The Lies We Tell Read online

  When it came to the witness who saw a Porsche hit Jenny Woods, everything was much simpler than with Mio’s disappearance. Because at least there was a name. The only problem was that the preliminary investigation was still confidential, which in turn meant that the witness’s name was difficult to get hold of for an outsider like me. The fact that something is difficult rarely means that it’s impossible. But I was going to need help.

  I’m the sort of man who understands the value of building a network of contacts at an early age. I rarely turn down an invitation to a party, and there’s not much I don’t get asked to attend. I’ve become the sort of person other people are happy to know, and that’s an important factor for success. That’s why mafia bosses like Boris contact me, and that’s why I know people like Madeleine Rossander.

  Madeleine Rossander was at university the same time as me. An incredibly clever woman. And she has enough energy to fire up an entire army if she wanted to. Be that as it may, Madeleine and I have something in common (besides the fact that we’re both extremely focused on our careers and are the sort of people other people want to know): we both used to be in the police. Me, because I thought it was a way of getting closer to my father. I don’t know why Madeleine did it. But I know that she, just like me, concluded that it was a big mistake. She didn’t fit in on the thin blue line. She wanted too much, thought too much, criticised too much. All in less than two years. Then she told the force to go to hell and she became a lawyer instead.

  The trick when you tell so many people to go to hell at the same time is to make sure that the exceptions understand that they really are exceptions. People love feeling that they’re special. Madeleine was well aware of this and played her hand perfectly. As a result, she still has a handful of friends within the force, and they’ll do anything for her when called upon.

  She picked up on the second ring.

  ‘This is Martin Benner,’ I said. ‘Have you got time to talk?’

  ‘Sure. How are you? It’s been ages.’

  I detected a trace of anxiety in her voice, and that bothered me. No matter how hard I tried, it was difficult to put a brave face on things and behave normally. Were other people starting to wonder what had happened to me?

  ‘There’s been a lot going on recently,’ I said curtly.

  ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ Madeleine said.

  ‘No, just far too much of the same old thing.’

  Or not.

  I’ve been trying to get justice for a suspected serial killer.

  I’ve been accused of committing two murders myself.

  My daughter was kidnapped by a mafia boss known as Lucifer.

  Her grandparents have been murdered.

  And now I’m trying to find a missing child.

  Up until then I hadn’t confided in anyone but Lucy, Boris and Fredrik. That was unsustainable. If I wanted Madeleine to help me, I’d have to tell her something about what I needed help with.

  I let out a cough as the words collided in my throat.

  ‘To be honest, things aren’t great right now,’ I said. ‘Could we meet for lunch?’

  ‘Sure,’ Madeleine said. Her voice changed. ‘How about the end of the next week? I can do . . .’

  ‘Today, Madeleine,’ I said. ‘Today.’

  I’m a man of simple needs and relatively few friends. Or rather – extremely few friends. My circle of acquaintances is magnificent and prodigious, but it’s constantly changing and not united by any particularly strong bonds. Everyone is replaceable and, to be perfectly honest, I spend a lot of time with people I don’t particularly like. But Madeleine is an exception. In all respects she is to be counted as a real friend. My only problem is that I haven’t really given her much proof of that.

  I informed Lucy by text that lunch was cancelled. Then I got in the car and drove to KB, ‘the artists’ bar’, where I’d arranged to meet Madeleine. She was already sitting at one of the more secluded tables, and her face lit up when she caught sight of me.

  ‘Okay, I’m really bloody curious now,’ she said.

  I gave her a quick peck on the cheek. The smell of her perfume hit me. I didn’t recognise it.

  ‘You smell nice,’ I said.

  She burst out laughing.

  ‘Chanel,’ she said. ‘Some new sort, apparently.’

  ‘Apparently?’ I said, raising one eyebrow. ‘You didn’t buy it for yourself?’

  ‘No, as a matter of fact.’

  She smiled, but her face soon settled into a more serious expression.

  ‘What’s happened, Martin?’ she said.

  More than anything, I would have liked to have been in a position to give her the uncensored version of what had become of my life, but that was impossible. I had to carry on being careful and not make any silly mistakes. So I said no more than was strictly necessary.

  ‘I have reason to believe that someone’s trying to frame me for something I didn’t do. Two murders. And the police aren’t exactly handling the investigation brilliantly. Quite the opposite, in fact.’

  Madeleine raised a glass of water to her lips. She put it down again without drinking any.

  ‘You’re suspected of two murders?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  But a bit less now, after Lucifer burned my daughter’s grandparents alive, I thought silently to myself.

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘There’s a witness,’ I said. ‘One of the murder victims is supposed to have been run down by a car that looks like mine. There’s someone who saw what happened. I’d like you to use your contacts in the police and get hold of a name for me.’

  We maintained eye-contact while I spoke. What I was asking was no small favour. For the first time in my life I saw Madeleine left speechless. Under other circumstances that would have been very amusing. Now it was terrible.

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

  ‘Yes, ideally?’ I said, feeling my cheeks burn.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, and nodded. ‘Of course. But . . . You said two people had been run down by your car.’

