‘No.’
I thought for a moment, something about what he had said was nagging at me.
‘Were you and Sara close?’
His eyes glazed over.
‘Yes,’ he said in a hoarse voice.
‘How come she expressly told you to drop any attempt at getting her off? Because I know that’s what she did.’
Bobby’s face closed up.
‘She didn’t know any better,’ he said. ‘And she was frightened. Of something.’
‘Had she been threatened?’
He shrugged.
‘I wasn’t allowed to see her, so I don’t know.’
I looked at my notepad. All I’d written was one word: Ed.
‘It would be useful if I could have the names of some of Sara’s friends,’ I said. ‘If she had any. So I can get somewhere with this story.’
Bobby looked thoughtful.
‘Okay,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ll see what I can come up with.’
I thought of something else I wanted to mention.
‘There’s something you forgot to tell me about last time we met,’ I said. ‘Sara’s diary. The one Jenny sent over by courier. Eivor had it. Don’t miss out things like that in future – if I’m going to make any progress, I need all the information I can get.’
‘I didn’t think the diary was that important,’ Bobby said hesitantly. ‘And there was so much else to think about when I was last here.’
‘Well, we’ll see how important it is,’ I said. ‘There are events and people mentioned in the diary that I want to follow up. Do you know who Lucifer is?’
Bobby grinned.
‘Lucifer? That’s Dad. Bastard. Although . . .’
I was so surprised that I didn’t notice at first that he’d stopped himself. But then I accepted it. Lucifer seemed a reasonable name for a father who sold his own daughter.
‘Yes?’ I said ‘Although . . . ?’
‘Well, Lucifer. That was what Dad’s friends called him when they were drunk. I didn’t know Sara used that nickname as well.’
‘Are you sure Lucifer couldn’t be anyone else? If I understood the diary correctly, he seems to have done the same thing as Ed: got on a plane to Houston to cause trouble for Sara.’
‘He may have done,’ Bobby said. ‘I don’t really remember.’
He looked down.
‘Either way, I don’t know anyone else who’s called, or who’s ever been called, Lucifer.’
It troubled me that he was so uninformed. He had clearly been very fond of his sister. Even so, he didn’t seem to know a flying fuck about her everyday life.
I started to feel that I wanted the meeting to end. It was time for Bobby to go home.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll be in touch when I’ve made some progress.’
Bobby stood up.
‘What do you think, then?’ he said. ‘About Sara’s case?’
‘I don’t think anything,’ I said brusquely. ‘Look, I’ve barely scraped the surface, but just like you, I think there’s something dodgy about your sister’s confession. What I need to do to prove that is turn the problem around and ask the following question: why did she take the blame for five murders she didn’t commit? What could motivate someone to do something so utterly insane?’
Bobby clenched his jaw tight.
‘That’s what I want to know,’ he said. ‘How could she get it into her head to confess to five murders? And how did she know all the things she said when the police questioned her? About the murder weapons and God knows what else?’
That was what I was wondering too.
10
Rörstrandsgatan is the mecca that the affluent middle-classes of Vasastan make their pilgrimage towards. A ridiculous number of overpaid people in their thirties and forties hang out there. The street stretches from Sankt Eriksplan up towards Karlberg, which means that it’s very close to the building where Lucy and I rent our office, and an excellent place to find a choice of restaurants after work. And, for some inexplicable reason, Lucy also chooses to live in Birkastan. And if we’re heading back to hers afterwards, that’s another reason to crash-land in Rörstrandsgatan.
So that’s where we ended up after I’d concluded my meeting with Bobby and went to collect Belle.
‘How did the meeting go?’ Lucy said, helping Belle put her things in her rucksack.
‘Brilliantly,’ I said.
‘Seriously?’
‘What do you think? The guy’s a bit weird, but he does care about his sister.’
‘And what do you care about, exactly?’ Lucy said.
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘I don’t know. There’s something smouldering away there.’
Lucy sighed.
‘So he wasn’t threatening?’
‘Not in the slightest.’
‘You’re sure? Remember what I said; you could have called me.’
I let out a laugh.
‘Come off it, Lucy. No one in their right mind would call you if they needed a bodyguard. I might just have called Boris, though.’
Now it was Lucy’s turn to laugh. At last.
‘Boris? Bloody hell, I’d almost forgotten him.’
‘Christ, I’ll have to tell him that next time I speak to him.’
Apparently there are lots of people who don’t swear in front of their children. I’m not one of them.
Lucy suggested that we go out and get something to eat. Belle grinned and took my hand.
‘I want to do that too,’ she said.
I looked at her. I tried to imagine what Belle would have been like if my sister hadn’t died. She certainly wouldn’t have had brunch at Haga Forum and then Sunday dinner in a restaurant, that much was obvious. The thought made me feel dizzy, and I hoped there was no life after death. Because just then I really wasn’t sure I wanted to have to answer to Belle’s mother and father after I died.
I’m doing as well as I can, I thought. She gets fed, gets to see new things, and she has a comfy bed to sleep in every night. She was pretty much the first child in preschool out of nappies, and it’s only a matter of time until she can wipe her own backside. So on the whole I reckoned I was doing pretty okay.
