He closed his eyes, opened his hands and heard the dice land on the felt table cover with a light thud, roll a few inches and come to a stop.

A two.

He exhaled and immediately felt his pulse slowing. Once again, he had avoided rolling a one and being forced to abort the whole thing. Instead, he now had a new mission as early as Saturday and had to shake his head at the way the dice insisted on challenging him. But this was exactly what he wanted, and if he could just focus on the present and ignore everything else, he would probably be able to pull it off, even with such a tight deadline.

The next roll was to determine the unlucky victim. For this, he brought out his collection of six-sided, anodized aluminium dice and shook one of them in his hands.

This was a so-called pre-roll to determine how many dice he was going to use. In this particular case, the option was one or two, which meant one, two and three represented using one dice and four, five and six represented two.

A five.

He picked up another dice and shook both for a good long while before releasing them on to the felt.

Two twos.

He stood up and walked over to the map of western Skåne that was pinned to the wall. The map formed a perfect square, which in turn was divided into 144 equal, numbered smaller squares. Twelve along the horizontal axis and twelve along the vertical. In the top left corner was Mölle, where he used to take the bus as a child to swim in the sea.

In the top right corner was Bjärnum, which he felt sure was as unexciting as it sounded. The bottom left corner was Copenhagen, which despite its peripheral position constituted the natural centre of the region. In the bottom right corner was Sjöbo; without knowing why, there was something inside him that wished the dice would take him there.

But not this time, since column four lay much further west. He picked up one of the dice to perform another pre-roll.

A three.

In other words, the number of squares going down was going to be decided by one dice. He picked the dice back up, shook it again and eventually rolled.

A four.

He put his finger on the square and instantly saw it was Hyllinge; when he zoomed in on the area in question on Google Maps, he realized the dice had chosen Hyllinge Mall. It was a location completely devoid of residential buildings, which meant he would have to go there and let the dice choose its victim at the scene.

That was going to be a new experience; he would have liked to have had a bit more time. But he wasn’t worried. On the contrary, he was looking forward to it. Besides, he already had an idea for how to make his selection.

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