He sticks out his chest. He’s my height and still looks strong, despite having seventy years on the clock. But his face has changed. His beard is white and soft, with some ginger still in his moustache. His eyes are sky blue.

‘Come in, come in.’

He ushers me over to a closed-up shop. The Visberg Tidningen sign is still visible on the window through the whitewash.

The office smells of old paper and coffee.

‘Sit, sit,’ he says.

I do as he asks and he moves behind his massive oak desk. The walls are full of framed front pages of old Visberg Tidningen issues.

‘Forty years of stories up there,’ he says, following my gaze. ‘These are just the highlights, just a few of the highlights.’

‘What do you think about the corpse found last night? The beheading?’

He peers at me with those light blue eyes.

‘Coffee, my dear?’

I shake my head.

‘Dreadful business, a beheading,’ he says. ‘Makes such an awful mess. I always feel sorry for the next of kin having to identify the body of a loved one in that state, even if it’s just from a photograph, the wound concealed. That’s a horror you never walk away from.’

‘And a shock for the town,’ I say

‘They’re scared,’ says Ragnar, nodding. ‘People are afraid.’

‘It’s natural.’

‘It’s not natural,’ he says. ‘Over the years Visberg town has seen more than its fair share of decapitations.’

5

‘This isn’t the first beheading?’

‘Oh, goodness, no,’ he says.

‘No?’

‘When you’ve been a professional journalist for as long as I have you see everything. It’s all cyclical, my dear. Is this your first story working on your own?’

I bite my lip. ‘No, it isn’t.’

‘All news is cyclical in a hill town like Visberg, you see. A corruption scandal at the town hall. Wait ten years. There will be another. Some kind of youth pregnancy at the high school. Wait two years. Another one, you see? There is no new news and eveyone’s related to everyone else.’

‘Beheadings, though?’

‘We had one in ’83. A motorcyclist. Head came to rest well down the hill. Rolled down like a soccer ball, it did. Another one the year after, an arborologist. That means––’

‘Tree surgeon.’

‘An amateur. Not a complete decapitation, but as good as. Dead by the time he hit the ground, or so I was told. Local man, but not an Edlund.’

‘Edlund?’

‘The family.’

‘What family?’

‘The Edlund family. How do you take your coffee?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘When you’ve been doing this a few more years you’ll be drinking strong coffee like me. Sign of a professional.’

He taps his nose and pours from a thermos.

I’ll give Ragnar Falk one more pass on the patronising bullshit then I’ll call him out. I’m mellowing, I guess.

‘And then there were the animal beheadings. Much more recent.’

‘Animal?’