Buried Lies

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘Boris,’ Lucy said, with unusual sharpness in her voice. ‘We’re not taking advice from him, surely?’

  ‘Then think of something better yourself, then!’ I said. ‘Because time is running out and we aren’t getting anywhere.’

  I hated having nothing to do but wait. For the phone to ring with information about a fresh catastrophe. Telling us to hurry back to Sweden because they wanted to question me again. Waiting for Didrik to realise I’d lied about why I had to come to the States, then telling his American colleagues to be on the alert, or, alternatively, to throw me out of the country. Or – worst of all – that, in spite of all my precautions, something had happened to Belle.

  When I thought about Belle my heart started to race with terror. Anything else could happen, just not that. However this struggle ended, Belle had to make it. And included in that thought was the idea that no one but me would raise her. If Belle ended up with foster parents I didn’t know what I would do.

  I squeezed Lucy’s hand.

  ‘If anything happens to me,’ I said. ‘Would you look after Belle?’

  Lucy raised herself on one elbow.

  ‘Don’t talk like that.’

  ‘Can’t you just answer the question?’

  She ran one finger across my forehead.

  ‘If anything happens to you, Martin Benner, I’ll look after Belle,’ she whispered.

  In the end I got my way. We decided to make an attempt to get Lucifer to come to us instead of vice versa, and then we would leave Houston. I usually like to sleep for a bit after I’ve had sex. This time I got out of bed and prepared for full-scale war. It was hard to know how we were going to attract Lucifer’s attention, but I figured that Boris had given me more ideas to work with than I had at the outset. Seeing as we only had a limited amount of time we were going to have to be creative. And noisy.

  I passed Lucy her laptop.

  ‘Here’s what we do: we dig out all the big articles we can find about the police operation against Lucifer’s network,’ I said. ‘Make a list of police officers quoted in the media. Then we contact them.’

  ‘Seriously? That’s going to be a lot of people. The investigation seems to have been organised on both a local and federal level, in all the major cities in Texas. As things stand, we don’t even know if Lucifer still lives in Houston.’

  ‘We won’t bother with the FBI,’ I said. ‘We’ll just focus on local police officers. The important thing is to get the jungle drums working. If Boris is right, then at least one or two of the people we contact will be working for Lucifer.’

  Lucy looked sceptical, but opened the laptop and began systematically going through the articles the way I had suggested.

  ‘You don’t think Didrik has contacted any of his colleagues here in Houston to warn them about us? What are the odds of him letting a suspect in a double murder run around as he likes in Texas?’

  ‘Pretty big,’ I said honestly, and looked up from the computer on my lap. ‘I mean, think about it. It must be clear to Didrik that even if I lied about the reason for this trip, I haven’t actually fled the country. If that were the case, I’d hardly have come to the USA of all places. If I seriously believe I can get myself off the hook by conducting my own private investigation here in Texas, I don’t think Didrik would have a problem with that. I mean, it would evidently never occur to the Swedish police to try to get to the bottom of this case. They’re probably so confused that they’re just grateful we’re giving them a hand.’

  Lucy grinned.

  ‘Grateful? You’re very funny, you know that?’ she said.

  But I was convinced I was right. Didrik and I had known each other for a long time. Deep down he must realise that I hadn’t driven into Bobby Tell and Jenny Woods. If he did, I was sure he would have remanded me in custody rather than let me go after questioning. But, on the other hand, he didn’t have any other leads to go on. He wasn’t prepared to re-examine the truth of the Sara Tell case, which meant he couldn’t see why anyone would subject me to a conspiracy. So I would have to help him understand what had happened. Especially as I had a nagging feeling that someone else might want to do the same. Possibly the same person who had got Sara Tell to confess to five murders she hadn’t committed. If that was true, then I stood a high chance of drowning in the shit that surrounded me.

