The Lies We Tell

by Kristina Ohlsson

  Didrik’s eyes were dark as he looked at me.

  ‘Those days without Rebecca and Sebbe were the longest in my life. When Lucifer called to ask what I wanted to do, I would have given him anything. I shouted down the phone that I’d do everything he wanted if I could just have Rebecca and Sebbe back. They were dumped at a rest area on the motorway just north of Stockholm. Rebecca couldn’t walk. She’d been beaten black and blue. I took her to A&E and said she’d been attacked in the city. But of course the doctors could see that some of the injuries were several days old. So they reported me for abuse. There was an investigation, but it was dropped. Rebecca said she’d fallen down the stairs. Caught her hand in the car door. Got attacked in the street. By then we’d already started planning our move to Denmark. It was only a matter of weeks before we were off; having cash from the sale of the house worked miracles. In Sweden, Sara’s case rumbled on. Under any other circumstances I’d have abandoned work and taken some time off to be with my family. But after Lucifer’s visit I didn’t dare to; I needed to keep an eye on how Sara’s case developed. I didn’t know she was planning to run. She called me from a phone that came up as unidentified: it later turned out to be a pay-as-you-go mobile. “Can you take Mio?” she sobbed. “You have to take him! To stop his father finding him.” ’

  The memories seemed to overwhelm Didrik, and he started to cry. I hadn’t had any idea that he had also been accused of wife-beating.

  ‘She didn’t know Lucifer had contacted you?’ I said, astonished at what I was hearing.

  ‘No, and I spared her from that. I said she had to hand herself in to the police, but obviously she wasn’t interested in doing that. Her life was over, finished. The only thing she wanted, all she needed to know, was that Mio would be safe. So I gave her my word. I promised to do my best.’

  ‘I heard that Sara’s friend Jenny had travelled to Sweden to look after Mio,’ I said.

  ‘That may be so, but if she did it was without Sara’s knowledge.’

  ‘As I understand it, it was a plan they’d come up with together.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can believe that.’

  So Lucifer’s envoy had filled my head with shit when he called to give me the task of finding Mio. Not that there was anything odd about that, seeing as he’d lied about everything else.

  ‘Okay, so you promised to do your best. Together with Rakel?’

  He looked surprised when I mentioned Rakel’s name.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She was a friend of Sara’s, and it was Sara’s idea that she should help. After she abducted Mio she looked after him for a few days. I think she wanted him for herself. But that was never an option. She wouldn’t have been able to protect him.’

  I remembered my own encounters with Rakel. Remembered the sex.

  ‘She was a very loyal friend to Sara, that Rakel,’ I said.

  ‘You have your weaknesses,’ Didrik said.

  ‘Were you worried the stuff about the Porsche wouldn’t be enough? Was that why you needed my DNA?’

  I refused to say the word sperm. Refused.

  ‘The first time it was just about finding out how much you knew,’ Didrik said. ‘Rakel was already up to her eyes in shit – it didn’t take much to persuade her to do what she had to do. But things had changed before the second time you met a few days later. Basically, it was absolutely vital that you got caught. So getting hold of some of your DNA was a good idea.’

  Madness, I thought. As well as repugnant.

  ‘And you had to drag Herman into this mess as well?’

  ‘Herman is a man with very few friends. Rakel needed somewhere else to stay, and his little summer cottage was ideal. At first we thought we’d be able to hide Mio there when the time came, but that plan soon fell apart. Herman wanted the house back so he could sell it.’

  ‘So Rakel got the terraced house in Solna instead?’

  ‘I don’t know about “got”. She was already looking for a place when she was staying out in Årsta havsbad. A summer cottage with so-called “summer water” and a chemical toilet is hardly a permanent solution, after all.’

  I changed tack.

  ‘You snatched Mio the same day Sara disappeared,’ I said.

  Didrik nodded.

  ‘That wasn’t the plan, originally, but all the commotion meant that it was a good opportunity. That was a terrible, terrible day.’

  Didrik rubbed his chin with his hand. It started to rain and we stood up. We were walking into the wind as we headed back towards Didrik’s house.

