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Lisbeth can not imagine herself as a shop girl, or a waitress, only if her intent was to poison someone who was eating at her café. She is not, what anyone would call, a people person in fact a lot of smart people have categorized her as an anti-people person which is not entirely wrong it’s just that the people making those statements Lisbeth views as stupid. However now she’s viewing Aubery, or had viewed him anyway, which really wasn’t difficult, what was difficult to handle was the amount of vapid girls and boys who had happen to fall under Aubery’s spell.

“Does it, party boy?” She likes calling him mistletoe actually but that doesn’t fit with the situation. The fact is he doesn’t really fit with her. Or she doesn’t fit with him, whichever comes first.

That she calls him a party boy does manage to wrangle a little more of Aubery's interest. He's no longer staring at her hands now (the way that she holds them, the length of her nails, how thin her wrists are), but stares at her face instead. Her eyes are obscured by the haze of smoke and her hair and that vague curiosity sharpens a bit, becomes more clearly fixed on his face.

"And thicker still."

He wonders if she's looked him up or if she's just taking a guess. It wouldn't have been hard to do -- Aubery went where he liked whenever he liked and left a trail of emails and text messages and facebook photos in his wake as he did so.

"Hobby?" he asks again, this time after any likelihood that she had looked him up.

Like a snail, text messages, wall messages and pictures on facebook and myspace marked his trail. It took her a few minutes to find his full name and after that everything was just cake. Not that she wanted it to be hard or expected it to be hard but still, it was pretty easy. He had no need for security she figures so there is none. What does impress Lisbeth is the number of places he’s been thus far in his life. She’s never really left Sweden, on except for Zurich but that was for business.

Lisbeth chews her nails, not now but it’s obvious that she does, she picks too – scabs sometimes her scalp. That too is not readily apparent but she does it to keep her fingers moving. Her hands are not moving and her gaze has not lifted from Aubery’s face she can the slight furrow of his brow. Is he a hobby? It’s not professional interesting question.

“Routine.”

If Lisbeth has looked hard enough Aubery's preoccupation with travel and his aimless wanderlust wouldn't have been too difficult to puzzle out. Aubery's father had written a series of books when he was younger; and Englishman himself, he motorcycled his way through Europe and across Russia only to arrive in the mountains where the books promptly ended. He'd had to return to England, to the young wife he'd eloped with out of the south of France -- Aubery's mother. Aubery's own path across the continents lacks the cohesion and continuity of his father's, but the echoes are there -- obvious enough that anyone clever can draw parallels between them.

He asks: "Not too boring, one should hope." It's not clear if he means Lisbeth's search or the story of Aubery's life, unearthed.

Lisbeth doesn’t like drawing subjective conclusions, objective results based on facts is what she specializes in. It’s not appropriate (in her head) to simply jump to conclusions and accuse someone of income tax evasion you’ve got to have the proof to back it up. Lisbeth also doesn’t appreciate psychology, once again, too subjective, too many factors but she really has no qualms about making her next statement: “you have daddy issues.”

Hello pot, meet kettle.

That gets Aubery to laugh a little around the filter of his cigarette. It's not a humorless, hollow laugh; but it's not particularly amused either. She'd done her homework and done it well, and Aubery's curious exactly how far she had gone. The impulse to ask if she'd read his father's books is there, but he doesn't act on it in the end, just shrugs and smokes some more.

"The symptom of an absentee father." Aubery's father had left England in the mid-90s, leaving his mother to fend for herself and her six year old son. "Couldn't be helped."

He either laughed because what she said is funny or because it's a handy defense mechanism. It's not particularly funny, having daddy issues so she is leaning toward the latter. Her hunch is rewarded with what he says next. For a moment she feels she needs to debate him on his statement that it couldn't be helped but for some reason she doesn't feel like getting into it. So instead she watches him smoke his cigarette and shrug while she remains rather passive with not much to add to her observations.

It's possible some people would find Lisbeth's passiveness unsettling, but Aubery -- who can be fairly passive himself when it came to other people -- doesn't seem to mind it. As he smokes, he watches her watch him and wonders if she finds it interesting or simply lacks anything else to do. His mind wanders back to the idea that she rifles through other people's business for a living. Aubery wonders if it's entirely legal. So he asks, because he has nothing really to lose:

"Are you a criminal?"

Well that certainly is a question isn't it and slightly subjective depending on who you were asking and their set of rules are. Sure, what she does might not be entirely legal but a criminal? Well that seems rather harsh, still if you were going by Swedish law or even American law enforcement might consider her a criminal. However they can suck it and he doesn't need to know that.

"Does it matter to you?"

"Not really." He's being honest, though Aubery's demeanor has a way of seeming disingenuous and detached. It makes him seem like he's trying too hard not to care when, in actuality, he doesn't. Criminality and the rules of law were relative, depending on where someone went. His brain automatically glosses over major universal sins as off the table for discussion. "Would you like it to?"

Her eyebrows furrow and she looks at him trying to gauge his response and how she should respond to his question. Why would she want him to care if she was a criminal or not? If he did care and thought she was then he'd rat on her, if he doesn't care then he stops asking questions about her profession. "Why would I like you to care?"