The woman didn’t share her husband’s fiery temperament. Her whole being exuded calm reflection. I could tell just by looking at her that she wasn’t the sort of woman who would have left her children with an au pair she had the slightest reason to distrust.
‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘But try to understand my curiosity. How could Sara hide who she was from the family she saw every day, and even went on holiday with?’
The man looked sad all of a sudden. He was harder to read than his wife, but seemed a fundamentally sympathetic character.
‘That’s something we’ve given a lot of thought to,’ he said in a calmer tone of voice than before. ‘How could we not have known, not have realised? To be honest, we’ve even wondered if the police might have made a mistake. That all the bad qualities that Sara was supposed to have had were made up. But . . .’
He threw his arms out helplessly and fell silent.
‘That doesn’t sound very likely,’ Lucy concluded.
‘No, it doesn’t.’
His wife fiddled with her car-keys.
‘Don’t misunderstand us,’ she said. ‘Of course we could see that Sara was troubled, almost haunted. But she seemed incredibly grateful for the chance to be part of our family. She was happy. And she did a good job. So we never questioned keeping her on. She was far keener to do a good job than any of the girls we’ve had from better families.’
I heard what they were saying, and saw before me the cornerstone of American society that says there’s nothing better than a ‘self-made man’. Sara had all the trappings of someone who had dragged herself up from the bottom and was fighting to get on in life. Yet she still hadn’t managed it. Why had she been such a devoted au pair if she was simultaneously being dragged back into the gutter? Had she just been an unusually confused young woman? Or had she made a serious attempt to break away from her old life but failed?
God knows, many more than her had tried and failed.
Frustrated, I wiped away the beads of sweat that were starting to appear on my forehead.
‘I’ve already met Jenny,’ I said. ‘Do you know if she had other friends here in Houston I could go and see? To get a better idea of Sara, I mean.’
The Browns looked at each other.
‘There were two other au pairs she used to spend time with,’ the woman said. ‘Both Americans. But they don’t live here any more. I don’t even think they’re still in Texas.’
‘What about in Galveston?’ Lucy said. ‘We understand that you used to go there quite often.’
‘We still do,’ the man said. ‘But I’m not aware that Sara had any friends there.’
A mobile phone rang. The man pulled it from his inside jacket pocket and excused himself.
‘Now I come to think of it, there was someone,’ his wife said. ‘I remember Sara mentioning a Denise in Galveston. I never met her, but I know she used to work at our favourite hotel back then, the Carlton. Who knows, maybe she still works there?’
Denise. I made a mental note of the name.
I wondered with wry amusement what the Browns’ current favourite hotel was. They had evidently tired of the Carlton.
‘How come Sara stopped working for you if it was all going so well?’ Lucy said.
Sara’s former au pair mother let out a sigh.
‘We wondered that too,’ she said. ‘Some time during the spring of 2008 she changed. She spent almost all her free time in her room, she never went out in the city. Then came the news that she wanted to leave. Two weeks later she was gone. In hindsight we figured out that her behaviour changed when the taxi driver was murdered. At least the timing seemed to fit, anyway. My husband and I didn’t recognise Sara in that picture the police released after the murder. But she recognised herself, of course.’
I was thinking out loud: ‘Strange that she wasn’t in more of a hurry to leave the country after the murder. If I’d killed someone, I wouldn’t be cool enough to wait several weeks before getting to safety.’
The woman nodded eagerly.
‘That’s exactly what we thought. Because she was taking a huge risk. But if she was such a hardened criminal as the police say, perhaps it wasn’t so strange. And it would have attracted more attention if she’d upped and left us overnight.’
I put my hands in my trouser pockets and looked the woman right in the eyes.
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘What do you and your husband think? Did Sara murder all those people she was accused of killing?’
There was a pause before she answered. Her husband finished his phone call and came back.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m not a police officer, and I’m not a lawyer. But I’ve been forced to realise that it can sometimes be hard to know someone as well as you might wish. However much I might want Sara to have been innocent, there are still certain facts that I can’t close my eyes to. Why didn’t she get in touch with the police when they started looking for her? And if she was so desperate to have a normal life, what was it that drew her to circles where drugs and prostitution were commonplace?’
Sara Tell was becoming more and more of a paradox. And in my world such things lack all credibility. A paradox is based upon something having two contradictory sides. But I’m of the firm opinion that these two sides are never equally valid. There’s always one that has the upper hand. The contradiction is therefore only superficial, more like a façade hiding a well-concealed truth. Often an uncomfortable one, at that.
I remembered something else I had been thinking about.
‘Were you ever questioned by the police about the murder in Galveston?’
‘Sorry?’ the man said, starting to look angry again.
I hurried to reassure him.
‘As witnesses, not suspects. Sara had a long weekend off. Did the police ever ask you where she told you she was going?’
‘No,’ the man said. ‘But they didn’t need to. One of the police officers recognised her. He questioned her at the scene that night.’
‘We could never have said with any certainty where Sara went that weekend,’ the woman said. ‘But we both remember her talking about Galveston. And not San Antonio. We offered to help book the hotel but Sara declined our help. She said she already had a place to stay.’
Of course she did. But in San Antonio, not Galveston.
‘Was there anything else you wondered about?’ I said. ‘Anyone she knew who seemed a bit suspicious, anyone causing trouble for her?’
I know you’re not supposed to ask leading questions but sometimes I do anyway. Particularly when I haven’t got time to wait for the correct answer.
The Browns looked thoughtful.
‘I know she had problems with an ex-boyfriend from Sweden,’ the wife said. ‘But I suppose you already know about him?’
Yes, we did.
‘You never heard anything about a boyfriend in San Antonio?’ Lucy said.
They just shook their heads in response. That bothered me.
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Would it surprise you if I told you that Sara wasn’t in Galveston when the girl was murdered there, but in San Antonio instead? With Jenny. To see a guy she’d just got together with.’
The woman looked like she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
‘By now there’s very little that would surprise us,’ she said. ‘You must appreciate that yourself. But we never heard anything about a boyfriend in San Antonio.’
The man looked at his watch and grimaced.
‘I wish we could be of more help, but we both need to get off to work now.’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Thanks very much for your time.’
I gave them a card on which I had scribbled my new contact details.
‘Call me,’ I said. ‘If you think of anything else. Anything at all.’
It was the woman who took the card. She blurted out: ‘There was one more thing. That peculiar tattoo she got in Galveston.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘Out of the blue Sara suddenly had a name tattooed on the back of her neck. It got infected, took weeks to heal.’
‘She was so secretive about what the name meant,’ the woman said. ‘She claimed it was a nickname she’d been given in Sweden, but I never heard anyone use it. She didn’t either, come to that.’
The sun was burning my back.
‘What was the name?’ Lucy said.
Lucifer, I thought. Say Lucifer, so I’ve got something to go on.
But that wasn’t it.
‘The name was Lotus.’
‘Lotus?’
‘Yes. Just that. Lotus.’
And with that, the field of play expanded to include yet another name.
Lotus.
A name that someone had branded onto the back of Sara Texas’s neck.