In a lot of ways cities are like people. When one is fashionable, it’s really fucking fashionable. And for one that used to be cool and fashionable but no longer is, there’s no way back. Barcelona is the clearest example of this. People who go there today can never get the magical first impression as those who went for the first time in the eighties and nineties. Time can be merciless. I’ve no idea how that can be prevented.
Galveston is far more tragic than Barcelona. Galveston’s age of greatness is so far back in time that there’s no one left alive who can remember it. Lucy was steering the car through areas where colourful wooden houses stood side by side with abandoned hovels.
‘Exciting,’ she said. ‘They’ve done a great job of integrating the disadvantaged into society. Every second house looks like it’s about to fall down, while the others look like something designed by Alice in Wonderland.’
I saw a chance to occupy my mind with something new, and gave a brief explanation of why the city looked the way it did. I told her about the hurricanes which sweep in to torment Galveston each year, tearing apart any buildings that aren’t strong enough. With my eyes half-closed behind my shades I talked about American society’s lack of solidarity and how much I actually like that, because it makes reasonable demands of individuals, as long as it doesn’t go too far. When a hurricane blows down the homes of hardworking people, I think it would be acceptable for society as a whole to help repair them.
‘Do most people have home insurance here?’ Lucy said.
‘Yes, but that doesn’t cover extreme weather conditions. They get defined as force majeure.’
‘So people don’t get financial compensation?’
‘Exactly.’
Force majeure. I tried out the expression, and decided it was magnificent. Force majeure was why I couldn’t take Lucy to Nice as we had planned. Exceptional circumstances had forced me to take drastic decisions. Force majeure was also the reason I had left Sweden even though the police had told me to stay in Stockholm. If I had felt confident that they were doing their job I would have acted differently. I would have felt secure in the knowledge that they had reached the only reasonable and acceptable conclusion: that I was innocent. But things didn’t seem to be moving in that direction, which was why I had, as the stupid phrase goes, taken the law into my own hands.
We checked into the Carlton Hotel. I paid for two nights but hoped we would be able to leave after just one. In spite of strenuous efforts to attract Lucifer’s attention we still hadn’t heard from him. All that remained of our plan was to meet Denise. We had come to the end of the road in Texas. It was almost time to go home.
While we were waiting for the key to our room I pulled my mobile out of my pocket again. Still no messages or calls from Belle’s grandparents. Irritated, I tried calling again. Still no answer. Hopeless people. I’d been through this before. They would disappear on an outing all day, and I would break out in nerve-induced eczema when I couldn’t get hold of them. I had reluctantly learned to appreciate that, because it taught me how much Belle meant to me.
I wondered what my sister would have thought if she could see me now. All sweaty palms and eyes red with tiredness. She’d have said she was disappointed. She would have wondered how I could leave Belle alone when I was in such a dangerous situation.
But that’s not what I had done, I thought. I hid her away in the archipelago with Boris to watch over her. She wouldn’t have been any safer if I’d hidden her in the Pope’s wardrobe in the Vatican.
The thought of Boris made me feel calmer for a while. He had promised to give me an update in a few hours. If Belle’s grandparents didn’t bother to get in touch in the meantime, at least Boris would let me know that everything was okay.
At last the receptionist was ready.
‘You’re on the top floor,’ she said. ‘The elevator’s over there.’
I thanked her and then asked the question that contained the entire purpose of our trip to Galveston.
‘Denise Barton,’ I said. ‘Does she work here?’
The receptionist’s smile faded.
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘But she used to work here, didn’t she?’
‘Yes, but that was several years ago.’
‘You don’t know where she’s working now?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
I smiled my most ingratiating smile.
‘It would be a huge help if you could ask around,’ I said. ‘Lucy and I would really like to get in touch with her. It’s urgent, really very important.’
The receptionist was more malleable than the old woman at the riding school.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said. ‘I’ll get back to you.’
We left it at that and squeezed into the lift.
Lucy let out a whistle when we walked into our room. I had booked a mini-suite with a view of the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps the magnificent view would help Lucy relax.
‘Have we got anything planned here, apart from seeing Denise?’ Lucy said.
‘Not that I know of,’ I said.
‘Good,’ Lucy said. ‘Then I’m going to take a long bath.’
She shut herself in the bathroom and I sat down on the bed with my eyes fixed on the big picture window. The view was magnificent. The water was clear blue, the beach endless. Unfortunately it was also packed to bursting with people. Presumably that was why Lucy would rather lie in a bath indoors than on a sun-lounger outside. Best to stay inside until the sun went down or the receptionist got in touch to say where we could find Denise Barton.
