She says something else but it’s a mumble and her mouth’s covered with the clipboard, so I say, ‘Sorry, I’m deaf. What did you say?’

‘I said I could tell you one or two things about this town. I could…’

‘Tuva Moodyson,’ booms a deep, clipped voice from deeper inside the building.

‘Dr Edlund will see you now,’ says Julia.

I walk through the doorway and along a corridor. Four closed doors and one open one.

He says, ‘Come in and take a seat’ without even looking at me.

Sven Edlund dresses like a wealthy aristocrat. Short, neat hair. Black with some grey. Dark red trousers, a tweed waistcoat, a tie with a deer-head insignia. He’s wearing a monogrammed pinkie ring and tortoiseshell glasses.

I sit back in the dentist’s chair and he pulls on a white coat and a face mask.

‘Lie down and open your mouth as wide as you can.’

No small talk with this guy.

‘Not that wide,’ he says.

I close my mouth a little.

His face is on mine. His coffee breath filtering through his mask. He says something but I can’t hear and I can’t read him through the mask.

I make a noise like, ‘Eh?’

He looks irritated. ‘When was the last time you visited a dentist?’

‘About a year ago,’ I say. ‘I’m deaf so it’s hard for me to hear you.’

Hard to talk as well with my mouth wide open.

‘I’m not interested in your ears,’ he says, standing straight, pulling down his mask. ‘Only your teeth.’

Thanks for clarifying, dickhead.

‘X-rays.’

He asks Tobias, the dental hygienist, to complete the X-rays because apparently the dental nurse is off sick having eaten some bad mushrooms. It’s that time of year, I guess.

The hygienist is clean-cut with a nice jaw. His breath is minty fresh.

‘Bite down on this, please.’

He inserts something between my teeth and then he retreats behind the safety of a lead screen. The machine beeps. He repeats the procedure.

‘Awful news,’ I say, once my mouth is empty. ‘The body, I mean.’

He shakes his head. ‘Last thing this town needed. You hear about this kind of crime in New York or Cape Town. But not Visberg. My girlfriend wants me to add extra locks to her doors. She’s even talking about a reinforced steel door.’

‘Can never be too careful,’ I say.

Dr Edlund comes back into the room and Tobias leaves.

‘You’ve lost part of a filling, I’ll repair that today. And you need root-canal surgery on your lower-right back molar. The one before the wisdom tooth. It’ll take two separate appointments.’

‘Will it hurt?’ I ask.

‘There will be some discomfort,’ he says.