‘Let’s head down to Bebe,’ I said, referring to a place that started out serving Indian food, then turned into something else serving generally decent food.
‘I’ll just put some lipstick on,’ Lucy said, slipping into the bathroom.
Belle watched her go with interest.
I was more concerned about my meeting with Bobby and his unfathomable relationship to his dead sister. Sara had expressly forbidden her lawyer from having anything to do with her brother. But he still cared. Because they’d once been the best of friends.
‘No other similarities, but it sounds a bit like you and your brother,’ I said to Lucy when we were sitting in Bebe. ‘You’re also close to each other.’
‘So far, I haven’t murdered a load of people,’ Lucy said.
‘I said no other similarities.’
Lucy said nothing, just looked hard at the menu.
‘What would you like?’ I asked Belle. ‘There’s . . .’
‘I want a hamburger and a milkshake.’
All three of us ended up ordering the same thing. The milkshakes at Bebe were like a drug. Lucy and I asked to have ours spiked with bourbon.
Belle sat and did some drawing while we waited for the food.
‘You don’t like me digging about in Sara Texas’s case,’ I said eventually, to break the silence.
‘No,’ Lucy said. ‘You’re right, I don’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I can’t get away from the feeling that you’re being exploited.’
‘By Bobby?’
‘By both of them,’ Lucy said, pulling a face.
‘Come on, Sara’s dead.’
‘But all the same, she’s still manipulating her brother,’ Lucy said. ‘From beyond the grave. She’s got him in a neck-lock he
doesn’t seem to be able to get out of. It’s been six months since she died, Martin. Why hasn’t he moved on?’
‘He misses his sister. Not to mention her son Mio, presumed dead. There’s nothing odd about that, is there?’
Lucy drummed her long fingernails lightly on the table. Blood-red nails. Nice. They’d look good with her black bikini when we got to Nice.
Our milkshakes arrived. Belle started drinking right away. I couldn’t be bothered to point out that if she drank too much before the food arrived she wouldn’t want her hamburger.
‘You think Sara committed the murders?’ I said.
‘Without a shadow of a doubt.’
‘Why haven’t you said so before?’
‘I did. After your first meeting with Bobby. But I haven’t reminded you since then, that’s true. I naïvely assumed that you’d reach the same conclusion.’
She sighed and drank some of her milkshake.
‘Maybe I will,’ I said. ‘But there are actually a few loose ends I’d like to look into before I’m prepared to let go of it.’
‘Maybe you could wait until you’ve been through the police file? What look like “loose ends” from this distance might in fact be properly investigated and dismissed lines of inquiry.’
‘I know that,’ I said. ‘But I still need to hear it. I want to hear it directly from the detectives who investigated her ex-boyfriend and father; I want to know that there aren’t any other possible perpetrators who have got off unpunished just because the police thought it would be fun if the pretty girl was guilty.’
Lucy looked up at the ceiling.
‘Yeah, because that’s how it works,’ she said. ‘The police choose someone they think is guilty, according to the size of the suspect’s breasts.’
‘Baby, that’s not quite what I said. Not remotely.’
‘But it’s what you meant.’
I couldn’t help smiling. It’s tricky when the people around you know you well. Tricky, but nice.
The food arrived and Belle threw herself at her hamburger while Lucy and I carefully began to rearrange our plates. More salt, more pepper, less bread and definitely no disgusting pickled gherkins. Why do we never remember to say we don’t want them?
‘So how are you thinking of making any progress with this mess?’ Lucy said after a few bites.
‘Now you sound like Bobby,’ I said.
‘Who’s Bobby?’ Belle said.
‘The brother of a real nutcase,’ Lucy said, and burst out laughing.
‘Can’t I have a brother too?’ Belle said, and I swear, my laughter caught so far down in my throat that it actually hurt.
Lucy smiled happily.
‘Well, that sounds like an excellent idea,’ she said. ‘What do you think, Martin?’
‘Belle, that’s a bit complicated. A brother isn’t the sort of thing you get, just like that,’ I said.
‘Please, tell us in more detail,’ Lucy said, putting her cutlery down.
Bloody tease.
‘What are you up to?’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you wanted kids. Sorry if I’ve been insensitive.’
For a moment, time stood still. Before Lucy managed to rearrange her face so that she looked cool again, I caught a glimpse of sadness. It was the first time I understood that she probably hadn’t finished with the whole issue of whether or not she wanted children.
‘We live in an unfair world,’ I said, mostly for the sake of saying something. ‘I can be a dad until I’m ninety years old, whereas you women can barely reach half that age before it’s too late.’
It felt like it was my fault that things were the way they were. As if I were God and had waved my magic wand to make women lose their fertility before they were fifty. When Lucy didn’t say anything it felt as if I had to carry on talking.
‘Mind you, I read about that clinic in Italy. They’ve helped women in their late sixties to get pregnant. Probably something that dirty old git Berlusconi set up. The Hugh Heffner of European politics.’
When I get nervous I start to laugh at my own jokes. There’s no excuse for it, but that’s how it is. I tried to stifle my enthusiasm for my own remarks by drinking some more milkshake. The only result was that I ended up with milky bourbon in my nose. It stung like hell.
