Twelve years passed before I went back, this time as a well-paid lawyer. My father wasn’t impressed. And that was the last time I saw him. I didn’t miss him before he died, and I haven’t missed him since.
It took less than half an hour for me to fall asleep in my seat on the plane. I slept until we started to come down to land.
Houston was insanely hot. We landed in the afternoon and the sun was frying the tarmac until it went soft. Lucy watched the bags while I sorted out a hire car. You can say what you like about Americans, but they’re good at cars.
‘Did you have to get such a big car?’ Lucy said as we slung our cases in the back.
‘There wasn’t anything else,’ I said.
‘Really?’ Lucy said, getting into the passenger seat of the Lincoln I had hired.
I took several deep breaths of the hot air before getting behind the wheel. It felt very odd to be back. I had always felt that I didn’t just have a problem with my dad but with the USA as a whole. The two of them had blurred to become one and the same thing. Simply by getting on a plane and crossing the Atlantic it felt like I had escalated the conflict.
The engine purred as I drove out of the airport. Motorways as wide as Swedish potato fields opened out as I followed the instructions of the satnav.
We were going to be staying at the Hilton in downtown Houston. Houston is a huge city. The city centre is fairly compact, but if you want to move around you need a car, or you have to use an awful lot of taxis. I could remember exactly where my dad lived but had no intention of going anywhere near that district unless I had to. His wife probably still lived in the house. Where the children were – my half-siblings – I had no idea. The years had passed and they would be grown up now. I had never felt anything for them, and they had never tried to contact me. Like fuck was blood thicker than water.
‘Do you think the police know we’ve left yet?’ Lucy said.
I had switched my old mobile back on. It was important that the police could contact me, so it didn’t look like I was trying to hide.
‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I did my best to shake off anyone watching me before we left, so they ought to be wondering where we’ve got to by now, if nothing else.’
I was keen to avoid a situation in which the Swedish police contacted their American counterparts to warn them. I wanted to talk to the police in both Houston and Galveston, and it was important that those conversations were not spoiled by the fact that I had become the subject of a murder investigation.
The Hilton Hotel looked just like the pictures. Cold and sterile. Professional staff, just the right amount of smarminess. A bottle of chilled champagne and a bowl of fruit were waiting on the coffee table of our mini-suite.
‘Nice,’ Lucy said, picking up the bottle.
I had earned most of my money from shares, stock options, derivatives and God knows what else. As a lawyer I am well paid, and believe it is therefore my duty to make my assets grow. Lucy doesn’t feel the same way, and thus has less money than me. She hates stocks and shares, and always thinks she’s being taken for a ride before any deal has been reached. She doesn’t listen to me, and nor should she. I’d never want to take responsibility for any losses that might ensue.
Nothing makes you feel shittier than flying. We tore our clothes off and went and stood in the shower. I had sex with Lucy against a cold tiled wall. It wasn’t one of our better fucks, but probably one of the most needed. I had suggested having sex on the flight from New York to Houston, but Lucy said no.
‘You can get fined for that,’ she said.
‘If that’s your only objection, I think we should go to the toilet right now,’ I said, unbuckling my seatbelt.
Lucy sighed and didn’t move a muscle. And I decided not to raise the subject again.
After the shower, when Lucy was drying her hair, my mobile rang.
I froze in the middle of what I was doing.
The police, of course. Already.
Bloody hell.
‘Martin Benner,’ I said when I answered.
First there was silence, then, sure enough, I heard Didrik Stihl’s voice.
‘Didrik here, how are things?’
I never answer that sort of question.
He waited for a moment before he went on.
‘Okay, I was just calling to say you can come and get your car.’
Bonus points to the police. They had lost track of me and were therefore offering me the chance to get my dearest possession back again. They must have broken into a cold sweat when they couldn’t trace either me or my mobile.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That’s good of you.’
‘When will you be picking it up? Just so I let the guys in the garage know.’
I laughed.
‘I’ll call in sometime next week.’
I could hear how upset Didrik was from his breathing.
‘Martin, for God’s sake, what are you up to now?’
‘Nothing for you to worry about. Just let me know if you want me to come in for more questioning. I can be there within twenty-four hours.’
Didrik let out a low groan.
‘You’re in the States, aren’t you?’
I didn’t answer.
Lucy came out from the bathroom naked. She looked at me anxiously.
‘Thanks for calling, Didrik. Speak to you soon.’
‘You fucking lunatic, you’re in Texas, aren’t you?’
‘Why are you asking questions I know you can get the answers to from your marvellous surveillance technology? Look after yourself now, I’m going out to get something to eat with Lucy.’
Didrik sighed.
‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ he said.
Then, and not before, anger flared up inside me. Who was Didrik to say something like that to a man in my position? If he’d done his job properly in the first place, this whole story would have been very different.
