Silver Tears

by Camilla Lackberg

  “Nice day,” he said.

  “Is it?” Faye replied abruptly.

  He chuckled.

  She scrolled down through the photos. To the week when she and David had met. It took a while. Johanna was a frequent poster. On some days there were three or four different pictures. Some of them were of David. On a jetty, at the dinner table, in a restaurant, by the barbecue. Smiling, laughing, hugging his daughters, kissing Johanna on the cheek. Happy kids. Sunsets. Beautifully assembled dishes.

  Faye’s jaw dropped.

  Dinner with my cuties.

  My husband surprised us with homemade lasagna.

  Barbecue hygge with the family.

  Minibreak: the west coast is the best coast.

  Each caption followed by at least six emojis.

  Faye got out her laptop, opened it, went to her calendar, and compared dates. David hadn’t mentioned going to the west coast. On the date in question, he had been on a business trip. And according to Johanna’s Instagram account, they were not in the midst of a fractious divorce—on the contrary, they appeared to have an idyllic relationship. Of course, social media could tell lies and present an illusion that wasn’t true, paint over the cracks, prettify. But this?

  Her heart was pounding in her rib cage. Her stomach was in a knot. She remembered the later stages with Jack.

  She pulled up David’s number on her mobile. She had to talk to him, hear his voice, get an explanation. There had to be some mistake.

  Faye got his voicemail.

  She sent him a text asking him to call as soon as he could.

  How blind had she been?

  Why hadn’t she returned Johanna’s call or listened to Ylva? Or checked the Instagram account sooner? How could she have been blind and deaf? Again?

  She got up from the bench. She knew where David’s office was—or at least where he’d said it was. Did it even exist? She hurried through Berzelii Park, around the corner of Berns, and headed for Blasieholmen, where several of Stockholm’s most reputable financial firms were based. Her phone rang, making her jump. She tugged it out, hoping it was David, but it wasn’t. It was Ylva.

  “Yes?” she said, answering irritably.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “I don’t feel like talking about Revenge right now. Give me a couple of hours to digest it.”

  “Yes, well, about Revenge, we need to meet up and make a plan—see what we can do to avoid losing control of the company. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Please, Ylva, this isn’t a good time.”

  “It’s about David. You’ll want to see this. You may not believe me, but you asked me to go over his proposal, his finances, everything. That’s what I’ve spent the last few days on. Everything is here. Paper doesn’t lie. Paper doesn’t pass judgment.”

  Faye stopped. She looked out across the water toward the elegant nineteenth-century façades. It was all so beautiful. How could it all be so beautiful when she was in the midst of a nightmare?

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t stay at the office after Henrik came by—who knows how long it will be before he chucks us out. So I came back to Alice’s.”

  “I’ll come there,” said Faye.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Faye whispered. “I don’t know.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Berzelii Park.”

  “Stay there. I’ll pick you up.”

  Heaps of papers were scattered across the desk in Alice’s study, which had been placed at Ylva’s disposal when she had moved in. She pulled out a chair, firmly pushed Faye into it, and sat down next to her.

  They hadn’t said a word to each other in the taxi.

  “Thanks,” Faye mumbled.

  Ylva looked her deep in the eyes.

  “There’s nothing to thank me for. You would have done the same for me. What’s happened? Well, apart from the obvious—the massacre we witnessed this morning. But there’s something else. Want to talk about it?”

  Faye sighed. “Can you open that window? I need some air…”

  Ylva nodded and went over to the window. Speaking slowly and hesitantly, Faye said: “I’m beginning to think you were right. I don’t know…Jesus, I don’t know anything any longer.”

  Ylva scrutinized her with a frown.

  “What do you mean?”

  Faye ran the nail of her middle finger along the desktop. She didn’t know where to start. She was burning with shame.

  She cleared her throat.

  “All this time, David has been seeing Johanna as if nothing has happened. To be honest, I don’t even know if he ever had any plans to get divorced from her. All those stories about him fighting for the two of us, that it was going to be us, I think it was all a lie. They went to Marstrand together when he told me he was at home all weekend fighting with her. They were on the rollercoasters at Liseberg in Gothenburg when he told me he was on a business trip to Tallinn.”

  Faye couldn’t stop the tears.

  “Please forgive me, Ylva. For the way I treated you when you tried to tell me. I know you had my best interests at heart—that you wanted to protect me.”

  Ylva shifted closer to Faye and put her head on her shoulder.

  “None of us wants to hear that kind of thing about the person we think loves us,” she said. “And I didn’t know for certain. I had no idea. All I knew was that he was exaggerating to you how crazy Johanna was.”

  “I don’t understand how I could be so blind. So stupid.”

  Faye was sobbing by now. Ylva stroked her hair, hushing her.

  Eventually, Faye was able to wipe the tears from her face. With a sigh, she put a hand on the stack of papers in front of her.

  “So what does this prove, then? I assume it’s bad news.”

  Ylva cleared her throat. Faye could tell from her expression that she was worried about hurting her.

