The Lies We Tell

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘She told me not to flush it away,’ I said slowly. ‘I mean, I know you’re not supposed to anyway, but sometimes it happens. The first time she was too late, I’d already dropped it in the toilet before she told me not to. But the second time . . . She said she’d had one that got stuck in the pipes and caused a blockage. So I had to put it in a little pedal-bin on the floor. I didn’t react to it at the time.’

  Lucy was looking at me in a new way. Her eyes were full of sympathy, the way you look at someone with learning difficulties when they do something silly.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ I said, folding my arms over my chest.

  ‘I’m looking at you the way you deserve,’ Lucy said.

  I sighed.

  ‘This doesn’t feel good,’ I said.

  Lucy reached the same conclusion. She looked deflated.

  ‘If it really is as bad as you think,’ she said slowly, ‘how are you going to get yourself out of this?’

  It was a question I’d been asking myself, and it terrified the life out of me. Because I was fucked if they had DNA.

  ‘Wasn’t Fredrik gay?’ Lucy said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Whereas you aren’t,’ Lucy said.

  ‘If the evidence says I had sex with him right before he died, then I did.’

  ‘But isn’t it possible to tell if sperm has been frozen or chilled? We ought to be able to find someone who knows.’

  My chest felt tight.

  ‘Lucy, if they pull me in with that evidence, I’m finished. Okay?’

  I said it quietly, as if to soften the implications of what I was saying.

  She picked at one of her cuticles before she replied.

  ‘I think we’ve reached the end of the road,’ she said. ‘You won’t be able to wriggle out of this one. You need to go to ground, Martin. Get yourself a good lawyer, someone you trust, and then vanish.’

  The thought was dizzying. I’m not the sort of person who goes to ground. I’m far too fond of my comforts, far too lazy. Besides, I’m responsible for Belle. That limits my options.

  ‘I already have a good lawyer I trust,’ I said.

  She shook her head.

  ‘This isn’t my area, and you know that.’

  She was right, but still wrong. I had no desire to find someone new to represent me. Besides, I was starting to think it didn’t really matter who I had representing me. DNA has revolutionised our entire legal system. It offers indisputable evidence, far stronger, for instance, than some feeble witness who says she saw a Porsche at a crime scene. Which got me thinking about something that had previously passed me by.

  ‘They must have found another fake witness,’ I said. ‘To Fredrik’s murder. Because someone said they saw a Porsche run him down.’

  ‘Christ,’ Lucy said. ‘You have no idea how happy I am right now about that whole thing with the orange.’

  I allowed myself a brief smile. But the incident with the orange brought up other thoughts that lowered my mood again.

  ‘Belle,’ I said.

  ‘I can look after her.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Good. Thank you.’

  I should have been in tears. I know that, but I couldn’t. Not just then.

  ‘We’ve still got one trump card,’ I said. ‘The footage from Wolfgang’s security camera.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Lucy said. ‘I’ll let the police have a copy when I judge the time is right.’

  Neither of us felt like saying anything else. We just sat there in our chairs waiting for time to stop or for the sky to fall in.

  ‘When are you going to leave?’ Lucy said.

  As if I already had a plan.

  ‘In the next few hours, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘Where will you go?’

  I did have an answer to that question.

  ‘I’m going to get hold of a car and then pay someone a visit.’

  Lucy looked quizzical.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Didrik. In Denmark.’

  And with that it was settled. For the first time in my life I was going to run away. From the forces of law and order, and from an enemy with no name. I thought I had a bit of time. A few hours. But in the middle of my conversation with Lucy, the doorbell rang. I didn’t have hours.

  Only a matter of seconds.

  PART 5

  ‘What happened to Mio?’

  TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN BENNER (MB).

  INTERVIEWER: KAREN VIKING (KV), freelance journalist, Stockholm.

  KV:

  Tarantino.

  MB:

  Sorry?

  KV:

  This story – it’s so convoluted it feels like a Tarantino film.

  MB:

  Hmm. Or Woody Allen.

  KV:

  A bedroom farce?

  MB:

  A farce? Allen doesn’t do those, does he? No, I was thinking more neurotic, chaotic relationships.

  KV:

  Tarantino would be better, then.

  MB:

  Who cares? Are you following it so far?

  KV:

  The story? Oh yes, I am. And now I’m seriously curious. Did you get confirmation that it was sperm they had found?

  MB:

  I’m getting to that.

  KV:

  But to sum up the situation you were in, things weren’t looking too bright?

  MB:

  That’s a pretty fair summary. The net was drawing in just as I was getting closer to the truth. It was right in front of my nose. But I could never have imagined it looked the way it did.

  KV:

  I have to admit, I have my suspicions about how it’s going to end.

  MB:

  So did I. It’s safe to say that I was surprised. You will be, too.

