The train was already leaving the station when he started seriously wondering where she had gone. Since he had dozed off for a while he had at first assumed she had gone to the toilet but when he looked at the signs he saw that they were unoccupied. This was also true in the next carriage. He walked through the entire train, checking the toilets and waiting for the person to come out if they were occupied. But Tea-Bag was gone. When he had been waiting for her at the Central station and became convinced she wasn’t going to show he had been overcome by a feeling of despondence. Now that she had disappeared from the train he only felt concern for her well-being. It was as if he had started reading a book — for the second time — and had become gripped by the narrative only to have some invisible force rip the book out of his hands. He didn’t understand why she had left. She had not shown any signs that something was amiss. But they must have been there, he thought. I just couldn’t see them.
Just north of Herrljunga the train suddenly came to a standstill. After thirty minutes Humlin finally asked the conductor what the problem was.
‘Why aren’t we moving?’
‘Temporary loss of power.’
‘Why aren’t we being given any information over the loudspeakers?’
‘I’m informing you now. Loss of power.’
‘How long will it take to restore?’
‘We’ll be on our way again shortly.’
Humlin tried to call Törnblom on his phone but naturally the train had malfunctioned in an area where his mobile was out of range.
The conductor returned after an hour.
‘I thought you said we would be on our way shortly,’ Humlin grumbled.
‘We will. It won’t take long.’
‘How long?’
‘A few minutes.’
‘We’ve already been delayed an hour.’
‘The engineer thinks he’ll be able to make up ten minutes.’
‘Then we’ll still be fifty minutes delayed.’
‘These things happen. It won’t be much longer now.’
The train was delayed for three hours. Then the loudspeakers announced that all passengers would be transferred to buses. Humlin was close to breaking down at this point, partly from worry about Tea-Bag, partly by the fact that the meeting in Stensgården would have to be cancelled.
Once he had climbed onto the overfull bus he went to call Törnblom again. He looked through his briefcase and all his pockets, but to no avail. He must have left his phone on the train.
It was a quarter to eleven when the bus pulled up to the Central station in Gothenburg. Humlin looked around for Törnblom but, of course, no one was there to pick him up.
Humlin took a deep breath.
It was all over. The best thing he could do now was simply to get himself out of the project he had started with Leyla and her friends, a project that he had lost control of almost immediately.
Standing there in the slushy snow outside the train station he saw the entire situation with excruciating clarity. The whole idea had been misguided from the start. He had imagined that a literary adventure awaited him. But a chasm separated him from the people of Stensgården. He would never be able to bridge it, however well-meaning his intentions. The latter he wasn’t even entirely sure of, to be honest. He thought that Leyla’s desire to be a TV personality was actually not so different from his own ambitions. He wanted to be rich, famous, always mentioned in the papers and with a string of great international successes.
He stepped into a taxi and asked to be taken to the hotel he normally stayed in when he came for the annual book fair. But just as the cab was pulling up to the kerb outside the hotel he changed his mind and asked to be taken out to Stensgården. The driver turned around and looked at him.
‘But this was where you wanted to go, right?’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
The driver did not speak Swedish fluently, but his Gothenburg accent was unmistakable.
‘Where in Stensgården?’
‘Pelle Törnblom’s boxing club.’
The cab pulled away from the kerb with great speed.
‘My brother belongs to that club,’ the driver said. ‘I live in Stensgården.’
Humlin sat back so his face would be cast in shadow. The driver was going way too fast on the empty city streets.
‘I’d be grateful if you kept the speed down,’ Humlin said. ‘I was planning to arrive at my destination alive.’
The taxi slowed down, but after the first light the driver resumed his previous speed. Humlin decided it was hopeless to get him to drive any slower.
‘My cousin is at the club tonight,’ the driver volunteered.
‘Is he a good boxer?’
‘My cousin is a she. She is meeting with an author tonight.’
Humlin tried to make himself even smaller.
‘That sounds interesting.’
‘Leyla is going to be very successful. This author is going to teach her what she should do to write a bestseller. Leyla has calculated that she can write four books per year. If they sell one hundred thousand copies per book she will be a millionaire within a few years. Then we will open an institute.’
‘Who is “we”?’
