Lucy shook her head slowly.
‘You’re crazy,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to let this go, are you?’
‘What did you expect?’ I said irritably.
The taxi pulled up outside my door. I tugged my wallet from my inside pocket. Before I handed the driver my American Express card I fixed my eyes on Lucy.
‘Okay, listen up. If you want to be on my team, you’re going to have to accept that we do this my way. I’m the one who’s being threatened here, not you. And it’s my future that’s on the line, not yours. And I’m the one with a child to provide for, not you.’
When I said that last sentence she started. Once again I saw that sorrow cross her face. A sorrow I didn’t understand.
‘If you insist on coming up to the flat and helping me get to the bottom of this crap, you’re more than welcome. But I repeat: we’re doing this my way. If you can’t accept that, I suggest that we ask this nice gentleman to drive you home.’
I waved my credit card.
‘The meter’s running, Lucy. What do you want to do?’
She raised her chin defiantly.
‘You’re not just mean,’ she said. ‘You’ve also got a lousy memory. You wouldn’t have got half as far in life if you hadn’t had me.’
She unfastened her seatbelt.
‘I’ll come up with you,’ she said simply. ‘Anything else is out of the question.’
Belle was awake, and worried, when we got home. She hugged me tight and wrapped her plastered arm round my neck. Sometimes I think no one has ever loved me so unconditionally. I try not to wonder if she has felt the same love from me.
‘Grandma said you’d probably be gone a really long time,’ she said.
I flashed an angry glare at Marianne.
‘Now you know that’s not true,’ I said. ‘I always come back, don’t I?’
Belle had had to get used to the idea that I went away from her at an early age. I went away and came back. Business trips, holidays. That morning I had only been gone a matter of hours. It scared me to realise that she had already had time to miss me.
‘You’re sure you don’t need any more help?’ Marianne said as she stood in the hall.
To be honest, I needed all the help I could get. I would have liked her to take Belle with her when she left. But there was no way that was going to happen. Belle needed time to recover from her trauma in her home environment. Lucy could look after her when I didn’t have time.
‘Thanks for coming,’ I said, opening the door.
Marianne looked sad as she left.
‘This thing you keep doing,’ she said. ‘Calling me in as a babysitter every five minutes but never letting me be part of your family or your life. It hurts, you know.’ She touched her chest. ‘In here,’ she said. ‘This is where it hurts.’
It was the wrong day for that sort of conversation. I had neither the inclination nor the time. But I could have put my hand to my chest and talked about things that hurt. Such as when I was seven and had to go to school in trousers that were too short because my mother had spent the last of her money on cigarettes. Or when I was fourteen and didn’t dare go out with my friends because I thought my mother would choke on her own drunken vomit if I didn’t watch over her.
Marianne is a different person these days. The sort of person who looks after herself. I know she wants to be told how clever she’s been for dealing with so much crap. And I do let her know, just not with words. I let her look after Belle, the best thing in my life. But I have rather more difficulty slotting cosy days en famille into my calendar. We aren’t there yet, the two of us. Why is that so hard to understand?
‘I’ll be in touch,’ I said brusquely.
Marianne left the flat and I shut the door firmly behind her, then turned both locks. I felt like washing my hands with disinfectant after touching the door. That was where the police arrived to pick me up for interrogation. The thought of it made me feel sick.
I went into the kitchen. Lucy was sitting there reading with Belle. I didn’t like the fact that Belle’s usually bright eyes looked dull with fever and tiredness.
‘Is it normal to run a temperature when you break your arm?’ I said.
‘How should I know? Call the healthcare helpline,’ Lucy said, stroking Belle’s hair.
So I did. But first I called Bobby. No answer. I tried again. Still no answer. So I sent a text: ‘Call me. Important. Best, Martin Benner.’
While I was waiting for my call to the helpline to be answered I got out my laptop. Lucy watched me as I sat down at the kitchen table and opened it.
‘What are you looking for? Can I help?’
I shook my head. She was already doing what she could to relieve me by having Belle on her lap.
In my head a list was starting to take shape. Time was racing away from me. I had to decide who I wanted to meet to find out more about Sara Texas. When Lucy and I were eating hamburgers at Texas Longhorn, I had said that Sara’s sister was the top priority. I still thought that, but seeing as I couldn’t get hold of Bobby it seemed more logical to start with someone else. I needed to speak to his and Sara’s mother.
Her name had cropped up at several points in the preliminary investigation. Jeanette Roos. Someone with such an unusual name shouldn’t be too hard to track down on the internet.
I was right. I didn’t manage to find a telephone number, but it was easy enough to find her in the electoral register. She still lived out in Bandhagen, where Sara had grown up.
As I was writing down the address my call finally got through. An older-sounding woman gave brief answers to my questions. No, there was no need to worry about a high temperature. No, it probably wasn’t anything to do with the accident. Thank you and goodbye.
‘An unusually uncomplicated person,’ I said to Lucy when the call was over.
In my experience, people who give medical advice about children tend to be a bit retarded. I couldn’t believe my eyes not long after Belle was born and my sister was sitting in my office breastfeeding her. Blood was running from her nipples, tears down her cheeks.
