‘No. Do you want to see the list?’
‘Thanks, but there’s no need. What about Sara’s au pair family? Did you question them about Sara’s activities on the night in question?’
‘No, that wasn’t necessary, seeing as I’d spoken to her myself.’
I let out a laugh.
‘Of course,’ I said.
Larry Benson flared up. His face turned even redder.
‘You little shit,’ he said, loudly enough to make the hotel receptionist glance over at us. ‘Do your homework before coming over here to cause trouble! Did Sara say she was in San Antonio on the night of the murder when she was questioned in Sweden?’
His question took me by surprise. She must have done, surely? Larry interrupted my thoughts.
‘I see you’re not sure. So let me help you. The answer’s no, she never claimed she was in San Antonio when the woman was murdered in Galveston. In the first interview she claimed she couldn’t remember what she was doing the night of the murder, and in the second one she confessed, as we all know.’
He sank deeper on the sofa.
‘You just think she mentioned San Antonio, and you think that because you’ve seen that damn train ticket. Why Jenny Woods went to the effort of coming up with something like that I can’t say. I just know what I saw with my own eyes: Sara Tell was in Galveston the night of the murder.’
I clenched my teeth while I considered how strongly to go on the counterattack. I had ended up at a disadvantage, and that wasn’t good.
‘How do you explain that Jenny Woods was murdered in Stockholm after telling me about her and Sara’s trip?’
‘I don’t honestly feel I need to explain that. Mistaken identity, maybe?’
‘And Bobby?’ Lucy said, speaking for the first time. ‘He was the other person fighting on Sara’s behalf. Was it a coincidence that he was murdered at the same time as Jenny?’
‘Another question I don’t have to take responsibility for.’
Larry Benson got to his feet.
‘You’re digging for oil but getting nothing but sand. Let this shit go. Leave the past alone.’
It evidently wasn’t a friendly piece of advice. There was something else hidden in his words. An unspoken threat.
Lucy and I stood up as well.
‘The rumours about Sara being a prostitute and a drug addict,’ I said. ‘Was there any substance to them?’
‘That was the whole reason why she was in Galveston without her au pair family,’ Larry said. ‘To meet as many clients as she wanted without being seen. There were others doing the same thing at that hotel. As well as the drugs. But we put a stop to that after the murder.’
‘What do you think the motive was for the woman’s murder in Galveston?’ I said.
‘Competition,’ Larry said, with complete certainty in his voice. ‘The women clashed over how to divide the clients. One of them had to go. Sara won that battle.’
I shook my head slowly. That was both too simple and too weak. It didn’t make sense. If Sara had had a better lawyer, it wouldn’t have held up in court either.
‘Think whatever the hell you like,’ Larry said. ‘I have to get back to work.’
He got ready to leave.
‘The tattoo,’ Lucy said. ‘We heard that Sara had the word “Lotus” tattooed on the back of her neck. Do you have any idea what that means?’
‘Not a clue,’ Larry said. ‘It doesn’t feel particularly interesting either. Most people seem to have tattoos these days.’
Not Lucy, I thought. Nor me.
‘Lucifer,’ I said, and Larry stopped mid-stride. ‘Do you know about him?’
Larry stood still, breathing heavily. Then he turned slowly towards me.
‘Let me give you a final warning,’ he said. ‘Stay away from Sara Tell’s story. Stay away from Lucifer. Otherwise you’ll find yourself in a shitload of trouble. Is that understood?’
I nodded curtly and Larry looked happy. He marched out of the hotel without shaking hands.
‘What do we do now?’ Lucy said.
‘Now we find someone who’s willing to talk to us about Lucifer,’ I said.
35
Across all the ages and in every culture, people have taught their children to beware of fire. If you get too close, you get burnt. And you never lose the scars. They stay on your body as a permanent reminder that you once broke one of life’s most basic rules. The one about taking care not to try to resist forces that are bound to destroy us if we get too close.
I keep asking myself over and over if I ought to have known. If I, or we, ought to have realised. The answer is obvious. Of course we should have. But in my defence I have to point out that we had no choice. I can’t see how I could have extricated myself. Not once I was faced with being charged with two murders I hadn’t committed. The potential consequences of having walked into a trap like that were impossible to live with. So I kept going. Heedless and blinkered. Bit by bit things were being dismantled. Without knowing it, I was heading at speed towards my own private Pompeii.
I had plenty of help getting there. Amongst others from the individual known as Lucifer, a man at the forefront of one of the biggest criminal networks in Texas. Its tentacles reached both north, far into the American continent, and south to the furthest reaches of Mexico. Sheriff Stiller had said the network had been broken and all the main players put in prison. They even managed to get Lucifer. Lucy and I managed to confirm what Stiller had said in countless newspaper articles online. The press seemed to share Stiller’s enthusiasm about the police investigation and its results. Neither Lucy nor I could understand that.
Because just as Stiller had said, Lucifer had only been convicted of a single offence. One feeble count of assault. For that he got less than a year in prison. He had been sentenced a few months after Sara left Texas. What Lucifer was doing now was unclear. But from the newspapers we did manage to learn his real name: Lucas Lorenzo.
