The Truth Behind the Lie Read online

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  PROLOGUE

  The rain was so strange the day they took Julia. Tiny drops, a heavy mist almost, but slowly and imperceptibly, you still got soaking wet. Julia noticed it, too:

  “Look at the rain, Mamma! It’s not really falling. It’s like those tiny mosquitos; what are they called, Mamma?”

  She turned her face up to me, her tiny nose damp, and her hood fell off her head for the fifteenth time in a row. I pulled it back on, not all that lovingly and tenderly, as I think back, and I took her hand.

  “Are you thinking of no-see-ums? Come on, now, Julia, we’re going to be late.”

  She wrangled her hand out of mine. She was stubborn that way. IS. She IS stubborn.

  “Oh, right, no-see-ums.”

  I’ve thought back on those words so often. The last words I heard from my daughter:

  “Oh, right, no-see-ums.”

  As if they could give me a clue.

  CHAPTER 1

  Private detective. If the police can’t help, call me!

  Kouplan isn’t sure if he should have mentioned the police. He knows how words work. Any police officer reading his ad would get stuck on the word police and that could bring unwanted attention. On the other hand, he needed to reach the right kind of clients. Now his ad is up on the same website as all the ads for cheap, really cheap, and super cheap cleaning services. It’s been up for two weeks now and not a bite.

  His e-mail address is a regular Hotmail address, like thousands of others, and not connected to any other place on the net. He’s certain it can’t be traced. Nobody can come knocking on his door unexpectedly.

  * * *

  He’d found the computer in the trash room of his apartment complex. It worked just fine. It had an old operating system and hardly any memory. A week later, he found a monitor in the same trash. Its only fault was that it weighed a ton and had the resolution from the Windows NT era. When he connected it and started the computer, a box popped up and told him the hard drive was full. It seemed there were hundreds of photos of a few neighbors from the other end of the apartment complex. Every once in a while, he’d glance at them. Today he just wants to find out if anyone answered his ad.

  Hi Kouplan! Thanks for your message. I’m fine. So are the kids. How are you doing? Are things starting to work out? The lawyers didn’t have anything new for me, but I promise (as you know) to get in touch as soon as I find out anything useful. Right away. Take care now and love from me! Karin

  He stares at his message for a whileb and wonders if he should answer now or later. “Are things starting to work out?” Well, now, that all depends on what you mean by that. He clicks the next mail.

  Saw your ad. Need your help right away to find my little girl who disappeared last Monday, near the Globe Arena Center. Can’t call the police. Will pay well.

  Pay well? Kouplan would have leapt at it even if just the word pay had appeared. As he searches her name, he thinks he would like to believe he’d help even if she didn’t have any money. A missing child. His mom lost a child once. Actually, twice.

  * * *

  He Googles her name and e-mail. On her Facebook page, she looks blond and average, some office worker, and has thirty-two friends. She works in telephone support, it appears, and he doesn’t detect any hint of an undercover policewoman. He types a reply:

  Hi, Pernilla. I’m a private detective. I have worked on kidnappings among other things. Give me your number and I’ll be in contact. I can help you.

  He realizes he’s shaking. Walking around in Stockholm would be the stupidest thing he could do, given who he is. Stockholm, a city where people walk through the city with their bags of groceries and talk breezily into their smartphones about their fish pedicures and Princess Estelle. A city where every corner can be dangerous and anyone could dig their claws into you, like a harpy, and demand your soul.

  On the other hand, from now on he will be the detective. He’s the one who will be spying on others, not the person spied on, or whatever the word for that could be. He’d be one with the shadows.

  CHAPTER 2

  Pernilla has noticed that she’s been re-washing clean mugs ever since Julia disappeared. Rubbing invisible stains on the stove, working late into the evening to avoid hearing the silence, the water running through the pipes. Julia’s absence is a vacuum, a deadly gas, if she lets it inside. So she dusts the clean shelves one more time and holds on to whatever keeps her busy. Reads all the papers, looks for clues, takes out money from the bank in case they want a ransom. She searches online under “girl found” and has gone back hundreds of times to the place where Julia pulled her hand away, but she hasn’t contacted the authorities, for her own, very specific reasons. That private detective mentioned situations where the police can’t help. That’s what gave her the courage to contact him.

  She’s dusting when her phone pings, shattering the silence. The sound makes her jump. She’s put her phone on the highest volume, so she wouldn’t miss a call in case it was Julia, or someone who found Julia. Now, she slides her finger along the screen, opens the message, hopes. It is the private detective and his last sentence holds her heart like a parachute. I can help you.

  The detective with nothing more than a Hotmail address wants her phone number. Her dog Janus is ready to pee on himself. He’s whining and giving small barks as he stands by the door. A dog’s bladder does not care whether or not someone has disappeared.

