• Act I - Introduction
  A detective and his partner: an aging veteran and his alter ego, twenty years younger. They make a perfect duo. One night, he watches her onstage in a local pub, playing with a band, radiant with life and joy. It’s the moment we understand she won’t survive the next scene.

• Act II - Confrontation
  A murder with no witnesses, no clear motive, only a symbol left at the crime scene, connected to a series of unsolved cases. The detective falls into an obsessive state, trying to solve the mystery of his partner’s death.

• Act III - Resolution (?)
  It’s a PG-13 movie, so there has to be a happy ending. The detective unmasks the killer, someone we know well, someone we’ve already gotten used to seeing. A respected figure. When the case seems closed, the detective reviews the investigation files one last time. A distant gaze, a smile filled more with pain and exhaustion than happiness. At that moment, the camera shows a note landing on the desk: “You missed one”, with the same symbol at the bottom of the page that we know from the murder. Sequel guaranteed.

Wait, wait, wait! Why these three acts here and not on some amateur writer’s forum? Well, because the Forester, most likely fascinated by Scandinavian crime literature, decided to play out just such a drama.

• Act I - Introduction
  Forester is my daily and I love it. Sometimes its old-age issues annoy me, but let he who doesn’t rub himself with Voltarol in the evening cast the first stone. Last week I lay under it, checked what needed checking, changed the oil, filters, and got the summer wheels on. That’s the pub scene.

• Act II - Confrontation
  I’m cruising along the A4 to Kraków (on the non-toll section, as a matter of principle I refuse to pay for that abomination of a motorway). Suddenly, the temperature gauge starts exploring regions it had never visited before. The partner’s corpse is just around the corner. Just as it hit red, there happened to be a lay-bay. I pull over, open the hood, look, listen. The radiator neck, the one from the hose leading to the expansion tank, crumbles before my eyes. Well, there’s the corpse. I call a tow truck. Obsessively browsing threads about head gaskets on the forums. Calculations: fix it, sell it, engine swap it, or scrap it - drama. The tow truck arrives.

• Act III - Resolution (?)
  PG-13 rules apply, or maybe it’s my innate luck, which Tomek firmly believes in (I’m ever so slightly more sceptical about that), nevertheless happy ending there is. Fortunately, it’s not a blown head gasket, just a leaking radiator. Low coolant caused it to overheat. Replacing the radiator, cap, and hoses solves the case. But the amount of stress I went through is another story. It seems that everything is OK, but there’s still a slight unease. I’ll have to be a bit more cautious with the Forester, after all, it’s a 24-year-old car with nearly 350,000 km on the clock.

• Forester
• Sg