All the things he’d done since then had been attempts at recapturing that same intoxicating exhilaration. Even if just one last time. He’d tried going to Tivoli again, more than once. He’d tried alcohol and drugs. He’d travelled around the world and experienced more than most people could ever dream of. But he’d never come close to that feeling of effervescent ecstasy that had almost made him fly.

Not until now.

Hyllinge Mall was not just his first stop, it was an amusement park that was more exciting than all the world’s amusement parks put together. The stakes were much higher and, consequently, the potential consequences more dire. Anything could happen and nothing was up to him. Thanks to the dice, he knew no more about what was going to happen over the course of the next hour than the first time he got on a roller coaster and pulled the cold metal bar down over his legs.

The dice.

He had the dice to thank for everything. For some inexplicable reason, it had brought him out here to Hyllinge Mall, of all places, and now it was going to lead him straight into the unknown and select his victim.

The bus pulled over and stopped on Åstorpsvägen. After getting off himself, he helped a mother get her buggy off and then watched it for her until she had managed to collect a protesting three-year-old who was doing everything he could to scratch her eyes out. She had got on two stops after him and the brat had howled more or less constantly since then. Every one of her increasingly desperate attempts to calm him down, taking the form of colourful smoothies, had either ended up on the bus floor or all over her.

To make matters worse, he’d also been forced to sit next to an obese woman in gym clothes who had terrible breath. He had never understood why people who clearly never worked out insisted on walking around in ill-fitting synthetic clothes in garish colours.

But he was in too fine a mood to let it bring him down, even though he would have preferred the dice to have chosen car, Vespa or even bike instead of bus. The mall was built for motorists. They hadn’t bothered to put in a proper pedestrian path across the car park, where two-thirds of the spots were already taken even though it was only twenty past ten.

He waited until the mother with the buggy had walked away before sitting down on the graffiti-covered wooden bench in the bus shelter and taking his six-sided precision dice out of its cloth bag. He weighed it in his hand and rubbed each of the sides with his fingers to warm it up.