‘They say you mustn’t stop breastfeeding,’ she said. ‘They say it can harm the baby.’
It turned out that loads of things that seem perfectly innocuous at first glance can be lethal: dummies, baby formula, regulated feeding and sleep. Anything that could make life simpler was forbidden. When Belle was mine and I was the one taking her to the clinic instead of my sister, you could say that things were rather different.
I was told all sorts of drivel.
Belle wasn’t ‘hitting her weight percentiles’.
Belle wasn’t crawling.
And of course I knew that Belle mustn’t under any circumstances come into contact with anything containing sugar?
In the end I pushed the baby-clinic fascist up against the wall and roared at the top of my voice that if she trotted out one more piece of brain-dead advice, I’d ram a sugar-coated percentile up her fat arse. I can wholeheartedly recommend that to every parent. From that day on I never had any more problems with the clinic. Probably because Marianne or the au pair usually take Belle to those ridiculous check-ups now.
I suspected that threats involving sugar-coated percentiles and backsides would have limited, if any, effect on whoever was trying to frame me for murder. I was at a massive disadvantage, and it was pissing me off. It doesn’t matter what currency you gamble with, the person with access to the most information will always leave the table victorious. In other words, I needed to get hold of more definite information to work with.
Lucy glanced at the note where I’d written down Bobby and Sara’s mother’s address. Jeanette Roos. I presumed the name Tell came from the children’s father.
‘What are you thinking of doing?’ Lucy said.
‘Heading out to Bandhagen to pay a visit to Sara and Bobby’s mother. Ask her if she knows where her son’s got to. Find out about Sara’s relationship with her and her father. And ask about the sister.�
��
Lucy looked at me warily.
‘Her father? What, you’re not thinking he committed all those murders?’
‘I’m not thinking anything. But I’ve got to start somewhere. Otherwise I’m not going to get anywhere.’
Belle was drawing flowers on a sheet of white paper. The bandage on her forehead looked ridiculously large. I stroked her hair gently.
‘Can you stay with Lucy for a little while?’ I said. ‘I need to go and see an old lady.’
‘You will come back, though, won’t you?’ Belle said anxiously.
My throat felt tight when I replied.
‘I’d never leave you,’ I said. ‘Never.’
23
The building was five storeys high and two hundred kilometres long. Or at least it felt like it. I didn’t care about the fact that it was Sunday. I was a hunted man who needed to get a dangerous situation under control fast. I stood outside the locked main door and rang the entry phone. My journey to Bandhagen had taken an unexpectedly long time. First it took forever to get hold of a decent hire car. Then I had to get the bastard satnav to work. If Jeanette Roos wasn’t home, I was planning to park nearby and wait. I had expended far too much effort on this just to give up.
But I didn’t have to wait. Jeanette Roos answered in less than a minute. Her voice bore testament to years of smoking and drinking. Marianne could have ended up sounding like that if she hadn’t got a grip on things.
‘What do you want?’ she said over the speaker.
‘I’d like to talk to you,’ I said, after introducing myself. ‘About your daughter, Sara. And your son, Bobby.’
‘So you’re a journalist? Sorry, I don’t talk to the press.’
For a moment I was worried that she had hung up, but her laboured breathing gave her away.
‘I’m a lawyer, like I just said,’ I said. ‘It’s important that we talk.’
‘What for? Sara’s dead and buried. If you cared, you could have come sooner.’
It started to pour with rain. Vicious little drops hit the back of my neck. They reminded me that I still hadn’t got round to having a shower.
‘Sadly I didn’t have the honour of representing your daughter,’ I said, making a real effort not to yell at her. ‘But Bobby showed up at my office a week or so ago and asked me to take a look at her case. Since then a number of things have happened which are making me wonder if Sara made all those confessions of her own volition. I won’t need to stay long. But there are several questions I’d really like to get answers to.’
I couldn’t hear a sound from the entry phone.
‘Hello?’ I eventually said.
‘You said Bobby came to see you?’ Jeanette Roos said. ‘Bobby, Sara’s brother?’
‘Yes,’ I said.’
Another silence.
Then the lock clicked.
‘Come up,’ Jeanette Roos said.
If Eivor, Tor Gustavsson’s former secretary, appeared to live in a doll’s house, Jeanette seemed to inhabit an old crack den. Someone had made a valiant attempt to liven it up with some half-dead geraniums and sun-bleached embroidered pictures in crooked frames.
My mentor at university, an old professor who refused to retire, taught me early on never to lie more than was absolutely necessary. People notice when you do, and they get upset. So I didn’t say ‘What a lovely home!’ or anything like that, just followed Jeanette into the kitchen where she evidently wanted the meeting to take place. She lit a cigarette with trembling hands, then went and stood next to the extractor fan. A tiny part of me wanted to point out that if she wasn’t going to switch the fan on, she may as well stand wherever the hell she wanted. But I held back on the sarcasm.
‘Tell me about Bobby,’ she said.
In a few short sentences I gave her an account of our meetings. About the ticket he had given me, and what we had agreed.
