Black Lies, Red Blood

Twelve

The coffee shop outside Laxå was just as rundown as the exterior promised. Håkan Malmberg had hoped for a surprise, that the cracked canary-yellow paneling, the rusty sheet metal roof, and the misspelled sign along the side of the road was a front.

But the interior was even more decrepit, with broken chairs and tables, worn textiles, and incredibly dusty plastic flowers. The coffee was lukewarm and the cheese sandwich dry as dust, the only thing he dared buy because of the obvious risk of food poisoning where the other sandwiches were concerned, sweating behind a smudged plastic cover: meatballs with red beet salad and shrimp sandwiches swimming in mayonnaise.

He was alone in the place. He understood why.

Despite the meager snack, he felt satisfied and did not let himself be discouraged by the fact that he would probably need to stop for food once more before Uppsala.

It had been a fine trip, a mini-vacation of over a week. He went to Koster for the first time in his life and visited an old acquaintance who had moved there permanently, spent a few days in Gothenburg, and unexpectedly ran into a childhood friend he had not seen for at least fifteen years. The last two days he camped at Kinnekulle, swam in ice-cold Lake Vänern, and finished the red wine he had bought in Gothenburg.

Now he turned on his cell phone for the first time since Koster. Five voicemails and eight missed calls.

He listened to the messages. The first few were not sensational, two from motorcycle buddies, who like him were out and about and wondered where in the world he was, two from his sister, who wanted help moving. The fifth message was all the more worrisome.

A woman from the police, Ann Lindell, was looking for him in “an urgent matter.” It was about Klara Lovisa.

Håkan Malmberg pushed aside the plate with the remains of the roll, got up immediately, and left the place.

“Bye now and welcome back,” a voice was heard, but he did not turn around and did not answer the greeting. There was nothing to say thank you for here either, he thought bitterly, suddenly enraged at the whole place. How the hell can you work in such a dive! Not even keep it clean. He resisted the impulse to go back in and scold the woman behind the counter.

“All these bitches can go to hell!”

It was more than a two-hour drive home. Just as he was kick-starting the motorcycle, he got the idea to turn west instead on E18 and go to Oslo. There he had bike buddies and could disappear for a week or two. Then maybe it would blow over. He had nothing waiting in Uppsala.

“She can move herself,” he muttered.

It was the third time in as many years that his sister was moving, always in the summer, and she always expected him to help out.

He pulled out on E20 and placed himself aggressively close to the centerline and the cars he would pull up alongside of and, one after another, put behind him on his ride.