The Lies We Tell

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘I know where he is.’

  Oh yes, I knew, alright. But the person I was talking about didn’t have a damn thing to do with Mio.

  Or did he?

  2

  The living and the dead. The boundary between the two is brutally sharp. So painful and frightening. By the time the nightmares got the better of me I was already in a terrible state. You tend to be after you’ve been accused of two murders, been on a crazy roadtrip through Texas and then lost and regained your daughter. I had no real appreciation of how urgent my mission to find Mio was. To be honest, I didn’t really care either. Not at first. According to the Bible, the earth was created in six days. And on the seventh day God rested. We turned that upside down. Lucy and I rested for six days. Then we got to work. On a Sunday.

  ‘What are you going to do first?’ Lucy said.

  Not such a stupid question.

  ‘Try to put a face to him. And pay a visit to the place where he disappeared, the preschool.’

  I had no idea what Mio had looked like. Had he been short or tall for his age? Fat or thin? With long or short hair? It bothered me that so much time had passed without me reacting to the absence of pictures. I hadn’t stumbled across a single photograph of the kid, in any context. Not in the records from the police’s preliminary investigation, and not in the media either. I used to be on good terms with the police; I could simply have asked where all the pictures of Mio had gone (assuming there had ever been any). But I no longer had any contacts of that sort. And I didn’t want to arouse the police’s curiosity about why I might want a picture of Mio.

  So who, if not the police, might potentially have a photograph of Mio? There was a maternal grandmother. And an aunt. Jeanette and Marion. I decided to contact both of them. Neither of them called me back. Hours passed. Never mind, I had plenty more important things to be getting on with. Such as visiting the last place anyone saw Mio.

  The car started with a roar. My fucking gorgeous Porsche 911. It smelled of leather, as if it were new. But apart from that it didn’t feel particularly new. Nice cars and young children aren’t a good combination. Belle did her best, but there were still traces of her everywhere. But Belle was hardly the biggest problem. After everything that had happened, it just didn’t feel anywhere near as much fun to drive. I had asked Boris – the old mafia boss – to get his guys to check the car after I got home from Texas, and they had removed a bug, a tracking device installed by the police so they could keep an eye on me. To make life harder for my adversaries, Boris’s men had attached the bug to a delivery van instead. My new pattern of movement would probably cause a fair amount of confusion among the police.

  It was already afternoon when I picked Belle up then drove south. She had spent the day with her grandmother, my mum, Marianne. Belle looked happy when she realised we weren’t going straight home. Her eyes shone with enthusiasm. The shortness of her memory almost frightened the life out of me. How could she look so happy? It was only just over a week since her father’s parents had died in a fire and she herself had been kidnapped. Shouldn’t she be beside herself with – I don’t know – grief, fear, anxiety? Perhaps it was odd, but I wasn’t actually too concerned about the kidnapping. She had been gone less than forty-eight hours, and had probably spent most of that time asleep, stuffed full of tranquillisers. For perfectly understandable reasons she remembered nothing of all that. But she remembered her grandparents, and sometimes asked about them. So she ought to be grieving for them. Missing them. Or so I thought, as an adult.

  Belle had a different perspective. I had explained that Grandma and Granddad were gone, and would never be coming back. But Belle’s only four years old. She doesn’t understand a word like never. She doesn’t understand that some things, some states are infinite.

  ‘They died,’ I said. ‘Just like your mum and dad did.’

  And Belle nodded so wisely, without any sentimentality. She knows her parents died in a plane crash when she was a baby. She knows I’m not her real dad, but her uncle, her mother’s brother. But that doesn’t mean she understands the significance of what I tell her. She doesn’t understand that she could have had a completely different life if my sister and brother-in-law hadn’t died. A life with two engaged and devoted parents who loved barbecues and renting summer cottages on Öland, going skiing in the winter and watching movies at weekends. Normal people with normal lives and worries, who would have other families round for meals and who would doubtless have seen to it that she had other siblings.

