The Lies We Tell

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘Malin, someone must have known,’ I said. ‘It’s as simple as that. Think about it. What happened once Bobby got to Stockholm? Did he just sit holed up in a flat somewhere, or did he meet anyone? Did he say anything about that?’

  My mobile rang. Loudly.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, and rejected the call.

  I opened the top drawer of my desk and dropped the phone inside.

  ‘No, he didn’t tell me anything about what he was doing after Sara died,’ Malin said quietly. ‘But I realised he wasn’t done with his inquiries. He must have used up all his holiday, he travelled to Stockholm so many times. I thought he should hand it all over to you, especially what he found out at Mio’s preschool.’

  I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  ‘What did he find out at Mio’s preschool?’

  ‘He’d got in touch with one of the teachers there. She was sure she’d seen Mio being abducted.’

  The hairs on the back of my neck settled back down again. I already knew about that. Why hadn’t Bobby shared what he’d already found out with me, either via Elias or by abandoning the deception and getting in touch with me himself? It was incomprehensible.

  ‘You said you didn’t care about Mio,’ Malin said quietly, as if she could read my thoughts. ‘Bobby was so worried that you wouldn’t understand how important he was in this whole thing.’

  ‘So why didn’t he tell me all he knew?’ I said.

  ‘He wanted to see how you worked first,’ Malin said. ‘What if you’d blown him out? Then he’d have given you far too much information, and all for nothing.’

  That was an explanation I wasn’t prepared to accept, but I didn’t say so.

  ‘So he met Susanne,’ I said. ‘Who else?’

  ‘Susanne?’

  ‘If it’s the same woman I’ve been in contact with at Mio’s preschool, that’s what she says her name is.’

  Malin shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know what her name was.’

  That reminded me that I still hadn’t looked through Lucy’s list of the school’s employees.

  ‘Either way, he met one of the teachers,’ Malin said. ‘She claimed she knew who abducted Mio. Rakel, I think her name was.’

  Malin’s voice cracked and I realised that I was holding my breath.

  ‘Did he find her?’ I said. ‘Did they meet?’

  Malin swallowed several times.

  ‘No. He died before he figured out how to find her.’

  It was hard not to feel sorry for Bobby. He had meant so well yet not managed to finish the job. Someone ran him down. Using my car. Or a Porsche that looked like mine. Malin still knew nothing about that, and that was the way it was going to stay.

  ‘You wanted to see me?’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m here today.’

  I pulled myself together for the conclusion to our meeting.

  ‘I’d like a photograph of Mio, if you’ve got one.’

  ‘Elias was right, then. That’s what he said, that you wanted a photograph. What for? I mean, you’re not working on Sara’s case any more.’

  ‘True. It’s too dangerous. But Bobby was desperate to know what happened to Mio. I’ve been thinking that it doesn’t cost anything to do a bit of cautious digging.’

  It was stupid lie. It burned my tongue. Bobby was dead. Why would I care what he did or didn’t want?

  Malin opened her handbag and took out a small picture.

  ‘This was taken at preschool a few weeks before he went missing,’ she said, putting it down in front of me.

  Even though I already knew what I was going to see, I was surprised. Mio hadn’t inherited any of his mother’s colouring.

  ‘You’d think he was adopted, wouldn’t you?’ Malin said.

  She didn’t mean any harm by that: it was a simple statement. I couldn’t take my eyes from the picture. Mio the ghost-boy finally had a face. He was much smaller than I had imagined. With serious, wide eyes that stared straight into the camera. He looked smart. A checked shirt and a knitted tanktop that was slightly too big for him.

  ‘He looks a fine lad,’ I said. ‘Can I keep this picture?’

  ‘Sure. I’ve got others.’

  Malin closed her handbag and got to her feet. I stood up as well.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘Bobby thought it was terrible when Mio ended up with foster parents. Social Services didn’t think Bobby was mature enough to look after a child, and they evidently didn’t care enough about me to even spare me a thought. Bobby’s no longer here, but I am. If Mio is still out there somewhere . . . I’d like the chance to offer him a home.’

  I could have burst into tears at that moment, but I didn’t.

  ‘I’m not a magician,’ I said. ‘But I’ll see what I can do.’

  Malin held out her hand and I took it.

  ‘Sara had high hopes of you, too,’ she said. ‘Almost as if she really did think you were a magician.’

  ‘Sara?’

  Malin let go of my hand.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mean Bobby? He – or rather Elias – was the one who came here and asked me to help. After hearing an interview with me on the radio.’

  Malin laughed. It was a warm laugh.

  ‘He may have said that, but if he did it was a lie. It was Sara who gave Bobby your name.’

  The sun reached in through the window; beams of light danced across the desk.

  ‘When?’ I said. ‘Sara had been dead six months by the time Elias came to see me.’

  I searched my memory frantically. Had I ever met Sara? I didn’t think so.

  Malin smiled gently.

  ‘You asked what Sara told us about her time in the US. There was someone else apart from that boyfriend, unless it was the same person. Sara called him Satan. But we didn’t hear about him until the police started causing trouble for her.’

