Free The Second Deadly Sin by Asa Larsson Page A

around, half expecting to see suitors hiding behind the heavy curtains or under the tables.
    She says in a friendly tone, albeit somewhat shyly, that of course he may join her. She also glances around at all the empty tables in the restaurant car.
    He feels the need to excuse his pushy behaviour. After all, he is wearing his working clothes, as it were, and looks just like everybody else: she can’t possibly know who he is.
    “Whenever I see a new face, I like to find out who it is on the way to my Kiruna.”
    “Your Kiruna?”
    “Oh dear, you mustn’t pay too much attention to the words I use.”
    He sits up straight. He wants her to know who he is – for some reason that seems to be very important.
    He holds out his hand, ready to be shaken.
    “Hjalmar Lundbohm. Managing director. I’m in charge of the mine.”
    He makes the claim with a little wink, an attempt to signal his modesty and to distance himself from his exalted office.
    She looks sceptical.
    She thinks I’m flirting with her, he realises, feeling awkward.
    But luckily for him, at that very moment the waitress arrives with coffee. She notices the sceptical look on Elina’s face.
    “What he says is true,” she says, pouring out a cup of coffee for the managing director and topping up Elina’s. “He really is the managing director of the mine. If he didn’t insist on shuffling around in his working clothes, he could dress himself up like the upper-class gentleman he really is! He should have a nameplate round his neck.”
    Elina’s face lights up.
    “Good heavens! So you are the one who appointed me. I’m Elina Pettersson, the schoolteacher.”
    *
    From then on the four hours between Gällivare and Kiruna simply fly past.
    He asks about her training and previous appointment. She explains how she attended a private college for the training of primary school teachers in Göteborg, that the school in Jönåker where she worked had thirty-two pupils, and that her salary was three hundred kronor per year.
    “And how did you like it there, fröken Pettersson?” he wonders.
    For some reason she plucks up enough courage to say “Well, I got by …”
    There is something about the way he listens that opens up herheart. Perhaps it is his half-closed eyes. His heavy eyelids give him a sort of thoughtful, dreamy expression that somehow loosens her tongue.
    Words come gushing out of her, describing all the dull, tedious experiences that have dogged her these last few years. She talks about the children, her pupils, that she had dreamt about and longed to meet while she was at college. She tells him how depressed she was when she discovered that nearly all of them were so unwilling to learn anything. She hadn’t expected that: she had thought they would all be ravenous to learn and read books, just like she had been when she was a little girl. She tells him about the vicar and the gentleman farmer who was a member of the school governors and seemed to think that reading from the catechism and counting with the aid of an abacus was quite sufficient, and that there was “no reason to agree” to her request for a wooden blackboard with easel and chalk for a total price of five kronor, in order to improve the children’s writing and spelling. Nor would they allow her to buy three copies of a Selma Lagerlöf reader.
    “What makes you think things will be any different in Kiruna?” Lundbohm says.
    He raises his head slightly, and looks her in the eye.
    “The fact that you are a different kind of man,” she says, meeting his gaze until he turns away and orders another cup of coffee.
    She becomes aware that she has some kind of hold over him. He is so much older than she is, so she hasn’t thought about him in that way while they have been conversing. But of course, he is a man after all.
    She is not unaware of her good looks, and sometimes she has taken advantage of them herself. It was her hair and her trim waist that led to the repairing of the roof of