The Lies We Tell

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘Are you stupid?’ I said. ‘You’re going to shoot me here? Unarmed? Sober and in daylight, in the middle of a residential area?’

  I shook my head and before she had time to think about what I was doing, I sat down on one of the chairs at the table. It had a high back that reached all the way to the hair on the back of my head. I leaned back comfortably.

  ‘Go on, then,’ I said. ‘Shoot me as I sit here. But you’ll have to explain it to the police afterwards. Why you shot me while I was sitting at your breakfast table.’

  ‘They won’t find you.’

  She came closer. Didrik watched what was going on without intervening. But I could see that he was far from sure if he liked the turn things had taken.

  I thought about everyone else who had died. Sooner or later they had turned up, and so would I. Rebecca took a few more steps towards me. There was no sign of the boy. I sat calmly where I was.

  ‘It’s probably best if you stop now,’ I said. ‘You’ll never be able to explain to the police why you shot me with a rifle from a distance of less than a metre.’

  Then Didrik walked over to Rebecca. Gently he put one hand on her shoulder.

  ‘That’s enough. I’ll take care of this.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Her words provoked Didrik. Quickly and roughly, he tried to grab the rifle. She refused to let go, and went with him. Her scream echoed across the neighbourhood.

  ‘Let go of me! Damn it, let go of me!’

  Then the boy appeared again. He was standing in the doorway with tears running down his cheeks. I felt a pang in my chest. It was Mio, alright. There was no doubt about it.

  Rebecca caught sight of him too.

  ‘Hello, sweetie, I thought I told you to wait indoors.’

  At last she let go of the weapon. Didrik tried to hide it behind his back. Completely idiotic. You can’t fool children with silly tricks like that. They see what there is to see, then demand an explanation.

  Rebecca’s eyes were full of tears as she walked back into the house. She picked the boy up in her arms and he sobbed silently against her shoulder.

  Didrik and I were left alone again. With the minor difference that he was now armed. I’m happy to admit that it bothered me.

  ‘Aren’t you going to sit down?’ I said.

  ‘Rebecca was right. You need to leave now. And I need to call the police.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  I said it more quietly than I had imagined. Did he really think they could get away with this?

  ‘No one’s going to believe you,’ Didrik said, as if he could read my mind. ‘No one.’

  I couldn’t understand his reasoning, because I had proof. There were pictures of Mio. And there were DNA tests. There’d be no problem proving that Mio was Sara Texas’s son. I said as much to Didrik.

  ‘And there’s also his father,’ I concluded.

  Those words made Didrik start.

  ‘He doesn’t want him.’

  ‘Yes – he does. That’s why I’m here.’

  Didrik laughed.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Martin.’

  He sat down with the rifle across his lap.

  He rubbed his face with his hands. People have done that for aeons. Tried to massage tiredness away by rubbing their face. It doesn’t work.

  It was a bewildering scene to take in. We were sitting in a delightful garden with the sea in the background. It could have been idyllic. But it was actually hell.

  ‘Did you kill your own son, Didrik?’ I said.

  He jerked as if I’d punched him in the face.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  I held my arms out. I wasn’t sure of anything. Maybe Didrik did hit children.

  ‘I know everything,’ I said. ‘I know you moved because you’d been reported to Social Services. I know about the terrible bruises. And how happy you were when you changed preschools. And then you moved here.’

  Didrik’s jaw dropped. He opened and closed his mouth several times before he managed to say anything sensible.

  ‘Is that what people are saying?’ he said. ‘Is that what you’ve heard?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And that’s not all I’ve heard. Someone told me Sebbe was ill. Seriously ill.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘I’ve talked to a number of different people. Discreetly, to stop anyone else having to die. I talked to Sebbe’s own godfather, for instance. Your best friend.’

  It was a ridiculous gambit. Herman hadn’t said a word about Didrik’s alleged abuse of Sebastian.

