by Eva Hudson
“No,” his brother said, then added something else in what she presumed was Somali. He pulled the gun from his waistband, a beaten-up SIG 1911. His hand gestures indicated he didn’t want to open the door. He thought the cops were outside, taking up positions.
Ingrid needed to keep the pressure on while they were unsettled. “I don’t just need the contents of the bag,” she said, “I need to use them. Do you understand?” She wondered if she should mime removing a tampon and embarrass them into capitulation. “Now.”
Mohammed said something to his brother.
“What are you saying?” the short man demanded to know. He obviously didn’t speak the brothers’ language.
“I will take her,” Mohammed said. He turned to Ingrid: “You try to escape, I shoot you. OK?”
No, not OK. Ingrid nodded.
“Then you bring her back,” the short man said. “She has to look after him.” He pointed to Jens, who was still motionless on the floor.
Ingrid consented. She checked Jens, who didn’t show any signs of either improvement or deterioration, then pulled her gloves from her pockets. She looked at her hat on Jens’s head. She wanted to take that too, but knew it would arouse suspicions that she intended going further than the six feet to the sauna next door.
The boy was staring at her.
“I won’t be long,” she said. Somehow, she never minded lying when she knew she was being untruthful nearly as much as when she unintentionally broke a promise.
Magnus nodded. “OK, Anna.”
He was the calmest ten-year-old she had ever met. The perfect hostage.
“Ready?” Mohammed asked.
Ingrid stepped forward, expecting Mohammed to stand behind her, place one hand over her mouth and hold a gun to her temple with the other.
“You stand here.” He indicated a spot just in front of the door.
Ingrid stood where she was told as his brother took up a position to her right, the SIG leveled at her head. The short man turned the key in the lock and slowly pulled open the door.
A dark rectangle of night, a swirl of snow and a blast of ice, but no flashlights from the cops, no gunfire, no instructions from a loudhailer.
“OK,” Mohammed said, raising his Dirty Harry Smith & Wesson. “Walk.”
Ingrid pulled on her gloves, still reveling in the fact that her hands were no longer bound, and edged out into the night, the brother’s steady aim following her as she moved. Mohammed walked behind her. She heard him cock the safety of his revolver, something he had presumably learnt from Clint Eastwood.
“Stop.”
She did, feeling the snow settle briefly on her face before melting. She turned her head through a one-eighty, but her eyes had not adapted to the dark and all she could see was the falling snow and the elongated rectangle of illuminated ground at her feet.
“OK, walk.”
Ingrid turned and took the few yards to the sauna door, her sneakers slipping underneath her. The door to the cabin was closed and locked, plunging them into darkness. Her exposed ears burned in the wind. Mohammed made a rustling noise behind her. It sounded like he was searching for something. Checking his pockets. Ingrid knew that, at that precise moment, he couldn’t possibly be aiming his gun at her.
Transcript from Riksdag Committee Hearing 23
December 16 2015
BILUNGS: Thank you for joining us this morning. I appreciate that you probably know everyone in this committee room, but for the official record if you wouldn’t mind stating your full name.
BILDEBURG: Sofie Bildeburg.
BILUNGS: Thank you, Mrs Bildeburg. Can you please start by telling us when it was on Monday December 15th 2014 that you discovered that your son had been captured?
BILDEBURG: Captured? I’m not sure I can answer that. Missing, though, somewhere between six and seven o’clock.
BILUNGS: The police reports suggest he had been abducted around lunchtime.
BILDEBURG: Yes, but I did not know that. It was only when he didn’t come home from school that I had started to have suspicions. But, of course, with all the road closures and the chaos in the city that day, I tried to reassure myself that the school bus was stuck in traffic, or that maybe I had forgotten he had a judo class or something like that. You know how it is, you think the worst and then try and find all the reasons why you are being an idiot.
BILUNGS: Mrs Bildeburg, I’m sorry, I obviously have the wrong information, but it had been my understanding that you had known much earlier in the day that Magnus had gone missing. I thought that he had some kind of tracking device. Am I wrong about that?
