‘Who are you?’ I said.
I wanted to make the conversation as short as possible. The police had to be kept out of this. At all costs. I’d promised that to Lucifer.
‘I can’t tell you. Can we meet?’
‘What, now?’
‘Would that work?’
At least a dozen alarm bells went off inside my tired head. How did she know who I was? There hadn’t been anything about me – so far – in the papers. Now that I came to think about it, there’d been surprisingly little about any of it in the papers. I’d seen a few small articles about two hit-and-run incidents in the centre of Stockholm, but no one seemed to be linking them. And I hadn’t seen anything about a suspect being questioned by the police. Why not? Since when had the police stopped leaking like a sieve? How the hell could two murders with a connection to the heavily reported case of Sara Texas not get greater coverage in the press?
The voice on my mobile spoke again.
‘So can we meet up now?’ she said.
I got annoyed.
‘Not unless you tell me who you are and why you think I’d want to meet you in the middle of the night,’ I said.
Lucy looked at me, wide-eyed. I ran my finger over her bare shoulder. It would take a fairly compelling argument to get me out of bed.
Then the woman said: ‘Bobby told me about you.’
I froze.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said.
‘Before he died. I met him. He said you’d come and see me and the others at preschool. To find out what happened to Mio. He gave me your number.’
My mouth felt bone-dry. It didn’t matter if the police heard this.
‘So you work at Mio’s preschool, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have to give me something more,’ I said. ‘Tell me why it’s so important that we meet.’
‘Because I know things,’ the woman said. ‘Things I don’t want to say over the phone. But I’m prepared to say that I saw something that afternoon. When Mio disappeared.’
She whispered the last sentence.
‘You saw something?’ I repeated slowly.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Are you going to come?’
Every sensible part of my brain protested. No, I wasn’t going to head out into the night alone. No, I wasn’t going to trust an anonymous woman who called me out of the blue. But curiosity got the better of me. In that respect I hadn’t changed. Once a thrill-seeker, always a thrill-seeker.
‘You have to tell me your name,’ I said.
She hesitated.
‘Susanne,’ she eventually said. ‘My name’s Susanne. Are you coming?’
I swallowed and avoided looking at Lucy.
‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘Now I want your phone number so I can call you from a different mobile.’
Perhaps Susanne had her own reasons to be scared of the police, because she refused to give me her number. In the end I gave her another number for her to call me on. One that I had thought was secure up to that moment, but which would be useless within a day or so if the police really were listening in and had found out about it. When the police decide to listen to someone’s telephone conversations, the surveillance is always limited to specific numbers. If it later turns out that the person they’re bugging is using other phones and numbers, the police have to go back to the prosecutor and request permission to monitor those as well. And that process can take a number of hours, days even.
It would be dishonest to suggest that Lucy gave me her blessing when I told her what I was about to do.
‘You’re mad,’ she said loudly as I got dressed.
‘Shhh, you’ll wake Belle,’ I said.
‘You can’t be serious,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to have someone with you. Surely you understand that?’
Oh yes, I understood. But the only person I could think of whose hand it might have been worth holding was Boris the mafia boss. And I didn’t want to bother him for no reason. Not after everything that had happened when he was watching over Belle. The less contact we had, the less likelihood there was of the police realising that he and I knew each other.
Which in itself was also pretty laughable – my anxiety about the police: I’d never been scared of them before, but now regarded them as irrational adversaries with the potential to wreck my whole life.
‘I’ll be at this address,’ I said, giving Lucy a note on which I’d scrawled all the details. ‘If you don’t hear from me within an hour, call the police. We’ll just have to hope they do something sensible if it comes to that.’
Lucy shook her head. She was sitting in bed with her knees pulled up under her chin. Her red hair was dancing over her shoulders. She was wearing nothing but pants and a thin vest. The more erotically inclined part of my brain – previously the larger part, to be honest – came to life. What wouldn’t I give just to be able to stay at home and have sex with Lucy instead?
‘Back soon,’ I said, and left the bedroom.
I put the car-keys in my pocket. I was going to meet the woman who’d said her name was Susanne outside the Blå Soldat bar at Gullmarsplan: an obscure place with peculiar opening hours. The car awoke with a rumble as I turned the key in the ignition. That was when the adrenalin really started to pump. Bobby had been thorough, I had to give him that. He had tugged at far more threads than I had realised. It bothered me that he wasn’t alive to enjoy the fruits of his hard work. Instead I was now working for a different client, and was busy trying to make Bobby’s sister’s absolute worst nightmare come true. I was trying to reunite Mio with his biological father. But it was also possible to see things in a different light. I was trying to save my daughter’s life. And my own. That had to act as some sort of justification. Even for Bobby.
The car rolled through a Stockholm that was full of life. I like cities that never sleep. Stockholm’s a little bit like that. There are always people on the move. As least as long as you’re in the city centre. As soon as you get beyond the old toll-gates the excitement stops. The streets become darker, the people sparse.
But nowhere I passed on the way was as deserted as the place where I was to meet the secretive Susanne. The Blå Soldat was closed and shuttered up. A large note on the door informed me that the bar had gone bust two weeks earlier. There were no plans for it to re-open.
