It had gone nine o’clock by the time I got home. Lucy had put Belle to bed and was sitting on the terrace with a glass of wine.
‘Did it go okay?’ she said.
‘I don’t know how to answer that,’ I said.
My legs felt like they were made of soft toffee. I sat down, exhausted. Going in to get a wineglass felt like as much of a challenge as carrying a grand piano up the stairs.
I reached distractedly for Lucy’s glass.
‘How was she?’ she said, letting go of the glass without protest.
‘Peculiar.’
‘Did you fuck?’
I swallowed the wine and it caught in my throat. It stung like fire when I coughed.
‘For fuck’s sake, Lucy.’
‘You usually call me Baby.’
I rediscovered my legs and went in to get a glass of water. I heard noises from Belle’s room and hurried to take a look. She had got tangled up in the covers and was bumping the plaster-cast against the wall as she tried to pull free.
‘Shhh,’ I said, and helped her untangle herself.
I held my hand to her forehead and waited until she fell back to sleep. Then I padded gently out of her room. Lucy was still sitting where I had left her.
Without responding to her tawdry question I told her what I had found out from Marion. Lucy listened quietly but attentively.
‘You need to watch out,’ she said when I had finished. ‘You’re in a situation where you’re getting information from all sides, but with no way of evaluating it. Who knows what a bitter sister might blurt out? How can you be sure she isn’t making up all that stuff about Sara’s violent past?’
I drank some wine. From the street came the muffled sound of traffic, and the evening sky was heavy with the same clouds that had hung there all day. We ought to forget the whole thing and go to Nice like we’d planned. That would have been the right choice, the only rational option.
‘I don’t think she was lying, seeing as she was almost pathetically honest about everything else.’
‘You mean the nephew she let Social Services look after?’
‘Amongst other things.’
Lucy took her wineglass back.
‘Do you need me tonight or is it okay if I go home to sleep?’ she said.
I was seized by an irrational fear that if I let her leave the flat she’d never come back. I wouldn’t be able to live with that. No way.
As usual when I got scared, I adopted a defensive attitude. Because I knew what she was trying to say, indirectly.
‘You were the one who broke up with me.’
She stood up abruptly.
‘Don’t start with all that crap again,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to take that.’
I was on my feet just as quickly.
‘But it’s true. You said you weren’t prepared to give me another chance, but that you wanted to keep seeing me. Without any conditions or expectations. That’s exactly what you said.’
I sounded like a five-year-old trying to renegotiate an agreement that had been wrong from the outset without bursting into tears.
‘And here we are anyway,’ Lucy said quietly. ‘Full of expectations and weighed down with obligations. Not because we’re a couple but because we’re friends, Martin.’
I lowered my head wearily.
‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I see other people, that’s just the way it is. I didn’t think of it as wrong. I thought that’s how you wanted it. I’ve always assumed that you sleep with other people when you feel like it. And I don’t really have a problem with us doing that.’
I looked up cautiously.
Lucy was running a hand through her wild red hair. The way I loved curling it round my fingers.
‘In theory it’s a great agreement,’ she said. ‘But in practice . . .’
She fell silent.
I waited as long as I could bear to.
Then I asked, ‘What do you want, Lucy?’
She looked tense.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Right now everything feels pretty crap. This whole Sara Texas mess. It’s taken up so much time and energy. We’re not going to get to Nice, I think we both know that.’
She shook her head.
‘Bloody hell, Martin. Someone’s trying to frame you for murder. Someone who’s already run down and killed a woman in your car. Aren’t you scared?’
Her green eyes were wide with worry.
If I was scared? Yes, I was. But I was also determined not to let whoever was after me win. There aren’t many battles for our peace of mind, and we can’t afford to lose them.
‘Of course I’m scared,’ I said. ‘But the threat won’t get any smaller if we just ignore it. That’s starting to look very obvious now.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘First of all, sleep. Tomorrow I’m going to call Didrik at National Crime and tell him what’s happened. It’s important that the police have everything documented. Then we need to try to figure out who came to the office pretending to be Bobby Tell. I’ll let Didrik have the mobile number I’ve been in touch with, maybe he can trace it back to someone. And I think we ought to consider the idea of going to Texas. It could be a bad mistake to think we can sort this out without leaving Stockholm.’
I realised that the thought had been there all along. I couldn’t tackle five different murders, and would never have time to do so. But I didn’t have to. Sara’s time as a suspected murderer had started in the USA, and there were only two murders there. If I could get her cleared of the two Texas murders, the Swedish ones would follow.
I said as much to Lucy.
‘Texas is so far away,’ she said. ‘And the Swedish murders are in our own backyard.’
‘But that breaks the chronology,’ I said. ‘It seems pointless to ignore the murders that first brought her to the attention of the police.’
Lucy shook her head slowly.
‘I think she did commit those murders, Martin. All of them.’
‘Still? You still think Sara Tell murdered five people? In spite of everything that’s happened in the past few days?’
She shrugged.
‘The evidence,’ she said. ‘The weight of evidence is overwhelming.’
‘Only if we fail to get to the bottom of this,’ I said. ‘I think that’ll show all the so-called evidence in a completely different light.’
An unnecessarily chill evening wind was making me shiver. We walked quietly back into the flat.
‘We,’ Lucy said. ‘You said we need to find out who came to the office and asked you to help Sara. That we ought to go to Texas.’
I stroked her back.
‘If you want to,’ I said.
‘Do you need me, then?’ she said.