Exhausted, I gave in to tiredness and lay back on the bed. The whitewashed ceiling with its little spotlights had an almost hypnotic effect on me. I pretended the lights were tiny stars and that I was drifting weightless in space, out of reach of anyone trying to catch me.
I believed I had solved a large part of the mystery that had made Sara Tell so hard to understand at first. The whole story was more logical if there was a link between her involvement in Lucifer’s network and her decision to come specifically to Houston. As far as we were aware, Sara had never even sat on a horse before she left Sweden. Something else must have enticed her to Texas. I thought about what her sister, Marion, had said. That Sara had belonged to a gang who wreaked havoc on the streets of Stockholm. Could that have been where she got her contacts?
To say I had doubts about my own theory was putting it mildly. If Lucifer’s network extended all the way to Sweden, then I wouldn’t have been the only one who knew about it. The police in Texas and Stockholm would have known. But perhaps Sheriff Stiller had been right: if Sara had been part of Lucifer’s network, she was so far from the centre that she hadn’t shown up on the police’s radar.
All that linked Sara to Lucifer were some sporadic mentions in a diary that turned out to belong to someone else. How much significance could I place on something like that? When we weren’t even sure that the Lucifer mentioned in the diary was actually the mafia boss and not someone completely different?
‘Baby?’ I said in a loud voice.
‘Mmm,’ Lucy said from the bathroom.
‘Why did Jenny send Bobby her diary?’
‘To get Sara exonerated.’
‘But what specifically in the diary would do that? There was nothing in there that could help Sara. The entries weren’t dated, and there was nothing that gave her an alibi for either of the murders.’
Silence from the bathroom. The only sound was the lapping of the water, as if Lucy were splashing it with her fingers.
I got up from the bed abruptly and ran over to the bathroom.
‘Are you okay?’ I said, pushing at the half-open door.
Lucy was lying in the bath with water up to her chin and her hair in a knot on top of her head. She looked at me with wide eyes.
‘Yes. Are you?’
I laughed and leaned against the edge of the door.
‘Sorry, I’m getting paranoid.’
‘Martin, no one could blame you if you were. You’ve got far too much on your mind right now. What did you think had happened?’
I shook my head. I refused to talk about the images that had flitted through my overloaded brain. Visions of someone sneaking into the bathroom and holding Lucy’s head underwater. Or cutting her with a knife and turning the bathwater red.
‘Are you getting out soon?’ I said.
‘I’ve only just got in,’ Lucy said. ‘Feels like you could do with relaxing as well.’
I didn’t respond, and walked back out into the room again. My pulse was too high and I was sweating even though the air-conditioning was doing its best to turn our room into a fridge. I had to make sure I didn’t lose my grip. There was no time for that.
‘The diary,’ I said, loudly enough for Lucy to hear. ‘It proves nothing. Jenny must have realised that.’
‘Possibly,’ Lucy said. ‘But I can’t think what she meant with it if not to help Sara.’
‘Yes, I’m sure that’s what she wanted, I just don’t understand how it . . .’
I broke off abruptly.
Because I did understand.
Without any hesitation, I expanded my theory with yet another supposition.
‘The diary was never about giving Sara an alibi or revealing anything revolutionary about her life,’ I said. ‘It was about one single thing, and that was to make sure that the link to Lucifer was made visible in the investigation. That was why she removed the passages showing that it was her diary.’
‘Because she didn’t want to be linked to Lucifer?’
‘Exactly. But she failed. The police had nothing else to indicate that Sara had anything to do with Lucifer, and therefore no one reacted to the contents of the diary. It’s not even certain anyone bothered to read it. Sara herself didn’t want anything to do with it, after all.’
I heard Lucy knock over what sounded like a plastic bottle, and resisted the urge to dash to her rescue again.
‘Or else Boris was right when he guessed that Lucifer had friends in the police. Which means it isn’t impossible that someone actually read the diary but made sure it got discounted from the investigation. The fact that no one in Sweden reacted to the name isn’t so strange, but Jenny took it to the police in Houston first. Regardless of the fact that they can’t read Swedish, the name Lucifer ought to have jumped out at anyone in the know.’
Everything she said was right, but the idea was still pretty damn difficult to accept. The suggestion that Lucifer’s network was so extensive that it even included police officers working on their investigation into him. But maybe that was why they failed to get him for more than assault.
Lucy continued her analysis from the bath.
‘One thing that contradicts Boris’s guess about Lucifer’s connections to the police is the fact that we haven’t had the slightest response to our attempts to get his attention.’
The same thought had occurred to me. I wasn’t happy about that. We had gone over the top and had called far too many people. There was a serious risk that we had attracted the attention of police officers who were merely doing their job. It would be unfortunate if another police force started to regard me as a potential criminal.
Then the phone on the bedside table rang. It was the receptionist.
She had found Denise Barton.