The outside-broadcast team are filming as I walk out. There are probably three more of them in Visberg town right now. Women and men with good hair standing in front of a cordoned-off statue holding microphones and saying, ‘In the early hours of this morning the head of a deceased male was discovered on or around the statue of legendary local industrialist Adolf-Fredrik Edlund in the quiet ex-steel town of Visberg.’

I spot the stationery-store woman walking toward the camera, adjusting her red beret and licking her lips. The gossip queen of Toytown has come out of the woodwork.

Slick-back approaches her. ‘Madam, can I ask you about the awful news coming out of Visberg town this morning?’

‘You surely can.’

Broad smile. She shuffles closer to the camera and slick-back intercepts so she doesn’t get too close.

‘What do you make of the discovery of a severed head in the town square?’

‘My Auntie Else used to live up that hill before her divorce and she said there was black magic up there this time of year.’

‘Care to explain?’

‘Not on your life, young man.’

He frowns ever so slightly then smiles.

‘What do you think the impact of this news will be on such a close-knit community?’

She ignores the question. ‘It’s your kind up there, that’s why it’s so hushed up if you ask me, I’m not one to gossip, but…’

‘One of us?

She lowers her voice. ‘The old man from the Tidningen.’ Her volume returns to normal. ‘Whole town knows he was caught as a boy with his mice.’

‘With his mice?’

‘Pet mice, you know, the little white ones, not the black mice, not rats or shrews or voles. Clean mice you keep in a cage. Cut all their tiny heads off, he did. Used a cutlery knife or so I was told, not sharp, you know the sort, so those little mice must have gone through agony at the hands of Ragnar Falk.’

Noora walks out of the station and ignores the reporters desperate to talk to her. She looks at me, and I know that look. I follow her round the back of Gavrik Posten. We sit in my Hilux.

‘I can’t tell you much right now, Tuva. I have to keep to my boundaries.’

‘And…’

‘Just. You know you went to the dentist in Visberg last week and they want to do follow-up work for you. Root-canal. I can’t tell you why or share any details, but do not go back to them yet. You’ll understand why soon.’

‘What is it?’

‘I can’t talk yet, I have to stick to my bound––’

‘Fuck the boundaries. It’s me you’re talking to, Noora. What is it?’

She looks over at the direction of the cop shop, then back at me.

‘The loose teeth discovered in the pan in Visberg. They were Arne Persson’s teeth.’

‘As suspected. And?’