Wimmer’s clockshop is closed. There’s a sign on the door that says, ‘Timex’ and then underneath is scribbled ‘Closed today for private museum visit’.

When I exit the square and start my descent down the hill, I pass by Harry Hansson in his sheriff car. He nods his head like a real sheriff might do.

I drive over the disused train tracks still embedded in the asphalt. The level crossing is here, but the barriers and lights are long gone. Tammy once told me there’s an old train carriage somewhere in the forest. A place where local teenagers used to congregate to flirt and smoke and escape the realities of hill town for a few hours.

The sky is the colour of an old faded tattoo. Blues stretching into mauves. Whites fading across the wrinkled horizon as the sun drags itself from east to west.

The two at the bus stop are still there. Still waiting.

Down past the cross and the white-bicycle memorial and on.

The trees either side of me contain killers. Men and women with rifles built for war. Telescopic sights and knives and fresh ammunition. Is this the future our forefathers saw coming? The execution of a hundred-thousand elk each and every autumn. Dogs and bullets. The slicing and eating of flesh. Disembowelment. Skinning. The celebration of so many deaths regulated, ordained, desired by the state.

I pull up at Svensson’s Saws & Axes. It’s a hut on the side of the road with a window display and car spaces for five. If the killer did in fact use a chainsaw, and he bought that chainsaw here at the base of Visberg hill, then he’s a fool. But sometimes, often, some would say, they are.

There’s a cardboard cut-out of a man behind the glass. He’s wearing a Husqvana cap and he’s wielding an axe. The thing is motorised so the axe moves up and down slowly. The cardboard guy is grinning like a child. Three chainsaws each side of him, all varying sizes. Petrol, but also a lightweight lithium-battery-powered model. I open the door and it bleeps.

‘We ain’t got no toilet in here,’ says the man at the counter, by way of welcome.

‘I don’t need one.’

‘Well, what do you need?’

‘Maybe an axe.’

‘Maybe an axe? You either need one or you don’t need one.’

I ignore that and check out the axes. Haven’t got a clue of the differences between one or another but I stand and study them.

‘Splitting or felling?’ he asks, moving my way, with his shoulders so far back he’s bent like a boomerang.

‘Splitting.’

‘Wood or man-made?’

‘What do you suggest?’

He sniffs and looks me up and down.

‘Lightweight polymer model. Suited to a female frame.’

I pick up a wooden axe. It weighs a ton.

‘How much?’

He almost smiles.