  I parked the car a couple of blocks from our destination.

  ‘We’re getting out here,’ I said, helping Belle out of the car.

  I squeezed her hand as we walked along the pavement. She was a lot like her mother. I hadn’t really given it much thought before, but she was. And still is. In terms of appearance, Belle is very much her mother’s daughter.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she said.

  ‘We’re going to walk past a preschool,’ I said.

  Mio’s preschool. The Enchanted Garden. But I didn’t say that.

  I could actually have gone past the preschool before I picked Belle up rather than after. But I wanted to have her with me. It looked better. A lot of people mistrust men they see creeping around a preschool late in the afternoon. Particularly if they look like me. Tall and black. Skin colour trumps everything else in Sweden. The fact that I’m wearing a ludicrously expensive shirt and hand-stitched shoes from Milan doesn’t make any difference. The first thing that strikes other Swedes when they see me isn’t uncomplicated success.

  There were a few children playing outside the preschool. Maybe there weren’t any other playgrounds nearby, so the preschool’s would have to do, even though it was Sunday. The sun was still relatively high in the sky. There was still a chance to make the most of the summer. For anyone who had the time. I didn’t.

  Belle looked at the children with interest.

  ‘Are we going to play with them?’ she asked, taking a step in their direction.

  My grip on her hand tightened automatically.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re just going to walk past.’

  If Belle was incapable of understanding the significance of her parents’ death, she certainly couldn’t comprehend the value of walking past an interesting-looking playground without going near it. Without joining in.

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  I heard the change in her voice. From happy to sullen and disappointed. Like an abrupt shift from sun to snow in April.

  ‘Because we don’t know the children in this playground.’

  I was happy with my answer. Perhaps Belle was too, because she fell silent.

  When we reached the gate to the playground I slowed my pace slightly. Not to the point where we were standing still, but enough to heighten my powers of observation. Taking photographs was out of the question. If I wanted pictures, I’d have to come back later.

  This was where he disappeared, I thought.

  But how the hell did it happen?

  Children don’t just disappear. They get mislaid by adults who neglect their duty of care. I had read the file relating to the investigation the police had carried out into Mio’s disappearance. The preschool teachers had said it was a perfectly ordinary day. Mio had been dropped off by his foster parents that morning. He had been tired, and had a bit of a cold, but perked up after lunch. At two o’clock the staff put the children’s coats on and took them outside. An hour later they served the afternoon snack outside, even though it was autumn and already cold. But it was sunny and dry, and the children were having such a nice time. It was, as one of the teachers said, all very peaceful.

  Perhaps that was the problem. That it had been so peaceful. Perhaps that made the staff drop their guard. So much so that they didn’t notice when one of the children suddenly wasn’t there. Not until his foster mother showed up to collect him. By then the sun had gone and no one knew what had happened.

  I let my eyes sweep across the playgro
und. It was surrounded by a metal fence that had to be seventy centimetres high. There were bushes growing in a bed on the inside, but they didn’t cover the whole boundary. A grown-up who felt like swinging a leg over the fence could easily do so without getting caught up in the vegetation. But a four-year-old child? Hardly.

  I looked for weaknesses. A hole in the fence, perhaps, or a point where there was no fence at all. There was nothing like that. Mio must have walked out through the gate the last time he left his preschool. Or been lifted over the fence by an adult.

  Belle was dragging her feet. Her sandals scraped the tarmac as she failed to pick her feet up properly. In a matter of minutes she would lose it completely. That was something she definitely hadn’t got from her mother. My sister was hopeless at raising objections, at making her presence felt. I used to hate seeing her back down in the face of the people around her. Her boss, her husband, her colleagues. Me.

  ‘I want to go home,’ Belle said.

  ‘Soon,’ I said.

  One of the children in the playground caught sight of me. He frowned as he looked at me and Belle warily.