‘You don’t look terribly well,’ Lucy said wearily as drops of white sludge fell onto my plate from my nose. ‘Hugh Heffner.’
And then she started to laugh, against her own instincts. Belle joined in, and for a brief moment I caught myself thinking:
This is it.
This is the family I never had when I was growing up.
This is the family I don’t deserve.
I grew serious and wiped my mouth. Belle and Lucy carried on messing about, while I lost myself in thoughts of Sara Texas. Who at some point while she was growing up was supposed to have ended up so crazy that she turned into a murderer. The sort of person who snatched people’s lives from them without a moment’s regret.
Lucy thought she was guilty, but I wasn’t so sure. Bobby had said I’d find out that everything was connected. That the disappearance of Sara’s son was linked to the murders. I didn’t understand what he meant by that. Regardless of whether or not Sara had committed those five murders, it seemed somehow cruelly logical that she had chosen to take her son’s life along with her own. The only question was what she had done with the body. Her social network had been thoroughly investigated, there was no way she could have given him to any member of her family without the police knowing about it. Which meant the boy was dead. But why had she laid him to rest somewhere else? That didn’t make any sense to me.
I realised that there were big gaps in my knowledge. There were two questions that I was particularly keen to find answers to:
What did Sara get up to during her last hours of liberty?
And who was the father of her son, Mio?
11
A new working week began. Now it was properly summer. The rain was pouring down and our assistant Helmer had gone off on holiday. It was just under two weeks until we went to Nice. But the longing for sun and cocktails that had obsessed me a week ago was now out of reach. Instead I was driven by a feverish desire to understand Sara Texas’s fate.
I could sit at my desk in silence for long periods at a time, just staring at a photograph of her. I looked at her long, wavy hair, at the alert yet somehow sad eyes gazing into the camera. The photograph had been in Eivor’s box, and was marked ‘taken by Bobby, 2010’. Back then she still had a life, an identity other than that of a feared criminal.
Did I have any idea, back then when I was sitting there with the photograph in my hand, of where I was heading? Of course not. If I had known – or even suspected – then obviously I would have backed out while there was still time. But as it was, I was distressingly unaware of what lay ahead of me, and therefore carried on digging my own grave. With a sturdy grip of the spade, I drove it into the ground time after time. Each time just as convinced that I was getting a step closer to solving the mystery.
There was one thing I was clear about, however, when I arrived at work that first Monday after deciding to give poor, dead Sara a chance: I had to stop playing at being a master detective and take a more professional approach to the case. No more coffee round at Eivor’s, no more guessing games. Now I wanted facts, and I wanted them fast. So I turned to the police.
It took me a few minutes to find out who had been in charge of the investigation. I have plenty of good contacts within the force. The fact that I myself was an officer once upon a time, if only for less than twelve months, obviously helps. To my immense satisfaction it turned out that I knew the officer personally, Detective Superintendent Didrik Stihl. A seriously good guy.
‘Martin Benner, it’s been a while,’ he said when he heard who was calling.
Yes, it had been. A very long while, in fact. At least a year, I quickly calculated.
We exchanged the usual masculine pleasantries. Was I still sleeping
with Lucy? Yes. Was he still sleeping with the same woman – in other words, his wife? Yes.
‘Are you really calling after all this time just to find out about my sex life?’ Didrik eventually said.
He laughed as he said it. And coughed. Didrik was a man who had smoked far too many Marlboro Lights before he came to his senses.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m phoning about something else entirely. Sara Texas. You were in charge of that case, weren’t you?’
Didrik fell silent.
‘Yes, I was,’ he said eventually. ‘Why are you calling about that?’
I hesitated. Should I tell him the truth? That her peculiar brother had contacted me. That he was willing to pay me to give his dead sister justice. Life has taught me a few fundamental rules. One of them is that the truth is in principle always the best option. Even when it hurts or is a bit embarrassing.
So I told him what had happened, and what I had spent the past week doing.
Didrik sighed down the phone when I’d finished.
‘Martin, let me give you some good advice. Leave all that crap well alone.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s old. Because it’s done and dusted. Because it was a unique and miserable business. Sara Tell is dead. The investigation’s been shut down. There’s no way you can start digging about in this without looking like an idiot. Is that really what you want?’
Over the years, Didrik has been one of the few people I’ve listened to. But not this time. He had his duties as a police officer, and I had different duties as a lawyer. I reached out towards the photograph of Ronald Reagan that I keep on my desk. You have to pick your role models with care. The guy who armed the Russians to destruction is one of mine.
‘I’m afraid I can’t let it go,’ I said. ‘I promised Bobby I’d give it a try. Besides, I’m seriously bloody curious.’
Didrik groaned down the phone.
‘Listen to yourself,’ he said. ‘“Promised Bobby” – what does that mean? And since when have you cared about what you’ve promised or not promised? Look, if you insist on going ahead with this, you’ll have to do it without my help. I don’t have much time for that Bobby. Even his sister didn’t want anything to do with him.’
Buried Lies Page 7