This is going to make one hell of a story but I have no idea when I’ll be able to tell it. Probably not until I’ve moved on to some big city in a few years. Maybe Stockholm with Noora. God, I hope that’s in our future somehow. But right now I have to focus on the task at hand. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about a party atmosphere, it’s that people let their guards down. Especially when costumes are involved. If I can glean anything about the grisly Arne Persson murder tonight I may be able to help save another life.

Four fire-breathers roar and exhale flames up into the night sky and the whole square illuminates. I see things I didn’t notice before. The man with the horned mask sitting on a bench, masturbating. The huge, broken clock on the side of Hans Wimmer’s shop isn’t broken anymore. Well, I guess it is. The hands are rotating anticlockwise as fast at the bee on the Hive is spinning. Whirring. Time reversing.

A pan outside the old newspaper office has a troll in it stuck down, head first.

Two women approach each other. Each one is holding a large udder balloon, each talking in chants or tongues. They turn and offer me an egg so I take it. Soft boiled. Soaked in vinegar. A pickled egg? Feels wrong in my hand. Too flaccid. One of the women sees me hesitate and places her hand over my hand and squeezes gently so the undercooked albumen oozes between our intermeshed fingers and then the yolk bursts. Warm protein spreading over our thumbs and down our wrists. She leans in and I think she’s going to kiss me. A rush of butterflies in my stomach. Moths. Small birds. But she lowers her head and licks from her hand and from my hand, and her partner howls and they scamper off into the murk.

There are lanterns in trees, and they swing in the breeze. The shadows are unreliable. This whole damn town is unreliable.

A man in a fur coat and pointed wooden clogs squats in the middle of the road and relieves himself.

The two violins screech and more people fill the square to the point where there aren’t many free spaces for me to keep myself to myself. I wipe my eggy hands on the dew-dampened grass. I look around me and I am hyper-aware now. Locals are more drunk or more high. The noises mess with my hearing aids and the darkness and weirdness turns me twitchy.

A group of powerfully built men walk past and ignore me and they are all chanting, as if in church, ‘The shadow of death, the shadow of death, the shadow of death.’ I can see the veins and membranes of their udder balloons clearly in the bonfire light.