  ‘And then Sebbe died,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Mio became Sebbe? Because no one would notice if you replaced one black kid with another?’

  Didrik snorted.

  ‘Of course they would. That was why we had to stay here, where no one knows us. Mio needed a new identity, so he assumed Sebbe’s. That was the simplest solution.’

  I didn’t buy that. There was something Didrik wasn’t telling me.

  ‘But didn’t Sebbe have grandparents who’d want to see their grandson regularly?’ I said. ‘Or other relatives?’

  ‘I haven’t actually had any contact with my parents since I inherited my grandmother’s amazing house,’ Didrik said. ‘Rebecca’s father is dead, and her mum had a stroke just over a year ago. She hasn’t been right since then. We’ve both got brothers and sisters, but we fell out with them, partly on purpose, when we moved to Denmark. They seriously thought we should give up the dream of saving Sebbe. Because of course the doctors were all saying it was hopeless, so we were only prolonging his suffering by trying to find new solutions abroad.’

  ‘Siblings can be bastards,’ I said helpfully, even though I had never thought of my sister in those terms. Her husband was a different story, though.

  ‘True,’ Didrik said.

  But I still didn’t understand.

  ‘Why turn Mio into Sebbe? I mean, you knew – still know – that Lucifer will demand to have him back. Is he going to – and I’m sorry for the choice of words – die again? Really? Wouldn’t it have been easier to give him a different name? Besides, here in Denmark Sebbe is officially dead.’

  ‘You’ve got a lot of questions,’ Didrik said. ‘Rebecca and Sebbe are registered at an address in Malmö, mostly to keep the Danish authorities and Stockholm Council off our backs. You see, Sebbe isn’t officially dead in either Denmark or Sweden. He died at home, here in Ebeltoft, and we never registered his death. We told the hospital in Copenhagen that we’d taken him home to Sweden once it was clear that their treatment wasn’t helping him. And we told the hospital in Stockholm that Sebbe was still being treated in Denmark. But we stayed here and let him die in his new home. That was the only way for Mio to assume his identity. By keeping Sebbe’s death a secret.’

  As a plan it was so full of holes that it could have capsized at any moment. All the same, it evidently hadn’t done so. Didrik carried on with life in Stockholm while Rebecca lived in Denmark as a full-time mum, initially to a dying child, then to a child who had made a miraculous recovery.

  ‘Doesn’t Mio suffer from epilepsy?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. We’ve found a doctor here who prescribes his medication. It’s pretty straightforward.’

  I stopped. The rain stung my face. I needed to gather my thoughts. Didrik’s torrent of words and information contained something that had passed me by completely.

  Something crucial.

  Didrik had taken Mio because Lucifer forced him to.

  So why the hell had I been told to find the missing child?

  ‘Lucifer,’ I said hoarsely. ‘It sounds like you’ve had plenty of contact with him.’

  ‘More than I’d like.’

  ‘So he knows where you live? He knows where Mio is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I shook my head. This was a whole new level of madness. It didn’t make sense. It mustn’t make sense.

  ‘You’re going to have to hand him back,’ I said.

 
; ‘No, Martin, we’re not going to do that. We’ve bought our freedom.’

  ‘How the fuck have you done that, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  Didrik looked out over the sea. His face was pale and taut.

  ‘I picked up Mio in Stockholm one week before Sebbe died,’ he said. ‘Seven days from hell. By then we’d left Copenhagen and moved into this house. We hid Mio and Sebbe from the outside world. I can’t even begin to describe how lonely Mio must have felt then. Because of course Rebecca and I were fully occupied with Sebbe. It was terrible. Terrible! We sat up all night after Sebbe died, talking about what to do. You have no idea . . . you can’t even begin to imagine . . . the extent of the self-loathing . . . and the grief . . . nothing but absolute blackness. And, in the midst of all that: Mio. It . . . it was Lucifer who forced us to give him Sebbe’s identity. To make it easier to move him, so to speak. In spite of all the new problems that caused. We relented, after a lot of anguish. Today I’m quite pleased it turned out that way. It was an opportunity that was never going to come again, if I can put it like that.’

