The Lies We Tell

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘There’s going to be a storm,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Rain,’ Belle said.

  ‘And probably some thunder and lightning,’ I said.

  Belle turned pale so quickly that I didn’t register it at first.

  ‘No lightning,’ she whispered. ‘No lightning.’

  Tears as big as blueberries were rolling down her cheeks. She’s terrified of storms. I tell myself that it must be something to do with the plane crash that snuffed out her parents’ lives. There was a ferocious storm that night. But Belle could hardly know that. And she wasn’t on that plane.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘No lightning.’

  As if I had the slightest control over the weather.

  Gently I lifted Belle up in my arms. Once again she wrapped her arms round my neck, holding so tight that I almost couldn’t breathe.

  ‘There was loads of lightning,’ she said. ‘Loads.’

  I stroked her back.

  ‘When, sweetheart?’

  She was breathing very close to my ear.

  ‘When I was sleeping at Grandma and Granddad’s. They said it was nothing to worry about. But I was ever so scared.’

  I froze mid-movement. Up until that moment Belle hadn’t said a word about what had happened before or during her kidnapping. We had assumed she couldn’t remember anything because she was sedated. Now, out of the blue, she was talking about thunder and lightning. What else could she remember?

  From the corner of my eye I could see Lucy staring at us. I prayed silently that Belle wouldn’t notice how agitated we were that she was talking. If she did, there was a risk that she would simply clam up again.

  ‘Do you remember talking to anyone else apart from Grandma and Granddad?’ I said.

  Belle didn’t answer. We sat down to eat, but it was impossible to get anything into her. Her eyes kept roaming over the large windows facing the terrace and the dark, stormy sky beyond. When thunder rumbled in the distance and the first raindrops started to hit the glass, I got up quickly from my chair.

  ‘Come on, Belle,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and read a story.’

  We went and sat on her bed. I closed the window and pulled the blind down. The room became dark and I took out a torch. Belle was delighted, and held it perfectly still while I read. Two books later she was fast asleep, safe from the storm, resting limply against my chest.

  I stroked her hair and tried to make some sort of sense of what she had said. There had been thunder. Grandma and Granddad had said it was nothing to worry about. There was no more to it than that. No matter how much I wished there was.

  ‘A flat for guests?’

  Lucy looked as confused as I had been when I told her what I’d found out on my visit to my former shag’s flat.

  I nodded solemnly. After mulling things over for a few hours I was now sure: there was something funny about Veronica.

  We were sitting under the roof out on the terrace, watching the flashes of lightning chase each other across the sky.

  ‘Why . . . I mean, how did you find that out? Why did you go round to see her?’

  I have certain rules that govern my life. One is that I never lie when asked a direct question. Especially not when it’s Lucy asking it, and all the more so if what she wants to know about is my sex-life. But this time I wasn’t sure if I should stick to the truth. I didn’t think I should. It was better to lie.

  ‘I can’t explain,’ I said. ‘It was a . . . an impulse. I wanted to check out everyone I’ve met over the past few weeks.’

  ‘Everyone?’

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean.’

  Lucy looked away.

  ‘Can’t it just have been a coincidence?’ she said after a while. ‘Maybe she allowed herself to be picked up for the simple reason that she thought you were hot. Maybe she was in the city for a course, or was visiting a friend and had just borrowed the flat. Who knows, maybe she lives in a completely different part of Sweden.’

  ‘That thought occurred to me too,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t explain why her mobile number no longer works.’

  ‘Did she say what her surname was?’

  ‘Don’t remember. I might not have been told.’

  ‘Martin, for God’s sake.’

  ‘What? Do you know the surnames of all your fucks?’

  Lucy became serious.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yes. And to be perfectly honest, I think that would apply to most normal people. You know who you sleep with. Or else you don’t sleep with them.’

  I didn’t know what to say, so I kept quiet. I didn’t agree with her in principle, but that discussion could wait.

  ‘Did she say what she did for a living?’ Lucy said.

  Another question I couldn’t answer with any confidence.

  ‘She said she was an accountant.’

  ‘How dull.’

  I laughed, loud and unforced.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s what I thought.’

  Lucy sighed.

  ‘So what’s to say she was lying, really? Maybe she is an accountant. Maybe she did borrow the flat from a friend who lives in the building. There are hundreds of reasons why someone might need temporary accommodation. Getting a new bathroom put in, something like that.’

  ‘How do you explain the phone number, then?’

  Lucy said nothing.

  The wind turned and the rain started to push us back towards the wall, almost scornfully. In the end we were pressed up against the window.

  ‘By the way, how did you get on investigating the staff at the preschool? Did you get hold of any passport photos?’

  ‘I’ve got their names and details in my handbag. I’ll be getting their passport photographs tomorrow. I’m not sure I’d call it investigating, though. I doubt we’ll be able to do much with what I managed to find out.’

  I didn’t feel up to looking at Lucy’s findings. That would have to wait until the following day, when I could see the passport photos as well. I had other things to think about.

  ‘Her phone number,’ I said. ‘If I can get an explanation of why that’s changed, I’m prepared to buy the rest of it.’

