Buried Lies

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘We’ve put that whole business behind us,’ the man said curtly. ‘We’ve said all we have to say to the police.’

  The air was already warming up. I could feel sweat trickle down my back as I stood on the Browns’ drive. I caught a glimpse of a child of about ten in one of their windows. A girl.

  ‘You didn’t have any doubts before employing Sara?’ I said.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ the woman said.

  I shrugged.

  ‘I’ve got a four-year-old daughter myself. I’d find it very hard to entrust her to a twenty-year-old drug addict involved in prostitution, who was also a member of a gang who got their kicks attacking people in the street.’

  The woman’s jaw dropped and the man took a step towards me. I resisted the urge to back away.

  ‘Who are you to come here and judge us?’ he roared. ‘We didn’t do anything that hundreds of other families in this neighbourhood don’t. Employing a stranger to look after our kids so we can both keep our careers alive. Do you suppose Sara wrote about her past and her lifestyle when she applied for the job? Hardly, because then she wouldn’t have got it. We only found all that out much later.’

  Much later. How could that be true? How could you not notice that you had a drug addict in your home?

  ‘What I’m actually wondering is how come you didn’t realise what Sara was like when she arrived,’ I said calmly. ‘I get that she didn’t mention the drugs and prostitution in her application. But how did she do her job?’

  The woman answered.

  ‘She was exemplary,’ she said. ‘We haven’t had such a good au pair since she left.’

  She swallowed before going on. ‘My husband and I aren’t naïve people. We know what a drug addict looks like. And Sara . . . she wasn’t like that. She was better than that.’

  I breathed something that felt like a sigh of relief.

  We had finally met someone who had something good to say about Sara.

  33

  The woman didn’t share her husband’s fiery temperament. Her whole being exuded calm reflection. I could tell just by looking at her that she wasn’t the sort of woman who would have left her children with an au pair she had the slightest reason to distrust.

  ‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘But try to understand my curiosity. How could Sara hide who she was from the family she saw every day, and even went on holiday with?’

  The man looked sad all of a sudden. He was harder to read than his wife, but seemed a fundamentally sympathetic character.

  ‘That’s something we’ve given a lot of thought to,’ he said in a calmer tone of voice than before. ‘How could we not have known, not have realised? To be honest, we’ve even wondered if the police might have made a mistake. That all the bad qualities that Sara was supposed to have had were made up. But . . .’

  He threw his arms out helplessly and fell silent.

  ‘That doesn’t sound very likely,’ Lucy concluded.

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  His wife fiddled with her car-keys.

  ‘Don’t misunderstand us,’ she said. ‘Of course we could see that Sara was troubled, almost haunted. But she seemed incredibly grateful for the chance to be part of our family. She was happy. And she did a good job. So we never questioned keeping her on. She was far keener to do a good job than any of the girls we’ve had from better families.’

  I heard what they were saying, and saw before me the cornerstone of American society that says there’s nothing better than a ‘self-made man’. Sara had all the trappings of someone who had dragged herself up from the bottom and was fighting to get on in life. Yet she still hadn’t managed it. Why had she been such a devoted au pair if she was simultaneously being dragged back into the gutter? Had she just been an unusually confused young woman? Or had she made a serious attempt to break away from her old life but failed?

  God knows, many more than her had tried and failed.

  Frustrated, I wiped away the beads of sweat that were starting to appear on my forehead.

  ‘I’ve already met Jenny,’ I said. ‘Do you know if she had other friends here in Houston I could go and see? To get a better idea of Sara, I mean.’

  The Browns looked at each other.

  ‘There were two other au pairs she used to spend time with,’ the woman said. ‘Both Americans. But they don’t live here any more. I don’t even think they’re still in Texas.’

  ‘What about in Galveston?’ Lucy said. ‘We understand that you used to go there quite often.’

  ‘We still do,’ the man said. ‘But I’m not aware that Sara had any friends there.’

  A mobile phone rang. The man pulled it from his inside jacket pocket and excused himself.

  ‘Now I come to think of it, there was someone,’ his wife said. ‘I remember Sara mentioning a Denise in Galveston. I never met her, but I know she used to work at our favourite hotel back then, the Carlton. Who knows, maybe she still works there?’

  Denise. I made a mental note of the name.

  I wondered with wry amusement what the Browns’ current favourite hotel was. They had evidently tired of the Carlton.

  ‘How come Sara stopped working for you if it was all going so well?’ Lucy said.

  Sara’s former au pair mother let out a sigh.

  ‘We wondered that too,’ she said. ‘Some time during the spring of 2008 she changed. She spent almost all her free time in her room, she never went out in the city. Then came the news that she wanted to leave. Two weeks later she was gone. In hindsight we figured out that her behaviour changed when the taxi driver was murdered. At least the timing seemed to fit, anyway. My husband and I didn’t recognise Sara in that picture the police released after the murder. But she recognised herself, of course.’

  I was thinking out loud: ‘Strange that she wasn’t in more of a hurry to leave the country after the murder. If I’d killed someone, I wouldn’t be cool enough to wait several weeks before getting to safety.’

  The woman nodded eagerly.