  ‘He’s not my best friend. But his wife used to be Rebecca’s. Until she fell for the same crazy stories as you. Of course she changed her mind when she found out how ill Sebbe was, but by then we’d already cut off all contact. Herman probably never really understood that, sadly. I’m sure he still thinks of me as a good friend. He and his wife live what one might call separate lives.’

  I leaned forward and rested my elbows on the cool tabletop.

  ‘So tell me, then,’ I said. ‘Where’s Sebbe?’

  Didrik could no longer look me in the eye. He looked at the trees, the grass, the sky, but not at me.

  ‘He died.’

  ‘You killed him?’

  ‘Are you really that stupid?’

  Didrik got to his feet with a roar. The rifle fell to the ground. I forced myself not to move. So it was true, what Madeleine had said: Sebbe had been ill, not abused.

  ‘I didn’t kill my own son,’ Didrik whispered.

  He was panting as if he’d run a marathon in stifling heat.

  ‘And I didn’t kill Jenny, Bobby, Fredrik or Elias,’ I said. ‘Or anyone else.’

  I tried to hold my voice steady.

  Didrik shook his head.

  ‘Sebbe was suffering from an extremely aggressive form of cancer, which was diagnosed far, far too late. In Sweden they didn’t even want to try to treat him with anything other than palliative care.’

  I don’t know what I’d expected to hear, but this wasn’t it. Astonished, I listened to a story I had little reason to doubt.

  ‘They take a different view here in Denmark,’ Didrik said. ‘They had some new medication that was still at the trial stage, and they were willing to test it on him.’

  ‘So you sold your house to fund the treatment?’

  ‘The Swedish authorities weren’t prepared to pay for it. We didn’t have time to persuade them to change their minds. And of course we knew we could actually get hold of the money.’

  ‘Couldn’t you just mortgage the house?’

  Didrik looked away.

  ‘No. We knew we’d be staying in Denmark . . . for a while. To start with we lived in Copenhagen, where Sebbe received his treatment. Then we moved here. Rebecca lived in Aarhus for several years at the start of her career. That’s why the Danish authorities accepted her as a property-owner.’

  ‘Where did he die?’

  ‘Here in Ebeltoft.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In November. Only a few months after we found out he was sick. By then he’d already been unwell for a while, but everything was delayed by the bizarre distraction of those claims that his problems weren’t the result of illness but because his parents were monsters.’

  I didn’t know where to start. This was too big, too implausible. Implausible was the word that stayed with me. Sebbe had died in November. The same month Sara Texas took her own life and her son disappeared.

  ‘You replaced one child with another. Do you have any idea how sick that is?’

  Didrik slumped in his chair.

  ‘You really don’t have a very high opinion of me, do you?’ he said.

  I swallowed hard.

  ‘You’ve kidnapped a child. Murdered at least four people. How high should my opinion of you be?’

  Didrik took his time before he replied. Perhaps he didn’t have a very high opinion of himself any more. A sleepy wasp mount
ed an attack on us. I knocked it aside with my hand and saw it fall to the ground. Tired fighters fall fast, I concluded.

  ‘I didn’t kidnap him.’

  The words were so light, weighed absolutely nothing individually. But together they were dynamite.

  ‘Sorry?’

  He looked me right in the eye.

  ‘I made a promise to save him. A promise that was actually forced upon me, but that no longer matters. Never in my worst nightmares could I have imagined that everything would turn out like this.’

  My mouth felt dry as dust.

  ‘Who was it, Didrik? Who the hell made you promise to save Mio?’

  His voice was barely audible when he replied.

  ‘Sara. I promised his mother, Sara.’

  37

  It’s often said that grown men like to do things together. That we find loneliness harder than women. Didrik and I left his wonderful garden and walked down to the shore. And there we took a walk. Like two people who didn’t want to be alone.

  ‘Sara came round to our house,’ Didrik said. ‘Back when everything was just starting, after my colleagues and I had been contacted by the Americans and we’d held our first interview with her. It was evening, and it was raining. She banged so hard on the door that I thought she was going to break it in. When I opened it she was standing there on the step with the boy’s hand in hers. “I’m going to end up in prison,” she said. “And someone has to look after my son.” ’

  ‘Pretty epic,’ I said.