BILDEBURG: No, no, you are quite right. Magnus is autistic, he doesn’t—didn’t—assess danger in the same way most of us do. When he was a toddler he would always wander off. He didn’t develop attachments… I’m sorry.
BILUNGS: Do not apologize. I hope we all understand that this must be painful for you. We can take this at your own pace, Mrs Bildeburg. Do not feel you have to rush.
BILDEBURG: Thank you, but I think I would really rather… if I am able, you know, to just, well, to get this over with.
BILUNGS: As I say, at your own pace.
BILDEBURG: Magnus didn’t form attachments in the same way most children do. If I took him shopping he would always wander off and he would never reach that point where he would wonder where I was, or where he was. He had an incredibly high pain threshold too. He fell off his bike once, a gash from hip to ankle, and he didn’t even seem to notice. When he was tiny… people would see a young boy on his own and would often help him find his mother, or his father, but it was always us who were distressed by his disappearance. But as he got older, people didn’t look twice at a seven-year-old walking alone, and so he ended up further and further away. We had heard about electronic tags for prisoners, and we wondered if there was something similar for Magnus. Anyway, we found this little device that clipped onto his belt, and we made sure he wore it every day.
BILUNGS: It would be helpful if you could tell us a bit more about the device and how this led to the discovery near Järlåsa.
BILDEBURG: It seems quite old-fashioned now, but one of the officers who liaised with us told us that if we had used a mobile phone, a smartphone, the kidnappers would have turned it off or thrown it away. They had probably never seen a tracking device and maybe thought it was an MP3 player or something, that’s even if they noticed it at all. It was no bigger than a box of matches, a black plastic box of matches. [Pause] Yes, sorry, you wanted to know how it worked, didn’t you? We paid a subscription to a monitoring service, and that service has a website, and whenever Magnus disappeared, we would log onto their website and a little red dot would flash on a map and one of us would go and find him. When we got iPhones, obviously we could track him on our phones. We no longer had to be, you know, one of us at the computer giving directions to the other.
BILUNGS: Thank you. So on December 15th last year, at what point did you become aware that Magnus was not where you expected him to be?
BILDEBURG: Not, as I say, until about seven o’clock in the evening. My husband was in court, though the kidnappers had called his office about four in the afternoon. I believe they refused to talk to anyone except my husband, but obviously he couldn’t be interrupted. It had been a long day in court and he did not go back to his office after they adjourned for the day, though he did pick up his messages from his secretary and he was told then that someone had been trying to contact him for the past few hours and that they had refused to leave a message. It’s not uncommon, when you’re a judge. Witnesses, usually those who haven’t been called, want to pass something on. No one thought anything of it. Anyway, Magnus had been due to take part—as I think I said—in a judo competition after school that day, so I did not expect him home until after six. At seven o’clock, I called his teacher, the one taking him to the competition, and he told me that Magnus hadn’t been on the bus. They assumed he was ill and we had collected him [Begins to sob]
&nb
sp; BILUNGS: Take your time. We can take a recess if you need one.
BILDEBURG: [Shakes head] I just need a moment… So, I logged onto the website, I think my husband came home at about the same time, and when we saw that Magnus was in Järlåsa we thought there had to be a mistake. I mean, what is it? Seventy miles outside the city? He couldn’t possibly have walked that far. He didn’t really like getting on buses. My first thought was that it was a mistake, a glitch. But then when you factored in that he hadn’t been seen since lunchtime, well, we talked about it and called the police.
BILUNGS: And what was their response?
BILDEBURG: They were very busy that day, obviously. As we all know. And their response, their advice, was that they would send round an officer to take a statement, but that if we were really worried we should probably drive over to Järlåsa ourselves. They had manpower issues.
BILUNGS: Really, a ten-year-old boy has been missing all day, you have a location for him and they do nothing?
