Silver Tears by Camilla Lackberg
For Karin
PART ONE
Two inmates convicted of murder escaped early this morning from their prison transport. When their prison guard stopped at the Gr?nna motorway services on the E4, the men seized the opportunity and fled into the forest.
Several police patrol cars were summoned to the scene, but the search for the fugitives has as yet been fruitless.
According to the Swedish Prison and Probation Service’s press spokesperson, Karin Malm, the men are not considered to pose a threat to the public.
Aftonbladet, 5 June
Faye switched on the Nespresso machine. While it made her an espresso, she looked out of the tall window in the kitchen. As always, the view blew her away.
The house in Ravi had become her paradise on earth. The village itself wasn’t all that large—it was home to just two hundred permanent inhabitants. It took all of five minutes or so to walk around the entire village, if you dragged your heels a bit. But in the center of the small piazza there was a restaurant that served the best pizza and pasta she had ever eaten. And it was packed to the rafters every night. Sometimes a few tourists would trickle in, and now that the end of May was approaching their number was increasing. Enthusiastic French cyclists or American retirees who had rented a motorhome and were now fulfilling their dream of seeing Italy, while their grown-up children wondered despairingly why their parents insisted on having their own lives instead of being on call as babysitters for the grandkids.
But no Swedes.
Faye hadn’t seen a single Swede here since she had bought the house. That had been a deciding factor in the choice of location. In Sweden, she was famous the length and breadth of the country. In Italy, she wanted and needed to be anonymous.
The beautiful old house she had bought wasn’t actually in the village—it was some twenty minutes’ walk beyond it. It was high on a hill with vines climbing the slope toward the house. Faye loved to stroll up and down the steep village streets buying bread, cheese, and air-dried prosciutto. It was the ultimate cliché of life in the Italian countryside, and she was enjoying it to the fullest. Over the last two years, while her ex-husband languished in a Swedish prison, she’d made a safe haven here for the two people she cared about most in the world: her daughter, Julienne, and her mother, Ingrid. This week they’d been joined by Faye’s closest friend and business associate, Kerstin, who doted on Julienne as if she were her own and had spent her visit competing with Ingrid to spoil the child.
The espresso was ready. Faye picked up her cup and went into the living room at the rear of the house, where the sound of splashing and happy childish cries divulged that there was a pool before it came into view. She loved the living room. It had taken time to decorate the house, but her own patience and one of Italy’s most talented interior designers meant it was exactly the way she wanted it. The house had thick stone walls that kept the heat out and made it cool even in the hottest summer months, but it was consequently rather dark indoors. They had remedied that with large, light furniture and plenty of discreet lighting. The large windows at the back also helped to let in the light. She loved how almost imperceptibly the living room faded into the terrace.
The white drape caressed her as she stepped outside. She tasted the espresso and watched her daughter and her mother without them noticing her at first.
Julienne had grown so big, while her hair—bleached by the sun—was almost white. She got new freckles pretty much every day. She was beautiful, healthy, and happy. Everything that Faye wanted for her. Everything that had been made possible by life without Jack.
“Mommy, Mommy, look! I can swim without armbands!”
Faye smiled and made an expression of amazement to show her daughter how impressed she was. Julienne was swimming in the deep end of the pool, doing a tortuous doggy paddle but completely independent of her Bamse the bear armbands, which were lying on the edge. Ingrid was watching her grandchild nervously, half sitting, half standing, ready to throw herself into the pool if need be.
“Relax, Mom. She’s got this.”
Faye took another sip of the espresso, which was almost all gone, and wandered farther out onto the terrace. She regretted not having made a cappuccino instead.
“She’s insisting on staying in the deep end,” said Faye’s mother, looking despairingly at her.
“I think she takes after her mother.”
“Thank you very much, I can see that!”
Ingrid laughed and Faye was struck—as she had been on so many occasions over these past two years—by how beautiful her mother was. Despite everything life had put her through.
The only people who knew that Ingrid and Julienne were alive were Faye and Kerstin. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, both were dead, Julienne murdered by her father—a crime for which Jack was now serving a life sentence in Sweden. He had come so close to crushing Faye. Her love for him had made her a victim, but in the end she’d seen to it that he paid the price.
Faye went to her mother and sat down next to her in a rattan armchair. Ingrid continued to watch Julienne, her body tense.
“Do you have to go away again?” she asked, without shifting her gaze from her granddaughter.
“This is a busy time for us. Expanding the Revenge brand into the American market means negotiating our way through a lot of red tape. And then there’s the Italian acquisition, which will give us a foothold in Rome. Giovanni, the owner, wants to sell, but, like all men, he seriously overestimates his own value. It’s just a case of making him realize that my price is the best offer he’ll get.”