Free The Second Deadly Sin by Asa Larsson

clenched fists in the air, chanting trade union slogans, looking for trouble. Palms of hands being slammed down onto tables, demanding an immediate end to all this damned oppression.
    All those trade unionists and hotheads who have been sacked by the sawmills in Västerbotten for being too revolutionary, then move up to Kiruna. Kiruna needs every man and woman it can find who can put up with the cold and the darkness. But then he’s the one who has to tussle with them – agitators, socialists, communists.
    Also crammed into his knapsack of woe are over-zealous civil servants and over-confident engineers who bicker and argue and all want more than they are entitled to. And the Stockholm politicians, and the Wallenberg family who demand profits no matter what. The iron ore must be mined. Dug out of the mountain. All that investment in the railway and the municipal community of Kiruna must be rewarded.
    Right down at the bottom of the knapsack are the mine’s victims – the injured, the maimed. The widows of dead miners, and the little fatherless children staring poverty in the face.
    A knapsack full of granite. The slag from the iron ore.
    How on earth will he be able to satisfy everybody? Take the housing situation: how can he possibly produce accommodation for everyone who needs it? He wants to create a real town. Kiruna will not become like Malmberget. Must not. Malmberget, the mining town a hundred kilometres south of Kiruna, is a real Klondike. Teeming with debauchery and drunkenness and whores. He doesn’t want anything like that. He wants schools and bathhouses and adult education – as in Pullman City in the U.S.A. and Henry Ford’s Fordlandia in South America. Those are models to live up to.
    It must become a genuine town, and it must look good as well: but that will take time. Meanwhile, people must have roofs over their heads. Overcrowding is a problem. Every square inch of floor space is used at night for sleeping on. Unauthorised house building is another problem: they can shoot up in a single night. They have to be demolished, and then women stand there surrounded by their homeless children, sobbing.
    Food is a constant problem. As is the water supply.
    He simply cannot cope. He cannot manage to help everybody in need of assistance.
    He has just had a meeting with the managers of the mines in Malmberget. They are outraged because they consider the Kiruna mines have access to too many railway wagons. They also want to transport their iron ore.
    Just as he boards the train, a gust of wind blows over the railway station. Snow whirls up and every single flake glistens like a hovering diamond.
    If only I could paint, he thinks. If only I could paint instead of having to slave away with all these insoluble problems.
    *
    The train shudders and clatters, and starts to move. He heads straight for the restaurant car.
    There is only one person sitting there. The moment he claps eyes on her, all his oppressive thoughts vanish in a puff of smoke. He feels the need to rub his eyes, and assure himself that what he sees is not a mirage.
    She has chubby pink cheeks, big enchanting eyes with long eyelashes, a snub nose like a potato and a sullen-looking mouth like a small red heart. She looks like a child. Like one of those coloured prints featuring a little girl walking along a footbridge over a beck, blissfully unaware of all the dangers of the world.
    But the most fascinating thing about her is her hair. It is blonde and curly. Lundbohm thinks it must reach down as far as her waist when she lets it hang loose.
    He notices that her shoes are well cared for despite being somewhat the worse for wear, and that the edges of her overcoat are trimmed in order to conceal their threadbare nature.
    Perhaps that is why he asks if she does not mind him sitting down at her table. The fact is that he is surprised to find her sitting there on her own: she ought to be surrounded by navvies and miners desperate for female contact. He looks