Below Zero

by Eva Hudson

  The cold air rushed into her mouth, her chest rising as her breaths got deeper, making the fibers of her jacket rub noisily against her neck. She kept filling and emptying her lungs: she was lucky to be alive.

  When her breaths began to soften and her heart rate slowed, Ingrid tried to focus on one simple question: why on earth would anyone kidnap someone at gunpoint, in daylight, in the middle of a capital city, if they didn’t know who they were? She hadn’t been abducted by a sadistic loner, as Megan had been, who wanted her for sex or torture. And even though she had head-butted the man with the gun, he had not hit back: as far as she could tell, they had no intention of killing her. And the sounds from the other side of the wall told her they weren’t intent on torturing and killing the kid either.

  Was she being held for future sexual gratification? Had she been abducted by henchmen who were waiting for the linchpin of their twisted gang to arrive before raping and killing her in some sort of ritual? Unlikely: she had worked enough exploitation cases to know that neither she nor her abductors fitted the profile. In those sorts of killings, she flattered herself, the victims were not tall, muscular and in the habit of being complimented on their looks, but rather misfits with low self-esteem. Ingrid grimaced: Megan. Neither of them had had much confidence when they were fourteen, but Megan had undoubtedly fit the profile.

  If sex and torture weren’t the reasons for her abduction, that left revenge and ransom, but those options only made sense if the kidnappers knew who they were holding captive. She returned to the comment about her husband: who the hell did they think she was?

  She jerked her head toward the door. One of the bolts had been slipped. Then the second. A fumble with a lock and then once again the door opened, the cold wind storming inside the cabin. Mohammed stepped inside but he did not look at her. His shoulders were drooping. The posture of a nervous man. Or an apologetic one. He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out an iPhone. He fumbled with it. The screen illuminated, lighting up his face. He seemed scared. He made no attempt to look at her before he pointed the phone’s camera in her direction.

  “OK,” he said.

  The short man strode into the sauna, his heavy-soled walking boots shaking the floorboards. He crossed the room in two strides and lunged at her.

  “No, please, no.” Ingrid knew what was coming and turned her face.

  His right fist hit the side of her jaw, sending her sideways into the log wall, scraping her cheek against the worn bark. Every instinct she had told her to raise her arms to protect her face, but the smuggled components kept her arms in her lap. The pain radiated across the top of her head.

  His right fist rammed hard into her cheek, slicing the inside of her mouth against her molars. He grabbed her skull with his left hand and slammed his right into her eye socket. Ingrid yelped as the skin above her eyebrow split. Mohammed was over his shoulder, filming it all. Warmth ran down her face.

  “Let me see,” Mohammed said.

  “Take the picture,” the other man said.

  “Yes, yes.”

  A camera flash, then another and another as her attacker gripped her jaw, making sure a record was made of her injuries.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  Ingrid kept her gaze defiantly centered on her lap. She knew why they were taking photos and she wanted to make sure they didn’t get a clean image of her.

  “Look at me.” He yanked her face and pulled her toward him, but he couldn’t make her look at him. A hard, stinging slap landed on her right cheek.

  He stood up straight. A retreat. If he could not make her look at him, he was going to pretend he hadn’t asked her to. Mohammed moved toward the door and said something incomprehensible. Her assailant turned sharply and ran to the doorway. Ingrid wiped the blood out of her eye and watched as the two men peered out into the darkness. They could see something.

  They pulled the door shut behind them and slid the bolts across. What was it? A rescue party and torches flickering through the trees? Flashing blue lights from the road below? Was she about to be found? She felt numb. Thoughts swirled inside her head like a wall of death rider, round and round, faster and faster, louder and louder. If a rescue party had located the cabin, there was no way she could escape.

  “What are you going to do?” The voice again, and this time Ingrid recognized it and collapsed forward onto her knees. It was Megan’s voice. She felt weak. Her best friend from childhood was talking to her. Her dead best friend. She knew it was just her brain playing tricks but she could not stop the tears from forming. The guilt of leaving Megan, of not looking back, would always have the capacity to overwhelm her.

