The Lies We Tell

by Kristina Ohlsson

  Boris’s source had been very thorough. The document contained all the information I needed to find Rakel. She lived in a small terraced house in Solna. The house was currently empty, I discovered when I arrived. There was no answer when I rang the bell. The terrace was absurdly long. Rakel had been lucky enough to get the house at the end. I walked round to the back. The hedges that separated the little patches of garden were surprisingly tall. It was perfectly still and I couldn’t hear any noises or movement in my vicinity. Like a child, I pressed my face to the glass door that was the only way in from the back. I found myself looking straight into the kitchen. It was empty.

  I went from window to window along the back of the house. Apart from the last one they looked in on the kitchen. The last window belonged to what looked like a guestroom. There was a narrow, neatly made bed and a small desk. Almost like a prison cell. No pictures on the walls, no personal belongings such as clothes or shoes. I frowned and went back to the kitchen windows. That too revealed an extremely impersonal style. I had already checked the property registry. The terraced house was owned by Rakel alone, no one else. Maybe she lived somewhere other than the address where she was registered.

  I liked to think that I was very rational. Goal-orientated and focused. But to be honest I was acting out of blind panic, shaken by what I’d found out during the course of the day. I thought hard. Could the house be alarmed? Or could I break one of the windows without being noticed? The thought sent shivers down my spine. If I went for it and broke into the house, I’d be crossing a boundary that I hadn’t yet overstepped. I’d be breaking the law in a way that I couldn’t talk my way out of afterwards. No one would take into account the pressure I’d been under, there’d be no excuses. If I got caught, I really would be fucked.

  So I hesitated. It was just past lunchtime. The sun was blazing in the sky. It was a ridiculous time to choose to break into a house. That might actually offer me a degree of protection. Breaking in during the day was such an overconfident thing to do that it would seem improbable. Once I’d broken the window, I’d be able to carry on undisturbed. The whole terrace looked deserted. Whether their occupants were at work or on holiday was irrelevant. For the time being I was alone.

  The thought of breaking into a house was so shocking that I felt weak at the knees. I had defended enough thieves not to do any of the things that got you caught. An infestation of unwelcome thoughts scuttled through my head. Given that I had once managed to get away with murdering another man, was I going to end up getting caught for something as simple as house-breaking?

  I went back to the car and drove away. There were people who were experts at breaking into houses. People who never ran the risk of getting caught. The mobile phone felt cool in my hand when I took it out of my trouser pocket. Boris answered on the second ring.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have you left the country yet?’ I said.

  ‘I’m leaving in an hour.’

  ‘Have you got time to do me one last favour?’

  Ordering a break-in was a new experience. A very liberating one, ironically enough. Now I was free to concentrate on other things. Such as trying to sort out my relationship with Lucy.

  But first I needed to get something to eat. I was hungry enough to eat a horse, or maybe a cow, depending on what I got hold of first, so I drove to McDonald’s and ordered a hamburger and a milkshake. I ate in the car.

  I had both the front windows open and the car was parked in the shade. Lucy would have yelled at me if she’d seen me. McDonald’s comes at the very bottom of food options for her. Not for me. That sort of snobbery is so damn unnecessary. Thankfully her objections are limited to the nutritional value of the food rather than ideologically motivated. I’ve never been able to understand all the noisy sods who regard McDonald’s as the ultimate symbol of the damage caused to the planet by capitalism.

  ‘I only travel to places that aren’t so exploited,’ is the sort of thing left-wing types are happy to come out with.

  And by ‘aren’t so exploited’ they mean places where there aren’t any McDonald’s. The fact that this is often a sign of a country in a state of collapse and a population that’s oppressed and impoverished seems to pass these pretentious tourists by.

  I called Lucy. She didn’t answer. I began to feel anxious. What would I do if she’d packed her things and left when I got back to the flat? The hamburger became hard to swallow and I slurped greedily at the milkshake instead. Then I called again. Still no answer.

  Did she owe me anything? It was an uncomfortable question, but it needed asking. And no, I didn’t think Lucy owed me anything at all. It was remarkable that she’d put up with as much as she had. The only reason I had found out that there was something funny about Veronica was that I’d tried to get in touch with her for sex. Lucy knew that was the case, but said nothing. We kept quiet about things that weren’t easy, that had always been the case. And, to be honest, what’s so wrong about that? Dwelling on a relationship that was hard to define was like getting fixated on the negative impact of McDonald’s on the planet. A discussion that will never be particularly worthwhile. So you might as well not bother.

  One of my mobiles rang.

  ‘It’s me,’ a thin voice said when I answered.

  Marianne, my mother.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘How’s Belle?’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  Dressing was dripping from the hamburger. The wrapper wasn’t arranged properly and the sticky sludge was oozing onto my fingers.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said as I fumbled with a napkin in an attempt to stop the sauce reaching the seat.

  ‘How did we end up like this?’ my mother said. ‘With you swearing at me when I call you?’

  I stiffened.

  ‘I was swearing at a hamburger,’ I said. ‘It had very little to do with you.’

  Marianne sighed.