  “Out with it!” she said. “I can take it.”

  “David Schiller is pretty much broke. You and Revenge are his last hope. And it’s actually worse than that. It’s all connected.”

  Then she began to explain.

  FJÄLLBACKA—THEN

  There was a phone booth in the harbor. While Sebastian tied up, I rushed over to it, grabbed the receiver, and dialed 90000 for the emergency services. Half an hour later, the jetty was crawling with people. Someone had tipped off the local paper and a reporter and photographer from Bohusläningen were prowling back and forth, waiting for an opportunity to talk to us.

  They were circling me and Sebastian like sharks anticipating their prey, but the policemen asked them to wait until we’d had a chance to explain what had happened. I must have looked scared and so small. But inside I was proud. Sebastian was as pale as a corpse. I stayed close to him all the time. The police and the others probably thought I was sticking to him because I was afraid, but my only aim was to ensure that he stuck to the story I had given him.

  “And you’re saying they fell in?” one of the policemen asked.

  Sebastian nodded.

  “We turned the boat around and went back, but there wasn’t a trace of them,” he said in a low voice.

  The police exchanged tired glances. There was no suspicion, just sorrow and resignation.

  “You shouldn’t have gone out in this weather,” said the policeman, before he turned away.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “But we were missing home. It was Tomas who wanted to.”

  Eventually, it was the reporter’s turn. He wanted to talk to me rather than Sebastian. I probably looked more young and innocent, which would generate greater sympathy from readers. During the interview, the photographer took pictures of me.

  “I refuse to believe they’re dead.
I hope they find them,” I said, trying to look as unhappy as possible.

  Faye walked slowly along Humlegårdsgatan, her sunglasses a screen between her and the surrounding world. It was surreal. The people, the laughter, the joy. How could they be so unaffected? Her world had just been smashed to smithereens and her future had been thrown away.

  David and Henrik were working together. They had managed to conceal it well. But not so well that Ylva—with a little time, stubbornness, and diligence—hadn’t been able to find the traces. And in one way, they had been clumsy. As Ylva had pointed out, Henrik’s weakness was that he was careless. They already knew that he had planned to report several of the acquisitions at the same time, to try to spring his new majority on them and allow him to propose a new board as quickly as possible.

  However, what Ylva had managed to figure out even before the new owner of the shares had been made official was that David was one of the investors backing Henrik. That too had been hidden in a slipshod fashion in a Maltese corporation, but following the revelations of recent years, Malta was no longer the safe haven it had once been for companies that wanted to engage in tax planning or hide something. Another mistake by Henrik.

  But it didn’t matter. His mistakes had simply allowed them to discover the connection between David and Henrik. It hadn’t offered up anything that would help them prevent the loss of Revenge.

  And now Faye realized what had been gnawing at her since the quarrel with Henrik at the office. He had intimated it there and then. He had said that no one could love her.

  She didn’t need to search for a motive behind the two men’s actions. Henrik wanted to restore his wounded manhood. Which was ironic, given that you can’t restore something you never had in the first place. And David? It was quite simple: money. And power. For him, she had merely been a way to achieve those two things. She saw that now. Several of the people who had sold to Henrik lately could only have been gotten at thanks to information that David had accessed on her laptop. She felt absolutely hemmed in on all sides.

  Faye got out her mobile and sent a text to David.

  Can you call me? There’s something we need to talk about.

  Everything had gone to shit. She had lost control of Revenge. And she had lost David—or, more specifically, the person she had thought he was. She had lost something that had never even existed, which it should have been impossible to grieve for. But for her, it had become real.

  Her mobile vibrated in her hand.

  Things have gotten messy in Frankfurt. Have to stay a few days. Missing you.

  Faye swallowed and then swallowed again. And then she made up her mind. She was going to sell everything off and leave Sweden for good. Withdraw. Julienne was in Italy. It was there, by her side, keeping her safe, that she belonged. Following David’s betrayal and the fact that Revenge would soon have slipped out of her grasp, there was no reason to carry on.

  She would head up to the apartment, fetch her things, and go home to Julienne. She’d leave it to the lawyers to handle the sale of her shares in Revenge. She no longer had to worry about the American expansion. That would be up to Henrik before long. She would never set foot in Sweden again. She didn’t really even want to go up to the apartment, but the photo of Julienne and her mother was in a plastic wallet behind the bathtub. It was proof that her mother and daughter were both alive. She couldn’t leave Sweden without it.

  David had left various items in the apartment, but Faye didn’t even have the strength to chuck them into the fire.

  And Ylva and Alice? Perhaps they would be disappointed in her, but if she stayed there was a risk they would be pulled down into the mire with her. They’d be much better off without her.

  She keyed in the code and opened the door. She had to wait a while for the elevator.

  Faye got in and pulled the grille shut. She saw each floor pass by. She readied herself. Just a couple of minutes, then she’d be in a taxi on the way to Arlanda.