  I held my breath, waiting for her to go on.

  ‘Bobby was so desperate to help Sara, but she kept brushing him off,’ Malin said. ‘She got her lawyer to tell him there was no point. Bobby kept trying, but she refused to have anything to do with him. Because she was being held in isolation there was no way for us to see her, and her lawyer was useless. All Bobby had to go on once she was gone was what she had said before she was arrested. She was aware that she was in danger, and tried to do something about it. But she asked the wrong person for help. One time she told Bobby that she regretted not turning to you instead. That you were someone who could get at Satan.’

  Someone who could get at Satan.

  ‘Why did she think I could do that?’ I said in a voice that was more tense than I would have liked. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up again.

  ‘Because you know each other.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Look, Sara sometimes said crazy things. I mean, Satan. He doesn’t even exist. Her lawyer said we should forget what she’d said, that it was just nonsense. According to him, the important thing was that she’d confessed to all the murders. But Bobby didn’t agree. Not at all. About any of it. Bobby thought it was worth taking a chance and turning to you. Sara was already dead by then, so what harm could it do if he contacted you?’

  All hell could break loose. Because Satan did exist, but Malin couldn’t have known that.

  Once again the ground opened up beneath my feet. The abyss, so infinitely deep. Sara had been surrounded by so many bad people, but none worse than the man who shared Satan’s name.

  Satan was very definitely a specific person. Satan was Lucifer.

  And now I could hear Sara’s voice echoing from beyond the grave:

  You know each other.

  Not a fucking chance. That couldn’t be true.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘In what context did this person called Satan say he knew me? How are we supposed to have met?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why, are you taking this seriously?’

  More than anything else I’d heard in the past few
weeks.

  ‘In what way did Sara think I could have made a difference for her?’ I said in a voice that didn’t sound like mine.

  Malin looked uncertain.

  ‘She said that someone Satan hated so much must be capable of getting the better of him,’ she said in a thin voice.

  It was like a storm had started to rage inside my office. I expected all the papers to fly up from my desk and land in a heap on the floor.

  He knew me and he hated me.

  I didn’t understand what Malin was talking about.

  A misunderstanding, I thought. The whole thing was a misunderstanding.

  Even if on some level I knew that couldn’t be true.

  ‘So why didn’t she come to see me, then?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t she ask me to be her lawyer? I’d have been happy to help her.’

  Malin lowered her eyes.

  ‘I don’t think it was in your capacity as a lawyer that you could have helped her. It sounded more like she was thinking of . . . well, something else. Either way – because of all that other stuff she didn’t dare contact you. She simply didn’t dare trust you; she wasn’t sure you’d be on her side.’

  Distinctly uncertain as to whether I wanted to know the answer to my question, I said: ‘What other stuff, Malin? Why didn’t Sara think she could trust me?’

  Malin said nothing. She fiddled with the catch on her handbag, unsure if she should answer my question.

  ‘She said you’d killed someone,’ she eventually said in a whisper. ‘The man she called Satan had said that you were the only lawyer in Stockholm who’d been able to get away with murder.’

  15

  That was the thought which I couldn’t allow to exist – that it wasn’t a coincidence that I’d been dragged into the story of Sara Texas and her son. That I had my own role to play, whether I was aware of it or not. A role that was somehow connected with my very dirtiest little secret. Those bloody nightmares. In which I was always buried alive, standing upright. They collided with what I’d just heard from Malin. Well, perhaps they didn’t collide – they created a potential bridge between past and present. A bridge that frightened the life out of me.

  Once Malin had gone I felt so drained I could have fallen asleep. But I didn’t. Instead I just sat at my desk for a long time. Memories from the time when I had extinguished another human being’s life had set fire to my brain. There had been three of us. It had been hot. And dark. So terribly fucking dark.

  I tried to organise my thoughts and made a decision.

  Then I stood up and went to see Lucy.

  ‘There’s something we need to talk about,’ I said.

  Lucy sat perfectly still on her desk-chair while I recounted what I’d been told. I held the finale back. I knew it would change everything, forever.

  ‘Baby, he knew who I was way before I got dragged into this mess.’

  It had been a long time since I’d called her baby. Life had become so serious that only our proper first names worked.

  Lucy ran her fingers through her hair.

  ‘We mustn’t lose our grip now, Martin,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I think I almost agree with Sara’s lawyer. We can’t suddenly start thinking that everything Sara ever said was true. If – and I mean if – it turns out that she really was referring to Lucifer, and if you really do know him, we still have no reason to start saying incomprehensible things are suddenly comprehensible. You used to be a police officer. You worked in Texas. Almost twenty years ago, maybe, but you could have come across him in some situation that seemed inconsequential to you but was crucially important to him. If it’s actually true at all.’

  I undid the top buttons of my shirt and felt the sweat on my chest and back. Our trip to Texas had opened the gates to a madness I had done everything I could to forget. Now the past had caught up with me. The way in which it was blurring with what was happening now was close to magnificent.

  Lucy saw the change in me.

  ‘Martin, what’s happened?’