  A single word started to circle round in her head like a hawk, like a fin surfacing. Payback. If she hadn’t run, Megan might still be alive. Payback. This was always going to happen. Abduction had been her destiny. Her penance.

  “You’ll find a way. You always do.” She was summoning up Megan’s voice from the deepest part of her.

  Ingrid blinked back tears and looked around the sauna. There had to be something she’d missed, some rabbit just waiting to be yanked out of a hat. There had to be. There always was. She scanned the roof, the walls, the door, the bench and quickly found her eyes settling on the floor.

  There was activity outside. A door slamming. A scratching sound. Perhaps the kid was talking loudly. What was going on? Heavy footsteps echoed under the floor. Were they leaving? Without her?

  Ingrid was still staring at the floorboards, watching as blood from her cut dripped onto them. They wouldn’t have taken the photos—hell, they wouldn’t have beaten her—if they were planning to move venue. Whoever was approaching was unexpected. She hadn’t heard helicopters or sirens, but her best guess was the cops. The kid was valuable, she wasn’t. The kidnappers would take the kid and leave her.

  Ingrid could not let herself be found. The repercussions—for the war in Syria, for diplomatic relations between the US and Sweden, for her career—were too great. She had to escape. Had to. She couldn’t end up inside an interrogation room. Or a cell.

  The short man was shouting. The kid was joining in. Undercutting it all was the thud, thud, thud of footsteps.

  Footsteps.

  That’s why her eyes were focused on the floor. The footsteps were echoing because there was a void below. If there was a void, there was a way out, or at least somewhere to hide. Suddenly energized by the prospect of escape, Ingrid wiped the blood from her eye, dropped down onto her knees and pulled the screwdriver from her sock. She slid the metal shaft between the boards, pressing down hard on the plastic handle, trying to pry the end of one board free from the joist underneath.

  She tried again. The wood moved slightly. A fever of excitement flushed her skin. She pushed the screwdriver between the adjacent gap, lifting the same board from the other side. It gave a little bit more. She repeated the maneuver until she could get her fingers underneath. Then she straddled the board and gripped one side of it and pulled hard. There was a squeak as nails that hadn’t moved for a century were sucked out from their recesses.

  “Yes! Come on!”

  Elation surged through her limbs, warming her toes, forcing her to smile as the blood continued to drip down onto the floor.

  All it would take to lift the entire length was a damn good pull, so Ingrid moved onto the adjacent board. The width of two floorboards would be enough for her to drop down below and hide or maybe even escape. She worked quickly, jimmying the flat end of the screwdriver under the wood, wiggling and shifting it till she felt the floorboard move. She didn’t want to think about what she might find underneath.

  She could hear voices but she didn’t have time to stop and listen. She just needed a few more minutes, enough time to pry the first few nails free of the joist. Then it would just be two sharp tugs and she’d be out of sight. She glanced nervously round the room and made a mental note to take the lantern down with her as well as her bag.

  The noise from outside was gettin
g louder. It would take them a few minutes to get through the bolts; she didn’t need to panic. She scrambled to her feet, swiped her bag and placed it close to the jimmied boards, ready to be thrown into the void. She worked the screwdriver under the wood again, pressing down on the handle with such force she risked breaking it.

  A scraping sound. The bolts.

  She pressed down hard again. She needed to free one more pair of nails. Her hands started to shake.

  She glanced at the door, then back down to the floorboards.

  “Shit.”

  There wasn’t going to be enough time. Another bolt was pulled across.

  Ingrid dropped the screwdriver and opted for brute strength, tugging hard on the floorboard. But with her arms bound she couldn’t get as much leverage as she needed.

  The bottom bolt screeched in its sleeve. A different voice. Swedish. Cops.

  Ingrid yanked hard. The board creaked as she pulled but she couldn’t free it. She needed to free more nails.

  The padlock rattled. Her chest was pounding with pain. She could not let herself be taken into custody. There had to be another way. Her best shot was to barge past and outrun the lot of them. She concealed the screwdriver in her fist and the door opened.