  ‘That’s exactly what we thought. Because she was taking a huge risk. But if she was such a hardened criminal as the police say, perhaps it wasn’t so strange. And it would have attracted more attention if she’d upped and left us overnight.’

  I put my hands in my trouser pockets and looked the woman right in the eyes.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘What do you and your husband think? Did Sara murder all those people she was accused of killing?’

  There was a pause before she answered. Her husband finished his phone call and came back.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m not a police officer, and I’m not a lawyer. But I’ve been forced to realise that it can sometimes be hard to know someone as well as you might wish. However much I might want Sara to have been innocent, there are still certain facts that I can’t close my eyes to. Why didn’t she get in touch with the police when they started looking for her? And if she was so desperate to have a normal life, what was it that drew her to circles where drugs and prostitution were commonplace?’

  Sara Tell was becoming more and more of a paradox. And in my world such things lack all credibility. A paradox is based upon something having two contradictory sides. But I’m of the firm opinion that these two sides are never equally valid. There’s always one that has the upper hand. The contradiction is therefore only superficial, more like a façade hiding a well-concealed truth. Often an uncomfortable one, at that.

  I remembered something else I had been thinking about.

  ‘Were you ever questioned by the police about the murder in Galveston?’

  ‘Sorry?’ the man said, starting to look angry again.

  I hurried to reassure him.

  ‘As witnesses, not suspects. Sara had a long weekend off. Did the police ever ask you where she told you she was going?’

  ‘No,’ the man said. ‘But they didn’t need to. One of the police officers recognised her. He questioned her at the scene that night.’

  ‘We could nev
er have said with any certainty where Sara went that weekend,’ the woman said. ‘But we both remember her talking about Galveston. And not San Antonio. We offered to help book the hotel but Sara declined our help. She said she already had a place to stay.’

  Of course she did. But in San Antonio, not Galveston.

  ‘Was there anything else you wondered about?’ I said. ‘Anyone she knew who seemed a bit suspicious, anyone causing trouble for her?’

  I know you’re not supposed to ask leading questions but sometimes I do anyway. Particularly when I haven’t got time to wait for the correct answer.

  The Browns looked thoughtful.

  ‘I know she had problems with an ex-boyfriend from Sweden,’ the wife said. ‘But I suppose you already know about him?’

  Yes, we did.

  ‘You never heard anything about a boyfriend in San Antonio?’ Lucy said.

  They just shook their heads in response. That bothered me.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Would it surprise you if I told you that Sara wasn’t in Galveston when the girl was murdered there, but in San Antonio instead? With Jenny. To see a guy she’d just got together with.’

  The woman looked like she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  ‘By now there’s very little that would surprise us,’ she said. ‘You must appreciate that yourself. But we never heard anything about a boyfriend in San Antonio.’

  The man looked at his watch and grimaced.

  ‘I wish we could be of more help, but we both need to get off to work now.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Thanks very much for your time.’

  I gave them a card on which I had scribbled my new contact details.

  ‘Call me,’ I said. ‘If you think of anything else. Anything at all.’

  It was the woman who took the card. She blurted out: ‘There was one more thing. That peculiar tattoo she got in Galveston.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘Out of the blue Sara suddenly had a name tattooed on the back of her neck. It got infected, took weeks to heal.’

  ‘She was so secretive about what the name meant,’ the woman said. ‘She claimed it was a nickname she’d been given in Sweden, but I never heard anyone use it. She didn’t either, come to that.’

  The sun was burning my back.

  ‘What was the name?’ Lucy said.

  Lucifer, I thought. Say Lucifer, so I’ve got something to go on.

  But that wasn’t it.

  ‘The name was Lotus.’

  ‘Lotus?’

  ‘Yes. Just that. Lotus.’

  And with that, the field of play expanded to include yet another name.

  Lotus.

  A name that someone had branded onto the back of Sara Texas’s neck.

  34

  We left the au pair family when they couldn’t spare us any more time. And the hunt went on. The hunt for the truth about Sara Texas, and the hunt for proof of my own innocence. Tirelessly we went on fighting for a story that so many people seemed keen to conceal and forget.

  New leads were falling out of the sky like confetti.

  Sara’s diary featured someone called Lucifer.

  The name Lotus was tattooed on the back of her neck.

  But no one was either able or willing to help us understand the whole picture. We knew a lot, but our overall understanding of what was going on was extremely limited.

  ‘The most highly populated ghost-town in the world,’ Lucy said when we were back downtown.

  It was a fitting description of what claimed to be the fourth largest city in the USA, but which seemed as deserted as if someone had let off an atom bomb.

  ‘It’s the heat,’ I said. ‘People prefer to be underground in hot weather like this.’

  ‘Underground?’ Lucy echoed.

  I parked the car at the hotel and took her for a short walk. I showed her the extensive network of tunnels that links a large number of places in the centre of Houston. The Americans know no boundaries in their attempts to make life more comfortable. On some level I find that deeply admirable. I’m a lazy bastard myself.

  Hand in hand we spent an hour exploring subterranean Houston. Lucy said very little. I was starting to detect a change in her. She was losing the spark. I squeezed her hand and tried a smile. She didn’t return it.