  * * *

  There are so many ifs. If they hadn’t decided to go shopping at the Globe Arena Center on that very day. If she had held on tighter to Julia’s hand. If there hadn’t been so many people around. If they’d at least taken Janus with them.

  Janus pees on his favorite post. When he’s done, Pernilla raises her voice into an eager falsetto.

  “Janus! Find Julia!”

  Janus wags his tail.

  “Janus! Where’s Julia?”

  She tries to make it sound like a game, but her voice breaks. Where is Julia? Is she even alive?

  Janus wags his tail and looks around, confused. Pernilla squats down and buries her face in his fuzzy coat.

  “It’s all right,” she murmurs into his soft ear. “You wouldn’t know.”

  They say mothers can tell by instinct if their children are alive or dead, but the more she tries to feel her instincts, the less she can differentiate her instincts from her desires. Finally, she shoves the thought away. She can’t leave that gateway open. She’s holding hard to the leash with one hand, her telephone with the other.

  Thirty seconds after she sends her number, her phone rings.

  * * *

  Kouplan isn’t sure what he should expect, but he’s still surprised by how small her voice sounds. You can cry your eyes out—can you cry your voice out? Pernilla’s voice isn’t loud, but she has an obvious Stockholm dialect, and he makes his first-ever mental note as a detective:

  She’
s from here. A native.

  She asks what he thinks.

  “One website said that if a child has been missing for more than a week, it’s probably … it’s probably too late. Is it? Is it really too late?”

  He hasn’t studied the subject, but he knows that answering questions has one purpose: to create trust.

  “Each case is different,” he says with his most Swedish accent. “There are always exceptions and there’s always a way.”

  “She hasn’t been gone for a week yet,” the voice in his ear says. “Not even a week. It’s only the fourth day.”

  “I see,” Kouplan says, because there’s nothing to say when another person is trying to find some hope.

  “I don’t want to call the police, but Missing Persons say they won’t do anything until I’ve given them a statement.”

  The woman on the other end does not hear Kouplan sigh in relief.

  “No, we won’t bring them in,” he says. “We should meet tomorrow morning, early, at the place where she disappeared. What was her name again?”

  For a brief moment, he thinks that she’s hung up. Then her voice returns, tinier than ever.

  “Julia.”

  Kouplan notes it. Then he has to take up that other piece of business.

  “Well, the mon … the commission.”

  “I’ve read up on that kind of thing and know it’s seven hundred Swedish crowns an hour, more or less.”

  Seven hundred an hour? When he worked at a restaurant, he was lucky to get fifteen an hour. Mostly it was twelve. Seven hundred? Did he hear that right?

  “I’m only going to take four hundred an hour, but I’d like some of it in advance, if that’s okay.”

  Pernilla informs him that she’s aware that an advance is customary. Kouplan writes down the number in the notebook he’d gotten at his Swedish as a Second Language class. Julia, 400, the Globe Arena Center.

  * * *

  Before he goes to bed, he writes down a plan. It’s the first time he’s written a real plan since he’s come here. A real plan for real work, that is, a plan he’s learned how to make from people who knew more than he did. During the evening, he searches the Internet, through the papers and telegram offices, the uncensored forum Flashback, and the latest updated information from web pages with all the words he’s put on his list. When he finally hits the sack, it’s past three in the morning and his eyes can no longer focus. For the first time in a long time, he falls asleep immediately.

  CHAPTER 3

  Kouplan has a peculiar relationship with his heart. He’s training it. He’s the coach of his own heart, and he commands it to slow down. Just like doing really good push-ups: slow and controlled, stopping an inch above the floor before slowly coming back up. His heart has to be beating slowly so he will seem like a bored commuter.

  The girl across from him believes the new iPhone comes in both black and white. She’s insisting she’s seen it in an ad. She blasts the information right into her iPhone 4S.

  “Okay, sure, do you have a copy of Metro? It’s that ad, I swear! And there was a white one in the picture, but … yes, the iPhone!… Jesus, can you just listen to me? It’s important!”

  Behind the girl there’s a group of gangly teenagers, and leaning against a seat, a woman who could be a police officer. She’s got that straight neck police officers get and she’s letting her gaze wander over the other passengers.

  Kouplan puts his elbow against the window and looks out over Årstavik Bay, as if he is unbelievably bored, and, above all, relaxed.

  The girl in the seat across from him is calling someone else to confirm that the iPhone does come in white. He can hear the person on the other end say she should check on the net. “Yeah.”

  Kouplan gets up, and keeping the erect figure of the policewoman at the edge of his vision, exits through the other door. His heart follows his orders.

