The Cruel Stars of the Night by Kjell Eriksson

Author:Kjell Eriksson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Women detectives - Sweden, Women detectives, Detective and mystery stories, Mystery & Detective, Police Procedural, Fiction, Mystery fiction, Missing persons, General
ISBN: 9780312366681
Publisher: New York : Thomas Dunne Books, 2008, c2007.
Published: 2008-04-29T06:00:00+00:00

Laura Hindersten woke up with the taste of blood in her mouth. Her lips were chewed up and her thighs scratched by nails.

A thick layer of dried sweat covered her thin body and she was cold, but now in a more human way than before. The blankets were on the ground and she reached down and pulled them up again.

The fever dreams lingered in her consciousness like a veil of mist over a deserted landscape. In her memory she looked for the source of her nightmare, because it was certainly somewhere in the literature. She was, after all, Ulrik Hindersten’s daughter. But she found nothing. This was her own river journey.

Ulrik would have loved the story and would have encouraged her to write it down, but she only wanted to bury the nightmare in forgetfulness.

After an hour she got up and, wrapped in a blanket, walked to the bathroom on unsteady legs. She knew what had to be done. The visit of the woman from the police had shaken her more than she first had realized. There was something in Ann Lindell’s gaze that bothered her, as if she had grasped more than she had let show.

But mostly it was Lindell’s ease that worried Laura, who had found herself during the conversation enjoying her time with the policewoman. She liked her voice, her slightly careful movements, and the little smile that was so well suited to self-irony.

Laura did not want to be disarmed by conversation. She feared the friendly words that could at any moment be transformed into their opposite.

She had been deceived so many times, had paid friendship premiums which, when the insurance policy matured, turned out to contain nothing but unpaid deductibles. Now was another time—the time of freedom— and no police officer in the world, however well-meaning she seemed, was going to be allowed to alter Laura’s plans.

A couple of days, then she would conquer that little restaurant by the sea. A small pub, whose crooked doors never closed properly, with one table that leaned worryingly and where the staff never asked if you wanted the check. An establishment that at the next severe fall storm risked being pulled out to sea and churned into firewood.

This pub existed. Laura knew it. She had seen it once.

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