  I didn’t like the feeling of being watched – not even by a small child – so I squeezed Belle’s hand and said, ‘Let’s go home and make spaghetti bolognese.’

  We turned and walked back to the car. I helped Belle with her seatbelt and got in behind the wheel. I did a U-turn and drove past the preschool one last time. Belle looked at the children playing on the swings but said nothing. She doesn’t make a lot of fuss, Belle. She knows it isn’t worth it, that that isn’t the way to get what she wants.

  The Enchanted Garden was out in Flemingsberg. I pulled out onto Huddingevägen and drove north towards the city centre.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Belle said as we headed into the Söderleden tunnel.

  I glanced at the time. No, she wasn’t. She was bored.

  ‘We’ll soon be home,’ I said.

  It was summer, a Sunday. Barely any traffic at all. The pulse of the nation’s capital had slowed dramatically.

  But the fun and games weren’t over yet. It happened at the pedestrian crossing outside the Gallerian shopping mall on Hamngatan. A truck was coming in the opposite direction. An old lady was waiting at the crossing. I put my foot on the brake-pedal.

  Nothing happened.

  I put my foot down again, more out of surprise than panic. The brake-pedal wasn’t responding at all. The woman was stepping out onto the road.

  ‘Fucking bloody hell.’

  I blew my horn repeatedly. Pressed the bastard brake-pedal. And thought: is she going to be the second person I’ve killed?

  3

  It didn’t happen. Terrified, the old lady threw herself backwards and watched me fly past. And the unbelievably unsettling thought that my desperate brain had just formulated vanished. As if it had worked out for itself exactly how unwelcome it was.

  Instinctively I stamped as hard as I could on the brake-pedal. So hard that I practically stood up from the seat. Then it was as if something beneath the pedal burst, and the car stopped so abruptly that the airbags went off.

  Belle started screaming. Behind me I heard other cars’ tyres shriek on the tarmac. I held my breath (you tend to do that when you’re being crushed by an airbag) and waited for someone to smash into us. Nobody did.

  Utterly confused, I threw the door open and managed to get out. I ran round the car and pulled Belle out as well.

  ‘There, there,’ I said, brushing the hair from her cheeks. ‘It turned out . . . okay.’

  Plenty of people had stopped to stare at all the cars that were standing motionless. The old woman was sitting on the pavement, shocked but unharmed.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, taking Belle by the hand.

  I went back round to the driver’s seat of the Porsche. I crouched down and peered at the floor of the car. What the hell was that smell? I leaned closer. At first I didn’t understand a thing. But that smell – I recognised it. Belle clung to me as I stuck my head inside the car. And realised what was wrong.

  An orange. An orange that Belle had been planning to take to her grandmother’s but had dropped in the car. The fact that it could have rolled in under the brake-pedal was beyond her imagination, and mine too. But it was nothing malicious. Not this time.

  Lucy laughed so hard she was actually crying (it was wonderful to see that beautiful smile again) when we got home and I told her what had happened. As for me, I didn’t have any difficulty keeping a straight face.

  ‘I think I’m going to hate that Porsche by the time this is over,’ I said.

  ‘The Porsche?’

  ‘I was so damn sure someone had messed with the brakes, Lucy. So fucking sure.’

  Lucy stroked my cheek.

  ‘I’ve already started to get dinner,’ she said.

  ‘Smells good,’ I said.

  And thought to myself: what the hell are we doing? We’re not playing happy families, are we?

  Lucy had spent every night with me since I got Belle back. I hadn’t had any reason to question it. Belle and I needed her, there was no more to it than that. But now quite a few days had passed. Enough for me to start feeling panicky. Belle is the only person I’ve ever lived with as an adult. I think that’s been good for me. I’m not really made to have other people too close to me. Lucy and I never lived together, even when we were a proper couple. That was mostly my fault, or thanks to me, anyway. I’m scared of everyday life, the same way other people are scared of war and environmental disasters. I have to be able to withdraw, recharge my batteries. Alone, or in the company of another woman. Whatever it takes to keep everyday life at bay.

