A lady in her fifties wearing a floor-length coat steps up to the Sheriff and says, ‘Are you working today, Harry? Could you run me down to the churchyard, I’d like to pay my respects. Fixed price if you don’t mind, I don’t trust the meter.’

The Sheriff mumbles something I can’t understand and then opens the back door for her. Guess he doesn’t get hailed down in the street much in this town.

Tobias the hygienist is standing outside Konsum with one of the barbers from down Annika’s street. The barber’s wearing a white apron and his hair is oiled and combed perfectly. The man is a walking advert.

‘None of this happened here till she took over Ragnar Falk’s newspaper,’ says the barber. I can read his lips pretty well from here.

Tobias rolls his eyes and says, ‘Not sure we can blame the newspapers for all this.’

‘Not the newspapers,’ the barber says, pointing at me with a long finger. ‘Her.’

Tobias says something I can’t make out and then he says, ‘Emil will turn up soon.’ ‘He’d better,’ says the barber. ‘They had enough tragedy in that family these past decades.’ He looks over at the Hive. ‘Emil’s pappa never deserved that end.’

‘When was that?’ asks Tobias.

‘Before you were even a twinkle in your daddy’s eye,’ says the barber. ‘Poor man lost his head on the diagonal, not that the angle makes it better or worse.’

I pass them by and the barber kind of hisses at me and I give him a poisonous stare that says do not fuck with me, old man. Not today.

The gamer café is busy. I can tell because of the roars and screams emanating from inside. Sounds like there’s a massacre going on inside Mind Games, and in a way, I suppose, there is. A virtual-reality massacre, unthinkable just ten years ago. Violence depicted so authentically I saw a guy about my age run out last night and vomit in the square. And yet as abhorrent as that kind of gaming sounds to some people, I’ve completed enough Doom levels to know how addictive it can be. How you can lose track of time. Lose track of your own moral compass.

The Grill chef is placing blankets over the backrests of all the chairs outside the pizzeria. It’s a Swedish thing. Back in London I’d ask for a blanket outside a bar or a restaurant and I’d be met with a puzzled expression every time.

Luka Kodro opens his door.

‘Tuva Moodyson,’ he says. ‘Early pizza? Spicy American Yankee Sausage?’

‘Too early, even for me.’

‘Coffee then?’

‘Sure.’

Luka makes some gesture to his chef and his chef brings out a pot of black coffee and two smaller pots of hot milk. I place a blanket over my knees. Luka does not.