  Didrik went on: ‘That sort of move isn’t exactly common. There was also one rather sensitive detail that I had thus far managed to keep hidden from my esteemed colleagues.’

  ‘That Sebbe and Mio went to the same preschool.’

  ‘Exactly. Rebecca did most of the dropping off and picking up in Flemingsberg, but I went a few times. We’d bumped into Sara, even though our children weren’t in the same class. It’s a ruddy big preschool, loads of kids. Mio and Sebbe were the same age, but in different groups. We thought that was a shame, because Sebbe used to talk about Mio at home. They used to play together when all the children were outside. We tried to invite Sara and Mio round to ours several times, but it was always so hard to pin her down. There was work and studying and laundry and God knows what else.’

  ‘Her life was chaotic?’

  ‘No, more just unfocused. We understood that something wasn’t right, but to be honest our guesses came nowhere close to the truth, I can tell you.’

  My feet sank into the sand. It was getting harder and harder to walk.

  ‘The truth, you say,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Do you think you know anything about that?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure I do, so I’d have to say yes.’

  Didrik brushed his rather too long fringe from his eyes. That’s one downside of having a fancy haircut based on the idea of it always being exactly the right length. It loses its elegance after just a week or so.

  ‘So, tell me,’ Didrik said. ‘Tell me how far you’ve got.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t. I had to swear not to reveal anything to the police. I don’t think the person who extracted that promise would care to differentiate between talking to the police and what I’m doing now.’

  ‘Interesting. Who did you make such a stupid promise to?’

  His voice was calmer now, his earlier agitation had almost literally blown away.

  ‘It’s rather in the nature of the beast that I can’t reveal that either.’

  Didrik sighed.

  ‘Let me guess. Lucifer?’

  I stopped. Didrik nodded and carried on walking. I hurried after him.

  ‘If you know who Lucifer is, then you also know that Sara didn’t commit those murders.’

  ‘Of course,’ Didrik said.

  ‘So why not reveal what he’s been doing? Is it because of Mio? If only you’d left me alone and hadn’t tried to frame me for those murders. Then you’d have had the case solved. You’d . . .’

  ‘Yeah, why not keep telling me what else I could have done? You fucking idiot. What makes you think that you and I are in fundamentally different positions, and that I don’t know what you know?’

  I couldn’t walk another metre. Like a child, I sat down on my backside in the sand.

  Didrik followed my example, but far more smoothly than I had just done. That was always one of the differences between us. He wasn’t just elegant on the surface like I was. Didrik was the real deal. Stylish, down to his very marrow.

  ‘Let’s take it from the start,’ I said. ‘Sara came to see you after that first interview. She knew she was going to be found guilty of murder and she wanted to find a solution for Mio. Is that how I should understand what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes. I assumed she came to see me because I was in the police, because Rebecca and I had been kind to her, and because I conducted that first interview with her. She realised I was going to be along for the rest of the ride as well. She believed that Rebecca and I would be both willing and in a position to help her son.’

  ‘So you said straight away that you and Rebecca could take him? How noble.’

  ‘It’s difficult to summarise the story so long afterwards. Sara had no idea of the position we were in, that Sebbe wasn’t well and that we were fighting tooth and nail to get him treated. She stayed with us until early the next morning, talking and talking. I told her she was foolish to be so frightened. If she was innocent, she wouldn’t be convicted. The story she told us, dear God, I’d never heard anything like it.’

  ‘But you believed her?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. But I realised that she was very, very upset. I even toyed with the idea that she might be guilty. That that was why she had come to see me, so that afterwards, if the evidence changed, she’d be able to say: “I told you this would happen.” Then everything unfolded horribly quickly. Overnight there was suddenly a mountain of evidence, and at the same time she made her confession. She was charged and remanded in custody, and Mio was placed with foster parents.’

  He fell silent.

  ‘Tell me how you went from thinking Sara was lying to believing her, and then also taking responsibility for her son.’