BILDEBURG: They did send an officer over. Sigmund, my husband, met with the officer. I had driven out to Järlåsa—it wasn’t in Järlåsa, you understand, about five or six miles north of the town. There was nothing there. Just the forest. There were no houses, no lights. I told myself—again—that there was a glitch. Of course, I know now that I was just a few hundred yards from Magnus. [Sobs ] So, when Sigmund—who you have to remember had been in court all day, who really hadn’t known the details of what had gone on except for the bomb at the National Museum—when he was talking to the police officer who probably arrived a little after nine… It was only when the police officer mentioned that Jens Luhrmann had also been kidnapped but that they were sure Anna Friese, sorry, Anna Skyberg was not a victim that Sigmund made the connection.
BILUNGS: The Abdullah Saladdin case?
BILDEBURG: Exactly. After that, things started to happen very quickly.
29
Ingrid turned quickly and took a step toward Mohammed, whose head was bowed as he searched for the sauna key. She brought her left arm up sharply, snapping his head upwards. He grunted, too stunned to shout. Ingrid kicked the revolver from his hand and brought her knee up hard into his crotch. He exhaled explosively but could not speak. With him doubled over, clutching his balls, Ingrid threw her right fist into his temple, making hard contact with his skull, knocking him sideways. She bent down, grabbed the gun and turned.
Her body was cold and stiff but she powered down through her legs, driving her heels into the ankle deep snow, pushing up onto her toes. She had covered twenty or thirty yards before Mohammed shouted. She would be another thirty yards away before the cabin door was unlocked, before they tried to come after her. Deep into the darkness. Free. She knew she should slow down—falling and freezing was a far greater threat than a shot on target—but the instinct to flee was too great. It was also the only way she had of keeping warm.
The sound of her breath, of the sleeves of her jacket as she powered her arms up and down and her sneakers crushing into the snow, felt amplified, as if she was leaving a sonic trail for her kidnappers to follow. An eerie whale song of distant trucks emanated from the road in the valley below.
Then a single crack splitting the cold night. A gunshot.
Sucking down the freezing air deeper into her lungs, Ingrid ran faster. She knew she was too far away. She told herself it was dark and they couldn’t see her, that they were just wasting ammunition. Her grip on the Smith & Wesson tightened. She risked a glance backwards but couldn’t see anything. No silhouetted figure standing in front of the open door, taking aim.
Another shot.
Was this one louder? Closer? Something about the acoustics meant it didn’t sound like it had come from the cabin. Ingrid powered on down the path as it curved through the pine trees, her ankles turning on the ridges of compacted ice under the freshly fallen snow.
She was leaving footprints. A trail. A case study from her training for the sheriff’s department thrust itself into her thoughts: the world’s dumbest bank robber… caught by deputies who followed his footprints through the snow. She had to get off the path and pick her way through the trees and down toward the road.
The snow either side of the path was knee deep. Impossible to run through. She checked over her shoulder but it was too dark to tell if anyone was following her, so she stopped and listened. For a moment the forest was silent apart from her labored breathing, the icy air stabbing like a blade as she filled her lungs.
A shout. A flash of light. A millisecond later she heard the third gunshot. She was sure it hadn’t come from the cabin, but in the darkness it was possible she’d become disoriented. She looked down and made out footprints leading in both directions: maybe she’d turned round somehow? A breeze torqued through the trees, releasing a flurry of snow from the dark branches.
More shouting. Men’s voices.
The footprints had been made by several different shoes, and as the snow was falling quickly, they were recent: they couldn’t have been left by the kidnappers. Someone else was in the forest. She gasped: and that someone was firing at her. She looked at the revolver in her hand. A vintage Smith & Wesson 29. She pulled off a glove with her teeth and checked the chamber. Five bullets. She tucked it into her waistband and started to run.
The snow either side of the path curved upwards in folds like unbaked meringue. Parts of it looked waist deep so she stayed on the path and kept running.
