‘Sara indicated the size of the golf club she used to kill the man in Houston. She couldn’t say exactly what sort or which brand it had been.’
One of many charming details. Sara was supposed to have knocked her second victim unconscious with a golf club, then smashed his head in with the same implement. No fingerprints were found on the club. They’d been wiped off.
I carried on reading:
‘Afterwards she put the club back in the bag. Note: probably a 3-iron, made by Ping. Owned by the victim. Cover missing. Sara says she doesn’t remember if she removed it, but the forensic evidence shows it was missing. Why doesn’t she want to say where it is?’
I put the file down with a feeling of unease.
That sort of detail, whether the cover of the golf club had been removed after the attack, was a typical control question that anyone confessing to a murder must be able to answer. But Sara had said that she ‘didn’t remember’. Not good. Not good at all.
Further down in the box I found a bundle of Post-it notes held together by a paperclip. Why on earth had Eivor saved those?
‘Buy cake,’ the top one said.
‘Roses for Märit,’ another one said.
Märit was Tor Gustavsson’s wife. So he had his secretary, with whom he had been having an affair, buy flowers for his wife. Charming.
It wasn’t until I got to the last note that I reacted to anything on them.
‘Contact Sheriff Stiller, Houston. Who’s Jenny’s boyfriend?’
I frowned. Jenny wasn’t a name that had appeared in any of the newspaper articles I’d read. But I still recognised the name from somewhere.
The ticket.
Bobby had said he got the train ticket from Sara’s friend Jenny. Could this be the same Jenny? In which case, why had Gustavsson been interested in her boyfriend?
I’d have to have another talk with Eivor, that much was obvious.
I poked about curiously through the rest of the box’s contents. My fingers closed around a hard-covered notebook. Someone had put an elastic band round it, and had written on a Post-it note: ‘Sara’s diary?’ Astonished, I removed the elastic band and opened the book. Why did Eivor have Sara’s diary? That should have been with the police.
Whoever had written it was evidently keen to keep things brief. There weren’t many lines per day. Most weeks the diary’s author didn’t seem to have written on more than two or three days. I had a list of which dates the various murders had taken place. None of those dates appeared in the diary.
I put the notebook down on the table and picked up the folder again.
I took another look at old Gustavsson’s notes.
The more I read, the more worked up I got. Because Gustavsson had obviously reacted to a number of inconsistencies in Sara’s story without actually following up any of them. The missing golf club cover was just one of several things. What had he done with his doubts? Had he spoken to the prosecutor? With Eivor, maybe?
I felt my determination grow as I stood there with the folder in my hand. Bobby was probably right. His sister’s lawyer hadn’t done his job. And he had ‘known things’.
Resolutely I tossed everything back in the box and took it into my room with me. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep my fingers off the diary. I’d end up reading it until I fell asleep.
So Saturday would be devoted to work rather than pleasure. Because, like I said, I had a decision to make.
Would I really consider representing a dead client?
8
When I woke up on Saturday morning I found myself lying on my back with Sara Texas’s diary on my chest. Belle was standing silently beside the bed. She does that sometimes when she wakes up. Creeps in to my room and stands and stares at me until I open my eyes. It’s actually very unpleasant; I can never get used to the fact that she does that.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said.
‘And good morning to you as well,’ I said, putting the book to one side.
I felt fired up again the moment my fingers touched the book’s stiff covers. It had afforded me a good deal of interesting reading before I fell asleep. It seemed completely incomprehensible that it hadn’t attracted the attention of the police.
‘Rudey nudey,’ Belle said as I got out of bed.
‘Speak for yourself,’ I said.
‘But I’ve got pyjamas on.’
She tugged at her pyjamas top.
‘Don’t do that, you’ll make it bigger,’ I said.
Belle shrugged her shoulders.
‘But I’m getting bigger too.’
I pulled on my clothes and sloped off to the kitchen.
‘Eurgh,’ Belle said when she saw the previous day’s washing-up.
I had to agree. We’d have to eat breakfast in front of the television. Belle watched some children’s programmes while I read the last pages of Sara’s diary. If it was actually Sara’s diary. That was one of the things I wanted to clear up over the course of the day.
‘Right, let’s put some clothes on so we can get going. I’m afraid I’ve got to do some work today.’
‘Where am I going to be, then?’ Belle said.
I smiled.
‘At Grandma’s.’
We were there barely an hour later.
‘What’s that noise?’ Belle said when we were standing in the hall at my mother’s.
‘It’s the fan in the cellar, sweetheart,’ Marianne said. ‘You see, there was such a bad flood the other day that some nice men had to come and pull the floor up. Now they’ve put a dehumidifier in there to dry everything out.’
‘That’ll be covered by your home insurance, won’t it?’ I said, remembering the invoice they had phoned about.
‘Probably,’ Marianne said. ‘I mean yes, it is.’
She helped Belle take her coat off.
‘What are we going to do today?’ the child asked.
‘I thought you could do some baking,’ Marianne said.
It was probably good for Belle to spend time with her grandmother. I basically never bake anything. Nor does the au pair. Lucy reckoned it counted as baking when she made waffles, but I didn’t buy that. Nor did Belle, frankly.
