Out of curiosity I read the names of the people who had been on the riding school’s committee. Almost all men from what I could see. A few women. Each name was followed by a single sentence describing the person’s background, and I soon realised that most of the committee members came from the business community. All apart from one woman who was a doctor, and a man who was a prison governor.
My eyes froze on the paper. I didn’t hear the door to the café open as someone came in. Nor did I notice when that person walked determinedly in my direction.
The only thing I had eyes for was the name of the former prison governor who had sat on the very first committee of the riding school. A man who had gone on to become a sheriff in Houston.
Esteban Stiller.
48
‘I heard you were trying to get hold of me.’
I recognised the voice immediately and flew up from my chair. But I didn’t get more than halfway before I felt unexpectedly strong hands and arms pushing me back down again.
‘Okay, okay. Don’t let’s get overexcited here. Or we might have to go somewhere else and talk, and I don’t think you want that.’
Elias Krom let go of me and sat down on the other side of the table.
The café owner padded over to us.
‘Everything okay?’
It wasn’t clear which of us he was addressing, but I took the initiative and replied.
‘Everything’s fine. Sorry if we disturbed you.’
‘I don’t want any trouble.’
‘No trouble,’ Elias said. ‘We’re just going to have a chat.’
The owner withdrew doubtfully.
Elias sat with his legs apart, leaning back in his chair. I had to give him credit for his acting skills. He’d done a good job of embodying Bobby. I’d swallowed the whole story, hook, line and sinker. I hadn’t doubted that he was who he said he was for a second.
‘I don’t know if you’ve been trying to reach me before,’ he said, and turned away to cough. ‘Sorry if you’ve had trouble getting hold of me. Things have been a bit hectic lately.’
Only then did I see that hidden beneath the superficial toughness was a hint of fear. I wasn’t the only person at that table under a lot of strain.
‘Three questions,’ I said as calmly as I could, holding up three fingers.
‘You can ask as many as you like, but I’ll only answer if I feel like it and am able to.’
I could have said the same, but kept quiet about that.
‘First question. Who asked you to come to my office and pretend to be Bobby Tell?’
One corner of Elias’s mouth twitched. If the idiot was about to grin he was making a grave mistake.
‘Who says I didn’t come of my own initiative?’ he said.
‘I do,’ I said. ‘And please don’t insult my intelligence with cheap jokes. I haven’t got the time for that right now. Just answer the question. Who was it?’
Elias’s expression didn’t change.
‘Do you remember what you said to me?’ he said. ‘“In this room you have no equal, just a man who is superior to you in every respect.” How does that feel now? I presume you’re not so superior any more?’
I forced myself to drink some coffee. It would be a disaster if I beat the guy to death before he’d even answered the first question.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was born arrogant and there’s no changing that. Let me ask again: who sent you?’
Elias leaned so far across the table that he was almost lying on his arms.
‘What makes you think it wasn’t Bobby?’
‘Bobby’s dead.’
Something dark came into his eyes.
‘I know.’
‘So tell me. Before you meet the same fate. Who told you to come and see me and plead on Sara Tell’s behalf?’
Elias sat up. His face was different now. There was something more relaxed, something sadder about it.
‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘It was Bobby who first dragged me into this.’
The air in the café was thick with sour coffee and old food smells. It seemed to catch in my nose when I breathed it in.
‘Prove it,’ I said.
I clenched one fist on my lap. Surely that couldn’t be true? That Bobby had got in touch with one of Sara’s old friends and asked for help?
‘I can’t,’ Elias said. ‘But I can tell you he wasn’t the one who first contacted me. That was Ed, Sara’s ex. Bobby didn’t know me that well, so he called Ed. He’d heard you on the radio – Bobby, I mean. Thought you sounded okay. Because, you know, Bobby never got over what happened to Sara. The rest of us didn’t really know what to think, but it hit Bobby so hard it almost killed him. He moved abroad and ended up in all sorts of shit. Then he decided to make one last try. Mostly to find out what had happened to the kid, Mio. That was how you came into the picture.’
The hand in my lap kept opening and closing, opening and closing. I believed what Elias was telling me. There was something liberating about his story. So distant from everything that came later, nocturnal death rides in my car and burning houses.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘Bobby was so used to being rejected. After all, he’d tried going to Sara’s lawyer and the police. But no one would listen to him. They didn’t even want to see him when he got hold of new evidence from Sara’s friend in Texas. That’s why he didn’t dare turn up in person and asked one of us to do it instead. Ed didn’t want to, so I ended up doing it. Once you’d taken the bait and a bit of time had passed, we were going to explain what was really going on.’
‘I would have been allowed to meet the real Bobby?’
‘Yes. Bobby had come home from Switzerland and was involved from the start. He was here for something like three weeks before he died.’
I thought through what I’d just been told. Put the pieces of information together. Belle loved doing jigsaws. I didn’t have the patience.
