He gets to work on the filling. Injecting my gums with local anaesthetic. He doesn’t have a sensitive touch – feels like he’s rushing to get me out of his surgery so he can play a round of golf with his cousins. Scraping. Probing. I look around the room. Computer with keyboard, covered in a fitted transparent-plastic protector. Nobody wants blood and plaque on their spacebar, do they? A digital SLR camera with flash. He sucks my mouth dry with that tube thing. And then the drill starts up. I should have put my volume down before this all started. The drill whine, that high-pitched squeal, is a bad sound for me. I feel the drilling in my mouth but the noise of it is even worse. He builds up the filling and gets me to bite on it, then grinds it down and asks me to spit.

The chair goes back to upright position.

‘Make an appointment at reception for the root-canal procedure.’

‘Thank you. Mr, Edlund, can I ask you a few quick questions.’

‘It’s Dr Edlund.’

‘Sorry, of course. Dr Edlund, do you hunt the forests on Visberg hill?’

He bites his lip. ‘Of course. My family have hunted these woods for three hundred years.’

He removes his white jacket.

‘I need to ask – as your family have been in the town for centuries and you’re an elder figure – do you know who might have killed Arne Persson? Could that have been an elk or boar-hunt accident?’

He looks over at the wall beside the computer. Two certificates. Some kind of dental qualification. One says ‘Sven Edlund’, the other says, ‘Eva Edlund’.

‘Your wife?’

He clears his throat. ‘Yes, but Eva doesn’t practice. She’s too busy with her charities and so on. The Edlund foundation. No, no. I don’t think the death was attributable to the hunt in any way. Possibly a transient. Two berry pickers fighting over their patch. I heard they use machetes to cut through the undergrowth, imagine that, machetes in Sweden! Could have been mushroom pickers, even; we have Eastern Europeans working around these parts. Some even ask for work at our golf club.’

‘But why Arne Persson, and why in such a gruesome manner?’

‘There’s no rhyme or reason with those kinds of people. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting.’

He picks up a golf glove and leaves the room.

I rub my jaw. There’s some numbness on one side but it’s not too severe.

I make an appointment with Julia for the root-canal work, and she tells me she’ll book me in with Tobias for a deep clean. I agree because I’d quite like extremely clean teeth, and also I need to grill as many locals as I can and this is as good a way as any.

I pay and walk out past the mannequins and into the town square.