  Lucy pulled her feet up onto her chair.

  ‘Who knew you were going to the Press Club that evening? That was where you met her, wasn’t it?’

  I nodded quickly. She was asking an extremely pertinent question. If I didn’t meet Veronica by chance, she must have known I was going to be there at that time.

  ‘Only you and Didrik,’ I said.

  Lucy said nothing at first.

  ‘Only me and Didrik,’ she repeated after a while.

  A flash of anxiety made my stomach clench. Madeleine’s question from lunchtime echoed in my head.

  Who else has access to your car apart from Lucy?

  I shivered involuntarily. Of course my car wasn’t involved. And of course Lucy wasn’t caught up in everything that had happened.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  New thoughts appeared. They set off quickly towards fresh targets, a long way away from Lucy.

  ‘Didrik,’ I said quietly.

  Lucy started.

  ‘Surely he can’t be involved in whatever it is we think is going on?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I really don’t think so. If that was the case, Didrik and his colleagues would have been keeping an eye on me before Bobby and Jenny died. Anyway, it just doesn’t make any sense. The police simply don’t work that way. Honey-traps only happen in films.’

  ‘Honey-traps?’

  ‘Pretty women enticing men and sleeping with them to get information.’

  Lucy pulled a cardigan over her shoulders.

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  ‘Come on, Lucy. We’ve always . . .’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  Of course she knew. Lucy wasn’t stupid; she knew why I’d tried to contact Veronic
a again. There was a rumble of thunder and flashes of lightning went on striking randomly selected patches of ground.

  ‘He teased me,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Didrik.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When I was flirting with her. Well, maybe not teased. Pulled my leg. He mostly just sounded jealous.’

  Didrik has a lot of talents, but was he a good actor? I wasn’t sure. The idea that he could have set up a honey-trap at the Press Club was laughable. But on the other hand – if that was the case – he was hardly the only person to have surprised me in recent weeks. That is the downside of knowing an awful lot of people very superficially: you can soon end up feeling alone and uncertain.

  ‘What was she like to talk to?’ Lucy said. ‘Did she ask a lot of questions?’

  I shook my head. Lucy would have hit me if she knew the images that popped into my head when I thought of Veronica. Warm bodies, sweat and breasts that were far too large. Hers, not mine.

  ‘Not that I remember.’

  ‘So what would be the point of meeting you?’ Lucy said. ‘What did you have that she wanted, if not information?’

  I closed my eyes. What did I have with me that evening at the Press Club that she might have wanted, and couldn’t get hold of any other way?

  I opened my eyes again.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Not yet. But trust me – it won’t be long before we get to the bottom of this.’

  14

  WEDNESDAY

  I was wrong. It took an inordinate amount of time for me to realise what Veronica wanted from me. And by the time I did so, it was too late.

  But I had no idea about that when I made my way to the office the following morning. Another bad night with too little sleep. Another morning of anxious glances from Lucy and irritating comments about how I looked. Irritating because I had so little to say about why I was sleeping badly. I thought I was comfortable with my lie. I was wrong about that too. Big revelations were on their way, and I didn’t have the faintest clue.

  The weather gods were very good at setting portentous background music to the drama that was unfolding. First, before it all began, we’d had an unusually warm summer. Then Bobby came to my office and the rain started. I’m not saying that there’s a perfect causal connection between these events, but I’m confident that it’s more than mere coincidence. Day after day the bad weather hung on. Until the day when Bobby’s girlfriend Malin came to see me. Then the sun returned.

  She rang the doorbell at ten o’clock. Lucy was in her room having a telephone conference call with a client. I was sitting drinking coffee. It had been a long, sleepless night. Thoughts I wasn’t prepared to share with any living person were going round inside my head. The nightmares that had been tormenting me at night up till then had found fresh impetus and were now tormenting me during the day as well.

  I hated the feeling of being doubly exposed. The problems I had in real time were bad enough – the past had to be held at bay. I no longer believed it was remotely possible that I had met Veronica by chance. Which meant that someone had made sure she was at the Press Club on that particular evening. And the only people who had known I was going to be there were Lucy and Didrik.

  Assuming Didrik hadn’t mentioned to anyone that we were going to meet up. Someone like that Staffan. It bothered me that I kept finding myself in situations where I needed Didrik’s help but couldn’t get it. That was no use to either of us. Particularly not if the mess I found myself in was somehow linked to the police. But how could that be the case? Could there really be people inside the law and order machinery of the state who were mixed up in everything that was afflicting me and my family?

  So, Bobby’s Malin showed up at ten o’clock. She wasn’t at all what I was expecting. Which happens fairly often. I was, and remain, a person with certain prejudices. We all are. That’s how we remember and sort the people we meet in different situations. Prejudices also mirror our expectations. In Malin’s case this was particularly unfortunate. Because my expectations were formed on the basis of the encounters I had had with a man calling himself Bobby, but whose real name was Elias. I’d never met Bobby, so I couldn’t possibly know what he had been like, or what sort of person his girlfriend might be.

  Malin was very straightforward. I respected her automatically, almost like the way I did when I first met my friend Madeleine Rossander. Certain people simply demand that of you. If you don’t comply, you don’t get anywhere near them.