‘Exactly what did they achieve by putting a guy like him in prison for six months?’ I said. ‘He’s hardly likely to have emerged a reformed character.’
Lucy agreed with me.
‘Unless the other inmates taught him a lesson,’ she said.
I thought that unlikely. A man like Lucifer was bound to have people inside every prison in Texas. He would never have had any reason to worry about his physical safety.
Lucy pushed the computer from her lap. We had shut ourselves away in our hotel room and only opened the door for room-service.
‘Can we be certain this is the guy Sara meant when she wrote about Lucifer in her diary?’
I had been asking myself the same thing. But now that we had found out who Lucifer was, and with the suggestion that Sara had been involved in both drugs and prostitution, my doubts were starting to shrink.
The only thing that seemed utterly incomprehensible was how surprised Stiller had looked when we asked about Lucifer. He didn’t seem to have had a clue about Sara’s connection to the famous drug baron. How could that be the case? Lucifer wasn’t the sort of guy you caught overnight. Destroying a network like his took years of work. The police must have spent thousands of hours documenting his contacts through surveillance and phone-taps, bugging and internet monitoring. And they were bound to have had access to a large number of physical sources too. How could Sara’s name not have cropped up at least once? Even if she, as Sheriff Stiller had suggested, had been on the periphery?
‘Lotus,’ Lucy said.
‘You’re wondering if that was her alias?’
‘Yes.’
That would explain a lot. Sara only lived in Texas for eighteen months. Being drawn into a network like Lucifer’s probably took time. So it was reasonable to conclude that Sara had only become involved in his activities relatively late in relation to the police operation.
‘There must have been loads of people in that network who were never identified,’ I said. ‘People the police assumed they could ignore because they were too l
ow down in the hierarchy to pose any real danger to others.’
‘You don’t think we could risk asking Stiller if anyone called Lotus had cropped up in the investigation?’ Lucy said.
‘We could try. But I don’t think he’ll be very forthcoming.’
I got Sara’s diary out of my suitcase. I had marked the pages where Lucifer was mentioned. Considering that there wasn’t much writing in the book, and that the entries were undated, it wasn’t possible to say exactly when Lucifer first appeared in Sara’s life. And he appeared a grand total of three times in the book. When I read them more carefully, I was embarrassed that I had at first believed that the name Lucifer referred to Sara’s own father.
I read them out loud to Lucy.
‘The first time she mentions him is here: “Lucifer is still being a problem. Why does he keep bothering me?” A bit later she writes: “I’ve told Lucifer to leave me alone. His whole fucking attitude scares me. Hope he doesn’t contact me again.” And the last mention: “Lucifer is talking about favours given and debts repaid. Don’t know how I’m going to get out of this.”’
Lucy took the diary and read for herself.
‘This tells us far too little,’ she said. ‘Was she working for Lucifer? Or did they have a personal relationship?’
‘Or both?’ I said. ‘Bloody hell, Lucy, we’re not getting anywhere with this. We need to find someone who can help us interpret what Sara wrote.’
‘The friend in Galveston. The one the Browns mentioned.’
‘Denise.’
‘Exactly.’
I leaned back against the tall, padded headboard. It looked like something from a porn film.
‘We’ve got other reasons to go to Galveston,’ I said. ‘I just want to finish things off properly here in Houston first.’
‘Who else do you want to see?’
I took my time replying.
‘Well, I haven’t given up hope of talking to one of the police officers who worked on the Lucifer investigation. And obviously I’d like to meet Jenny Woods’s husband. I also want to try to meet our mafia boss in person.’
Lucy stared at me.
‘Lucifer?’
‘Yes. What the hell was his name again? Lucas Lorenzo.’
She got up abruptly from the bed.
‘You’ll have to do that one without me, then.’
‘Baby, listen . . .’
‘Like hell I will! Martin, people keep warning us off looking for Lucifer. We’re not even supposed to talk to anyone else in the police about him. Don’t you realise how dangerous this could be?’
No, I didn’t. And nor did Lucy. But her gut feeling was better, and more reliable, than mine. Feelings are what they are. Soft and malleable and made by nature to be overridden by our more logical brains. So I got my way.
We didn’t leave Houston until we had taken more steps towards Lucifer.
Belle’s grandfather answered on the second ring.
‘Everything’s fine here,’ he said. ‘How are you getting on?’
I had no good answer to that.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It’s hot. Can I talk to Belle? Or has she already gone to bed?’
She hadn’t. It was eight o’clock in Sweden, and Belle was playing with her cousins in her grandparents’ garden. It struck me that if I ever had biological children, they’d be Belle’s cousins and not her siblings. On paper, anyway.
She was soon on the phone.
‘Martin?’
I had never encouraged Belle to call me Dad. She already had a dad. A dead one, admittedly, but that wasn’t the point.
‘Hi, Belle, how are things?’
‘Wonderful!’
I don’t know what I’d have done if she’d said anything else. I’d probably have started crying or something else stupid.
‘That’s good to hear. I hope you’re not wearing out Grandma and Granddad?’