I realised that I had new problems to deal with, much sooner than I had hoped. There was a distinct risk that it would now be much harder for Lucy and I to talk to the detectives the way we’d planned. So I broke one of my own cardinal rules. I lied. To gain time and to keep Didrik’s pulse down at a level I could handle.
‘You’re right,’ I said, managing to make my voice tremble. ‘I’m in Texas. To bury my brother. Okay?’
Lucy stared at me as if I’d lost my mind.
‘I’m sorry,’ Didrik said when he had recovered. ‘I didn’t know you had a brother. But . . . I presume he’s your father’s son? Or was?’
‘That’s right,’ I said, with my heart thudding so hard with shame that it must have been visible through my chest. ‘Dad’s youngest. It’s not easy to have a relationship with a brother who grew up on the other side of the Atlantic, but I did my best. And now he’s not here any more. Don’t worry, as soon as he’s in the ground Lucy and I will head back to Stockholm.’
I could see Didrik before me, the way he nodded thoughtfully when he hears something that makes sense.
‘That’s good, Martin. The fact that you answered your phone really tells me all I needed to know. That you haven’t gone on the run. Sorry to bother you. We’ll speak soon.’
I ended the call and put the phone down, then met Lucy’s gaze.
‘Problems?’ she said.
‘Nothing I can’t handle,’ I said.
We didn’t speak as we dressed. That very evening we were due to meet the sheriff Eivor had spoken about in such glowing terms. Sheriff Esteban Stiller. I’d managed to get hold of him and had spoken to him over the phone. Even though I was cagey about the details, it hadn’t taken long for him to agree to a meeting.
The appointment to see the sheriff was like an oasis in the desert. God help him if he couldn’t provide us with some useful information. Because time was running out for me much faster than I could ever have imagined.
30
The Old River Café was located on the edge of the Heights, the part of Houston
where Sara Tell had worked as an au pair. I had never been there before, but Sheriff Esteban Stiller had. It was his suggestion that we meet there.
Eivor had described Esteban as a very nice man. After just five minutes I was inclined to agree with her. I didn’t even have to ask what Lucy thought. She looked almost turned on.
‘Naturally I had you checked out,’ Stiller said once we had our coffees. ‘You didn’t last long in the force.’
‘True,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t really for me.’
‘According to one of your bosses who’s still here, you had a lot of potential.’
I looked down and stirred my coffee. I didn’t deserve any praise for my efforts with the Houston Police Department.
Esteban leaned back in his chair.
‘What about you?’ he said to Lucy. ‘Did you start out as a police officer as well?’
She shook her head, making her curls dance on her shoulders.
‘No, I’m just a lawyer.’
Just a lawyer. As if my police training made such a difference.
‘I see,’ Stiller said in the inimitable way that only Americans can say those words.
I see.
Really?
‘So now you’re here to find out more about Sara Tell’s adventures.’
The turn in the conversation came without warning and felt liberating. None of us had time to sit there talking rubbish.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘We’re interested in anything you can tell us.’
‘But you must have done a bit of reading in advance?’
‘We’ve read pretty much everything,’ Lucy said.
‘Then I don’t see how I can help you.’
He glanced at the time and took a sip of the beer he had ordered to go with his coffee. An incomprehensible combination, in my opinion.
‘We’d like to know, for instance, if you had any other suspects for the murders in Houston and Galveston,’ I said.
‘What I’d like to know is why the two of you have flown all the way to Houston just to poke about in this old crap.’
He put his beer glass down hard, and the look in his eyes was no longer so friendly.
‘I thought we’d already said?’ I said.
‘You said Sara’s brother showed up in your office asking for help,’ Stiller said. ‘Six months after she died. And then you said you’d just started to look into the case when Bobby was suddenly murdered.’
True enough, that was what I had said. I didn’t think it would help our trip if I said it wasn’t Bobby who had come to see me. Just as little as it would help my credibility to explain that I myself was now suspected of killing him.
‘Do they know who was responsible for his murder?’ Stiller said, as if on command.
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But they’re working on it.’
I pulled out the train ticket I had been given by fake Bobby, and which with Jenny Woods’s testimony gave Sara Tell an alibi for the murder in Galveston. I passed it to Stiller.
‘This ticket,’ I said. ‘Do you recognise it?’
He took it.
‘Sure I do. Sara’s friend brought it to us. What was her name again?’
‘Jenny,’ I said. ‘Woods. She’s also dead.’
Stiller put the ticket down slowly.
‘How did she die?’
‘Same way as Bobby. They were both run down within the space of an hour.’
I outlined the sequence of events as briefly as I could, still without mentioning my own supposed involvement. It suddenly struck me that it was odd for both Bobby and Jenny to be out and about so late. Where had they been going?
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ Stiller said.
That was the reaction I had hoped to get from Didrik.
I took the ticket back and put it in the inside pocket of my jacket.
