‘Sorry?’

He chortles to himself.

‘I’ll explain in person. Meet me at six-thirty when I close the shop?’

I can’t say no to this kind of request. Every journalist, no matter how junior or senior, must exploit every available lead. Every source. Every ‘in’. Most of my Posten stories are already written. I can polish them later when I get back to the office. And I can lean on Sebastian.

‘On my way.’

I say bye to Tam and we hug, I mean a real tight embrace, the kind of thing friends do when they know they might not see each other for a while.

‘Watch your back, Tuva,’ she says.

I walk away to my Hilux and drive off up Storgatan. A man steps out of Benny Björnmossen’s shop carrying a brown leather rifle-bag. It’s Sven Edlund, the dentist. The rifle bag is monogrammed, his initials flash in my headlights. He climbs into the passenger side of a waiting black Audi 4x4. The Audi from the hill. The Audi that drove off.

The road darkens with every minute.

Part of me wishes I was still hanging out with Tammy in relative safety. Most of me wishes that.

My dash reads five degrees and half a tank of gas. This autumn has been unseasonably warm so far and even wetter than usual. That means two things: more mushrooms and more bloodthirsty critters.

I stop at a red light past the sewage works and there’s a tree lying horizontal in the field. Looks like it’s been felled. The branches have been lopped away by a chainsaw. Each one now a nub. The trunk has bleached white over the summer and the tree, after its amputations and its whitening, now resembles the ripped-out spinal cord of some mythical beast.

This Hilux came on winter tyres but I still slide on Visberg hill. It’s not ice or snow, it’s leaf slime. The autumn fall. Needles and leaves and fungi lying over the road like a film of sludge. Not enough traffic to shift it. This place is more wilderness than human. Like we’ve never really been welcome. Like we’re fighting a losing battle.

Up the hill. Past the white bike, past the cross, past the now-empty bus shelter. Over the derelict train-tracks, cresting the summit. The scent of rotting apples drifts through my heating vents. The bandstand’s uplit by powerful lamps hidden down by the apple-tree trunks.

I park outside Visberg’s Clocks and Watches. Wimmer’s there, behind the window, wearing a yellow pocket-handkerchief, removing all the plastic alarm clocks from the display, like this is a flagship Cartier boutique and they’re 100,000-kronor diamond-encrusted horological works of art. Each one’s worth two or three pizzas. Why remove them?

‘Good, good. Excellent,’ he says, opening his door. ‘Shall we?’

‘Shall we what?’

‘The Hive,’ he says. ‘Self-storage. I’ll explain everything.’