  I twisted my head so I could see out of the window. Stockholm was bathed in sunlight. The city never looks more beautiful than it does then. Blue water, blue sky, blue blood in the royal palace.

  ‘Blue is for other people,’ my mum used to say when I was growing up.

  And dressed me in a green sweater with patches on the sleeves.

  I took a deep breath. I had to find the words to say something I had never spoken about. And I had no idea what the consequences might be.

  ‘Something happened when I lived in Texas. I’ve never talked about it. To anyone. Yet Malin mentioned it a little while ago.’

  A different sort of surprise appeared in Lucy’s face. There was still a limit to my ability to confide in her.

  I killed another person.

  There’s no other way to describe it.

  I, Martin Benner, killed another man. By mistake.

  ‘Benner, we’re going to bury this problem,’ my boss told me that evening.

  And that’s what we did.

  I hated remembering the minutes after the shot went off. When I was standing in the rain, shaking with shock as I called my boss. He said: ‘Stay where you are.’

  Two hours later we were standing far from Houston in an abandoned oilfield. I can still feel my boss’s heavy hand on my shoulder.

  Benner, we’re going to bury this problem.

  It was so easy at the time. Rendering what had been done undone. Very few people knew what had happened, and they all kept the secret. The camaraderie of the police force is unique; it doesn’t exist within any other group of people.

  ‘I killed a man. By mistake.’

  I said.

  To Lucy.

  And saw her image of me change irrevocably.

  Because there are things we think we will never hear. Lucy had definitely never expected me to tell her I had killed another human being. Her face was completely white as she listened to the story I thought I had buried forever in the sand.

  ‘It was dark,’ I said. ‘The middle of the night. I was a police officer, had been for a little less than a year. My partner and I were sitting in our patrol car, talking. A call came over the radio. A wanted drug-dealer had been seen a few blocks from where we were. We were eager for some action. I responded to the call as fast as I could. ‘We’ve got it,’ I said. And off we went. Foot to the floor, flashing lights, the whole circus. Ridiculously amateurish. We saw the guy from a distance of a hundred metres or so. He was running along the pavement, terrified. It was raining and he lost his footing. We caught up with him in three seconds and leapt out of the car. By then he was back on his feet and running like a lunatic, straight into a dead-end lined by long-abandoned workshops. There wasn’t a single light in any of the windows. Neither my partner nor I had a torch on us. We ran, and we shouted. ‘Stop! For fuck’s sake, stop!’ In the end he did. When he turned round he had one hand inside his jacket.’

  Lucy ran the tip of her tongue over her lips.

  ‘So you shot him?’

  ‘My partner fired a warning shot, straight up in the air. We yelled at him to show his hands, and stick them up. At once. But he didn’t. Instead he grinned and went on feeling inside his jacket. When he eventually pulled his hand out . . . It was raining, hitting me right in the face. I couldn’t see properly, but I was as good as certain he was holding something in his hand. That and the grin were all it took. I fired one shot. I was aiming for his leg but hit him in the torso. He died within minutes.’

  Lucy didn’t say a thing. She looked like she was about to ask if I was mad, but thought better of it. In the meantime I carried on talking. I told her what my boss had said, and what we did with the body. And how I left Texas, and how my partner had later died.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said. ‘I really don’t.’

  I took several deep breaths.

  ‘It wasn’t murder,’ I said.

  ‘Okay.’


  ‘What do you mean, okay? It wasn’t.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Lucy . . .’

  ‘I need to get some fresh air. Sorry, but this . . . I don’t know what to say.’

  Lucy stood up.

  ‘No, so you said. Several times.’

  ‘Have you any idea how you sound? Do you realise what you just told me?’

  Probably not. Because I had just put into words something I had never spoken about. There had actually been long periods of my life when I had managed to forget what had happened. At least in the sense that I stopped thinking about it. Stopped thinking about the fact that I had once stood with a shovel in my hand digging a grave for a man I had shot. Even when we were in Texas I’d managed not to think about it. But I’d had Sara Texas to concentrate on. My own future. And my dad.

  ‘How the hell did your boss come up with the idea that you should conceal what had happened to the guy? Why not go the usual route and claim self-defence? You thought he was armed. People get away with that all the time. Especially in Texas.’

  ‘He was unarmed,’ I said. ‘We searched him and found nothing. Nothing at all. No gun, no drugs, nothing. But I did find his wallet and ID. I’d shot the wrong guy. We looked him up in our records, and the police didn’t have a thing on him. Or at least nothing big, I should say. He belonged to a gang of young troublemakers the police had been keeping an eye on.’

  Lucy picked her handbag up from the floor and put it over her shoulder. She really was going to leave.

  ‘So he was just a bit of a nuisance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  Lucy reacted as if I’d hit her in the face.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ she whispered. I jumped up.

  ‘Lucy, don’t get this out of proportion. I—’

  ‘Out of proportion? Out of proportion? Martin, you shot a child! And buried him in an oilfield!’

  She started to cry as she strode towards the door. I caught her and tried to hold on to her. She pulled free.

  ‘Don’t touch me, I need to be alone.’