The Press Club isn’t half as intellectual as the name implies. Like I said, I only go there because of their fantastic range of beers. Why a police officer like Didrik goes there, I have no idea. I suppose he must like the beer as well.
‘Either you haven’t got enough work on, or something else has made you take on such an idiotic commission,’ Didrik said.
‘I don’t know if I’d call it a commission,’ I said, drinking straight from the bottle.
‘That only makes it worse.’
Didrik looked like he’d been born with a brown beer bottle in his hand. The perfect accessory to his expensive jeans and bespoke jacket.
‘Do you still buy all your clothes in Italy?’ I asked wearily.
Wearily because I was envious.
‘Of course,’ Didrik said. ‘Where else am I going to shop? Dressmann?’
We burst out laughing at the same time.
A young woman sitting over in one corner with what looked like a really boring guy was looking at me. I looked back, and raised my bottle in a discreet greeting. She nodded and smiled shyly.
‘You sod, nice to see you haven’t changed,’ Didrik said, following my eyes.
‘I’m just looking,’ I said.
‘Right. How’s Lucy?’
‘Fine, thanks. We’re off to Nice in a couple of weeks.’
‘Just the two of you?’
‘Yep.’
‘And Belle?’
‘She’s going to stay with her grandparents.’
Didrik shook his head.
‘It’s a bit silly, trying to pretend that you and Lucy aren’t a couple, don’t you think?’
I shrugged and tried to get eye contact with the girl I’d raised my drink to. She looked back unflinchingly. The hunter in me woke up in less than two seconds. She was prey, and I didn’t even have to catch her. She was already lying there waiting for me, if I could just be bothered to pull my bow.
Didrik grinned.
‘You’re being childish, Martin. You’re going to have sex with that girl just to prove that you aren’t together with Lucy.’
I cleared my throat and put my bottle down. It was time to shift the focus of the conversation, even if he was basically right. Of course I’d end up having sex with the girl I’d spotted. But that had nothing to do with Lucy. No, I fucked because I was horny. If there were other underlying reasons, I wasn’t remotely interested in analysing them. Life’s complicated enough as it is.
‘Sara Texas,’ I said.
‘I’d rather talk about your sex life,’ Didrik said. ‘You’re such an inspiration.’
‘It never occurred to you that she might actually have been innocent?’
Didrik became serious.
‘Come off it,’ he said. ‘A little part of me honestly thought we were going to meet up for a beer because you were bored.’
I raised one eyebrow and he relented.
‘Okay, fine, we’ll do it your way. No, I never thought she was innocent. Because, as you’ve doubtless realised, she was extremely cooperative.’
‘Precisely,’ I said. ‘And since when do murderers behave like that?’
For some reason my keenness annoyed Didrik.
‘Okay, you need to calm down,’ he said sharply. ‘You’re talking rubbish, Martin. You’ve been badly informed, and it doesn’t suit you. It wasn’t the case – let me emphasise that, it wasn’t the case – that sweet little Sara started talking the moment we brought her in for her first interview.’
I stopped myself and waited for him to go on.
‘It all started when the police in Texas got in touch with a request for help. Obviously there was never any question of extraditing someone who might end up on death row, but we were more than prepared to bring her in to question her ourselves. The Yanks sent us what they had, and the prosecutor agreed to set up a preliminary investigation. We found her pretty much immediately, I seem to recall. And got nowhere. The cops in Texas had done a good job of linking her to the murders in Galveston and Houston, but it wasn’t enough. There was no forensic evidence.’
A waitress appeared and asked if we wanted any food to go with our beers. I ordered a bowl of nuts.
‘Please, go on,’ I said to Didrik. ‘You were saying that there was no forensic evidence?’
He ignored my unmistakably ironic tone.
‘So we brought her in for questioning. Have you seen pictures of her? She didn’t look older than fifteen or so. So damn . . . innocent. None of us believed she was guilty. I felt like starting by apologising for bothering her and calling a halt to the whole stupid thing there and then. But obviously I couldn’t do that, so we went ahead as planned. And do you know what she did then?’
‘No.’
‘She became defensive. Wouldn’t admit a thing.’
This was new to me.
‘She didn’t confess to any of the murders?’
‘Nope. Not that we thought that was strange. We certainly didn’t have enough to hold her, so we had to let her go. A colleague who was on his way home from work saw her leave Police Headquarters. He said she was crying like a baby.’
‘Doesn’t sound all that strange,’ I said.
‘Of course not,’ Didrik said. ‘But then the Yanks got in touch again. They’d received an anonymous email that we helped them to trace. The IP address led us to Sara.’
I waited for him to go on. The fact that the Americans had received an anonymous email didn’t feel all that exciting. The girl with Mr Charisma looked at me and smiled broadly when her date dropped his fork and leaned over to pick it up. I smiled back quickly. Sorted: I wanted her, she wanted me. Now all we had to do was arrange the practicalities.
‘An email,’ I said, to let Didrik know I was listening.
‘An email,’ he repeated. ‘Sent from Sara’s computer. Can you guess what it contained?’
‘No idea.’
‘A description of where the police could find the knife used in the Galveston murder.’
‘Let me guess,’ I interrupted. ‘It was in a shoebox that had been hidden in a swamp in Florida.’