  She looked up and gasped.

  No cops. Just Mohammed.

  Ingrid sighed so deeply her ribcage collapsed forward.

  “In here,” Mohammed said to someone out of sight. “You will stay in here.”

  A trudging of footsteps in the snow, then a man with a hood over his head was pushed inside, stumbling with the force of Mohammed’s shove.

  “When the door closes, you take off the hood. Only then. Understood?”

  The man nodded.

  Mohammed looked at Ingrid: “If one of you escapes, we kill the other.” The way he held eye contact made her think he meant it. The door slammed shut and she flinched.

  The man pulled the hood down over his face. He had a black eye and a bleeding lip. He blinked several times before he saw Ingrid sitting on the floor.

  “Oh my word,” he said in Swedish. “It really is you.”

  24

  Ingrid scrambled herself upright and moved toward him as he staggered, stumbling like a boxer in the tenth round. She guided him over to the bench and helped him sit down. His trousers—smart moleskin slacks—were sodden and his expensive leather shoes were puckered with the wet. He looked like he had been abducted during his lunch hour when he had popped out to buy a sandwich. He wasn’t even wearing a jacket, just a woolen sweater that was now wet from the snow.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?” he said. “I am Jens. Jens Luhrmann. We met once. A party in Södermalm.” He was in his thirties, lean and compact—a martial arts build—with a prominent, cartoon chin. His accent was odd: perhaps he wasn’t Swedish.

  Ingrid shook her head. She knew it would be impossible to pretend to be whoever he thought she was, but she hadn’t yet worked out a cover story. She tilted his head back and held the lantern over his cut lip. The bruised skin was taut and engorged. Blood oozed from a centimeter long split below his philtrum.

  Ingrid grabbed her backpack and reached inside for the packet of maxi pads. Her fingers brushed against the cold Perspex canister as she pulled out one of the individually wrapped sanitary napkins. She got to her feet, tore off the wrapper and crossed the sauna to dip the pad into the slowly melting bucket of ice. Jens did not take his eyes off her as she knelt before him and wiped the dried blood from his chin.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked. He was shivering, his legs twitching rhythmically and his hands trembling like poppy heads. Ingrid pulled out another towel and ripped off its cover. She handed it to him and indicated he should hold it against his wound.

  “Three, four hours,” she said in Swedish. There was just no way she could continue with the charade. Her language skills weren’t up to the job, even if the gash above her eye sufficiently disguised her resemblance to a woman who had once been at a party in Södermalm. She eyed him, trying to assess if her speaking voice had given the game away.

  He spoke again. This time she did not understand him. She did not ask him to repeat it, but after a few seconds he did anyway. Again, Ingrid could not work out what he meant. It was possible he wasn’t speaking Swedish. She remained crouching in front of him, staring hard into his bloodshot eyes.

  Ingrid could feel her pulse beneath her right ear as she weighed up the wisdom of what she was about to do. Sucking the cold air deep into her lungs, she started to form the words. “We have not met before,” she said in English. She spoke with a Russian accent, keen to disguise her true identity as much as possible.

  Jens looked puzzled. He started to say something but his teeth were chattering so violently he could not get the words out.

  “Tell me,” Ingrid continued, “who you think I am.”

  “English?” he managed.

  Ingrid nodded.

  “You are not Anna?”

  Anna? Had he said Anna? Ingrid felt a void open up beneath her solar plexus as her heart stalled. She nodded. That was, after all, the name she had given Mohammed. “My name is Anna,” she said, a little uncertainly.

  “But you are not Anna. I mean you are not Anna Skyberg. You are not Björn’s wife?”

  It was as if Ingrid’s entire body had become hollow. Flesh, bone and blood had all transpired into air. Cold, freezing air. She shook her head as her thoughts returned like a bullet in flight to Republik. A café she had only known about because her cousin had mentioned it on Facebook. She had even ordered Anna’s favorite item on the menu. A flash of the way the girl behind the counter had smiled at her surged through Ingrid’s brain. Dear God.