  The discussion with Lucy died away. We made a list of local police officers who had taken part in the operation against Lucifer’s network, then started to call round. You could say we phoned like lunatics. Call after call. This probably wasn’t exactly what Boris had in mind, but we didn’t have time to be delicate and cautious. It was all or nothing. Because right then we were both the hunters and the hunted.

  It was late afternoon, and we managed to get hold of a surprising number of them. Together we concocted a story that we stuck to in our phone calls. We said we were lawyers and that we were from Sweden. Curiosity had brought us to Houston. We thought we could see connections between a murder trial in Sweden and a character by the name of Lucifer. Was that by any chance the same Lucifer whom the Texas police had tracked down?

  And had they encountered the name Lotus during the investigation?

  Over and over again we trotted out the same story. None of the calls generated any particularly interesting information. No one we spoke to was willing to concede any link between Lucifer and Stockholm. And no one recognised the name Lotus.

  Fuck.

  My thoughts began to race again. They were like wild horses, impossible to catch. New ideas took shape, each one more time-consuming than the last.

  ‘We ought to go to San Antonio as well,’ I said, quickly and intensely. ‘Try to find the guy Sara was going to see there when everyone seems to think she was in Galveston.’

  Lucy leaned her head against my shoulder. I detected a silent plea in the gesture.

  ‘Martin, you’re probably going to have to accept that she wasn’t in San Antonio that weekend.’

  I closed my eyes and saw Jenny Woods in front of me. I remembered how she had looked when we were sitting opposite each other in Xoko, when she told me about her trip with Sara. She had been able to explain everything, even why she, rather than Sara, had the ticket and diary.

  Lucy rubbed her cheek against my shirt.

  ‘Think about what Larry told us,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t Sara mention the trip to San Antonio as her alibi?’

  I opened my eyes. My body was throbbing with irritation.

  ‘You mean during the first interview, before she made all those confessions? It’s hardly that strange. Five years had passed since the murder in Galveston. Besides, she did remember later – she called Jenny and asked for help proving her alibi.’

  Lucy shook her head tiredly. She stretched and reached for the diary. Her long fingers closed round its covers and opened it.

  ‘It’s not really a literary masterpiece, is it?’ she said. ‘Half-written pages and bits rubbed out. Almost as if its writer had censored her own work.’

  ‘Sara doesn’t seem to have been in a good place,’ I said. ‘I suppose she wrote things she later regretted.’

  Lucy didn’t answer, just gently stroked the rough pages of the diary with her fingers, as if she were playing a silent piano. Then she reached for her handbag and took out a pencil.

  ‘What are you going to do? Finish the masterpiece?’

  Very carefully Lucy began to move the blunt end of the pencil back and forth across the erased sections. The diary’s writer had pressed hard with the pen; the letters were almost imprinted on the paper. When the pencil traced over them they became visible again. White letters stood out against the grey.

  ‘Lucy, you’re a genius.’

  I kissed her on the cheek. God knows, I’m not good at giving praise, but I recognise a brilliant idea when I see it. And I also know that you must never, ever steal them.

  We weren’t lucky enough for Lucy’s trick to work everywhere that any text had been erased, but that didn�
�t seem to matter. The words that did appear were more than enough to show us what a bad misjudgement we had made.

  With our heads close together we started to read.

  I don’t know what I would have done without Sara. She’s my only friend right now.

  ‘Sara?’ Lucy said. ‘Did she used to refer to herself in the third person?’

  I didn’t answer. The more I read, the more obvious our mistake became.

  Sara fucked up badly this weekend. Neither of us can sleep. I think she’ll be going home to Sweden soon.

  ‘Martin, do you understand this?’

  I read the last fragment of text we had found.

  Sara’s trapped. I don’t think Lucifer’s going to let her go. Does he know she’s pregnant?

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I whispered.

  I looked at Lucy and saw that she had drawn the same conclusion as me.

  It wasn’t Sara’s diary that Jenny Woods had sent to Sweden with the train ticket.

  It was her own.

  PART V

  ‘Forgive me’

  TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN BENNER (MB).