‘Nice try, but wrong. It was in a plastic bag.’
‘Plastic bag, shoebox – who cares?’
‘In Sara Texas’s storage locker up in the attic.’
So there was compelling evidence pointing to Sara’s guilt. Of course I’d known that all along, but it still felt dispiriting to have it confirmed. That’s what happens to those of us who are always looking for the ultimate high. We often end up disappointed.
For a moment I had to check my own motives for getting involved in a dead woman’s eventual culpability for five murders. Could it simply be that I was bored? God knows, I’d done some pretty peculiar things in the past to liven up everyday life. And even though several years had passed, I was still in shock at the way my life had changed since Belle came to live with me.
But this time it was different, I told myself. I wasn’t just bored and out for an adrenalin kick. There were a lot of things about Sara’s case that appealed to me. It had been the same when she was still alive, too. I hadn’t been lying on the radio when I said that I would have liked to be her defence lawyer. The simple fact that the case had such a clear connection to Texas made my pulse-rate increase. I could still remember all the smells and colours I associated with my time in the state. I remembered the countless hours I spent in my car, driving all over the rugged landscape in an effort to see as much of it as possible. I had the car radio on at full blast, and I learned to love country music. That was my farewell tour, my farewell to the USA. And to my dad. There are some parental betrayals that we learn to live with, and there are those that we never get over. My dad’s was the latter sort.
‘I don’t know what I could have done differently,’ he had said as I stood and packed the car.
That was the first time I hit another person. Bang, right in the jaw, and he slumped to the ground. Then I slammed the boot shut and drove away. I left him lying in a cloud of sand and exhaust fumes. Once upon a time he had left my mum on her own with a small child. And he claimed he didn’t know what he could have done differently.
He died six months later. Neither Marianne nor I attended his funeral.
‘I can see I’ve managed to sow a few doubts,’ Didrik said, interrupting my thoughts.
I took a few deep swigs of my beer.
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘It was obvious that you had evidence against her. It’s a bit odd that she brought the murder weapon home from the US, though.’
‘I’m not sure the word “odd” really has any place in this context. I mean, we’re talking about a serial killer here.’
I laughed. Didrik could be quite funny, in spite of his strict adherence to the facts.
He went on: ‘Martin, she knew all the victims. Can you explain a coincidence like that to me?’
‘I don’t have to. Let’s talk about that email instead. What was your theory? That Sara was suddenly struck by such terrible remorse that she emailed the police in Texas after she’d been called in for questioning that first time?’
‘We’re never going to get an answer to that, and to be honest I don’t really care,’ Didrik said firmly. ‘The email came from a laptop we seized in her flat. The knife was in her storage-space in the attic, no one else had access to it. An attic that turned out to be an absolute goldmine when we went through it more systematically in conjunction with the full search of her home.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. We found the belt that was used in the third murder, her first one here in Sweden. You remember, she strangled an ICA-supermarket cashier. And we also found traces of arsenic.’
I frowned.
‘Which victim was she supposed to have poisoned?’
‘The fifth.’
I put my beer bottle down.
‘I’d like the whole of the report from the preliminary investigation.’
‘No problem, it’s in the public domain seeing as the charges were actually filed.’
‘I’d like to see the slops as well.’
Didrik’s face clouded over.
‘Of course.’
His mobile rang and he quickly pulled it out of his jacket pocket. I made use of the break by getting eye contact with the girl I’d been cruising. She got up from her chair and smiled apologetically at her date. It was a polite but strained smile. Nothing like the one she fired off at me as she passed our table on the way to the ladies’ room.
I saw Didrik chuckle as I slid out of my chair and followed her. She looked surprised but happy when I opened the door to the ladies’ bathroom and walked in.
‘Well, hello, you’re not allowed to be in here,’ said another woman who was washing her hands in the basin.
‘I’m not, am I?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you go into the men’s room and say the same thing to the women using the toilets in there.’
Now, I hadn’t actually been inside the men’s room first, so I didn’t honestly know if there were any women in there. But there usually were, and I thought that was justification enough for what I said. Not that I cared. The idea of separate toilet facilities for men and women feels ridiculously old-fashioned.
The woman washing her hands didn’t answer. She just finished up as quickly as possible and left the room.
‘Alone at last,’ I said to my prey, as if I’d been waiting all evening for this.
She giggled.
‘We aren’t,’ she said.
‘Sorry, we aren’t what?’
‘Alone.’
She gestured with her foot towards the row of toilets. They were all occupied. She was wearing extremely expensive shoes with very high heels. And she knew how to walk properly in them.
‘I’ve already got a date,’ she said.
Sorry, love, it’s too late to play hard to get, I thought.
‘He doesn’t seem to be terribly entertaining,’ I said.
She laughed loudly. Brilliant white teeth and eyes that were clouded with alcohol. The fact that she could still walk in those shoes was impressive.
‘True,’ she said. ‘I’d go so far as to say he’s pretty boring. I work with him, he asked me out.’
I took a few steps forward, standing shamelessly close to her. She didn’t move.
‘You deserve better,’ I whispered in her ear as I heard someone flush one of the toilets.
I put one hand gently on her backside.
‘Do you want to go home alone, or would you like company?’ I said.