‘I do that too,’ he says softly. ‘I think everyone does.’

  ‘How are we supposed to… just… keep going right now? I have chest pains. Like my heart is beating too slow and then too fast,’ I say.

  ‘This is the most extreme situation we will ever experience.’

  I nod and keep my eyes squeezed shut. ‘How do you feel?’ I ask.

  His eyes brim with tears. ‘Like you, I think.’

  It’s as though I’m entirely losing control of my mind and all the images I need to shut out hurl themselves at me, each one worse than the last. A little girl, covered in blood. A man looking down at her, face blank. A blood-curdling scream cutting through the dark night. A little girl, broken, her short, twisted legs splaying strangely outwards. Open eyes that will never see again. Fingers already blue at the tips, crusted with blood.

  ‘No,’ I whisper, but I know now that I can’t shut the deluge of horrific images out anymore. ‘No, no, no!’

  ‘Elisa,’ says Fredrik, very gently, and I feel his hands touch gently upon my shoulder.

  I recoil and stay bent forward, my fingers pressing into my eyes as if to make sure they stay firmly shut.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Stay with me, Elisa. It’s just a panic attack. Breathe…’

  ‘I…’ I begin to speak, and it’s as though I’ve lost all hold over myself and simply cannot stop myself from telling Fredrik the impossible things, all of them, all of the things I’ve been keeping inside of me, but just then Gaute opens the door and I don’t know whose face is more disturbing, his or mine.

  ‘Elisa…’ he begins.

  I can tell it’s bad news; he won’t quite look at us – rather, he looks in our direction, fixing his gaze on a spot on the wall behind us.

&
nbsp; ‘The team have searched the house.’

  I begin to cry, and my voice echoes around the little room. Gaute Svendsen is still talking, but I can’t quite grasp his words. I catch him exchanging a worried glance with Fredrik and I make an effort to somehow pull myself back together and stabilize my breath. There was something about the moment when I opened my mouth to speak, the exact moment Gaute opened the door. I was about to release it all. Everything. Maybe deep down I believe that if I do, I will get Lucia back. And when I heard the door go, I believed for a split second that Gaute was going to burst in, shouting the news that our little girl has been found, that she’s weak but completely unharmed and ready to come home.

  ‘… a body.’

  I just catch the last two words of Gaute’s sentence and I stare at him.

  ‘What? Say that again?’

  ‘I said… the team in Sweden have uncovered what they believe to be human remains at the house in Mölleryd. A body.’

  21

  Selma

  She is getting ready to leave, tidying her desk and closing her laptop. Kai-Marius and Lisbeth left several hours ago and it was already dark then. A couple of the juniors are still here, as well as the tech guy, Hasse, who always works until eleven, when the night supervisor arrives. Olav is still in his office and Selma glances at him through the glass wall as he turns slowly round and round on his chair, bright yellow headphones trailing from his ears. His mouth is moving and Selma can tell that he’s on the phone. She waits for him to do another full turn so she can give him a quick wave on her way out, but when he does face her again, his expression has changed. He looks troubled, no, shocked, and stands up, indicating urgently for Selma to come to his office.