‘Makes you wonder who’s got good reason to silence the two of them after such a long time,’ Stiller said.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Lucy said with a sharpness in her voice that I rarely heard. ‘There’s only one person who had any reason to want them dead: the real murderer.’
Said by the woman who, deep down, seemed convinced that Sara, and no one else, was our culprit.
Stiller said nothing, just looked out of the big window where we were sitting. Slowly he watched the cars driving past.
‘Let’s take a walk,’ he eventually said, and got to his feet.
We left our cups and beer on the table. I know we never paid for any of it.
‘You think we were sloppy,’ Stiller said when we had turned into a quieter street.
Large Southern States villas decorated with flags lay scattered on lawns that breathed of eternal summer and inadequate rainfall. This was the kind of area my dad had lived in.
‘You think we ignored alternative culprits, and that we didn’t follow up the loose ends. But we did. We looked under every goddamn rock. We brought Jenny’s ex in for questioning, because he’d threatened taxi drivers on several occasions when he was drunk. They tipped us off that he might be involved. But unlike Sara he had an alibi for every single second of that evening. He’d been in another fight and was in a police cell pretty much the whole night through. All very embarrassing, of course, but the officer who arrested him hadn’t done the paperwork properly and it was all a mess.’
Stiller shrugged his shoulders as if he didn’t think it was a big deal that someone could be locked up for a whole night without it appearing anywhere in police records.
‘What about the others?’ I said.
‘What others?’
That made me think. Sara’s father had evidently never been in Texas. But her ex-boyfriend Ed had been. And whoever was known by the name Lucifer.
I mentioned both of these to Stiller.
He stopped mid-stride.
‘You can forget Ed,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t in the US when either of the murders took place. But Lucifer . . . How do you know that name?’
‘I didn’t know it was a name,’ I said.
A different sort of anger flared up. They genuinely hadn’t read Sara’s diary.
‘Just answer the question,’ Stiller said sharply.
‘I found out about someone called Lucifer from Sara’s diary. You know, the book Jenny tried to get you and your colleagues to take an interest in?’
Stiller wiped the sweat from his brow. It was far too warm an evening to be out for a stroll.
‘If it’s the Lucifer I’m thinking of, he didn’t have anything to do with the murders,’ Stiller said, and started walking again.
‘Who is he?’ I said.
‘Okay, we’re moving away from the murder investigations that Sara was caught up in, just to make that clear.’
We nodded. We understood.
‘Lucifer was the head of the biggest drug network we’ve ever cracked here in Texas,’ Stiller said. ‘I was never part of the investigation, but a lot of my colleagues were. They got away with it for years, but eventually we managed to bring them down. We arrested over fifty people in one night, at several different locations in Texas. Twice that number of illegal immigrants were caught and deported from the country. It was quite a clear-out, if I can put it like that.’
There was no mistaking his pride in his colleagues. I tried to imagine something similar in a Swedish context. It was impossible. No one would dare to boast about deporting a hundred unregistered individuals over the course of one night.
But regardless of the boasting, he was unwilling to contemplate any link between Sara and the big mafia boss.
‘Was Sara involved in drugs?’ I said.
‘Sara was involved in everything,’ Stiller said. ‘Drugs, prostitution, murder. That was clear from what we found out about her activities in Galveston. The idea that someone else stalked her across two continents and committed no fewer than five murders in her name is so stupid that it defies belief. You can forget about Lucifer. She didn’t know him. She must have been referring to someone else in that di
ary.’
Our opinions on that matter differed, but I didn’t say so out loud. I had spent days trying to imagine what Sara’s enemy, the person who had framed her for five murders, had looked like. For the first time I thought I could see a hint of an answer to that question.
I forced myself to carry on walking when I would rather have stopped to catch my breath.
Drugs and prostitution and murder.
And then a single mother in glasses and a smart jacket.
I tried to use that contrast to come up with an argument in Sara’s favour. But Stiller didn’t buy it.
‘We’re talking about a damaged girl who had been on the wrong side of the law since her early teenage years,’ he said. ‘Someone who was sold by her own father. So you can’t just look at the last years of her life and say, “What an exemplary member of society!” That’s not a serious argument. When Sara committed her first murder in Galveston she was already up to her ears in shit.’
‘But how could she have been in Galveston if her friend Jenny can prove that she was in San Antonio?’
‘Could,’ Lucy said quietly.
‘What?’
‘You said she can prove that Sara had an alibi. I changed it to could.’
‘Good point,’ I said. ‘You can’t get this to make sense, Stiller. Sara didn’t commit those murders. Not the one in Galveston, and not the one in Houston either. And certainly not the three she confessed to in Sweden.’
Stiller stopped again.
‘I’m going to tell you something,’ he said. ‘Something very few people are aware of, but which unfortunately I think you need to know to stop you spending the rest of your lives chasing shadows. Can I trust you to keep what I’m about to say to yourselves?’
Buried Lies Page 20