‘He’d heard me on the radio,’ I said. ‘He knew I was interested in Sara’s case. At first I was sceptical, but now that I’ve acquainted myself with the material I can understand that you and the rest of her family must have felt incredibly frustrated. It’s upsetting to see how badly the police did their job.’
I paused and waited while she stubbed the cigarette out in the drainer. I couldn’t figure out if she was drunk, or under the influence of some other shit. Her tics and shakes could just as easily have been a sign of nerves, or some sort of illness. But her eyes told a different story. They were clear and steady.
She looked at me with something that felt like sympathy.
‘I have a pretty good idea of where someone like you comes from,’ she said, looking me up and down. ‘You don’t have to tell me what you think about this part of Stockholm, or my flat. I can see that well enough. But I can also tell that you mean what you say. You seem to be genuinely interested in Sara and the hell she went through.’
I nodded in confirmation.
‘I am.’
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Do you really think Sara was lying when she confessed to those five murders?’
‘Yes.’
Her tone surprised me. It sounded as if she was less convinced of her daughter’s innocence.
‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘So I assume you also have a good explanation of why she lied?’
I didn’t like the fact that I was sitting down while Jeanette was standing.
‘I suspect that she was being threatened,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure how, but I believe the threat was also aimed at her son.’
Jeanette’s expression didn’t change.
‘What do you think happened to your grandson, Mio? Is what the police are saying true? That Sara took his life as well as her own?’
Jeanette’s shaking hands fumbled for the cigarette packet again, and she managed to pull another one out.
‘I don’t know what to think,’ she said hoarsely. ‘I don’t know if you’ve got children, but I find it impossible to get my head round the idea. That my daughter would have killed her own kid.’
She got the lighter to work and lit the cigarette. Soon the kitchen was filled with even more smoke. I was going to smell like a crematorium when I left.
‘Why do you think she killed herself?’ I said. ‘Why jump off Västerbron instead of trying to escape?’
Jeanette shook her head wearily.
‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘Who knows?’
Unless I was mistaken, she had softened up. So I went on feeding her questions.
‘As I understand it, Sara had problems with her father?’ I said.
‘Who didn’t?’ Jeanette said with a dry laugh.
The laugh turned into a muffled cough that echoed deep in her lungs.
‘He was a real sadist,’ she said when she finished coughing. ‘A domestic tyrant of the first order.’
‘I’ve heard that he used to sell Sara to his friends. Is that true?’
Jeanette sucked greedily on the cigarette.
‘That’s private,’ she said curtly. ‘But yes, it’s true.’
And what did you do about that as her mother? I wanted to scream.
But I sat there in silence. God knows what battles had been fought in that flat.
‘What was it like when she moved to the States?’ I said. ‘Did he carry on causing trouble for her then?’
‘Hardly,’ Jeanette said. ‘Well, let me put it like this: as long as that man was alive he caused trouble. For anyone and everyone. But the trouble varied over time. Soon after Sara moved he suffered his first stroke. After that he only left the flat on a handful of occasions. The last time he went out he got mugged and knocked down.’
So Jenny had been right about that too. Sara’s father hadn’t caused trouble in Texas. So who was Lucifer?
I asked Jeanette, but she just looked back at me inscrutably.
‘Oh, so that’s what you’re getting at? His friends did sometimes call him Lucifer. But he never went to the USA.’
I changed track. But my heart was still racing. So
mething told me that identifying the Lucifer in the diary was important.
‘How about Sara’s ex?’ I said. ‘Ed, that was his name, wasn’t it?’
Jeanette rested her head against the inactive extractor fan.
‘He was quite a piece of work. A guy who spent the last of his money on a plane ticket so he could be close to her and make her life a misery. But I assume you’re asking about him because you want to know if he could be the real murderer. And to that question I’d have to say no. There’s no way on earth that Ed could have come up with such an intricate plan, killing a handful of people and then finding a way to get away with it.’
A smile played across her face. It struck me that she had probably been very attractive once upon a time. Before life stripped her of all energy and sparkle.
But I wasn’t ready to accept her evaluation of her erstwhile prospective son-in-law’s abilities. I needed to get someone else’s verdict as well. Not that I knew how that was going to happen.
‘What was Ed’s surname?’ I said.
‘Svensson,’ Jeanette said. ‘And his name’s Edvard, not Ed.’
She was starting to look restless. Maybe it was withdrawal kicking in, maybe just a general lack of patience. I’d have to hurry to get to the end before she threw me out.
I glanced at my watch.
‘I’m taking up too much of your time,’ I said. ‘I’ll leave you alone. Just a few quick questions. Bobby made quite an effort to help Sara. Do you know why she wouldn’t accept that help?’
‘Presumably because she was so intent on claiming responsibility for those murders,’ Jeanette said, and for the first time her voice sounded shaky. ‘If not, I don’t know why she acted the way she did.’
‘Were she and Bobby close?’
‘Very.’
I recalled Bobby’s demeanour the first time he showed up in my office. The fact that anyone could be close to someone like that was beyond me.
‘Do you know where Bobby is now?’ I said. ‘I don’t want to worry you without cause, but I think it might be important that I get hold of him.’
Buried Lies Page 15