  ‘I’ve always been so pleased that you inherited so few of your father’s bad qualities,’ she said. ‘But I’ve started to notice that you’re as bad a liar as he was.’

  I crumpled the napkin and threw it on the floor.

  ‘Did you want anything in particular?’ I said.

  It was the wrong day to pick a fight with me. I was too tired to argue, too tired to feel guilty.

  ‘I just wanted to know when the funeral is going to be.’

  ‘Funeral?’

  It felt like there were far too many dead people, and too many funerals. Bobby Tell had already been laid to rest. I had no idea when Fredrik Ohlander’s funeral was going to be, and there was no way I could find out. But Marianne didn’t know either Fredrik or Bobby. She must have been thinking of someone else.

  I felt my throat tighten when I realised who she meant.

  ‘Belle’s grandparents,’ I said. ‘They’re not being buried until two weeks from now.’

  ‘As late as that?’

  ‘I think there’s a backlog.’

  I couldn’t remember exactly what Belle’s aunt had told me. There had been a lot of phone calls, short and tear-filled. I regarded them as punishment for my grotesque sin. If it weren’t for me, Belle’s grandparents would still be alive. It was as simple as that.

  ‘Can’t I see Belle again soon?’ Marianne said. ‘I miss her already.’

  I got out of the car and threw the rest of the food in a bin. I had no desire to see Marianne just then.

  ‘Maybe sometime next week,’ I said. ‘Things are really hectic right now.’

  I heard her sniff down the phone.

  ‘We’re going to have to talk everything through one day, Martin,’ she said.

  What for? I felt like asking. You can’t just ‘talk through’ parental failure, or years of betrayal. It is what it is, and that’s just shit.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘Seriously, I . . .’

  I reached my limit.

  ‘Seriously, I haven’t got time for this. Stop blaming me for the problems in your life. Oka
y?’

  Then I ended the call. And made a silent prayer that Belle would never, ever talk to me like that.

  I’d driven less than a kilometre when the phone rang again.

  It was death, who evidently wasn’t done with me yet.

  18

  As a child I used to hide behind the kitchen door and listen to Marianne and her friends as they drank wine and talked rubbish. Usually they talked about their husbands. Marianne was always the loudest, the one who set the tone. She had succeeded in doing something none of the others had managed – she had met a Yank, moved all the bloody way to the USA to give birth to his child, then moved back to Sweden again as a single mother.

  ‘He might as well be dead,’ she used to say. ‘You know, we never hear from him. Never.’

  I didn’t understand what she was saying, for the simple reason that I hadn’t yet made the acquaintance of death. I knew that no one lived forever, but I had no concept of what that actually meant in practice.

  It wasn’t until I started school that the idea of death started to make sense. My friend Oliver drowned just before Christmas. We were at the swimming pool to learn how to swim, and at an unguarded moment Oliver jumped into the deep end. And couldn’t get out again.

  No one noticed until one little girl said: ‘Oliver’s floating.’

  And he really was. Like a cork, his limp body was floating on the surface of the water.

  The swimming teacher threw himself into the pool.

  ‘Be careful!’ my class teacher yelled. ‘Be careful!’

  What she actually meant was that we should move away from the edge of the pool. That was where they laid Oliver once they’d got him out of the water. I’ll never forget how they tried to breathe life back into him. His lips were totally blue, his face white. Both teachers were crying. None of us children said a word. We just stood there staring. Oliver was gone, and he wasn’t coming back. All of a sudden I understood how death worked. It snatched people away from under your nose.

  As an adult I developed a more complex attitude towards death. Especially after I’d killed another person. There and then I learned how definitive death is. How badly the lack of any room for negotiation hurts. It’s not like in films. Death doesn’t want to play chess. Death is like everyone else – just wants to do his job.

  ‘He’s missing,’ the woman on the phone said. ‘Elias is missing. I don’t know where he’s gone.’

  His girlfriend. We’d only met once, but that was evidently enough. She remembered me, and assumed I had some connection with whatever fate her boyfriend had met.

  The moment I saw Elias outside the church I’d realised that he was having problems, something he subsequently confirmed. He was feeling frightened, thought he was being followed. I’d hoped he was just being paranoid, that his fears were unfounded.

  But that wasn’t the case. I’d probably already figured that out at Bobby’s funeral, but had chosen to ignore it. I didn’t have room for anyone else’s anxieties, and besides, there was nothing I could do about them.

  ‘He disappeared yesterday evening,’ his girlfriend said through tears. ‘He set off for work but never arrived. They called to ask where he was. I reported him missing late last night. But I don’t know if they’re trying to find him.’

  I imagined that they probably were. The police were well aware that Elias and I had been in contact with each other. I had personally managed to spoon-feed them that particular morsel of information. I felt a degree of relief that – once again – my Porsche couldn’t have been involved in anything. It was still at the garage. They’d called, asking me to pick it up, but I’d squirmed and said I’d pick it up ‘another day’. I had no intention of collecting it until I knew there was no longer any risk.

  I avoided the word murder as I talked to Elias’s girlfriend. In fact, I avoided any speculation about what might have happened. But I knew. Elias was dead. The only question was where his body would show up.