  The elevator came to a halt.

  Faye went straight to the front door, her heels tapping briskly across the floor. She put the key in the lock and turned it. At that moment, she heard a scraping sound behind her and felt the cold steel against the back of her neck.

  She turned around slowly. She knew it was Jack before she saw him. Like she always did.

  PART FOUR

  At least one person lost their life when a summer house outside the town of Köping was burned to the ground on Wednesday evening. By the time fire services arrived on the scene, the cabin was already engulfed in flames.

  “These kinds of older cabins often have inadequate wiring in place. It’s not unusual for short-circuits to lead to these sorts of accidents,” said Anton Östberg from Västra Mälardalen emergency services.

  The identity of the deceased remains unknown, and it is unclear whether there were other casualties.

  “We have just begun an investigation, but there is much to suggest that this was a tragic accident,” said Gun-Britt Sohlberg from Köping Police.

  Aftonbladet, 27 June

  The tip of the knife was now digging into Faye’s ribs. Jack’s mouth was curled into a triumphant and contemptuous smile.

  “Open the door,” he said. “Otherwise I’ll stick the knife in your throat.”

  Faye’s heart was pounding violently in her breast.

  She did as he said and unlocked the door and the safety gate. Jack shoved her into the apartment and locked the door behind them. There was nowhere to escape.

  He pushed her ahead of him and forced her down onto the sofa. Then he grabbed her handbag, rooted through it, and scattered the contents onto the coffee table.

  “You tricked me, you tricked everyone. You’ve ruined my life. I know I didn’t kill our daughter. I don’t know how you did it, but she’s alive. She must be. You’ve got my daughter somewhere.”

  Faye wasn’t able to summon up an answer. She was paralyzed, almost numb about what was happening. Jack had appeared so suddenly, she still couldn’t grasp that he was here.

  “I’m going to find Julienne and prove that you framed me. When I’m done with you, the whole world is going to know what a deceitful whore you are.”

  Jack was talking fast and in a strained voice—he sounded almost manic. He kept pacing back and forth across the living room. His hair was greasy and his clothes dirty.

  Gone was the elegance that had impressed Faye so much.

  He grabbed her mobile phone and began to look through the photos. Faye waited calmly, knowing there were no traces of Julienne there.

  “You can search everywhere,” she said. “I’m not hiding anything from you.”

  When he didn’t find anything, he cast the mobile away, rushed over to the sofa, and thrust his face close to hers.

  “You had me convicted of the murder of my own daughter!” he shouted. “Everyone in Sweden, my family, my friends, everyone thinks I’m an animal. A child killer.”

  Saliva spattered her face.

  “Do you know what they do to us in prison? I’m going to find her and prove what you did! I’ll take everything away from you, just like you did to me!”

  His reaction made Faye feel more confident, even if she realized she was in mortal danger. Her words still touched Jack—she thought and hoped so, at any rate. As long as she could influence him, she could get out of this with her life intact.

  Jack pushed her down into the sofa, raised the knife, and lowered it slowly toward her face. Faye pursed her lips and forced herself to look him in the eye.

  “I ought to cut off your face,” Jack hissed. “You’ve cost me everything.”

  Her heart was racing, but Faye didn’t so much as flicker.

  “I’ve missed you,” she whispered.

  Her voice sounded so believable that she actually wondered whether she was lying or not. For a m
oment, she thought she had him.

  “Jack, it’s me. Faye. You love me. I would never have done what I did if you hadn’t left me, hadn’t humiliated me.”

  Jack looked at her searchingly, almost tenderly.

  The next moment he raised his left arm and slapped her face.

  “You’re not even called Faye. Your name is Matilda. And when I’m done with you here, I’ve promised your dad he can have the pleasure of killing you for what you did to him.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Faye rubbed her cheek, curling up and making herself small. Her chest felt tight.

  “You know what I’m talking about. I was in the same prison as him. I know what happened in Fjällbacka. How you took everything away from him, just like you did to me. And then you ran off to Stockholm and thought you could start over.”

  “That’s not true,” Faye said, trying to rally her thoughts. “You’re mistaken.”

  A new blow landed, this time on her stomach. She lost her breath and rolled to one side.

  “Please, Jack,” she panted. “I don’t know who you’re talking about—someone has fooled you. It’s not the way you think it is.”

  Jack got up and paced back and forth again. Faye looked at him narrowly. Did he believe her?

  “Do you think it was coincidence that Gösta and I managed to escape together? We found each other in prison. I promised that if I found a way to get out I would take him with me. Apparently he has a bone to pick with you too…”

  Jack smirked.

  “When we heard we were going to be transported at the same time, I realized it was a golden opportunity. One guard who needed a piss later and we were out.”

  Faye shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them, forcing herself to look at Jack.

  “Leave here,” she said. “You’re only making it worse. I won’t tell the police you were here. I can give you money so that you can leave the country and start over. I love you. I’ve always loved you. No man is like you, no one has ever been able to replace you.”