I stood on the pavement for a while, waiting. Apart from the distant sound of cars on the motorway, there was no noise at all. A short way to the south the Globe arena rose up, huge and white. I looked at the time. I’d give Susanne another five minutes, then head back home again.
The second-hand moved like a projectile over the clock-face. Ten minutes later I was still standing there, now full of an anxiety I hadn’t felt earlier. I was missing something. Something very important. I shivered and set off reluctantly back towards the car.
Get out of here, for fuck’s sake, a ghostly voice whispered in my head.
Then a different voice said: It’s already too late.
I began to move faster. Almost as if I’d just found out that the Blå Soldat was going to explode within three seconds. I revved the engine and drove away. Holding the wheel with one hand, I fumbled with the seatbelt with the other. Then I called Lucy.
‘Everything okay?’ I said.
‘Fine. How about you?’
Her voice sounded worried.
‘I’m on my way home,’ I said, and ended the call.
Because Susanne had withheld her number I had no way of contacting her. But she could have called me if she was running late and couldn’t get to our meeting in time. But she hadn’t. That could only mean one of two things.
She’d been prevented from coming by something that also meant she was unable to let me know.
Or she had never intended to show up.
It didn’t really matter which it was, because either way, the feeling that I had walked into a new trap was just as strong.
5
After the incident with the orange I had h
oped that the nature of my nightmares might change, but sadly that wasn’t the case. Once again I was buried alive, standing in a deep pit. Once again I woke up drenched in sweat and tangled in the bedclothes. If only the bastard sun would rise so a new day could start.
‘You’re not getting any sleep,’ Lucy said anxiously.
‘Oh, it’s fine,’ I said.
But my brain was starting to get sluggish and my eyes itched. Those nightmares were an omen, nothing else. I knew exactly where they came from; I knew exactly why they had started to torment me after I’d been to Texas. But despite that, I couldn’t break free of them. All I really wanted to do was curl up in a foetal position and beg to be left alone. But that sort of thing only works if there’s someone you can direct your pleas at, rather than the sins in your past.
Lack of sleep does something very destructive to people. It tends to affect me by making me far too sensitive and slow-witted. And that’s a terrible combination for someone living under the threat of death. My nocturnal excursion was still troubling me as well. My firm conviction that I’d walked into a trap and landed myself in even more trouble was seriously stressing me out.
‘It doesn’t necessarily mean someone was fucking you about,’ Lucy said as we were preparing breakfast.
Porridge for Belle, yoghurt with fresh berries for Lucy, and coffee and a sandwich for me. To hell with diets, I say. Moderation is rarely best, but when it comes to food it undoubtedly is. Don’t eat too many sweets, don’t drink too many fizzy drinks, don’t eat too little fibre and protein. And don’t worry so much. Life’s fragile enough as it is. Who knows, maybe next time you’ll be the one the mafia are after.
‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘It’s just a coincidence that someone called me in the middle of the night and said she had something to tell me about Mio’s disappearance. Just a harmless prank call.’
Lucy raised her eyebrows.
‘That’s not what I meant. I was thinking that there could be a perfectly logical reason why she didn’t show up.’
‘And didn’t call?’
Lucy shrugged her shoulders.
‘Give her a bit of time. She’ll probably get in touch again.’
Belle came into the kitchen in her pyjamas. The doll was propped up in the high-chair and then we were ready to start a new day. Lucy and I had stuck to a clear strategy since this whole inferno began: we would do our best to carry on with ordinary life. For Belle’s sake, but also so it wouldn’t be so obvious to anyone looking on from the outside that our life was collapsing. I was a murder-suspect, after all. The police needed some sort of proof that I wasn’t just waiting to be locked up. I was an innocent man, and I had to behave like one. Go to work, do the preschool run, do my two hundred spins on the hamster-wheel of everyday life.
‘What are you going to do today?’ Lucy said.
‘I’ve got the names of the people who were working in Mio’s preschool when he went missing,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d check them out.’
Lucy didn’t seem convinced.
‘It’s not as if no one’s done that before,’ she said. ‘The police talked to every member of staff, and . . .’
‘Thank you, I’ve read the file containing the interviews. When I said I was going to check them out, I didn’t mean I was going to talk to them.’
Lucy frowned.
‘No?’
‘No. I’m going to see what they’re doing now. See if they’re still working at the same preschool. If they’re even still alive. If any of them is called Susanne.’
Belle was slapping her porridge with her spoon. Milk and jam splashed out onto the table. She hadn’t done that since she was two.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said sharply.
She stopped, but didn’t eat anything. This was something she’d started with since the fire and kidnapping. She wasn’t eating well at all. That was why I was so quick to get cross. Because I was worried she’d starve to death and leave me alone that way instead.
Lucy stroked my arm.
‘Belle, can’t you try eating some?’ she said.
Her voice was much gentler than mine.
Belle shook her head.
‘It’s not nice,’ she said.
I looked down into her bowl.
‘Is it the wrong jam?’ I said.
She didn’t answer.
‘How about if you sit with me?’ Lucy said. ‘If you come and sit on my lap and we help each other out? Would that feel better?’
