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Back Bad Apples Save as PDF
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  65. Acknowledgements

He sees me out the corner of his eye and says, ‘I’ll call this in. We got procedures to follow, even tonight. You run along now and let me do my job.’

But two hours later the teeth are forgotten about and there’s no sign of any police. I’ve been waiting for them to arrive. Nothing. More and more people are heading into the Hive. A troupe. A queue of hideous misfits drawn to the block-size building. The bee on the roof is whirring now, and the clock hands are spinning so fast I can hardly keep up with my eyes.

Pans are full to bursting. Stuffed with rotting fruit and coins and bloody loins of deer. Some people leave their masks in a pan. Others drape silver-charm bracelets from the pan handles. I see one man stagger to a pan and urinate in it, but he’s reprimanded by a gang and sent away.

Were they really human teeth in the clockmaker’s pan? Teeth from that severed head? Arne Persson’s teeth? One part of me wants to call Chief Björn myself but I know that action would finish my career in this town stone dead. They’ll never trust me again. And I won’t get to the bottom of the Edlund’s secrets that way. So I’ll wait it out. Keep looking. Bide my time.

A man in loose animal skins comes up to me. He’s wearing a Baby Björn-style sling on his chest. There’s a cross-eyed troll sitting in it. He asks for a light.

‘Don’t smoke, sorry.’

He leaves me be.

There’s a darker tone to the square now. The crowds have thinned out, some to return home and relieve their elderly babysitting parents, others into the Hive to do God-only-knows. What’s left are writhing couples and more backwards walkers than before. Huddles and small groups all trekking anti-clockwise round Visberg square, their boots caked in rotten-apple sludge and ash.

I have that feeling you get at a good house party in the early hours of the morning when you know you have to go home. When you’re exhausted but you can’t quite face the night bus. Or in my case, getting back to Julia’s garage and driving all the way back down to Gavrik. I can’t leave yet, the road must still be blocked.