‘When are you picking her up?’ Marianne asked me.
‘Five o’clock,’ I said.
That would give me plenty of time to do what I’d got planned.
‘Do you want to eat here this evening?’ Marianne said.
I hadn’t thought about that. I suppose I’d vaguely considered letting Lucy come and see Belle and me, but nothing more than that.
‘I don’t think we can,’ I said.
Marianne looked disappointed.
‘We don’t see enough of each other, Martin.’
I didn’t agree with that either.
‘Thanks for having Belle,’ I said, and left the house.
As I got in the car I could see Belle and Marianne standing in the window watching me. But Belle was the only one who waved as I started the car and drove off.
Just as I suspected, it wasn’t hard to arrange another meeting with Eivor. I implied that the contents of the cardboard box had provoked some questions, and she agreed to see me like a shot.
‘Will you bring the box back?’ she said.
‘I need to keep it a bit longer,’ I said.
Not the answer she wanted.
‘You look very different today,’ she said when she opened the door.
She looked at my green polo shirt and brown trousers. She was quite right, I hadn’t looked like that the last time we met.
‘It’s Saturday today,’ I said. ‘This is what I look like when I’m not at work.’
We sat down at her little kitchen table again.
I got straight to the point, keen not to waste any time.
‘Last time I asked you if you ever thought Sara Tell was innocent. Your answer was no.’
Eivor’s expression became serious.
‘Naturally,’ she said.
‘Naturally,’
I repeated. ‘But despite that I found a folder marked “Loose ends” in the box you gave me. When you read Gustavsson’s notes, it’s clear that he reacted to a number of things in Sara’s version of events. Things she ought to have known about but couldn’t account for. Such as what had happened to the cover of the golf club used in the murder in Houston.’
The silences that arise when the person you’re talking to has nothing sensible to say speak volumes. Eivor considered what response to give for a while. A small part of me felt sorry for her. It wasn’t her job to defend Gustavsson’s work. If she wanted to she could tell me to go to hell. But she didn’t, because she was far too loyal to her old boss.
‘I didn’t know that folder was in the box,’ she said. ‘That was silly. Of course not everything Sara said was as detailed as one might have wished. But . . . it was enough. Who remembers every single detail of individual events several years later?’
That was true, of course, but we weren’t talking about any old events here, rather a series of premeditated murders. In which case it felt like the memory ought to work rather differently.
‘There was a notebook in the box, too,’ I said. ‘Which you or someone else had marked “Sara’s diary?”. How did you get hold of that?’
‘We got it from a friend of Sara’s. Or rather from Bobby, who got it from the friend.’
‘Jenny?’
Eivor lit up.
‘You know about her?’
I shook my head.
‘Just a guess. Because a Jenny cropped up in the case. Someone who claimed to have a ticket that proved Sara couldn’t have murdered the woman in Galveston.’
Eivor’s face gave nothing away. I was wondering why Bobby hadn’t mentioned the diary as well.
‘So Jenny gave Bobby both a diary and a ticket,’ I said slowly. ‘What did the two of you make of those items?’
Eivor shrugged.
‘There wasn’t much we could think, according to Tor. The ticket itself proved nothing, Jenny could have got hold of that from anywhere. And the diary . . . Sara refused to acknowledge it. Or the ticket, come to that. Have you read the notebook?’
I had.
‘Whoever wrote that diary seems to have been a fairly fragmented character,’ I said. ‘The entries are short, and practically episodic. Most of them aren’t dated. Looking at the handwriting, I get the feeling that the same person wrote all the entries. Did you get anyone to analyse the handwriting?’
Eivor got annoyed.
‘Why would we have done that? Completely unnecessary; she said the book was nothing to do with her.’
‘True, but considering what was written in it, I think I would have it checked out anyway.’
Eivor hadn’t read the diary, that much was very clear. We’d reached a point where we were skirting round each other, and that wasn’t good. She was defensive, didn’t want to entertain the possibility that they had done anything wrong or could have done anything differently. And all I wanted was to have a straight conversation.
‘Amongst other things, the person writing the diary had a very troublesome ex-boyfriend who acted in a very threatening manner,’ I said. ‘One who scared the writer of the diary. Even though he seems to have been living in Sweden while she was in Houston. And there’s someone called Lucifer who appears several times. He seems to have travelled all the way to the USA to cause trouble for her. Unless he was American and was already there – that isn’t entirely clear.’
The legs of Eivor’s chair scraped the floor as she stood up.
‘I know Tor mentioned that,’ she said. ‘But, again, what did it prove? Nothing at all. I mean, “Lucifer”? You can’t take things like that too seriously. Sara just snorted at those entries. And so did we. Anyway, you can’t help wondering what Jenny would have been doing with Sara’s diary.’
It was an important question. I didn’t have a good answer to that one.
‘Were Jenny and Sara good friends?’
‘If you ask Jenny, the answer is yes. If you asked Sara, the answer was no. The two girls were both au pairs in the same part of Houston. The Heights, that was what it was called. According to Sara, Jenny was more interested in their friendship than she was.’