  Under different circumstances I would have been more attentive. But not this time. We weren’t just running out of time – it felt like it had already run out, as if I had been on borrowed time right from the start. I no longer checked my watch, it was as if I had an inbuilt clock inside me. And I felt I couldn’t waste any more time sightseeing.

  ‘We need to hurry,’ I said when Lucy stopped to buy two croissants for breakfast.

  She didn’t answer. I knew what she was thinking. If we didn’t have time to eat, we might as well lie down and die there and then.

  I had managed to get hold of Larry the policeman as we were driving away from the Brown family’s house. His name cropped up in a number of newspaper articles online. But I hadn’t seen any pictures of him.

  To my surprise, he wasn’t as uncooperative as I had assumed he would be. Wary, but not impossible. He wasn’t averse to dropping by our hotel to talk about the police work that led to him recognising Sara from Galveston, and thus being able to identify her as a murder suspect.

  It only served to increase the pressure I felt.

  ‘We need to figure out if she really was in Galveston that night,’ I said to Lucy when she had paid for the croissants. ‘Or if that’s just something our friend Larry made up.’

  ‘And you think he’s going to admit that to two strangers in a hotel lobby?’ Lucy said.

  She was radiating deep scepticism as she snuck a bite of her croissant. I followed her example and ended up with crumbs all over my shirt.

  ‘Of course not,’ I said irritably. ‘But he might let something slip.’

  When we got back, the hotel lobby was empty. We may not have known what Larry looked like, but I imagined we’d be able to recognise each other. We sat down in a couple of armchairs and waited. Businessmen came and went. No sign of a policeman.

  Just as I pulled out my mobile and was about to call him the doors slid open. A uniformed man in his thirties appeared. He had ruddy cheeks and was wearing sunglasses. He didn’t remove them until he reached our chairs.

  ‘Martin Benner?’

  I hurried to stand up.

  He held his hand out.

  ‘Good to meet you.’

  We couldn’t thank him enough for taking the time to see us. He settled down warily on a sofa that was slightly too far away from us.

  ‘I don’t honestly see how I can help you,’ he said. ‘I mean, I can’t see that there’s anything that isn’t clear.’

  A lot of people seemed to share that opinion. I decided not to waste time. In a few simple sentences I described my dilemma. That I was unwilling to doubt the word of a police officer, but that I didn’t see how it was compatible with Jenny Woods’s testimony saying that she and Sara had been in San Antonio on the night of the murder. I didn’t mention the fact that Jenny had told me Larry had hit on Sara and been rejected with a cup of hot coffee in the face.

  Larry Benson listened impassively.

  ‘I’ll answer your question,’ he said when I had finished. ‘Not because I have to, but because I want you to learn a lesson. It’s not a smart move to set more store in a whore than a police officer. Someone of your background ought to realise that, but okay, let’s play this by your rules.’

  I responded by mimicking his own expression. I didn’t move so much as a muscle in my face. Without looking at Lucy I knew she was doing the same. But inside me the question marks were growing and multiplying.

  Whore?

  Jenny too?

  Objections were piling up in my throat. But Larry Benson hurried on.

  ‘It’s not my fault you haven’t done your homework,’ he said. ‘Just so I understan
d this right – and please don’t waste time by not answering honestly – you’re wondering if I made up the fact that Sara was at the hotel in Galveston the night one of the cleaners was murdered there?’

  I didn’t hesitate.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because we, or rather I, met Jenny Woods before she died. And she told me she had been with Sara in San Antonio that night.’

  Larry’s eyes grew wider.

  ‘Sorry, Jenny Woods is dead?’

  His surprise was genuine. So he hadn’t heard that we’d met Sheriff Stiller the previous evening.

  ‘She was run down and killed on a pedestrian crossing. The police think it was murder.’

  I’m not sure if I saw correctly, but a twitch seemed to flit across Larry’s face. What I’d just told him had unsettled him.

  Then he pulled himself together, and as if to reinforce his strength, spread himself even further across the sofa.

  ‘But she wasn’t the one who dragged you into all this?’ he said. ‘That was Sara’s brother Bobby?’

  ‘Correct,’ I said. ‘And he’s dead too, by the way. Murdered, same way as Jenny.’

  Larry turned pale. Too much unsettling news in one go. The murders said something about Sara Texas’s case that he would prefer not to have to deal with.

  ‘Then let’s take it from the start,’ he said in a sharp voice. ‘Jenny was lying. Why, I don’t know, but she was. Sara was at the hotel in Galveston the night of the murder. I know that because I was the one who questioned her. We spoke to everyone staying there. Sara didn’t stand out. Not back then. I realise it was pretty damn stupid not to write up a proper report of the interview, but that sort of thing happens. Her name was on the list of people who were questioned, though.’

  He looked like he wanted to apologise to me personally for neglecting to write the report. That was entirely the wrong conclusion. I didn’t need an apology – Sara did.

  ‘A list like that must contain hundreds of names,’ I said. ‘The Carlton’s a big hotel, after all. You couldn’t have got Sara mixed up with someone else?’