She laughed down the phone. In long, rambling sentences she started to tell me what they’d been doing since we parted. The line was distorted by the fact that she was outdoors and it was windy. But from what I could make out, she was telling me excitedly that she had been in a boat, had had ice cream, had cooked sausages on a fire, and had been swimming.
‘Swimming?’ I said. ‘Isn’t it cold?’
Stupid question. Children would be only too happy to swim in holes in the ice if we grown-ups didn’t hold them back.
‘It’s really warm!’ Belle said. ‘And rainy.’
So things were much the same. Even the weather. That was good. But I didn’t feel completely confident until I spoke to Boris a bit later.
‘I’ve put two of my best guys onto it,’ Boris said. ‘Everything’s fine. They had nothing to report last time I spoke to them. Other than the fact that you’ve given them a hell of a difficult job, keeping an eye on a kid out on an island in the archipelago.’
He laughed. I wasn’t having any trouble keeping serious.
‘How are you getting on?’ Boris said.
‘Two steps forward, two steps back,’ I said.
Lucy had gone out to do something and I was on my own in our room.
‘Anything I can do to help?’ Boris said.
It struck me that there probably was. Not just one thing, but several.
‘If a young woman caught up in drugs and prostitution suddenly gets a tattoo on the back of her neck, what would you think was going on?’
‘That someone had marked her, of course. So that other people could see who she belonged to.’
It sounded like the most natural thing in the world. I felt slightly sick. I wanted never to have a full picture of what Boris was involved in. But what he said fitted what we’d already guessed. Getting the tattoo hadn’t necessarily been Sara’s idea. It could just as easily have been someone else’s.
There were other things I needed help to understand.
‘I’m looking for a particular person here in Texas,’ I said. ‘Someone whose background is a bit like yours.’
‘What do you mean, a background like mine?’ Boris said.
His voice sounded wary. Why did you have to be so fucking diplomatic the whole time? I didn’t have time for that crap.
‘I mean someone who knows an awful lot of people, and earns an insane amount of money from criminal activity.’
Boris started laughing again.
‘You’re a blunt bastard,’ he said. ‘Cocky. That’s one of the things I like about you, always have done. Do I know the person in question? The person you’re looking for, I mean?’
‘I don’t think so. But suppose someone wanted to get hold of you in Stockholm. Someone who knew who you were and what you do, but not where to find you. How would they get hold of you?’
Boris became serious.
‘I know you’re under pressure, but don’t get careless. People like me don’t want to be found. Not by you, and not by anyone else. Think about it. What do you think someone like me would say to someone like you if you turned up at my house uninvited?’
I retreated at once.
‘Not a shit,’ I said.
‘So what do you have to do?’
‘Give up. It was a stupid idea from the start. I’ll have to revert to my original plan, which was to get information about the man I’m looking for from the police.’
Boris interrupted me.
‘Sorry, you’re going to get information about someone in my position from the police? In the USA? With all due respect, but have you gone stupid?’
I could see him before me. Shaking his shaved head and looking up at the ceiling. His voice exuded contempt, and that wasn’t particularly flattering to my powers of analysis.
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re getting at,’ I said.
‘People like me don’t survive in the USA, and definitely not in Texas, without the protection of the police. So you won’t get anything out of them. There’s far too great a risk that you’ll end up in the clutches of some corrupt bastard who’l
l tell his boss a dumb Swede is running round asking loads of stupid questions.’
Even if I thought Boris was exaggerating about how many police officers might have been bought off by someone like Lucifer, I realised that he was making an important point.
‘Let me see if I understand you correctly,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t try to contact Lucifer directly. And I shouldn’t try to find out anything about him from the police. Have you got any better suggestions? Or should I just give up?’
There was a scraping sound down the phone.
‘Lucifer? He calls himself Lucifer? What a joke.’
‘Agreed. But I didn’t want to discuss Lucifer’s alias, just how to get hold of him.’
‘You’re not hearing well today,’ Boris said. ‘What I said was that someone like me wouldn’t see someone like you without an invitation.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that you need to switch roles. You’re not going to look for Lucifer. Give him a reason to look for you instead. And pray that he listens to what you’ve got to say before he shoots you.’
36
The last but one time I had sex with Lucy in Texas it was raining. If we’d been in Stockholm we would never have remembered the weather, because of course it rains there most of the time. But in Houston every summer shower of rain is a miracle. The light drops fell like a blessing from God against the window of our hotel room as I, with all the strength I could muster, was guiding Lucy towards an orgasm that made her let out a short, hoarse scream. I think I was fifteen when I realised that girls who scream the whole time, or just unnecessarily often, when they’re having sex have watched too much porn. Men basically never scream when they come. It’s a myth that women’s orgasms are so much more intense that they have to be celebrated by a two-minute-long operatic howl.
Afterwards we lay back on the bed, breathless. I don’t really like too much proximity. But with Lucy it’s different. I like to feel her sweaty skin stick to mine.
‘That was a very good fuck,’ Lucy said.
‘Agreed,’ I said.
She smiled and took my hand in hers. She pulled it slowly towards her and kissed it.
We’d been having an argument just before we had sex. I hadn’t been able to resist, and told her about my conversation with Boris.
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