  So Lucifer was the brains behind the idea of turning Mio into Sebbe. I should have realised.

  Over the previous few weeks I had told anyone who was prepared to listen that I didn’t know Didrik very well. I barely knew his son’s name, I’d never been to his home. But the word ‘know’ has many meanings. I thought I knew Didrik in the sense that he was predictable. Now I knew that wasn’t the case. There were so many aspects of his story that I wanted to talk about that I hardly knew where to start.

  ‘Where did you bury him?’

  Didrik shivered when he replied.

  ‘In the garden. Under the apple tree,’ he said.

  His voice was only a whisper away from cracking.

  I didn’t want to hear any more. It was the notion of it being ‘an opportunity’ that was the problem. I had missed something in Didrik’s story. Something he had already said. ‘We’re not going to hand him back.’

  ‘Lucifer was in no rush to have Mio,’ Didrik said. ‘Not at first. Several months passed, and spring came. Then he began to get impatient, and wanted his son. I kept coming up with objections, said I couldn’t travel to the USA just then. And then, thanks to you, we got an opportunity to keep Mio.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I agreed to give Lucifer something he wanted more than his son.’

  ‘And what the fuck might that be?’

  Didrik turned his head and looked at me.

  ‘You, Martin. He wants you.’

  38

  It was hard to get Didrik to say what ‘he wants you’ meant in definite terms. But I did at least realise that from the moment I first showed up on their radar, Didrik’s task had been to put a stop to me, and try to tie me to the crimes that Sara had been accused of committing. As he himself put it: ‘It wouldn’t have been difficult to persuade a prosecutor that Sara hadn’t committed those crimes on her own.’

  I assumed it would have happened the same way Sara had been framed before me, with fake evidence and forced confessions. But then, almost immediately, completely new crimes popped up that I could be framed for. Bobby and Jenny’s murders changed everything. But that was a conclusion I drew for myself. Didrik talked less about what he had actually done, and rather more about what he thought Lucifer and I had done.

  Neither Lucifer nor his representative had called me so much as one single time since I started to look for Mio. And I had no way of contacting them. But Didrik did. When we got back to the house I wasn’t keen to go inside.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Didrik said. ‘Killing you isn’t part of our task.’

  ‘No? You’ve already killed plenty of other people,’ I said.

  Didrik looked away and stepped aside as if to let me go past, into the house. But I stayed where I was.

  ‘Okay, in that case I’ll make the call,’ he said.

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘Lucifer. I’m supposed to call him if and when you showed up.’

  But he didn’t make the call. Instead he said: ‘You do realise why you were instructed to look for Mio, don’t you? You needed to be kept active; the police’s preliminary investigation needed new fuel. So that I had something to pin you down for.’

  I stood there paralysed. If I could only realise how Lucifer and I knew each other. Pastor Parson’s burial flashed past. I was convinced that played an important role. But in what way?

  ‘Are you going to stand out there in the rain, or are you coming in?’

  Reluctantly I went inside with him.

  ‘What happens now?’ I said.

  ‘I have to call him,’ Didrik said. ‘I have to.’

  He took out a mobile phone and started fiddling with it.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry, but . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ I said. ‘Fucking sorry, even. But you’re not calling Lucifer to tell him I’m here. That I’ve found Mio. Don’t you understand that it’s over for all of us if you do?’

  I was clutching for the feeblest of straws now, but what choice did I have?

  ‘If you make that call, I’m finished,’ I said. ‘And so are you. The plan is either that we both end up in prison, or else you’re signing our death warrants by telling him I’ve succeeded in what I was forced to do – finding Mio, and whoever was trying to frame me for murder. This is a game. Don’t you realise that? He’s got us both.’

  ‘My deal with Lucifer is done,’ Didrik said. ‘I’ve got nothing to worry about.’

  But that didn’t seem to be entirely true, because he was still hesitating.

  ‘Go on, then, call!’ a voice said behind him.

