Every time so far, he’d dreaded rolling a one. The only number that could stop his little pastime. But today, he felt differently. He’d decided he would accept the outcome if he rolled a one. It’s not that he was sated, but he definitely wasn’t as ravenous as he had been.

It had been an extraordinary journey, offering both peaks and troughs, disappointments and pure, unadulterated euphoria. From time to time, he’d thought the dice was dead wrong, that it expected too many things at once, that it had made things unnecessarily complicated or that it had been both mean and unfair. But in hindsight, he could see it had in fact outperformed his wildest expectations and been right every single time.

A seven.

He exhaled. That was practically as good as it could get. The fun wasn’t over yet. And he had a week before he was supposed to strike again.

He took out the box with the six-sided precision dice, picked one and did a pre-throw to determine the number of dice.

A three.

That meant using one dice, so he picked it back up and rolled again.

A two.

He walked over to the pinned-up map that was divided into a grid of twelve by twelve squares. Column two was a special column, full of contradictions. It started in the north with the idyllic village of Arild in northern Skåne and ended in its complete opposite in the southern part of Copenhagen, also called Amager. If chance happened to be in the right mood, his victim or victims might even be found at Kastrup International Airport.

He did another pre-roll.

A four.

The number of squares down would consequently be decided by two dice; he picked up an additional one.

A one and a six.

As though his pulse had already figured it out, he could hear it pick up both speed and force as he turned his eyes to the map and noted that the area the dice had chosen for his next mission was in the middle of Öresund, just north of the island of Ven.

86

Fabian pushed his fingers in under the skin of the chicken and gently separated it from the breast to create a pocket into which he could pour a splash of olive oil and throw a pinch of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, which he then rubbed into the meat. Then he stabbed the chicken with the tip of the knife in a few select places and pushed the peeled and halved garlic cloves into the cuts.

It was Sunday, and he’d decided to pull out all the stops and make a roast chicken from his own recipe, which he’d made a big deal of keeping secret all these years. It was his signature dish and, to his mind, no one came close to making a better chicken.