Belle slid off her chair and slipped round the table. She climbed up into Lucy’s arms and buried her face against her chest. Anxiety was pricking at my soul like needles. I really had no idea what she’d been through during the hours she was at the mercy of the kidnappers. At the hospital they hadn’t been able to detect any signs of abuse or other maltreatment. But they did find traces of sleep-inducing drugs in her blood. She didn’t seem to have a single memory of when she was snatched from her grandparents’ cottage out in the archipelago.
The police and doctors all guessed that she’d been sedated in her sleep and carried out of the house before it was set alight. When I asked Belle what she could remember, she said she’d fallen asleep while her grandmother was reading her a story, then woke up when I lay down beside her. But by then she was no longer in her grandparents’ summerhouse, but in my room at the Grand Hôtel. None of us knew how she’d got there.
‘No preschool today,’ Belle said.
Baby talk, with no subject or verb. When had we last heard that? My instinct had been to get her back into her usual routine as quickly as possible, and spending her days at preschool was an important part of that. But perhaps not, if she was so tired and wasn’t eating anything either.
‘I’ll call Signe,’ I said.
Signe, the au pair, was one of the rapidly shrinking group of people I still trusted. Largely because I was so dependent on her.
‘And I’ll call the preschool,’ Lucy said.
She went on feeding Belle like she was a baby while she made the call. One spoon, two spoons, three spoons. Then Belle twisted her head away. Lucy tempted her with some orange juice instead. And then another spoonful of porridge.
One spoon for Mummy, and one for Daddy, a voice chanted inside my head.
Signe arrived half an hour later. Lucy and I went off to work shortly after that: Lucy to get on with work, me to search for someone else’s child. It was half past eight when we got in the car. Twenty minutes later we were at our office on Kungsholmen. Lucy shut herself away in her room. I sat down at my desk and took out the police investigation file into Mio’s disappearance. I had been confused and tired when I received the phone call during the night. She had said her name was Susanne. But had there been anyone of that name working at the Enchanted Garden at the time?
I had my answer after a brief read-through. No. There was no Susanne at the Enchanted Garden. Naturally. She had lied about her name. I tried to tell myself it was perfectly understandable. But I still wanted to find her. Because the woman who called had claimed to work there. And said she’d been given my phone number by Bobby before he died.
Why trick me into leaving the flat in the middle of the night?
I hated having so many questions and so few answers. Over and over again I kept reliving the feeling of not being able to stop the Porsche at the pedestrian crossing. It could have been for real. I could have killed another human being.
Again.
I rubbed my forehead with clenched fists. Hard, hard. Inside my skull a single thought was throbbing: I’m not a killer. I’m not a killer.
Lucy knocked and walked in.
‘I’m going out to a meeting. Lunch later?’
Lucy and me. Me and Lucy. It was starting to feel claustrophobic. I used to have a large social network that I was careful to maintain. There was no way that could just have withered away. Unless this was just what happened in the summer? People escaped from the city and those who were left were the loneliest of the lonely.
She nodded and turned to go. It struck me that she must be feeling just as isolated as me.
‘By the way,’ I said.
‘Yes?’
I gulped. There ought to be limits to what I felt I could ask of Lucy. Even so, the words came out of their own accord.
‘If the police want to know where I was last night, for whatever reason . . .’ I began.
‘I’ll say you didn’t leave the flat,’ Lucy said. ‘Anything else?’
I shook my head. A false alibi, just like that. As if it was the easiest thing in the world for a lawyer.
Lucy left the office. I sat there wondering what had become of us. And decided it was time to deal with something else altogether.
6
There are always witnesses. Always. Even if someone is murdered, mugged or raped in complete seclusion, then at least the perpetrator (and the victim, if they survive) is a witness. Those are the sort of people you need to get hold of if you want to know what happened. People who saw something, heard something.
I was looking for two witnesses. Firstly, one who saw Mio being taken from the Enchanted Garden. The police claimed there was no one who’d noticed anything suspicious. The boy was there, and then he wasn’t. How this actually happened, no one seemed to have the slightest idea. I don’t believe in stories like that. Mio disappeared from a playground full of children. Belle can see whatever I’m doing or not doing from what feels like a distance of a thousand metres. And she comments on everything: if I cough, sneeze, or – on very rare occasions – happen to break wind in her vicinity. In other words, there was no chance whatsoever that Mio could have disappeared from an admittedly fairly dark but still well-populated playground without one of his friends seeing something. Or one of the teachers.
But I was also looking for another witness. A witness who could solve a mystery. The mystery of who was trying to frame me for murders I hadn’t committed. Finding Mio wouldn’t make any difference if I was still facing a life sentence. Someone had said they’d seen a Porsche that looked like mine run down and kill a young woman a few weeks earlier. Jenny had died just a few blocks from her hotel. Bobby had been run down and killed shortly after that. There were no witnesses that time. According to the police this wasn’t a problem. Because the police were quickly able to link Bobby to me, and that was the end of it: it was my Porsche that had killed two people the same night. And I was the person who had been sitting behind the wheel.
The Lies We Tell Page 3