  Rebecca stepped out from the shadows.

  ‘Make the call,’ she said. ‘Now!’

  ‘Keen to put an end to this, Rebecca?’ I said.

  ‘More than anything.’

  ‘There is no end!’ I shouted as loudly as my lungs would let me. ‘Don’t either of you get it? How can you live a normal life after all that’s happened? How can you live with everything Didrik’s done? Sorry, Rebecca, but if you haven’t worked it out, your husband’s the one who carried out all the murders he’s trying to pin on me.’

  Rebecca pulled her kaftan tight around her.

  ‘No, he isn’t,’ she said.

  ‘How interesting,’ I said. ‘So who killed them, then? Lucifer?’

  The silence that arose was more fragile that antique porcelain. I had no response to the answer I got.

  ‘I did,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘You?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I was the one who started it all. So it’s my fault that Didrik had to carry on.’

  Her face was paler and more haggard than any I had ever seen. The same could almost be said about Didrik’s. The things our lies do to us. I thought I knew a fair bit about that, but Rebecca and Didrik knew infinitely more. Everything had slipped from their grasp. The life they had known was gone, in the past. Things would never be the same again.

  ‘It was an accident,’ Didrik said.

  Rebecca nodded frenetically.

  ‘It was,’ she said. ‘It was.’

  I almost burst out laughing.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, you can’t call murdering four people “an accident”? They didn’t even die at the same bloody time!’

  Rebecca clapped her hands over her face and turned away.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t handle this right now,’ she said.

  She ran upstairs and disappeared into one of the rooms. A door slammed shut.

  ‘Perhaps you can manage a bit better?’ I said to Didrik. ‘Let’s talk about something easy. Exactly when were you told by Lucifer to stop me poking about for the truth about Sara Texas?’

  ‘I can probably manage, but I’m not sure I really want to. The same day you called me and wanted to meet up to talk about Sara. That was pretty much the last conversation on the planet I wanted to have with anyone. And that you of all
people should have started thinking about Sara’s fate . . . Lucifer had given me a number to call in emergencies, if there was ever a problem concerning him or Mio. I called it as soon as I’d spoken to you. It would have been disastrous if he’d found out afterwards and it looked like I’d gone behind his back.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Good that you know where your loyalties lie.’

  Didrik went on: ‘You’re clever, Martin. Smart. So I started to keep an eye on what you were up to. You and everyone else I was worried about. When Jenny showed up it was pretty much time to act. I kept Rebecca informed of what was going on. Big fucking mistake. I hadn’t really understood how damaged she was. Or how scared. I had enough on my hands dealing with my own grief, my own terror. Those were things I . . . we couldn’t share. I contacted Bobby and Jenny later that evening and arranged to meet them a few hours later, in the middle of the night. I didn’t have any trouble persuading them; we’d been in touch before when I was in charge of the Sara Texas case and I let them think something had happened that radically altered the police’s view of what had taken place. The fact that I refused to answer any questions over the phone and implied that we had to meet at night only made them even more eager. My plan was to lay more or less all my cards on the table when we actually met. Tell them Mio was okay, that I knew Sara had been innocent, but that there was nothing I could have done about that. That it would be best for Mio if they left him alone. I was extremely unsure of how far my plan would get me, but it was worth a try.’

  ‘But Rebecca didn’t agree with it?’ I said.

  ‘Not at all,’ Didrik said. ‘She was in Stockholm at the time. She decided to intercept Jenny first, then Bobby, on the way to our meeting. She was planning to give them a fright. A serious one. Make out she was part of the conspiracy against Sara, and that Bobby and Jenny would come to a sticky end if they didn’t keep out of the way. She hadn’t thought it through very well. Or at all, really. She’s never been much good at driving, either. The idea was presumably to swerve before she hit them, but she misjudged Jenny’s movements and ended up running her down instead. She didn’t know she’d killed her until she got out of the car. Jenny didn’t die from the actual impact. She died because she fell and broke her neck when she hit the edge of the pavement. No defence for what Rebecca did, obviously, but that was what happened.’