  ‘I’m pleased you got in touch,’ Malin said once we’d introduced ourselves.

  She spoke with a Norrland accent, making her voice sound calm and measured.

  ‘And I’m very pleased you’ve come to see me,’ I said.

  I had to stop myself. There was so much I wanted to say, so much I wanted to ask. At the same time I was weighed down by a guilty conscience. But that was irrational. It was Bobby who had sought me out. It was he who had turned my life upside down, not the other way round. Even so, I had the perturbed sense that I had caused him great harm.

  I let my confused reasoning boil down to: ‘I’m so sorry that Bobby died. If there’s anything I can do, let me know.’

  Malin tilted her head to one side. Her eyes were too bright; it was obvious she’d done a lot of crying recently. I felt unexpectedly envious. There were so many times in my life when I should have cried but didn’t.

  ‘Bobby had such high hopes of you,’ she said.

  She couldn’t have inserted the knife with greater precision. I didn’t know how to respond.

  ‘He talked about you long before he came to see you.’

  I had to interject: ‘He never came to see me, Malin. He sent Elias.’

  ‘Bobby was so used to not being taken seriously. That’s why it happened that way.’

  ‘I know that. But why Elias? He’s hardly the sort of person who wins other people’s confidence.’

  ‘He probably was in Bobby’s world. Besides, Elias was very sympathetic towards Sara, whatever one might think. And Ed, who was the obvious choice, didn’t want to do it.’

  I nodded dumbly. Ed, Sara’s unpleasant ex-boyfriend, hadn’t been prepared to help Bobby contact me. But he had passed the task on to Elias. Very noble.

  ‘I understand that Bobby made a number of inquiries of his own into what happened to Sara and her son,’ I said. ‘Far more than Elias told me about.’

  Malin blinked several times.

  ‘When Sara came home from the USA, pregnant, she was a complete wreck. We thought things would get better once the child was born, but she just got more and more paranoid. It was painful to witness.’

  ‘So you and Bobby were already together then?’ I said, unable to conceal the surprise in my voice.

  Another prejudice – that Bobby wouldn’t have been capable of maintaining a long-term relationship.

  ‘We got together when we were seventeen,’ Malin said. ‘It was him and me against the world. He didn’t have anyone but me, and I didn’t have anyone but him. Sounds pathetic, doesn’t it?’

  Her question took me by surprise.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Not at all? How many other teenagers only have each other?’

  I didn’t know. I just knew that I had been one of the lonely ones. That my dad was absent and my mum an addict, and therefore incapable of looking after me and my sister properly.

  ‘Did Sara ever tell you and Bobby what she had been through in the USA?’ I said.

  Malin looked me straight in the eye.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by “what she had been through”, but we understood that she had had serious problems with her boyfriend there. The man who was the father of her child.’

  I nodded stiffly.

  ‘She had a tattoo at the back of her neck,’ I said. ‘The word Lotus. Did she tell you how she got that?’

  Malin shrugged.

  ‘She said it was a drunken prank, and that she regre
tted it.’

  A drunken prank. That was one way of describing the tramp-stamp that was meant to tell a certain sort of person who you belonged to. Lotus was the nickname Sara had been given by Lucifer. It had been branded into the back of her neck as a permanent reminder that she would never be free.

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘You mean she was lying? That the tattoo actually meant something more?’

  I held my hands out, not altogether unlike really bad doctors when they want to suggest that their patient might be right after all.

  ‘No, not at all,’ I said.

  Malin fiddled with the strap of her wristwatch. I noticed that the hands were standing still and showing the wrong time.

  ‘I know that Bobby, via Elias, asked you to get justice for Sara,’ she said. ‘How far did you get?’

  All the way. I got all the way to the miserable, shitty truth that Sara wasn’t a serial killer, just an exploited prostitute.

  ‘Not as far as I would have liked.’

  ‘But you stopped working on the case when Bobby died?’

  I folded my hands on my desk and leaned forward.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did.’

  ‘They’re saying Bobby was murdered. You must have been scared.’

  ‘Very scared.’

  ‘So was Bobby. That’s why he didn’t tell anyone he’d come back to Stockholm.’

  There it was again. The alarm bell telling me that I was missing something vital.

  ‘Someone must have known,’ I said. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t have died.’

  ‘He told Elias, obviously. But not his mother. Nor any of his other friends.’

  ‘Apart from Ed?’

  ‘No, not even him. Ed put Bobby in touch with Elias. But he had no part in what happened after that. He keeps to himself, always has so many things going on.’

  Once again I saw Elias before me. Trembling and shaking with nerves. The memory conjured up such angst that it created a sinkhole beneath me. I almost had to cling onto the desk to stop myself tumbling into it.

  ‘Is Elias the sort of man who can keep quiet?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, absolutely. He comes across as a bit rough but Bobby and I trusted him.’

  Even though he’d been in prison, I felt like adding. Even though in his youth – which wasn’t actually all that long ago – his hobby had been beating people up on the street, which got him a conviction for assault. Calling him a bit rough was an understatement.