Although it is the book’s second story, “An Elderly Lady on Her Travels” takes place chronologically just before the collection’s first story, “An Elderly Lady Has Accommodation Problems.” This timing is noteworthy, as it sheds new light on Maud’s state of mind during the first story. In “An Elderly Lady Has Accommodation Problems,” Maud first meets Jasmin a few days after her vacation at a spa. In “An Elderly Lady on Her Travels,” it becomes clear that this spa vacation was Maud’s trip to the Selma Spa to murder Zazza. This deliberate structural move—placing a prequel after its consequences—invites readers to revise their moral assessment of Maud retroactively, as new context complicates previous impressions of Maud’s assessment of Jasmin.

In “An Elderly Lady on Her Travels,” Maud kills Zazza because she believes she is protecting Gustaf, a man she once loved. When she returns home in “An Elderly Lady Has Accommodation Problems,” she kills Jasmin to protect the apartment she once shared with her family and feels is under threat. Taken in combination with the new information this second story provides about Maud’s early life, “An Elderly Lady on Her Travels” adds a layer of complexity to Maud’s motivations in the first story: She kills Jasmin to protect her own comfort as well as safeguard her past, preserving the place where she remembers the happiest times of her life 70 years prior. This increases the discussion of The Ambiguity Between Justice and Vengeance of the collection’s stories, as the emotional thread between these murders—anchored in loss, memory, and unresolved grief—suggests that Maud feels compelled to defend and protect herself from perceived threats in a world that has been robbed of joy since the passing of her father and the family’s subsequent financial ruin.

Maud’s moral complexity expands in this section through discussions of her younger life. It is clear from her backstory that she has suffered in life—she has lived through her parents’ early deaths, the loss of her family’s money, and a callously broken engagement. She is also capable of real sacrifice—for decades, she supported her ill sister both financially and practically, despite Charlotte’s difficult temperament. After years of loss followed by hard work and sacrifice, she enjoys her present solitude, her travels, and her ability to control the details of her own life. This desire for control, born out of decades of caretaking and hardship, shapes her ethical framework—where autonomy becomes the ultimate virtue and perceived threats to the peace of her life are worth killing for. 

Maud is also a thief and a murderer who shows little empathy for those around her. Her misuse of her mother’s rationing booklet after her mother’s death can perhaps be explained by her and Charlotte’s financial circumstances, but her theft of the laptop cannot—by the time she steals the laptop, she is well-off and can easily afford one of her own. Her theft of the cane from the doctor’s office shows no regard for the person who came in with it—she simply sees it and takes it, thinking that it “might come in handy” someday (57). Maud’s moral logic consistently privileges utility and self-preservation over community or compassion, positioning her actions as part of a long habit of rationalized self-interest.

The murder of Zazza is, in Maud’s mind, morally justified because Maud believes Zazza is trying to take advantage of Gustaf and is a bad person. Maud sees Zazza as a self-centered and ruthless person who places her own desires in front of other people’s needs. Ironically, this is a fair description of Maud herself. Maud’s failure to see how her own actions unfairly impact others supports the text’s exploration of The Impact of Self-Centered Thinking. Her self-righteousness is rendered more chilling by how calmly and efficiently she executes her plan, without any hint of internal conflict or guilt.

As with Jasmin’s sexually explicit art, Zazza’s sexually explicit films are used as a detail that impugns her character in Maud’s mind. Even when Zazza was a schoolgirl, Maud thought of her as “a trollop,” based on her smoking, skipping class, and her greater interest in boys than in academics (54). As in the case of Jasmin, the narrative presents selective details that reflect Maud’s perspective—Zazza wears heavy makeup and a revealing dress, drinks heavily, and makes a disparaging comment about Gustaf’s daughter—but it never definitively confirms that Maud’s suspicions are justified. These observations are filtered through Maud’s often judgmental and self-righteous lens, leaving room for readers to question whether Zazza is truly exploitative or merely perceived that way by Maud. This ambiguity is central to the story’s destabilizing tone, as it complicates the reader’s ability to distinguish between credible threat and Maud’s distorted worldview. Even if Zazza really is scheming to leverage her sexuality in exchange for Gustaf’s money and prestige, of course, it does not justify her murder. The fact that Maud thinks it does typifies her cold-blooded lack of compassion for others. By allowing readers to see how Maud constructs a one-sided moral narrative to justify killing, the story underscores how prejudice, memory, and self-interest conspire to manufacture a sense of moral clarity.

Another repeated thematic motif in this story is The Mistake of Stereotyping the Elderly. Zazza has no idea that the seemingly frail older woman she sees in the spa is a threat and that the cane she carries is not for physical support—it is a murder weapon. There is dark humor in turning such an object—associated with weakness and vulnerability—into something deadly, and Zazza never sees it coming. Maud is not at all suspected of murder, despite being the only other person present during Zazza’s death. It is simply not conceivable to officials that Maud might be leveraging their stereotypes of her against them and that she might be substantially more capable than they give her credit for. This misperception is reinforced by the staff’s kind treatment of Maud after the murder: “The girl gently led Maud to her locker and made sure she put on her bathrobe and slippers. Maud thanked the helpful young lady, who gave her a consoling pat on the cheek before returning to her duties” (68). The image of Maud “helplessly” waving the very cane she used to kill Zazza not only encapsulates this theme but also heightens the story’s satire, revealing how social scripts around age and femininity can be weaponized.

One thematic thread that becomes even clearer in this story is Maud’s deep psychological need for control, not just over her environment, but over narrative itself. Zazza’s presence threatens Maud’s memory of who she was and what she lost in her broken engagement to Gustaf. By killing Zazza and then rewriting the scene with herself as the distressed bystander, Maud rewrites the story both literally and symbolically. Tursten uses Maud’s carefully staged post-murder performance to critique how power operates through narrative manipulation: Maud curates how others perceive her, bending reality until it suits her version of justice. This adds a metafictional layer to the story’s dark humor and offers commentary on how easily truth can be obscured by performance, especially when social biases are at play.