  (Silence)

  KV:

  It disgusts me. That they went on hurting Fredrik after he was dead. That business of planting your DNA on him. That’s just appalling.

  MB:

  I think . . . or rather, I know . . . that by that point the whole thing had slipped beyond the control of the people behind it. No one was in control any more. That was the most alarming thing of all.

  KV:

  No one was in control?

  MB:

  No, not in the way I had imagined. And that was very unsettling. Very, very unsettling.

  KV:

  But you did head off to Denmark? Did you find what you were looking for?

  MB:

  I don’t know how to answer that.

  KV:

  But you must be able to say something about what you found?

  (Silence)

  MB:

  Something completely unexpected.

  33

  It was Boris who taught me that I ought to have an extra shithole.

  ‘You’re a lawyer, for fuck’s sake,’ he said, the first and only time he ever came to my office. ‘Sooner or later you’re going to piss off a client. Piss them off really badly. At which point you’ll need a way out.’

  I didn’t understand what he was talking about.

  ‘You think I might have to jump out of the window? I don’t think my clients are that dangerous.’

  Boris groaned.

  ‘Jump out of the window? No, Christ, that’s exactly what you shouldn’t have to do. Seeing as your office is on the tenth floor. How much do you know about the dark sides of your clients? You should have somewhere to hide if some crazy fuck shows up here with an axe or a pistol or some other bollocks.’

  The thought made me chuckle.

  ‘You can laugh,’ Boris said. ‘But what you need is an extra shithole.’

  An extra shithole. A place to hide, the sort that little kids dream about. A hidden compartment behind a bookcase. Or a magic trapdoor in the ceiling. Or, in Lucy’s and my case, a horribly cramped space behind a fake wall at the back of the store-cupboard. Not even our assistant, Helmer, knows it’s there.

  We hadn’t ever had to use
the shithole. Well, actually, we had. To have sex in. But that didn’t count. There had never been any sort of emergency at our office. Not until the doorbell rang that day.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ Lucy said when we heard it ring. ‘You go and hide.’

  ‘Come off it, what for?’ I said.

  ‘Because it might be the police,’ Lucy said.

  Neither of us thought she was right, but she was. She didn’t open the door until I’d sorted myself out behind the fake wall. I felt truly pathetic as I stood there in the darkness. Boris would have despised me if he knew what my shithole looked like. Far smaller than he had in mind, and completely unfurnished. It wasn’t designed to be used for more than a few minutes at a time. And the police’s visit lasted no longer than that.

  I didn’t recognise any of the visitors’ voices. There were two of them, a man and a woman.

  ‘I’m afraid he isn’t here,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Do you know where we can get hold of him?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Perhaps you can let him know we’re looking for him? The prosecutor has decided that he needs to give a DNA sample. We’ll expect to see him before this evening.’

  Lucy promised to tell me. I held my breath and waited for the police officers to leave. They didn’t. They wanted to look round first. I didn’t dare move a muscle while they poked about our premises. One of them admired the design and Lucy said something about the company we’d used.

  ‘Tell Benner this is serious now,’ was the last thing they said.

  ‘Of course,’ Lucy said.

  Once they had gone she went and sat in her office. I waited in the shithole. Minutes passed. We waited for the police to return, but they didn’t. Eventually I dared to emerge.

  ‘Maybe I should come with you?’ Lucy said as we were picking out the things I wanted to take with me from the office.

  ‘Not a good idea, baby,’ I said. ‘Someone needs to look after Belle.’

  ‘Will you have time to see her before you leave?’

  ‘No, but that doesn’t matter too much. I’m expecting to be back tomorrow or Sunday, then I’ll go to ground here in Stockholm. I’m going to hire a car that they’ll easily be able to trace, and drive it over the bridge to Copenhagen. I’ll check into a hotel. Then I’ll leave the car there and take the train back. That’ll win me a bit of time.’

  ‘Are they that easy to fool?’ Lucy said.

  ‘Believe me, things will start to move in our favour, as long as I can get away from here. Today’s Friday. If we’ve got it right, Didrik will go back to see his family for the weekend. He’s going to tell me everything he knows. And lead me to Rakel, so I can find out what happened to Mio.’

  Lucy didn’t raise any further objections. People who don’t have any better suggestions usually go quiet.

  Then Madeleine Rossander called.

  ‘Can you talk?’ she said.

  I thought I could.

  ‘My source in the police has just called,’ she said. ‘He said something I need to tell you.’

  I sank onto the chair beside my desk and waited. I wanted to tell her not to take any risks, but she was already far too involved. I had to learn to differentiate between what she and I were each responsible for. She was an adult, and she was aware of the risks. If she continued to supply me with information, I had to trust that she knew what she was doing.

  ‘He said he’d seen something funny in the preliminary investigation into Jenny’s death,’ Madeleine said.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘There’s another witness, Martin.’

