‘Christ, Martin, that’s enough!’
Didrik’s voice was a warning, so loud and clear that no one could possibly mistake it. Not even the children. The girl stopped running and turned to look at the adults.
Didrik waved to them.
‘It’s okay,’ he said, and tried to smile. ‘We’ve just got a grown-up thing to sort out here.’
But the boy was already on his way over to us.
‘Are you my daddy?’ he said. ‘Are you?’
His words breathed life into some terrible childhood memories. I didn’t see my father once when I was growing up. I lived with my very blonde mother and my equally blonde sister, and every time I saw a black man in the street I thought: Could that be him? Until I reached the age of ten I was obsessed by the idea that my dad was out there somewhere, that I could find him if I just made enough of an effort. It never happened. No matter how hard I looked, or however many people I asked, I never found him.
Rebecca ran to meet the boy.
‘Sebbe, he’s just a man we know. He isn’t your daddy.’
The neighbours stared from Didrik to Rebecca with their mouths gaping. Didrik tried to explain what they’d just seen.
‘Of course you know he’s adopted,’ he said. ‘He’s clearly at the age where he wants to know more about his background.’
‘And his name,’ I said.
If looks could kill, I’d have reached my last breath several seconds ago. My heart was pounding like a steam-hammer, but I was still alive.
‘Mummy, what’s going on?’ the girl asked.
‘Nothing, I think,’ the woman said, and glanced anxiously at Didrik.
‘Absolutely nothing,’ Didrik said in the same tone of voice he had just used on me.
His tone caused a reaction in his visitors. No one likes feeling threatened. The man stood up.
‘I think we’ll be going now,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’
The woman stood up as well. The girl ran over to her and took her hand. Rebecca was still standing on the grass with her arms round Mio. She looked horrified.
The neighbours thanked her. I wondered if they’d ever come back.
‘I’ll explain another day,’ Didrik said.
He was evidently more optimistic than me.
The neighbours disappeared. As did Rebecca. Holding the boy by the hand, she vanished into the house.
‘What are you going to explain, Didrik?’ I said when we were alone. ‘Because, speaking purely for myself, I’d much rather not wait until another day.’
Didrik was standing motionless with his hands in his trouser pockets. His gaze was fixed on a point far out in the water. His ribcage rose and fell in time with his breathing. In and out, in and out. He looked the way he always did. Like a pleasant, affluent man in the prime of life. Warm and open. Not like a sadistic child-beater, or a murderer.
I didn’t like the silence that had arisen.
‘That wasn’t Sebbe,’ I said, to break it.
At last Didrik looked away from the sea.
‘What do you know about that? You don’t give a damn about children. You hardly care about your own.’
I let the insult pass.
‘True,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what Sebbe looks like. But I have, despite your efforts to prevent it, seen pictures of Mio. And unlike other people, I can tell one black child from the other. That lad on the grass was Sara Texas’s son. So what have you done with your own?’ The clicking sound came from the left, from inside the house. I had no trouble recognising it, and I knew exactly what I was going to see when I instinctively turned my head.
‘You need to leave now.’
Rebecca was standing in the doorway with a rifle in her hand. She was remarkably calm. So, to my immense surprise, was I.
‘Are you stupid?’ I said. ‘You’re going to shoot me here? Unarmed? Sober and in daylight, in the middle of a residential area?’
I shook my head and before she had time to think about what I was doing, I sat down on one of the chairs at the table. It had a high back that reached all the way to the hair on the back of my head. I leaned back comfortably.
‘Go on, then,’ I said. ‘Shoot me as I sit here. But you’ll have to explain it to the police afterwards. Why you shot me while I was sitting at your breakfast table.’
‘They won’t find you.’
She came closer. Didrik watched what was going on without intervening. But I could see that he was far from sure if he liked the turn things had taken.
I thought about everyone else who had died. Sooner or later they had turned up, and so would I. Rebecca took a few more steps towards me. There was no sign of the boy. I sat calmly where I was.
‘It’s probably best if you stop now,’ I said. ‘You’ll never be able to explain to the police why you shot me with a rifle from a distance of less than a metre.’
Then Didrik walked over to Rebecca. Gently he put one hand on her shoulder.
‘That’s enough. I’ll take care of this.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Her words provoked Didrik. Quickly and roughly, he tried to grab the rifle. She refused to let go, and went with him. Her scream echoed across the neighbourhood.
‘Let go of me! Damn it, let go of me!’
Then the boy appeared again. He was standing in the doorway with tears running down his cheeks. I felt a pang in my chest. It was Mio, alright. There was no doubt about it.
Rebecca caught sight of him too.
‘Hello, sweetie, I thought I told you to wait indoors.’
At last she let go of the weapon. Didrik tried to hide it behind his back. Completely idiotic. You can’t fool children with silly tricks like that. They see what there is to see, then demand an explanation.
Rebecca’s eyes were full of tears as she walked back into the house. She picked the boy up in her arms and he sobbed silently against her shoulder.
Didrik and I were left alone again. With the minor difference that he was now armed. I’m happy to admit that it bothered me.
‘Aren’t you going to sit down?’ I said.
‘Rebecca was right. You need to leave now. And I need to call the police.’
‘Really?’ I said.