  ‘No. By a car that looked like mine.’

  Madeleine put one hand to her cheek and brushed a lock of hair aside.

  ‘But you did know the victims?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She fell silent. She was like me – she didn’t believe in coincidences.

  ‘I’ve got an alibi for the night of the murders. I was at the hospital with Belle.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Madeleine said, relieved. Then she became serious again. ‘Is she okay?’

  ‘She’s great,’ I said. ‘She fell and broke her arm, but she’s fine again now.’

  Maybe not fine. She still had her arm in plaster. And a scar on her forehead. I tried to avoid looking at it.

  A waitress came over to take our order. I hadn’t even looked at the menu, but Madeleine ordered two salads of the day for us.

  ‘What I don’t quite understand,’ she said, ‘is why you’re having trouble with the police if you’ve got an alibi?’

  That’s the disadvantage of hanging out with smart people: they pick up on things that don’t stand up in daylight.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You know how retarded detectives can be. Getting hung up on pointless details.’

  Madeleine looked at me sternly.

  ‘What sort of pointless details?’

  I held my arms out.

  ‘I went outside the hospital to get some fresh air. At three o’clock in the morning. A security guard found me and told the police that I most definitely hadn’t spent the whole night inside the hospital.’

  I grimaced and waited for Madeleine’s response. To my surprise she looked like she was about to burst into laughter.

  ‘I don’t know anyone else who could have something like this happen to them,’ she said. ‘No one at all. But go on. How did all this start? Are you in trouble with a client who’s now trying to frame you for murder, or what?’

  They were
reasonable questions. Extremely reasonable, in fact. But I had no answers that I felt like sharing with her. Which is more or less what I said.

  ‘It’s probably best if I don’t know too much,’ she said.

  I could have kissed her. I didn’t.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  She drank some water. I watched her long, slender fingers as they held the glass. No new ring. The man who bought perfume for her understood the value of proceeding slowly.

  ‘How are the kids?’ I said.

  ‘Fine, thanks. At long last they’ve accepted that their father and I are divorced. I think they’re happy with life.’

  ‘And your ex?’

  ‘Less happy, evidently.’

  ‘Sore loser,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said.

  We sat in silent camaraderie until our food arrived. Madeleine wielded her cutlery with such force it looked like she was planning to kill whatever was on the plate. She’d got divorced several years ago. It was the only way to get her husband to pull his weight at home.

  ‘You just want the name?’ she said.

  I cut tentatively at a piece of chicken.

  ‘It would be great to get hold of a photograph as well,’ I said. ‘I’ve scoured the preliminary investigation file I got hold of from the police like an idiot, looking for one, but I can’t find anything.’

  Madeleine didn’t understand.

  ‘A photograph of the witness?’

  ‘Of a missing boy you might have heard of. By the name of Mio.’

  7

  Without the name of the witness who claimed Jenny had been run down by a Porsche, I had nothing to go on. So I was left with the hunt for Mio. Madeleine and I parted with a promise to be in touch again soon. We smiled and hugged each other warmly. But when she turned and walked away I knew that something had changed. Madeleine was (and is) a loyal friend, and would do whatever she could to help me. But seriously – how relaxing is it to spend time with someone suspected of having committed two murders?

  Madeleine didn’t think she’d have any trouble getting hold of both the name of the witness and a photograph of Mio. But I was more doubtful.

  ‘There must be a picture of the boy,’ she said. ‘How else would the police have been able to look for him?’

  I’d been wondering that too. All I knew for certain was that there wasn’t a single photograph of him in the material I’d been able to check for myself. The boy was like a ghost. I could sense his presence somewhere close to me, but I couldn’t reach him. And that bothered me. Or rather, it frustrated me. Because I’m not the sort of man who believes in fairy tales, nor ghosts either, for that matter. The fact that I still didn’t know what he looked like was starting to annoy me more and more.

  Jeanette Roos, Mio’s maternal grandmother, didn’t want anything to do with me. His aunt, Marion, did eventually reply to the message I’d left on her phone. She didn’t have any photographs of her nephew, she said in a text message. Of course not. She hadn’t cared a damn about her sister, so why would she have any pictures of her child?

  I only have two personal photographs on my desk. They’re both of Belle. But that certainly wasn’t the case when my sister and brother-in-law were still alive. I blushed when I realised that if Belle had gone missing while my sister had been alive and someone had asked if I had a picture of her, the answer would have been no. Belle had been a baby when my sister died. She was of no interest to me. My sister and I used to meet up occasionally, for dinner or a drink. There was nothing wrong with my sister, but her husband was a different matter. If it hadn’t been for him, we’d have seen far more of each other. But I wouldn’t have had any photographs of Belle. In that regard I wasn’t the slightest bit better than Marion.

  I thought about Sara’s brother, Bobby. He had genuinely loved her, and wanted to clear her name. He ought to have had some pictures of his nephew. On his phone, if nowhere else. But I had no idea how I was supposed to get hold of that. I have to admit that I was starting to feel disheartened. Bobby had been based in Switzerland when he died. That was where he lived and worked, and that was where he had a girlfriend. Maybe I could get hold of her, ask her to dig out some old family photographs from whatever he had left behind? But in order to do that, I needed to know what her name was, and how to get hold of her. And I didn’t.

