The house is wooden on the inside, like a sauna, and it’s almost as hot as one. There are kids’ toys all over the place: dolls and doll’s houses, racing-car models and tin soldiers. There’s a jigsaw of Frozen fully completed on the timber floorboards.

He steps over to the fireplace. ‘Let me light this.’

Ragnar sinks down into an old, fabric armchair. There’s a sofa with lace antimacassars, and a low coffee table with a cracked glass top. Three sets of coffee cups and saucers laid out, like they knew I’d be arriving. And a plate of dammsugare : little cake rolls wrapped in poison-green marzipan and dipped in chocolate. Named after an old-fashioned design vacuum cleaner. The name literally means ‘fluff sucker’.

The fire crackles and spits in the hearth and Hans blows air at it with a creaky pair of leather bellows.

‘Where was I?’ he says, before pouring us all coffee.

Ragnar says something but I still can’t hear. My aids need a night in desiccant. I need a fucking night in desiccant.

‘I’ll be out of your way soon,’ I say. ‘Nice to dry out and warm up.’

Ragnar wipes sweat from his brow and says something but I can’t make it out. My lip-reading isn’t that good.

‘What?’ I say.

‘Why are you out here?’

‘Hunters,’ I say, sweat dribbling down my back. ‘They reported some elk skulls missing. Seven of them. So I had to come out here to report on the story.’

‘Barbarians,’ says Hans Wimmer. ‘Primitive heathens.’

One of my aids starts working clearly again.

‘You know,’ says Ragnar, fanning himself with his hand. ‘Hunters round here take their lifestyle so seriously that their year starts on day one of the elk hunt. There is no January to December for Visberg hunters. They plot their whole year around this savagery.’

Suddenly I’m exhausted. Sleepy. It’s like I’m being drawn back to this infested hillside. The mass of it, the darkness within, the spinning bee perched on top, keeps drawing me closer.

‘Police are talking to those sisters two doors down renting the shop,’ says Ragnar. ‘They got wind of the rumours.’

‘Rumours?’ I ask.

‘That the mute one had issues with Arne Persson. That they’d had some kind of fight and Arne scared her.’

‘First of all, Alice isn’t mute. Second of all, I doubt anyone could scare her or her sister.’

Hans loosens his collar, then pours coffee from his cup into his saucer and sips it. Ragnar does the exact same thing.

‘I don’t know all the facts,’ says Hans Wimmer. ‘But they were definitely having issues. Lawyer letters and so forth. The license on the pop-up shop was informal on account of the short term, you see. I have a twenty-year lease on my shop.’ He looks proud of himself. ‘Arne only gave them a one-week rolling-term licence.’

‘Arne Persson was their landlord?’