I said it more quietly than I had imagined. Did he really think they could get away with this?
‘No one’s going to believe you,’ Didrik said, as if he could read my mind. ‘No one.’
I couldn’t understand his reasoning, because I had proof. There were pictures of Mio. And there were DNA tests. There’d be no problem proving that Mio was Sara Texas’s son. I said as much to Didrik.
‘And there’s also his father,’ I concluded.
Those words made Didrik start.
‘He doesn’t want him.’
‘Yes – he does. That’s why I’m here.’
Didrik laughed.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Martin.’
He sat down with the rifle across his lap.
He rubbed his face with his hands. People have done that for aeons. Tried to massage tiredness away by rubbing their face. It doesn’t work.
It was a bewildering scene to take in. We were sitting in a delightful garden with the sea in the background. It could have been idyllic. But it was actually hell.
‘Did you kill your own son, Didrik?’ I said.
He jerked as if I’d punched him in the face.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
I held my arms out. I wasn’t sure of anything. Maybe Didrik did hit children.
‘I know everything,’ I said. ‘I know you moved because you’d been reported to Social Services. I know about the terrible bruises. And how happy you were when you changed preschools. And then you moved here.’
Didrik’s jaw dropped. He opened and closed his mouth several times before he managed to say anything sensible.
‘Is that what people are saying?’ he said. ‘Is that what you’ve heard?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And that’s not all I’ve heard. Someone told me Sebbe was ill. Seriously ill.’
‘Who said that?’
‘I’ve talked to a number of different people. Discreetly, to stop anyone else having to die. I talked to Sebbe’s own godfather, for instance. Your best friend.’
It was a ridiculous gambit. Herman hadn’t said a word about Didrik’s alleged abuse of Sebastian.
‘He’s not my best friend. But his wife used to be Rebecca’s. Until she fell for the same crazy stories as you. Of course she changed her mind when she found out how ill Sebbe was, but by then we’d already cut off all contact. Herman probably never really understood that, sadly. I’m sure he still thinks of me as a good friend. He and his wife live what one might call separate lives.’
I leaned forward and rested my elbows on the cool tabletop.
‘So tell me, then,’ I said. ‘Where’s Sebbe?’
Didrik could no longer look me in the eye. He looked at the trees, the grass, the sky, but not at me.
‘He died.’
‘You killed him?’
‘Are you really that stupid?’
Didrik got to his feet with a roar. The rifle fell to the ground. I forced myself not to move. So it was true, what Madeleine had said: Sebbe had been ill, not abused.
‘I didn’t kill my own son,’ Didrik whispered.
He was panting as if he’d run a marathon in stifling heat.
‘And I didn’t kill Jenny, Bobby, Fredrik or Elias,’ I said. ‘Or anyone else.’
I tried to hold my voice steady.
Didrik shook his head.
‘Sebbe was suffering from an extremely aggressive form of cancer, which was diagnosed far, far too late. In Sweden they didn’t even want to try to treat him with anything other than palliative care.’
I don’t know what I’d expected to hear, but this wasn’t it. Astonished, I listened to a story I had little reason to doubt.
‘They take a different view here in Denmark,’ Didrik said. ‘They had some new medication that was still at the trial stage, and they were willing to test it on him.’
‘So you sold your house to fund the treatment?’
‘The Swedish authorities weren’t prepared to pay for it. We didn’t have time to persuade them to change their minds. And of course we knew we could actually get hold of the money.’
‘Couldn’t you just mortgage the house?’
Didrik looked away.
‘No. We knew we’d be staying in Denmark . . . for a while. To start with we lived in Copenhagen, where Sebbe received his treatment. Then we moved here. Rebecca lived in Aarhus for several years at the start of her career. That’s why the Danish authorities accepted her as a property-owner.’
‘Where did he die?’
‘Here in Ebeltoft.’
‘When?’
‘In November. Only a few months after we found out he was sick. By then he’d already been unwell for a while, but everything was delayed by the bizarre distraction of those claims that his problems weren’t the result of illness but because his parents were monsters.’
I didn’t know where to start. This was too big, too implausible. Implausible was the word that stayed with me. Sebbe had died in November. The same month Sara Texas took her own life and her son disappeared.
‘You replaced one child with another. Do you have any idea how sick that is?’
Didrik slumped in his chair.
‘You really don’t have a very high opinion of me, do you?’ he said.
I swallowed hard.
‘You’ve kidnapped a child. Murdered at least four people. How high should my opinion of you be?’
Didrik took his time before he replied. Perhaps he didn’t have a very high opinion of himself any more. A sleepy wasp mounted an attack on us. I knocked it aside with my hand and saw it fall to the ground. Tired fighters fall fast, I concluded.
‘I didn’t kidnap him.’
The words were so light, weighed absolutely nothing individually. But together they were dynamite.
‘Sorry?’
He looked me right in the eye.
‘I made a promise to save him. A promise that was actually forced upon me, but that no longer matters. Never in my worst nightmares could I have imagined that everything would turn out like this.’
My mouth felt dry as dust.
‘Who was it, Didrik? Who the hell made you promise to save Mio?’
His voice was barely audible when he replied.
‘Sara. I promised his mother, Sara.’