  I snatched up my phone and called Marion Tell again. This time she answered at once.

  ‘I thought I made it clear that I don’t have any photographs,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t, but Bobby’s girlfriend might,’ I said. ‘How do I find her?’

  ‘Goodness, I’ve got no idea. But perhaps she’ll be moving back home now that Bobby’s dead.’

  ‘Home? So she’s not from Switzerland?’

  ‘No, certainly not. They moved down there together. He went to work as a lorry driver, she as a hairdresser.’

  It was difficult to imagine a more unlikely move. Statistically speaking, they had to be pretty much unique. No one moves to Switzerland to drive lorries or cut hair. No one. Yet that was precisely what they had done.

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why in God’s name did they move?’

  ‘Bobby claimed he’d earn more money there. And there was all the fuss about Sara. I don’t think he was feeling that great.’

  I toyed with a pen on my desk. Sara’s family didn’t know I was suspected of having murdered Bobby (even if Bobby’s mother already held me responsible). So in that respect there was nothing odd about Marion being so unguarded when she spoke to me. But Marion was also a woman who had lost both her brother and her sister in the space of a year. Her only siblings. Regardless of whether she’d been close to them or not, their deaths ought to have left some sort of mark on her.

  ‘How do you mean, “all the fuss about Sara”?’ I said. ‘I thought she got her act together when she became a mother?’

  Marion sighed.

  ‘I suppose she held it together, more or less. But there was still something chaotic about her life. If you ask Mum, she’d say Bobby moved after Sara died, but that’s just her getting mixed up. He moved some time before that. I kept out of the way, didn’t want to get involved in all that nonsense. I assume it had something to do with her old friends. Those violent thugs.’

  Something chaotic about her life. Yes, that was certainly one way of putting it. I bit my lip to stop myself blurting out what I knew. That Sara had managed to have a child with Satan himself, and that he hadn’t given her a moment’s peace after she fled with his unborn child in her womb.

  ‘I want to get in touch with Bobby’s girlfriend,’ I said. ‘What’s her name, and how do I reach her?’

  ‘Her name’s Malin,’ Marion said. ‘I don’t know how you could contact her. I have absolutely no interest in helping you.’

  I ignored her comment.

  ‘You never met her?’

  A stupid question, but one that was worth asking.

  ‘No. But I assume we’re likely to meet tomorrow.’

  I was surprised.

  ‘So soon? Could you tell her from me that—?’

  ‘No, no, and no. I’m not going to pass on any messages from you. Tomorrow is Bobby’s funeral. And you know what? I think you should come.’

  ‘Er . . .’ I began.

  ‘Yes, come along,’ Marion said. ‘You seem to have been much closer to Bobby than I was. Come along to the funeral and feel like a member of the family.’

  Her voice was dripping with sarcasm and made me squirm.

  There was no way I could go to Bobby’s funeral, was there?

  My grandmother once said that before you turn sixty you attend less than five funerals, and then a countless number of them after that. She wasn’t a nice person, my grandmother. So I didn’t go to her funeral. Nor did my mum, Marianne, or my sister. What would we have been doing there? Celebrating the fact that the old bag was dead?

  Before I decided to go to Bobby’s funeral, I’d been to three in
the past. A friend’s, my brother-in-law’s, and my sister’s. The last one was the toughest. Someone had heard my sister say that if she died, she wanted everyone to wear bright clothes at her funeral. So I showed up in my best summer suit and a pale blue shirt. There was a big photograph of my sister on top of the coffin. The contrast between us couldn’t have been more pronounced. In the picture she was so blonde that her hair looked almost white. She had a fetching suntan. On her lap sat little Belle, just as fair as her mother. And there I sat, in the front pew. Her black half-brother. A man hardly anyone recognised because my sister and I preferred to meet up alone or not at all.

  It was a fantastic, beautiful summer’s day, and the singing of the children’s choir had almost raised the roof. My brother-in-law had a separate funeral. It rained then. My mother couldn’t stop crying as she buried her only daughter. Lucy was the same. But I just sat there staring at the white coffin and trying to understand how such a young person could just cease to be from one day to the next. I still haven’t got to grips with that. Or else I simply haven’t accepted it. I hate the fact that life is finite.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Lucy said when I told her of my plan later that evening. ‘Surely even you can see that there’s no way you can attend the funeral?’

  ‘You mean because the police think I was the person who ran him down and killed him?’

  ‘Duh, yes.’

  ‘Lucy, no one knows about that stupid theory. Thank God.’

  ‘What if the police are there?’

  ‘The police? Why the hell would they be at Bobby’s funeral?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Maybe to see if the murderer shows up?’

  ‘But Lucy . . .’

  I couldn’t help laughing. I ought to have been screaming, though. Yet another night at home with Lucy. We had now reached a – to my mind – dizzyingly large number of them.