  He walks over the bridge to the Globe Arena Center as if he were a completely ordinary man. It’s not Pernilla’s fault she lost her kid here, he tells himself. Still, he would have preferred any other place to this one. The rubber soles on his shoes suck up water from the wet asphalt, but from the top, they look good. His jacket is in worse shape. He found out that people look at the jacket first, then the shoes. Oh, well. It’s early in the morning and nothing is going on. Just people on their way to work. He’s on his way to work, too. He just has to project that feeling.

  * * *

  Pernilla doesn’t know what to expect. Obviously not a Sherlock with a pipe, a trench coat, and a magnifying glass. She’s not that naïve. Perhaps it’s that black-haired guy with a briefcase walking quickly past her, who stops and stares into a display window, perhaps to study her from her reflection. Perhaps it’s that hipster riding by on a bike. He gets off and locks it to a tree. He takes off his helmet and runs his hand through his more than unruly head of hair. It could be him, even if he’s now heading right into the mall and is gone from sight. Certainly it can’t be that teenage kid in washed-out jeans, who stops in front of her with a questioning look.

  * * *

  “Pernilla?” She nods, confused, and takes the hand he’s holding out toward her. From his eyes he appears to be, perhaps not fourteen, as she’d first guessed, but hardly more than eighteen. He smiles as he presses her hand.

  “Let’s sit down, shall we?”

  As they start to search through the Globe Arena Center for a place to sit, she makes up her mind not to give him any advance. At least, not until she’s questioned him thoroughly.

  “I can barely stand being in this place,” she says in spite of herself, because he’s the only person she can talk to. “Even though I’ve been here many times since last Monday, it makes me feel ill. I don’t know what I’m looking for, and my dog Janus is not exactly a bloodhound. I don’t know…”

  She lets her sentence hang in the air.

  The boy detective gestures toward McDonald’s.

  “It looks empty in the corner. Let’s sit down.”

  * * *

  Kouplan has many favorite Swedish expressions. One is “truth with modification.” It’s a kind of truth that is not all that true. For instance: Size doesn’t matter. Or: The eyes are a window to the soul. If eyes really were windows to the soul, Pernilla would not be looking at him with such skepticism. She would have realized at once that she was dealing with a sharp man who had the competence to solve her problem.

  “I’m older than I appear,” he says and catches her eye.

  It is a truth. Pernilla smiles in embarrassment, as if she suspected this but didn’t dare ask.

  “I’m twenty-eight,” Kouplan continues.

  That’s a modified truth. Still, adding three years to his age is not a sin.

  Pernilla’s eyes narrow, as if she doesn’t believe him.

  “It’s a genetic issue: My genes make me look younger.”

  That is a truth, and Pernilla can tell. She smiles quickly.

  “You could make a fortune if you figured out how to sell that mutation.”

  “I just wanted to put that out there, because I know you had to be wondering about it,” Kouplan says.

  Pernilla straightens her back, clears her throat.

  She hasn’t touched her cheeseburger.

  “Before we enter into a contract, I need to know more about you.”

  Kouplan takes a bite of his burger. It tastes better than the ones you buy and bring home on the bus in a paper bag.

  “Shoot,” he says.

  “How long have you worked as a detective?”

  “To tell the truth,” Kouplan says (and here comes another modified truth), “I’ve only worked as a detective for the past year. Before that I did investigative reporting. So, basically, I was trained as a journalist.”

  Some old Nazi once said that if you want people to believe a lie, make it a big lie. But Kouplan knows better than to trust a Nazi slogan. He tells truths and modified truths, and when Pernilla asks about his career in journalism, he can
answer.

  “I have a great deal of experience in kidnapping,” he says.

  That is a truth.

  Pernilla begins to sniffle once they leave the restaurant. She’s about to show him where it happened, but she can’t get a word out. He lays a hand on her shoulder and feels her body stiffen.

  “So you were walking here,” he says in a calm way, as if talking to a frightened child.

  Pernilla nods.

  “In this direction?”

  She shakes off his hand and vaguely gestures toward the entrance to the mall.

  “That way.”

  “What brought you here?”

  “We were shopping. Julia needs new winter shoes. And also I needed to buy groceries.”

  Kouplan writes this down in his book.

  “Are you absolutely sure this was the spot?”

  He takes out his cell phone and begins to take pictures in every direction.

  “The people we see can see us,” he explains. He feels uncomfortable hearing his own words out loud. “All the people in the restaurant, for example. Was it crowded when it happened?”

  Was it crowded? Pernilla doesn’t remember. The more she tries, the less she can remember. She and Julia, in that rain she could barely feel. She sighs, shudders, tries to give this man-boy real answers.

  “It was raining, but not hard. Almost misting.”

  He writes in his book that looks to her like one of those composition books from elementary school.

  “Did you have an umbrella?”

  He’s looking at her in such a demanding way that she doesn’t tell him what she really wants to say. What does it matter whether or not we had umbrellas? Find my daughter!

  “No, our faces were getting wet. But Julia had a raincoat, in bright pink.”