REVENGE TASTES OF bile, and it doesn’t matter how many times you brush your teeth, you won’t get rid of the taste. It eats its way into your enamel and gums.
Madeleine Silfverberg has checked into the Sj?farts Hotel in S?dermalm, and is in the bathroom tidying herself up. In a few hours she’s going to meet the woman who once called herself her mother, and she wants to look as beautiful as possible. She pulls an eyeliner from her bag and applies some light make-up.
Just like hatred, revenge forms tiny, threadlike wrinkles in an otherwise beautiful face, but whereas bitterness gives you deep lines around your mouth, revenge settles around the eyes and forehead instead. The marked groove between her eyes, just above her nose, has been getting deeper. Her worries have made her frown for far too long, and she has grimaced too many times because of the sour taste in her mouth.
There has never been time to forget, and between the person she once was and the person she is today lies a whole universe of events and circumstances. She imagines that other versions of herself exist in parallel worlds.
But this world is hers, and it’s here that she’s killed five people.
She closes the make-up bag and goes out into the little hotel room, and sits down on the bed where thousands of people have already sat, slept, made love and probably felt hate.
The suitcase lying at the foot of the bed is so new that she has no feelings for it yet, but it contains all she needs. She has called Charlotte Silfverberg and said she wants to meet. That they need to talk and that she’ll leave her in peace after that.
In a few hours’ time she’ll be sitting opposite the woman who once called herself her mother. And they’ll talk about the pig farm outside Struer and everything that happened there.
Together they will remember that time in Denmark, and talk about events in the pig shed the way other, normal people talk about nice holiday memories. But instead of beautiful sunsets, fine-grained sand and lovely restaurants, they’ll be talking about boys who were drugged and forced to fight each other, about men sweating on top of young girls, and about women who called themselves mothers looking on excitedly.
They will talk for as long as necessary, and she will illustrate her story with Polaroid pictures that reveal what her foster-parents had done.
She’ll show her the documents from Copenhagen University Hospital that show that she was a breech birth, and that she was taken from her biological mother along with the placenta. It also says that she was thirty-nine centimetres long, weighed almost two kilos, and was placed in an incubator with suspected jaundice. At the postnatal clinic she was judged to be a month younger than the documents said.
In her suitcase there are more documents, and she knows them all by heart. One of them is from the Childhood and Adolescent Psychiatry unit in Copenhagen.
The seventh line: ‘The girl shows signs of depression.’ Two lines below: ‘She has an ingrained habit of self-harm, and can be violent.’ Next page: ‘Has repeatedly accused her father of sexual abuse, but has not been regarded as credible.’
Then a note in the margin written in pencil that has become almost illegible over the years, but she knows what it says: ‘Based largely upon the mother’s claims that the girl has always had a vivid imagination, which is corroborated by the fact that she often talks incoherently about a farm in Jutland. Recurrent delusions.’
Another document has a social service stamp at the bottom, and is an official authorisation for her ‘placement in a family home.’
Family home, she thinks. A nice phrase.
She shuts the suitcase and wonders what’s going to happen next, afterwards, when she’s finished talking and her foster-mother has understood the nature of the choices facing her.
Revenge is much the same as a cake: you can’t have it and eat it too. Once revenge has been carried out you have to go on in the blunt awareness that you need to find new meaning in an otherwise meaningless life.
But she knows what she’s going to do. She’s going to return to the house in Saint-Julien-du-Verdon in Provence. To the cats, to her little studio, and to the calm isolation of the fragrant lavender fields.
When it’s all over she’s going to stop hating and learn to love. It will be a time for forgiveness, and after twenty years in the dark she needs to learn to see the beauty in life.
But first the woman who once called herself her mother must die.
Fagerstrand – a Suburb
‘WHO ARE WE doing first?’ Hurtig asks as he drives out along Drottningholmsv?gen. ‘Hannah ?stlund or Jessica Friberg?’
‘They practically live next door to each other,’ she says. ‘We’ll do the closest one first, Hannah ?stlund.’
After the roundabout at Brommaplan they head west along Bergslagsv?gen, and the rest of the journey passes in silence, which suits Hurtig.
One characteristic he appreciates in his boss is her ability to make silence feel comfortable, and as they pass the Judar Forest nature reserve he gives her a little smile.
They turn off into the residential area, down towards Fagerstrand.
‘OK, pull up along here,’ Jeanette says. ‘It must be that house over there.’
He brakes and steers past the long hedge surrounding the house, then heads up the drive and parks in front of the garage.
The large house is partially lit up, even though its owner obviously can’t be at home. The lights are on in the hall and kitchen, and in one of the rooms on the first floor.
As they walk up to the house he catches a glimpse of something through the kitchen window that they’ve seen before.
A vase of yellow flowers.
Jeanette folds up the warrant bearing von Kwist’s signature and puts it in her inside pocket as Hurtig opens the unlocked door.
A heavy, sweet smell hits them, and Hurtig instinctively takes a step back.
‘Shit,’ he exclaims with a look of disgust.
The house is silent apart from the sound of flies trying desperately to get out through the closed windows. ‘Wait here,’ Jeanette says, and closes the door again.
She goes back to the car, opens the boot, and gets out a couple of white breathing masks, four blue polythene shoe covers and two pairs of latex gloves. Since their visit to the cavern below St Johannes Church she has made sure always to have some breathing masks handy. Just in case.
She goes back, gives Hurtig the protective gear and sits down on the step. She stretches her legs and can feel the tiredness in her body. The stench from inside the house is lingering in the air.
‘Thanks.’ Hurtig sits down beside her and begins to pull the plastic covers over his black leather shoes. Jeanette notes that they look expensive.
‘Are those new?’ She points at them and smiles at him.