  Didrik swallowed.

  ‘That . . . that may not have been entirely voluntary,’ he said. ‘Not to start with. Look, Rebecca and I have never been able to have children. We used to dream of having four kids, but we weren’t able to have a single one. It took years to adopt Sebbe. We both turned forty a couple of years ago. If we’d wanted to adopt another child, we were starting to run out of time. Early last year we tried to get going with another adoption application. But then that fucking report of abuse appeared out of nowhere just a month or so later. I feel nothing but contempt towards an awful lot of people involved in that. The preschool staff who wouldn’t listen, the doctors who didn’t take us seriously when we asked for help. Because of course we knew we hadn’t hit Sebbe, that there was something else wrong. He was tired, in pain, and there were those marks on his skin that the preschool staff said were bruises. But the weeks passed and we didn’t get any help. It was a seriously fucking thin silver lining when the doctors here in Denmark told us that there had never been any “in time” for Sebbe. We might have been able to get a few more months with him, but there was never any chance of anything better than that.’

  Didrik stopped to catch his breath, take a pause in the story of how his life fell apart.

  ‘Sara came and asked for help just after we found out that Sebbe was sick. I didn’t believe her. Not until she was remanded in custody, and there was another knock on our door.’

  ‘Jenny or Bobby came to see you,’ I said.

  ‘Wrong. Lucifer.’

  It was like falling through ice and finding yourself in astonishingly cold water.

  ‘Sorry?’ I said. ‘I can’t believe that. Lucifer would never come in person. He’d send an envoy.’

  ‘You’d think so. But not on that occasion. I don’t have much r
eason to think that I misunderstood something as important as that. But I did make the mistake of reacting the same way as you at first. Seeing as he was armed, I had to let him in. He was standing on the front step with a gun in his hand. I was alone in the house. We sat down in the living room. He explained how he wanted everything to play out, and warned me against involving my colleagues in what I had heard and what was coming my way. It was Sara who led him to me. She didn’t realise how closely he was watching her at the time. After that first interview with the police she never took another step without being watched.’

  ‘What exactly did Lucifer want?’

  ‘For me to take care of Mio.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘I refused, said it couldn’t happen the way he wanted. He’d worked out that it would be impossible to take Mio back to the USA, and was therefore asking for my help. First I was to abduct him. Then hide him. And then, once everything had calmed down, fly to the States with him and hand him over to Lucifer.’

  ‘You refused, of course?’

  ‘Obviously. I pointed out that it was impossible to travel anywhere with a child who was the subject of a nationwide search. But as you know by now, not much is voluntary when it comes to Lucifer. He thought Mio could travel on Sebbe’s passport, more or less the way people-traffickers work. You travel using the passport of someone you resemble. When I said I wasn’t going to cooperate with him, he asked me where Rebecca and Sebbe were. I said something vague, like “Out doing something”. In actual fact they were at the doctor’s. Lucifer grinned and said, “Call them”. So I did.’

  Dark clouds were rolling towards us from the sea. There was rain on the way, possibly even a storm. I was freezing, but couldn’t have cared less.

  ‘They didn’t answer,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Oh, but they did. Rebecca was crying like a child and Sebbe was screaming in the background. Lucifer took the phone from me and told me he’d be back in three days. By then I needed to decide what I was going to do, whether I was going to cooperate or not. If not, Rebecca and Sebbe would die. And if I accepted, I would get them back the same day. I was utterly fucking terrified. I demanded their immediate return, said he could have everything he wanted. He refused to negotiate. I would be without my family for three days, no more, no less. It was a complete nightmare. I had the sense that he was absolutely everywhere, that he knew everyone. Obviously I know what you’re supposed to do if you’re blackmailed. Always, always contact the police. But that simply wasn’t possible. Because I knew he wasn’t messing about. If it came to it, he wouldn’t hesitate for a second to murder my wife and child. And he’d get away with it. I realised that from what Sara had told me. Not that I ever shared her story with anyone else.’