‘When Bobby died he had the mobile phone I’d tried to reach you on in his pocket.’
‘Because it was his phone,’ Elias said. ‘I only used it to communicate with you. And we only did that by text, too.’
‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘We spoke on the phone before we met on the Sunday when I accepted the job.’
‘Yeah,’ Elias said. ‘Bobby was staying at mine for a few nights.’
I sat without saying anything, trying to understand. So it really had been Bobby who had set the whole thing rolling, even if he hadn’t dared do it in person. But what about everything that had happened since? Bobby obviously had nothing to do with any of that.
‘I don’t know anything about that,’ Elias said quickly when I broached the subject with him.
Far too quickly.
‘Believe me, I’ve been lying seriously bloody low since Bobby died,’ he said. ‘I’ve been totally fucking terrified. I have no idea why Bobby had to die, and I don’t want to know either. I’m really sorry if we’ve messed things up for you, that wasn’t the intention at all. But keep me out of this battle, I don’t belong there.’
It was only then that I realised. Whoever had murdered Bobby had no idea that it was one of Sara’s friends who had come to see me. Whoever killed Bobby had done it to shut him up, which from the killer’s point of view would probably still have been deemed necessary even if he had known about Elias’s role in the story.
‘Bloody hell,’ I whispered. ‘Bloody hell.’
Elias squirmed on his chair.
‘My girlfriend said you mentioned that fire out in the archipelago. What’s that got to do with anything?’
I was no longer in any doubt. Elias looked genuinely bewildered and stressed. He didn’t have a thing to do with anything that had happened later.
I felt like bursting into tears at my impotence. Fucking bastard bollocks . . . How do you find your way out of a labyrinth? You don’t. You get directed the way its designer wants you to go. And in this instance that wasn’t Elias, and it wasn’t Bobby. It was
a shady character from Texas who went by the name of Lucifer.
‘You need to be careful,’ I told Elias. ‘Do you hear? If whoever killed Bobby finds out that both you and Ed knew about Bobby’s plan, you’ll have serious problems.’
Suddenly our roles were reversed. I had the upper hand and Elias was at a disadvantage. That had been the case all along, but I hadn’t realised before now.
Elias rubbed his face with his hands to wake himself up. He was tired. Considerably more tired than I was.
‘Who burned down the house in the archipelago?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I’m going to find out.’
Esteban Stiller’s name came into my mind. The man who had been on the riding school’s committee and pretended he didn’t know that Sara had belonged to Texas’s biggest drug baron’s stable of prostitutes.
Stiller is Lucifer, a ghostly voice whispered inside my head.
I tried to stay calm. Denise Barton had said that Lucifer had some sort of link to Sweden. That was how he had been able to recruit prostitutes from here. If I could find a link between Stiller and Sweden, I’d have an explanation that actually held water.
Elias cleared his throat.
‘I get it if you’re angry with me,’ he said. ‘But . . . fuck it, my girlfriend and I are getting married. Don’t torch me if you can avoid it, okay?’
He was as pale as freshly fallen winter snow.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m capable of a lot of things, but I don’t kill people. But I’d really like you to answer another question, if you’ve got time?’
He nodded.
‘When Sara left for Houston, did she say what she was going to do there?’
‘She may have done, but not to me. I was in prison. Only six months, but all the same. We didn’t have any contact at the time.’
Shit. But I tried all the same.
‘When you were in the same gang as Sara . . . Did she ever talk about prostitution? To be blunt, was that something she was involved in?’
Elias hesitated, as if he didn’t want to reveal Sara’s secrets even though she was dead.
‘Look, her dad was caught up in all that. He used to sell her. So she had it in her, somehow. She used to do it from time to time, fuck people for money.’
‘I can understand that these questions might seem a bit weird, but do you know if she had any particular contact who helped her find clients?’
‘Like a pimp, you mean? No, she didn’t. She wanted to be independent, that was the whole point.’
No matter how I tried, I wasn’t getting any closer to the truth. How on earth had she managed to find – or be found by – Lucifer’s network?
Elias looked thoughtful.
‘Although there was actually one guy she used to talk about,’ he said slowly.
I held my breath, felt my heart hammering against my ribs.
‘She met some American guy, an older bloke. I don’t know how old the bastard was. But I know she fucked him at least once. When she started talking about Texas, Bobby told me she’d mentioned him. Said he was going to help her. I don’t know how. But Bobby was really fucking worried.’
I swallowed.
‘Why?’
‘Because he thought she was acting like she was in love. And that’s not smart. Falling in love with someone who’s paid for you.’
Finally some important pieces fell into place. Denise had been wrongly informed. Sara hadn’t got to know Lucifer by chance in Texas. He had recruited her in person.
My stomach knotted. This was worse than I could have imagined.
‘I think I’m going to have to go now.’
Elias stood up. The feet of his chair scraped on the floor. He held his hand out feebly across the table.
Without hesitation I stood up and took it.