  INTERVIEWER: FREDRIK OHLANDER (FO), freelance journalist.

  LOCATION:

  Room 714, Grand Hôtel, Stockholm.

  FO: You started this conversation by saying that this was the most clichéd story I’d ever hear. I’m wondering if you shouldn’t have said it was the most complicated and fascinating.

  MB: Fascinating? Maybe. Misery has always had a peculiar attraction to people who aren’t affected by it.

  FO: I didn’t mean to sound insensitive or patronising.

  MB: Of course not. So far you haven’t said anything to shake my faith in you.

  FO: How much longer did you stay in Houston?

  MB: Not long. Just one more day. Then we got in the car and drove down to Galveston.

  FO: You mentioned wanting to go to San Antonio as well?

  MB: Not after we figured out the diary was Jenny’s. After that there was obviously no point going to San Antonio.

  FO: You were completely sure the diary wasn’t Sara’s?

  MB: That was the only logical interpretation.

  FO: How did that affect your thoughts on the question of Sara’s guilt? Did you think she really had committed the murders she had confessed to?

  MB: We carried on differentiating between the Swedish murders and the two that had been committed in the USA. As far as the Texas murders were concerned, we decided to withhold judgement until we’d been to Galveston.

  FO: You must have reflected over the strange turn the story had taken? Seeing as you said back at the start that you weren’t running a detective agency.

  MB: Of course I thought about that. Day and night. But it never felt like it was a conscious decision on my part. Circumstances were forcing me to act in a particular way. At the start I was driven by nothing but my own curiosity. But towards the end the survival instinct was the only thing motivating me.

  (Silence)

  FO: You keep coming back to the fact that you couldn’t understand why you got mixed up in this story. When did you realise just how bad it was?

  MB: You want the honest answer to that?

  FO: Please.

  MB: I’m afraid I still haven’t realised just how bad it is. I’m not even close to the end of this drama.

  FO: It’s still going on?

  MB: Day after day.

  FO: What’s your biggest regret?

  (Silence)

  MB: Regret implies that you had a choice when you made your decision. And that never applied to me.

  FO: So what happened after you discovered that the diary belonged to Jenny?

  MB: The worst.

  FO: Sorry?

  MB: You asked what happened and I replied the worst. The very, very worst thing of all.

  37

  ‘Where are we going?’ Lucy asked as I turned off the freeway.

  We had been driving aimlessly around Houston. After discovering that the diary had belonged to Jenny we both needed a break. So we got in the car. We had been past the alleyway where the taxi driver was beaten to death, and the club where Sara had been photographed getting out of the taxi. Stiller had said there had been a lot of drugs and prostitution going on in the club’s basement. There was no trace of that now. The basement had been renovated and turned into a bar and restaurant. The maître d’ told us that the club had changed hands a few years before, and that things were very different now.

  Neither of us felt like lingering so we were soon back in the car. At first I said I wanted to go back to the hotel, but on the way I changed my mind.

  ‘We’re going to drive past the house where my dad lived,’ I said.

  ‘You said you didn’t want to go anywhere near . . .’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind. I want to now.’

  I’ve never known what to call him. I call my mother Marianne, but I only ever refer to my dad as my dad. On the few occasions when we actually met and talked, neither of us used names or titles. Just an exchange of terse remarks.

  Lucy put her hand on my arm as I pulled up in front of the house where the man who had been my father used to live. I don’t know what had taken me there. It was as if I had to do something else apart from chasing Sara’s ghost. Something I had a bit of distance from, something that belonged to the past rather than the present.

  ‘Has your dad’s wife moved or does she still live here?’ she said.

  ‘I think she’s still here,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know her.’

  I could barely remember what she looked like. We only met once while I was living in Texas. It hadn’t been a good meeting. Not good at all.

  I tore my eyes away from the house and smiled at Lucy.

  ‘So we won’t be going in for a cup of coffee.’

