“So you’re Moa’s dad, are you?”

Good. Moa had done her job.

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe we should go to the waiting room and have a little chat.”

“I suppose he was just unlucky,” she said. “Wrong man in the wrong place, or however you put it.”

They sat down by a window. The gray light of day outside seemed translucent. The room was in a strange sort of shadow cast by a sun that wasn’t there. A woman coughed quietly on a sofa by a low wooden table weighed down by magazines with cover photos of well-known people, smiling. Well-known to whom? Ringmar had wondered more than once. Visiting hospitals was part of his job, and he’d often wondered why

Hello and similar magazines were always piled up in dreary hospital waiting rooms. Maybe they were a kind of comfort, like a little candle burning on the tables of these huge wards. All of you in that magazine, who are photographed at every premiere there is, maybe used to be like us, and maybe we can be like you if we get well again and are discovered in the hectic search for new talent. That search was nonstop, never ending. The photos of those celebrities were proof of that. There was no room for faded Polaroids of crushed skulls.

“It wasn’t bad luck,” said Ringmar now, looking at the girl.

“You look younger than I expected,” she said.

“Based on Moa’s description of me, you mean,” he said.

She smiled, then turned serious again.

“Do you know anybody who really disliked Jakob?” Ringmar asked.

“Nobody disliked him,” she said.

“Is there anybody he dislikes?”

“No.”

“Nobody at all?”

“No.”

Maybe it’s the times we live in, Ringmar thought, and if so it has to be a good thing. When I was young we were always mad at everything and everybody. Angry all the time.