The question was incomprehensible, no matter how simple it sounded.
‘More than ever,’ I whispered.
She hugged me harder than I deserved.
‘Prove it, then,’ she said. ‘Prove it.’
Sleep does something to us. Something good. When I woke up the following morning I had slept for over ten hours. My head was heavy when I lifted it from the pillow. From the kitchen I could hear muffled sounds from Lucy and Belle.
Lucy had stayed the night, of course. She had asked me to prove how much I needed her. So I did. The only way I knew how. I made love to her until I quite literally passed out. That sort of effort ought to have earned me a few points.
‘Am I going to preschool today?’ Belle said when I walked into the kitchen.
Lucy stared at my naked body.
‘You forgot your underwear, Martin.’
Without a word I went back to the bedroom. I’m man enough to admit when I’ve made a mistake, and to put it right.
I returned to the kitchen, this time wearing not only pants but jeans and a t-shirt.
Belle giggled and I kissed her on the head.
‘You’re not going to preschool today. Signe’s going to come and look after you.’
Lucy smiled playfully as I poured a cup of coffee. My hand was shaking slightly.
‘What about us?’ she said. ‘Are we staying at home with Signe as well?’
I drank the hot coffee, felt it run down my throat and warm me from the inside in the summer chill. Rested and relatively recently fucked, I felt ready for any battle.
‘We’re going to work,’ I said. ‘And we’re going to call the police.’
Which was one of the first things I did when we got to the office. Everything was the same as usual there, which was the contrast I needed to understand how much my life had changed over the course of the weekend.
Someone had stolen my car and run down and killed another person.
That sort of thing doesn’t pass without leaving its mark.
People say that the police are always drinking coffee. It’s true. During my short time as a police officer in Texas I had more coffee breaks than at any other time of my life. And from what I’d heard, things were no different in Sweden.
When I finally managed to get hold of Didrik I was pretty sure he was in the middle of a coffee break. Not that I said as much when he took the call.
‘Bloody hell, are you sitting there having a wank at work? I’ve been calling and calling, but you don’t seem to have had a spare hand to answer with.’
I thought it was very funny. A cop who needed two hands for a wank had to be pretty special.
Didrik didn’t appear to share my opinion.
‘Martin, did you want anything in particular?’
You could say that.
I began with the most important point.
‘When can I have my car back? I hate hire cars. It feels like I’m cruising round in a Batmobile for pensioners.’
Didrik muttered something inaudible to someone who was evidently standing nearby.
‘I’m afraid I can’t answer that at this moment in time,’ he said.
Can’t answer that at this moment in time?
‘Sorry, all due respect to the forensic examination, but how long is it going to take?’
‘I don’t know. Anyway, it’s only been twenty-four hours.’
He was right there, of course, but I was keen to get my life back to normal again. Ideally as soon as possible.
The line fell silent.
‘Anything else?’ Didrik said. ‘If not, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.’
Maybe that should have set my alarm bells ringing. But it didn’t. Unless they were ringing too quietly for me to hear.
‘I’ve got more to tell you,’ I said in a slightly louder voice.
‘Okay,’ Didrik said.
His dismissive attitude was unsettling me.
‘I’ve been doing some research,’ I said. ‘Amongst other things, I went to see Sara Tell’s mother.’
I heard Didrik sigh.
‘Didn’t I tell you to leave that shit alone?’
I ignored him. Again.
‘The man who came to my office wasn’t Bobby,’ I said. ‘Jeanette showed me a picture of her son. It wasn’t the guy who claimed he wanted to clear his sister’s name.’
Another silence on the line.
‘So who was it, then?’ Didrik said.
‘No idea. But I’m pretty pissed off that I didn’t ask the guy to show me some ID.’
I sighed as I said that. How could I have been so naïve that I didn’t even ask the man calling himself Bobby to show me his driving licence?
‘I can imagine,’ Didrik said.
His dry tone of voice brought me up short. Then, and only then, did I hear the alarm bells.
‘I’ve got a phone number, too,’ I said, reading out the fake Bobby’s mobile number. ‘If you’ve got time, it would be great if you could help me check it out. See if it’s cropped up in other cases, that sort of thing.’
‘I might be able to do that. Anything else?’
I hesitated. In the end I decided to tell him the rest of what I’d found out.
‘So you met Marion?’ Didrik said. ‘Interesting woman. Good that you seem to have taken in what she told you. You can’t deny that it reinforces the suspicion that Sara was guilty, can you?’
I raised my eyebrows in surprise.
‘Sorry, but did you know Sara used to be in a gang that beat people up? If you did, why wasn’t there anything about that in the preliminary investigation?’
‘The information we had was very hard to substantiate,’ Didrik said. ‘And we didn’t need it. As you know, we had plenty of other evidence.’
I didn’t agree.
Didrik went on before I had time to say anything.
‘It’s a coincidence that you’ve called, because we were about to try to get hold of you,’ he said. ‘We need to talk to you again. Would you mind coming down here?’
In spite of the polite phrasing, I could detect an order in his tone. That worried me.
‘Sure,’ I said slowly. ‘What’s this about?’
‘We can talk about that when you get here.’
‘Talk about what? Didrik, if . . .’
‘Save your questions and get down here. Preferably right away.’
I felt a familiar stubbornness flare up.
‘What happens if I don’t come? I’ve got a few other things to be getting on with.’
Didrik cleared his throat.
‘If you don’t come voluntarily in the next half an hour, I’m afraid I shall send someone to pick you up. Which would you prefer?’