  Lucy smiled back.

  ‘Shame,’ she said. ‘That could have been pretty memorable.’

  Just as we were pulling away a car turned into the drive of the house. Automatically I slowed to a crawl and looked at the car to see who got out of it.

  It was a tall black man in his thirties. Sunglasses made his face anonymous, but he was neatly dressed in jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was carrying a blue jacket. A metal bracelet hung from his wrist. Like a lot of American men, his clothes were too big for him. Why they chose to look like that was beyond me.

  ‘Do you recognise him?’ Lucy said.

  I shook my head. He was darker than me, but I couldn’t help noticing that we had a similar walk. Lucy had demonstrated it to me once when we were in the first flush of infatuation.

  ‘You walk like a cowboy,’ she had said, then showed me. ‘Like someone with a ridiculously low centre of gravity. You’re only a hair’s breadth from looking like you’ve shat yourself.’

  She only said that last bit to wind me up, but ever since that day I’ve tried to walk with my legs straighter. It’s impossible.

  I felt a pang in my stomach. The guy disappearing into the house could well have been my brother. It felt odd not to recognise him.

  ‘Have you ever met your American siblings?’ Lucy said.

  ‘Never,’ I said. ‘Not remotely interested.’

  As if to underline the point, I put my foot down and drove away. Neither of us said anything until we were back at the hotel.

  ‘Are we going to Galveston tomorrow?’ Lucy said.

  I reached out to her, wanted to have her close to me. I couldn’t bear to think of the next step, the next trip.

  Lucy pulled away.

  ‘Sorry, I’m being boring, but I’m so damn tired.’

  She had nothing to apologise for. I did, though. I just kept on making demands and never giving anything back. One day, when all this crap was over, I’d find a way of compensating for all the misery I’d brought into her life.

  I yawned. I was tired as well. Totally fucking exhausted.

  ‘I’m so knackered I can’t even summon up the energy to fe
el horny,’ I said as a dry statement of fact.

  Lucy burst out laughing.

  ‘But at least you’re honest,’ she said.

  She kicked her shoes off and went into the bathroom. I sank onto the edge of the bed. It was starting to get dark outside and the sound of traffic was quieter.

  ‘We’ve only got one thing left to do in Houston,’ I said. ‘We can do that first thing tomorrow morning. Then we can take off for Galveston.’

  ‘What are we doing tomorrow?’ Lucy said from the bathroom.

  I pulled the diary out from where we’d hidden it under the mattress.

  ‘We’re going to see Jenny Woods’s husband.’

  Evening turned to night and I lay awake in the cool hotel room. From a distance we probably looked like a couple of kids at summer-camp. We were fishing for sharks with a tiny fishing rod. Any fool could see that if we did get a bite, the entire jetty we were standing on would quake and the fishing rod would shatter into a thousand pieces.

  I could hear from Lucy’s breathing that she had fallen asleep, and waited to follow suit. It was a long wait. I didn’t fall asleep until three. I’d be lying if I said I felt rested when the alarm clock went off at seven. We packed our bags and threw them in the car. By eight o’clock we were on our way to where Jenny’s husband worked.

  I had tracked him down with Eivor’s help. She had been surprisingly helpful considering I called her in the middle of the night.

  ‘You don’t happen to have Sara’s friend Jenny’s address in Houston?’ I said.

  It was a wild guess, but because I knew they’d been in touch it wasn’t impossible. My gamble paid off. I managed to get the name and phone number of where Jenny had worked.

  ‘I know she works at the same place as her husband,’ Eivor said. ‘If you want to talk to him as well.’

  I registered the fact that she said works, not worked. So Eivor didn’t know Jenny was dead. I decided not to tell her what had happened, it would only prompt too many questions. But I was grateful for the information. Paying a visit to Jenny Woods’s husband when I myself was the police’s main suspect for her murder was a pretty bold move, even for me. But the fact remained: I hadn’t killed her, and I needed to prove it.