  Most people I knew said I was stupid when I refused to move in with Lucy. I was told plenty of times that I was immature. No passion lasted forever. All infatuation eventually turns into love. Everyday routine couldn’t be avoided forever. It was just something you had to get used to. And start loving.

  I stirred Lucy’s bolognese sauce listlessly. I was, and am, made differently. I do not love the everyday.

  ‘How did you get on?’ Lucy said. ‘Did you see anything?’

  Memories peppered me like bullets from an automatic rifle. Children. Tarmac. Buildings. A playground. A boy who couldn’t take his eyes off me.

  I described everything.

  ‘The children were outside when Mio disappeared,’ I said. ‘Which makes me wonder how on earth it could have happened at all. A child of Mio’s age couldn’t have climbed over a fence like that. And he couldn’t have opened the gate on his own.’

  ‘We’d already worked that out, though, hadn’t we?’ Lucy said. ‘That he didn’t go off on his own, I mean. We just don’t know who took him.’

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘We’re talking about a big open area here. The playground’s not some leafy space with plenty of corners to hide in. Whoever took Mio must have done it right in front of the teachers’ eyes. Or on the other side of the building. But then someone ought to have reacted when Mio started heading in that direction. There’s nowhere to play round there.’

  I walked away from the stove and started to lay the table. Lucy tipped fresh pasta into boiling water. I wasn’t only playing happy families. I’d also become a private detective. The sort who sneaked round empty preschools measuring the length of the fence surrounding them.

  ‘It was dark when Mio went missing,’ I said. ‘It was November, almost four o’clock in the afternoon.’

  ‘The playground must have been lit up, then,’ Lucy said. ‘And the streetlamps must have been on at that time.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t mean there are no shadows or dark corners.’

  Lucy drizzled some oil over the pasta.

  ‘None of the teachers remembers seeing him go,’ I said. ‘Or being picked up by either of his foster parents. You don’t just walk in and take a child. You say hello to the staff and ask how the day has been.’

  I could hardly believe those words were coming out of my mo
uth. I was never going to have children. Now I was standing in my own kitchen telling Lucy what it’s like, picking up a child from preschool. As if she didn’t know that just as well as I did.

  Lucy called out that dinner was ready. Belle came trotting in with a doll under each arm.

  ‘No more than one doll at the table,’ I said.

  Instantly she dropped the short-haired one on the floor. She sat the other in the high-chair next to her own place at the table.

  ‘What about the car?’ Lucy said.

  I pulled a face and looked at the time.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to take it round to the garage when we’ve finished eating,’ I said. ‘Oranges smell like shit when they dry out.’

  So that was the last thing I did on my first day back at work. I took my Porsche to a garage that was open on Sundays and left it there. I drove home in a hire-car. Completely unaware of what a brilliant move that was.

  4

  MONDAY

  The phone rang just after midnight. The first thing I thought when I opened my eyes was that I hadn’t had time to start dreaming yet. Lucy woke up a moment after me. Because I was still in purely formal terms suspected of a double murder, we assumed that my mobile was being bugged. So I had several different ones. The one that was ringing now was the oldest of them. The only one I possessed when this whole bizarre sequence of events began. The one I thought the police were monitoring.

  ‘Answer it, then,’ Lucy said.

  She’d become so impatient. But so had I.

  I pressed the wrong button several times before I finally managed to shut the phone up.

  ‘Martin.’

  My voice sounded rough and sleepy.

  ‘I know what you’re looking for.’

  I fell silent. It was a woman’s voice. I didn’t recognise it, didn’t know who she was.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I . . . I have to see you. There’s something I want to tell you. About Mio.’

  My pulse quickened, abruptly, rapidly.