  “But it was on the news. The r-r-radio.” Jens’s hand dropped to his lap, unable to carry on holding the sanitary towel against his trembling lip. “You and the judge’s son.” His gaze became distant.

  “Jens!” Ingrid placed her hand on his leg and squeezed hard. “Jens?”

  He wrenched his gaze back toward her but now it seemed that he had never seen her before. “Anna?” His voice was faint, faltering.

  “Jens? Jens!” Ingrid shook his knee hard. “It is really important that you tell me how you know Anna Skyberg. Jens?”

  He nodded but his expression was blank. He was blacking out. Hypothermia.

  “Jens!” Ingrid got to her feet. She grabbed his right hand and tugged him upwards. “Jens. Jens, you need to keep moving. Jens, get up! Jens!”

  She tugged hard and got him upright. His hand was as cold as a corpse’s.

  “Walk with me. Come on now.” Ingrid made him take a couple of steps but his body was shaking so violently that she had to hold him tight. “You gotta keep moving,” she said before realizing she had let her accent slip. Chances were he wouldn’t remember any of this anyway. “Come on. Just one foot in front of the other.”

  When you’ve lived through more than twenty Minnesota winters, hypothermia is something you know about, just like putting chains on tires and keeping a blanket in the trunk. Ingrid had experienced it herself many times and she knew the extreme shaking was Jens’s body’s last-ditch effort to maintain the correct temperature. If he lost any more body heat, the shaking would stop when the blood left his limbs to help preserve his core. Eventually, the blood would also leave his brain, sending him into a coma.

  When Ingrid had worked for the sheriff’s department she’d felt the symptoms of hypothermia overwhelm her on a stake-out. She’d radioed for back-up but had no memories of being rescued, of being taken back to her apartment and placed in front of the gas fire and gently warmed back to consciousness.

  “Jens, Jens, you need to tell me how you know Anna Skyberg. What’s the connection between you? How do you know her? Jens!”

  His eyes were swimming, he could barely focus. His shaking was uncontrollable. Ingrid knew the shaking was a good sign: it was when it stopped that he’d be in real danger.

  “Can you put your arms rou
nd me? Can you try?” Ingrid placed his right arm over her right shoulder, then turned into him so that her back pressed into his chest. With her own hands bound, she couldn’t grab his left hand and clutch him to her like a backpack in the hope her body heat would help keep him conscious. “Come on, Jens. Remember your left hand? Come on, throw it over my shoulder now. Come on. You can do it.”

  Somehow he managed to follow her instructions and his arm landed heavily around her neck. Grabbing both his hands in hers she started to walk.

  “Walk with me. Come on, right foot, then the other. Come on, Jens.”

  With his body pressed against hers she could feel how lean he was. She remembered the classroom sniggers about her and Megan being the kids least likely to succumb to hypothermia. Jens, in contrast, felt like he had a BMI in single digits.

  Hauling him like a sack, Ingrid walked Jens round the sauna, one heavy step at a time. With no fire, the only way she could stop him falling into a coma was to keep him moving. “OK, Jens, you’re going to talk to me. We’re going to walk and talk. That OK with you?”

  He murmured something.

  “Good.” Even if she couldn’t keep Jens’s core temperature at the right level, the effort of carrying him was ensuring that she didn’t succumb. “Now tell me about this party in Söder. Why were you at a party with Anna Skyberg?” It was only when she said her cousin’s name out loud that Ingrid noticed she had been pronouncing it the American way. “I mean Skoo-berg.”

  He was trying to speak but Ingrid couldn’t decipher his slur.

  “What was that? Come on, Jens. Tell me again.”

  “Björn.”

  “Björn?” Anna’s husband. “You know Björn?”

  “Ja. Björn. Lise. Osberg. Osberg and Nyquist.”

  Some of those names were familiar, but Ingrid couldn’t be sure where she’d heard them before. It was taking all her depleted energy to keep Jens on his feet, to keep him alive.

  “Tell me about Björn. Tell me about Lise.” He was like a dead weight on her back. “Come on, Jens. Who is Lise? Tell me.”