  ‘The best thing you can do is let the police get on with their work without bothering them,’ I said. ‘Give them all the information they ask for. Think if anything odd has happened in the past few days. Did Elias mention any arguments, anyone he was worried about?’

  ‘The past few days? Are you kidding? He’s been weird for weeks. Hasn’t been sleeping, wouldn’t eat anything. He even stopped drinking beer.’

  It sounded like she found this the oddest thing of all. What she told me merely confirmed my own impression – Elias definitely hadn’t been in a good way.

  ‘He was really careful to keep the door double-locked when he was home. And he closed all the curtains. He told me to make sure I wasn’t being followed whenever I left the house. Really crazy stuff!’

  She sniffed loudly down the line.

  ‘Did he say who he was so scared of?’ I said.

  ‘He didn’t know. That’s what he said, anyway. But he did say it was to do with Sara. Sara Tell.’

  I nodded silently to myself.

  ‘Did you know Sara?’ I said.

  ‘We all did,’ Elias’s girlfriend said. ‘We were in the same gang for years. Until she went off to the States. Then when she came home she had a kid. Most people change after that.’

  A thought popped into my head and I took a gamble.

  ‘Do you know anyone called Rakel Minnhagen?’ I said. ‘Or Svensson?’

  My pulse rose as I said the name.

  ‘Rakel?’ Elias’s girlfriend said. ‘Yes, but a long time ago. She was a bit older than the rest of us.’

  I made an effort not to sound too interested.

  ‘Do you know what happened to her?’ I said. ‘What she’s doing these days?’

  ‘No idea. We lost touch completely when she disappeared.’

  ‘Disappeared?’

  ‘Left. Left the gang, I mean.’

  Left the gang. A gang which had been pretty violent. Several of them ended up in prison, but not Sara. And not Rakel either, apparently.

  ‘Where did she go?’ I said, well aware that my persistence might seem provocative. ‘People don’t usually just vanish.’

  ‘Of course she didn’t,’ Elias’s girlfriend said. ‘It was more like she pulled away. We – some of us got into trouble. With the police. Rakel got out in time. And then she stayed away.’

  ‘Can I be really impertinent and ask if you were one of the ones who got into trouble with the police?’ I said.

  I heard her blow her nose.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to get involved in that sort of thing.’

  ‘Unlike Elias.’

  ‘He sorted himself out. He really did.’

  The whole car reeked of hamburger. A thousand images exploded inside my head. There was a reason why Elias, unlike Bobby, Jenny and everyone else who had died, hadn’t been found yet. If the perpetrator was finding it increasingly difficult to frame me, he was probably more likely to try to cover his tracks.

  Unless Elias had simply had enough and taken off? Maybe the pressure got too much for him? But where would someone like Elias go?

  ‘You don’t have a summerhouse or anything similar?’ I said. ‘You, or your parents?’

  ‘No, no, we’ve never been able to afford anything like that. That must be obvious, even to you.’

  It probably was, but I still had to ask.

  ‘Did Elias have any relatives or friends where he might go into hiding?’ I said. ‘Bearing in mind that he thought he was being followed.’

  ‘No one I can think of.’

  My heart sank. It was naïve to think that Elias had gone into hiding of his own volition. He’d been feeling under scrutiny for weeks; of course he was dead.

  But how could that be?

  I’d been so damn certain I wasn’t being followed that night I went round to Elias’s home to confront him. Who else apart from me could have figured out his role in all this?

  ‘Exactly when did Elias start to say he thought he was being followed?’ I said.

 
‘A few days after he found out that Bobby was dead.’

  ‘How did he find out? That Bobby had died?’

  ‘Bobby didn’t show up at a bar where they’d arranged to meet. Then he stopped answering his mobile. So Elias called Bobby’s mum. She had no idea that her son was even in Stockholm, and had just found out from the police that he’d been killed in a hit-and-run.’

  ‘And Elias concluded that Bobby had been murdered? He didn’t think it could have been an accident?’

  ‘Why would he have done? His mum told him it was murder. Because that’s what the police said. They could tell from his injuries, or something.’

  His injuries. Caused by a car. Which someone had taken from my locked garage the night I spent at the hospital with Belle. The forbidden thoughts returned. If it really was my car, who could drive a car out of a garage without leaving any trace on either the car or the garage?

  Someone with a key.

  Lucy.

  Impossible.

  ‘I need to know what’s happened to him,’ Elias’s girlfriend said, and started crying even harder. ‘How am I going to find him?’

  It was a reasonable wish. But there was no way I could help her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m really sorry, but I don’t know.’

  I didn’t say that I thought Elias was dead. And outside the car the world rushed past as if nothing had happened.

  Then Elias’s girlfriend said something I really wasn’t expecting.

  ‘He called the police.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He called the police to say he thought he was being followed. After Bobby died. But he didn’t want to tell the police why, so I assume they didn’t take him seriously.’

  My shirt felt tight across my chest.

  ‘Are you sure he didn’t tell them everything?’

  ‘Absolutely certain. The police told him to go back to them when he felt ready to tell them the rest of the story. Presumably they thought he was withholding information.’