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Back Love and Other Lies Save as PDF
Chapters (61)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Imagine a girl
  4. Prologue
  5. The Foreigner
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. The Skeptic
  12. Six
  13. Seven
  14. Eight
  15. Nine
  16. Ten
  17. Eleven
  18. Twelve
  19. Thirteen
  20. Fourteen
  21. Fifteen
  22. Sixteen
  23. Seventeen
  24. Eighteen
  25. Nineteen
  26. Twenty
  27. Twenty-One
  28. Twenty-Two
  29. Twenty-Three
  30. The Spectator
  31. Twenty-Four
  32. Twenty-Five
  33. Twenty-Six
  34. Twenty-Seven
  35. Twenty-Eight
  36. Twenty-Nine
  37. The Assassin
  38. Thirty
  39. Thirty-One
  40. Thirty-Two
  41. Thirty-Three
  42. Thirty-Four
  43. Thirty-Five
  44. Thirty-Six
  45. Thirty-Seven
  46. Thirty-Eight
  47. Thirty-Nine
  48. Forty
  49. Forty-One
  50. The Hunter
  51. Forty-Two
  52. Forty-Three
  53. Forty-Four
  54. Forty-Five
  55. Forty-Six
  56. Forty-Seven
  57. Imagine a girl
  58. Acknowledgments
  59. About the Author
  60. Also by Ben McPherson
  61. About the Publisher

Those unblinking eyes of his, so endlessly dark that the pupil and the iris seemed to merge.

“I have no explanation,” I said. “We are not extremists.”

“But you have a political alignment, surely?”

I shook my head. “We teach our daughters to think for themselves.”

He considered this. Something about my answer did not satisfy him. His mouth twisted one way, then the other. Then he smiled.

“I have one final question, after which you may go. You received a link by SMS at three a.m. yesterday morning. You downloaded a file. You received a second such file while you were waiting on the shore for news of your daughter. You deleted both files. My colleague Mikkel Hansen was wondering—”

“Unknown number,” I said. “Blank files. I assumed they were spam.”

“All right. Okay. Though the files were not in fact completely blank. Mikkel Hansen undeleted them. Here is the first of them.” He turned his screen so it faced me, then clicked an icon on the desktop. The screen turned black.

He pressed play. The merest hint of something else, tiny patches of gray against the black. Tvist stopped the clip. He adjusted first the brightness, then the contrast, his eyes flicking to me all the while. “You really didn’t try this?”

“No.”

He pressed play on his keyboard. The picture was clearer now. The profile of a woman, her face in close-up. She was lying on her back, eyes closed. That familiar nose, long and straight with a curved tip; those full lips and those planar cheeks.

I felt his eyes boring into me as I watched.

“What’s your question?” I said.

Tvist reached out, pressed stop, watching me all the while. He smiled a sympathetic smile. He reached into a drawer in his desk, took out a headset, plugged its lead into the computer. He handed the headset to me. I put it on. Tvist pressed play.

There was no mistaking the familiar sound of her breathing.

In.

In.

Out.

“A colleague will be in with your phone.” He watched me for a moment. “I’m very sorry to add to your burden.” And with that he was on his feet. “But you are a strong man. I am sure this will not break you.”

Oh, Elsa, I thought. What have you done?

In the park below the police station the grass was greener than in our suburb. Men lay, shirts off, or kicked soccer balls up the incline, laughing and shouting. A clamor of children’s voices; birdsong; traffic. If you wanted Scandinavian multiculturalism, here it was. Blond girls in bikinis sunbathed next to dark-haired women in headscarves. Young men grilled meat on portable barbecues, drank beer from cans. For a moment it was possible to believe that yesterday had not happened, that the country had not been attacked.