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

  ‘Someone apart from that woman who saw Jenny murdered? The one who was upset because I represented a suspected rapist?’

  ‘Yes,’ Madeleine said, and I could hear the excitement in her voice. ‘Another young woman. She sat with Jenny until the ambulance and police arrived.’

  I was clutching the phone far too tightly, waiting for her to go on.

  ‘She said Jenny had been run down by a black Volvo.’

  ‘A Volvo? There’s a hell of a difference between that and a Porsche. How . . .’

  ‘The police questioned her, but she was later dismissed as being of no interest once the other witness came forward. There’s a note saying that she was drunk and confused, and therefore unreliable.’

  I shook my head slowly. Someone who identified a specific make of car, not just ‘a black car’, was in pretty good command of their faculties.

  ‘No way was she drunk,’ I said. ‘Have you got a name and address? Assuming she’s still alive. Is she?’

  I blurted out that last question. Madeleine answered as if there was nothing odd about it.

  ‘Yes. But she’s moved to Malmö since Jenny died. Her name’s Viola Benson. I couldn’t resist checking her out. Looks like she does a lot of work abroad; she’s a member of a dance group.’

  Malmö. On the way to Copenhagen. A lot of work abroad, so possibly not home at the moment. But still worth a try.

  I asked for her address and wrote it down carefully.

  ‘I’m starting to get seriously worried for your sake,’ Madeleine said.

  ‘And I am for yours,’ I said. ‘Promise not to dig about in this any further.’

  ‘That’s a promise I’ll be only too happy to keep,’ Madeleine said. ‘But I did find out the other thing you asked about: whose child Herman is godfather to.’

  ‘Didrik Stihl’s,’ I said.

  ‘Precisely. So you already knew that, then?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it’s good to have it confirmed.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I can imagine you’ve got more than enough to think about.’

  I glanced at the time. She couldn’t imagine how right she was. I didn’t know how much I should tell her. The general rule is that someone in possession of a lot of information has the advantage over someone who knows less. But that wasn’t the case this time. Not if the information was about me and all the shit I’d been subjected to. It was best to know as little as possible. Otherwise you were dead.

  ‘You know this Didrik, don’t you?’ Madeleine said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, beginning to pack the rest of the things I wanted to take with me. ‘I do.’

  At that precise moment I could hardly remember how we knew each other. It must have been as a result of some case we were both working on, him as a police officer and me as a lawyer. But which case? I couldn’t remember. There was only room in my head for what was happening now, and in that context how Didrik and I met hardly seemed relevant.

  ‘I must say, I did rather well with my intelligence-gathering,’ Madeleine said. ‘It turned out that my friend knew Herman Nilson much better than I thought she did. She even had pictures of all the kids on her mobile.’

  ‘All the kids?’ I repeated.

  ‘Her own and Herman’s. Apparently they play together a lot – that was how the parents got to know each other. Didrik’s son used to be part of the group too, but they seem to have moved away from the city last year.’

  ‘They moved to Denmark,’ I said automatically.

  ‘Oh, so you know about that as well? What a dreadful story. Poor parents.’

  Something in the way she said that made me stand still. Lucy had started shooting impatient glances at me, keen for me to end the conversation.

  ‘Poor parents? You mean the accusations that were levelled at them?’

  Madeleine fell silent.

  ‘No,’ she said hesitantly. ‘No, what accusations?’

  ‘I heard they moved because they were accused of abusing their son.’

  ‘How odd, my friend didn’t mention that at all. I didn’t want to pry too much into that part of the story. She just said that the boy had been very ill, and that’s why they moved. To receive better treatment than they could get in Sweden.’

  I froze. Was that why Herman Nilson had been so edgy? Because he was trying to protect his sick godson, and not
Didrik, as I had thought?

  ‘What illness was it?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t know. I didn’t think that was important.’

  I had stopped filtering what was important from what was irrelevant. I was like a vacuum-cleaner, sucking up everything that came my way.

  ‘What sort of treatment would they have in Denmark but not in Sweden?’

  ‘Martin, there was absolutely no way I could have guessed this would be what you were most interested in. I’ve got no idea what illness it was, or what sort of treatment. My friend mentioned something about a transplant, but she didn’t sound at all sure.’

  ‘A transplant?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe from one of the parents to the boy,’ Madeleine said.

  ‘I doubt that,’ I said. ‘Sebbe was adopted. He came to Sweden as a baby, around the same time I started to look after Belle.’

  ‘Do you think the illness is important? I’m not sure if I can find out any more, but I can . . .’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No, definitely not. Your investigations stop right here, Madeleine. Is that understood?’

  She was silent for a moment.

  ‘Okay, understood,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  My pulse was racing.

  There was no way the illness could be relevant.

  I looked helplessly at Lucy after I’d ended the call.

  Could it?

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything any more.’

  34