‘Thank you for coming,’ I said. ‘Good luck.’
Relieved, he shook my hand hard, with feeling.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You too.’
Then he disappeared from the café, out of my universe. The man who had never really had any interest in helping Sara, who had just agreed to help Bobby. I sat down again. I watched him as he crossed the street and vanished into the building where he lived. The pressure in my chest felt immense, relentless. The story looked pretty clear now. Sara had been the exception. She had been Lucifer’s very own find. And she ended up pregnant with his child. Then, when she decided to run, the eventual consequences were worse than she could ever have imagined.
Five premeditated murders. She had been framed for five premeditated murders. When she had actually only committed one. And that was unpremeditated. It was self-defence, and could never have been classified as anything but manslaughter, at the very worst. In all likelihood she would have been found not guilty as long as she could prove that she had feared for her life.
I pulled out my mobile and started searching aimlessly for information about Sheriff Stiller on the internet. I had limited expectations, but it did no harm to look. I knew that American sheriffs were elected by the people. So there had to be quite a lot written about them.
The first search results led me to various Texan newspapers that had published articles about Stiller in various contexts. I went onto the sheriff’s office’s own website. It featured a picture of a smiling Stiller. An untroubled man with happy eyes and deep dimples.
Sheriff Stiller liked playing chess, according to the brief biographical note. He had been married to his wife for fifteen years, and they had four children. They went to church regularly. The family had two dogs and lived in a beautiful house in one of the more prestigious suburbs. I was about to close the page when I read the last lines:
‘The Stiller family love travelling, and do as much of it as they can. They particularly like visiting Europe. Sheriff Stiller’s wife Pamela’s parents are Swedish, and they love to see their grandchildren as much as possible.’
Nausea rose up out of nowhere. I rushed through the café and to the toilet, only pausing to grab all my papers under my arm. They fell to the floor as I leaned over the edge of the bowl and threw up so violently that it splashed the white porcelain.
He had been right under my nose the whole time. The man who had managed to escape the Texas Police’s big operation against his network. The man everyone knew as Lucifer, but whom no one seemed to have met.
Esteban Stiller was Lucifer.
Of course. How the hell could we have missed that? The fact that Lucifer not only had contacts inside the police but actually belonged to the force himself.
I vomited until only bile came out. With my legs trembling I straightened up and leaned on the washbasin. My eyes were bloodshot when I looked at my reflection in the mirror.
My brain was working at top speed. Could Belle be hidden away with Stiller’s Swedish parents-in-law? Or had she been smuggled out of the country? I didn’t think so. Belle was still in Sweden, I was convinced of that.
So why hadn’t I got her back? Why hadn’t anyone been in touch?
Then, as if in answer to my musings and prayers, my mobile phone rang. A voice I knew I’d never heard before said: ‘I’ve got something that belongs to you.’
49
My first impulse was to roar down the phone. Which is what I did.
‘You fucking bastard, where is she?’
There are limits to the polished manners of a lawyer.
‘Bastard? Listen, if I can be civilised then so can you.’
He was speaking English with a heavy Southern States dialect. But he wasn’t Sheriff Stiller. I knew that much.
The man went on, ‘It’s a damn shame it’s ended up this way, but I believe we have a solution that we could both live with.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
I waited, unable to breathe.
‘You see,’ the voice said, ‘things have got a little complicated. What with you managing to become a suspect in two murders and all.’
‘Yes, thanks very much for that,�
� I said. ‘It’s good for a lawyer to see what life is like as the accused.’
A dramatic pause followed. The line hissed and it struck me that I had no idea where the man was calling from. I yanked open the toilet door and peered out into the café. No one was behaving suspiciously.
‘Oh,’ the man said. ‘You think I’m the one trying to frame you for two homicides as well?’
‘Er, yes?’
The man clicked his tongue.
‘Then I can understand that you’re confused. Sadly I cannot claim the honour for that.’
‘Yeah, right.’
I walked out of the toilet and over to my table. I stuffed my paperwork into the bag and left the café.
The man sounded noticeably irritated when he replied.
‘It’s a shame to hear you use such a sarcastic tone of voice,’ he said. ‘Now listen to me, because, strange though it may sound, you have more problems than the ones I have caused for you.’
I stopped on the pavement a metre or so from the café. The street was dark and it was pouring with rain. The feeling of being utterly exposed was so strong that I almost turned and went back inside again. The cool summer’s night gave me goose-bumps.
‘There’s only one problem I care about,’ I said. ‘Belle. Where is she?’
‘She’s two hundred metres from the Grand Hôtel,’ the voice said calmly.
The bag slid from my grasp and landed on the ground with a thud. I crouched down to pick it up, then found that I didn’t have the energy to get back up again.
‘Sorry?’ I said.
‘You heard what I said. And best of all is that she can be at your room within ten minutes. So she could be there waiting for you when you get back. How does that sound?’
Buried Lies Page 33