Lars walks in at nine. This is odd because Lars is part time and doesn’t work weekends. Also, even on work days he gets in at around eleven. He pulls off his outer coat like a T-Rex might struggle with a tight sweater. Or any sweater, I guess. He hangs it up.

‘Hej, hej,’ he says.

‘Hej, hej? It’s the weekend, Lars. Your calendar malfunction on you?’

He shows me his little wheelie case, some kind of hand-luggage expandable thing, and says, ‘Working on my book.’

Ah, yes. Lena did mention Lars is writing his memoir. If you have any trouble sleeping, you may want to look into pre-ordering it.

‘Nineteen seventy-seven to nineteen eighty-three,’ he says, sitting down slowly on his chair and rearranging the haemorrhoid cushion. ‘Including the time the Karlstad mayor visited the town.’

‘You hear about last night, Lars?’

He looks over with a blank expression and adjusts his bifocals and says, ‘The head?’

I nod.

‘I heard.’

Gathered that.

‘Absolutely horrific. I’ve never been to Visberg town as an adult.’

‘You’ve lived here forever. Never been tempted?’

He smiles and powers up his computer.

‘Looks like I was wise to avoid it,’ he says. Then he trudges into the kitchen and brews a fresh pot of coffee. His Velcro indoor shoes squeak on the linoleum. Down in Malmö I missed the sound of that squeak.

When I get to the cop shop there’s already an out-of-town journo van here. They’re not filming, they’re drinking something hot from disposable McDonalds cups and chatting among themselves.

‘Tuva,’ says the slick-back journo from Aftonbladet.

‘I’m going inside.’

‘I heard you were there when the severed head was found early this morning.’

I look at him and say, ‘You need new sources, mate.’ And then I go inside.

Thord’s at the counter.

‘Thanks for coming in.’

‘I want to help.’

He’s eating cereal from a cardboard bowl with a plastic teaspoon.

‘That so your hand looks bigger?’

He looks down at the spoon and drops it in the bowl and says, ‘Come on through to the back.’

I give him my full statement. We go over the discovery of the body on Visberg hill earlier in the week. The woman who found him. I talk in great detail about the head, describing the man who noticed it, and then I give reasonably accurate descriptions of where I was standing and the exact time of discovery. But he doesn’t ask about the hours before. Why would he, I guess? I probe him about leads and he says, ‘Not now, Tuvs.’