‘Where’s Jenny now?’
‘She stayed in Texas. Ended up getting married to some businessman. She’s got children of her own now, and her own au pair.’
There was something condescending in Eivor’s voice that I had trouble accepting, but I let it pass. To my mind it seemed like Jenny had done best out of the two girls.
‘Let’s see if I’ve understood this right,’ I said. ‘Sara and Jenny knew each other in Texas six years ago. Last year Sara went on trial for five murders, and suddenly Jenny races across the Atlantic with an old train ticket and a diary that both prove that Sara could be innocent.’
‘She didn’t race across the Atlantic,’ Eivor said. ‘She phoned. And then sent those things over by courier. To Bobby, who brought them to us.’
‘But you and Tor showed the diary and ticket to the police?’
Eivor squirmed.
‘Of course we did. But they weren’t interested.’
But I was. Bobby may have been onto something after all. There were certainly loose ends to follow up in Sara’s case. Threads the police appeared to have ignored entirely. There were several things mentioned in the diary that ought to have been picked up.
‘One last question,’ I said, pulling the Post-it note I’d found the previous evening out of my pocket. ‘Why were you going to call the sheriff in Houston about Jenny’s boyfriend?’
Eivor reached for the note and looked at it with the same concentration as archaeologists do when they find old bits of stone that could be remnants of something interesting from a fuck of a long time ago. The problem for Eivor was that this wasn’t an old piece of stone, but a piece of paper with her own writing on it.
‘Ye-e-es,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Why were we going to call Esteban about that?’
‘Esteban?’
‘Esteban Stiller, the sheriff in Houston. A very nice man, always answered all our questions.’
Clearly a very obliging guy, this Esteban, I thought.
‘What did he have to say about Jenny’s boyfriend?’
Eivor went on staring at the scrap of paper.
‘Now I remember!’ she said eventually. ‘You see, Tor found an article in an American newspaper saying that Jenny’s ex-boyfriend had spent some time in custody for the Houston murder, but was released on lack of evidence. Tor wanted to find out why he’d been picked up in the first place.’
‘And what did Esteban have to say about that?’
‘That they’d made an embarrassing mistake. But he didn’t say what they actually had on him.’
‘You said ex-boyfriend, even though it says boyfriend on the note. So this isn’t the guy Jenny’s married to these days?’
Eivor snorted.
‘I hardly think so. Jenny is a very smart young lady, you know. She’d never have married a negro.’
Negro. There aren’t many words in the world that I can’t stand, but negro is one of them. Couldn’t she see she was talking to a black man?
‘So the guy who was first in custody for the murder was an Afro-American?’ I said, stressing the last word.
Eivor blinked.
‘Afro? No, he was from China, if I remember rightly. You know how untrustworthy they can be there. But I don’t think he was a murderer.’
No, and evidently not a negro either. A Chinese negro, that was a new one. Ignorant bitch.
I stood up abruptly and thanked her for letting me visit.
‘When can I have my box back?’ she said, sounding anxious.
I turned round in the doorway.
‘When I’ve finished my investigation,’ I said.
And knew that I’d made my mind up. I’d give it a go. I was going to help Sara Tell to get justice.
Fuck knew how that was going to work.
PA
RT II
‘So fucking . . . innocent’
TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN BENNER (MB).
INTERVIEWER: FREDRIK OHLANDER (FO), freelance journalist.
LOCATION:
Room 714, Grand Hôtel, Stockholm.
FO: I don’t know what to say about what I’ve heard so far. You probably said it best yourself. Christ, what a clichéd story.
MB: Isn’t it? And believe me, it’s going to get even worse.
FO: Is that possible?
MB: I’m afraid so. Take the weather, for instance. Do you remember how much it rained back at the start of the summer? Remember how wet and horrible it was? Sometimes I wonder if all that wetness made a difference somehow. That life sort of turned into slippery soap, and that’s why I lost my grip on it.
FO: You mean you had control of your life before . . . well, before all that happened?
MB: I did. I’m very conscientious. I know, it doesn’t look like it, but I am. Before all hell broke loose I was in control. Of everything. And now . . . everything’s different. Everything.
(Silence)
MB: But we were going to take everything from the start, wasn’t that what you said?
FO: That’s right.
MB: It started with the rain. I think it’s fair to say that. If it hadn’t been for the rain, I don’t think I would have embarked upon the whole project the way I did.
FO: The project?
MB: Trying to get Sara pardoned posthumously. I can’t explain why it became so important to me. I mean, she was already dead, after all. Which, in a way, is also partly how this all started. With Sara dying. If only she’d been alive. Then I could have gone directly to her instead. But of course that wasn’t possible now.
FO: Do you regret it?
MB: Do I regret what?
FO: Deciding to help her.
(Silence)
MB: What am I supposed to say to that? On the one hand there’s only one answer to that question, which is of course I fucking do. But on the other hand . . . is there anything more pointless? Than regret? I don’t really think there is. That was then and this is now.
FO: That’s very poetic.
MB (Laughing quietly): Poetic but true. It all feels so distant now. Even the rain has gone.
Buried Lies Page 5