But running toward what? The road was the obvious choice, but was that too obvious? Would that send her straight into the path of the cops? But what other choice did she have? Deeper into the woods? She kept to the path that inclined down toward the bottom of the valley.
Ingrid felt something warm on her face: blood. Running had reopened her wound. She had lost count of the number of times she’d interviewed witnesses who only remembered that the woman was pregnant or the man was six five: people only recall your most striking feature. A bloody gash might mean no one noticed she looked like her cousin. It might buy her a few seconds of anonymity.
Her feet started to slip and she slowed down, making her aware how deep her breathing had become. Her chest was heaving, steam billowing from her lips like cigarette smoke. Up ahead was a pinprick of light. On second thoughts, it was more of a beam of light. There was someone on the path below her, scanning the trees with a flashlight.
Ingrid stilled her breath.
They were about a hundred yards away, moving slowly and deliberately, sweeping the path in front of them with the flashlight. They were looking for something. Or someone. Ingrid heard a bark: they had a dog with them.
Ingrid frantically looked around for an escape route. If she continued downhill she’d encounter them. Leaving the path would be like drawing an arrow in the snow and shouting ‘follow me’. Retracing her steps would take her toward angry men with guns.
The flashlight owner was only fifty or sixty yards away. She had to make a decision. Left or right? Forwards or backwards?
“Or upwards?” It was Megan’s voice.
Ingrid looked up and smiled. The idea that Mega Megan would ever have suggested climbing a tree was preposterous. Almost as unthinkable as Ingrid Fatberg doing it. Ingrid took a deep breath and reached up, her gloved hands grasping an overhanging branch above her head, dumping a thud of snow onto the ground in the process.
The dog started barking immediately. The flashlight holder shouted and yanked on its leash, but the animal did not stop howling. Ingrid hauled herself onto the branch, making the most of the fact that the dog owner wouldn’t hear her movements over the barking. She scrambled toward the tree trunk, then shuffled around onto the opposite branch and climbed up.
“Polisen!”
Polisen. The police. Ingrid puffed out her cheeks. When am I going to catch a break here? Ingrid was covered in snow. Every layer down to her bra would be soaked through within minutes. Either she was going to get shot or she was going to freeze to death in a goddamn pine tree and wouldn’t be
discovered till the spring when the snow melted. Great suggestion, Meg.
The dog kept barking as it strained against its leash. Ingrid looked around her. The trees were close together, like legionaries in formation, but jumping to the nearest one was impossible. Up was her best bet: further from the path, further from the dog’s nose. Ingrid reached up, pulled herself onto the branch above and clung to the trunk, her teeth chattering like a wind-up toy from the prank shop. She hoped she was the only one who could hear them.
The police officer called out again. This time Ingrid could make out it was a woman’s voice. Then the crackle of a police radio. The dog was snarling, its guttural noise vibrating the air between the branches. They were only twenty feet away.
Ingrid adjusted the position of her feet to avoid losing her balance and sent another slump of snow down onto the ground. She could hear the crunch of the officer’s footsteps and the panting of the dog. She dared not look at their approach and instead faced into the blackness of the forest. She could see the beam trace its way across the ground beneath her. In a few moments, in just a few steps, they would come to the pile of snow she had dumped. Her pulse rushed through her ears, obliterating every other sound. Ingrid held her breath. Her stomach muscles tightened. She waited.
30
Ingrid resisted the urge to wipe the falling snow from her face as she listened to the footsteps draw nearer. The police officer said something softly to the dog, as if she too could sense Ingrid’s presence. Ingrid swallowed hard, suppressing the desire to gasp.
The footsteps stopped. They were directly below her. She could hear the dog sniffing and the noise its tail made as it beat excitedly against its handler’s leg. A whimper. Then a bark. Then a howl.
“Polisen,” the officer said again. Presumably the next few words were ‘if there’s anyone there’ but Ingrid was too anxious to tune in and translate. The beam from the flashlight flickered through the trees as it bounced between the serried tree trunks.