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of executives and high-ranking public officials jumping off the edge.
    ‘They haven’t brought him out yet,’ says the lady in the skirt and jacket. Her eyes shine as eyes often do when humans sense blood.
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘They said they were waiting for the county medical officer.’
    I have a sudden headache. I take the cigar out of my mouth and massage the top of my nose. I shouldn’t have gone in so hard. ‘Should have given the mirror a miss.’
    ‘What was that?’ The old man stares at me.
    ‘You what?’
    ‘You said something about a mirror.’
    ‘I’ll be damned if I did.’
    One of the goons shakes his sabre at a couple of curious kids. A half-full tram passes by, a boy in a Vega cap cadging a ride on the carriage’s back coupler.
    ‘Here they come!’ the lady next to me cries in falsetto. First out, carrying one end of a stretcher, comes a corpulent young man whose tight-fitting trousers stick around his wide thighs. Zetterberg has been covered with a clean sheet. The other bearer is small of stature, grimacing with the exertion, and his face is quite red. I remember the taxing stairs to Zetterberg on the top floor.
    Halfway to the mortuary car, Zetterberg’s arm drops away from the body, falling out and dangling like a pendulum. The signet ring drops off the corpse’s thin fingers and hits the street. It bounces a few times before it stops in the gutter.
    A sigh goes through the spectators. The small bearer seems to swear silently to himself. He bends his legs, rests one of the stretcher’s handles on his knee and reaches for the ring. For a moment the stretcher is on the verge of overturning, but in the nick of time the bloke picks up the ring and manages to getZetterberg back into balance. The lady next to me is panting with agitation.
    I’ve seen enough. I leave the little crowd. The cold, razing December wind finds its way under my collar and into my sleeves, leaving the skin goose pimpled. My feet are colder than ever.
     
    The bell on the door tinkles welcomingly when half an hour later I arrive at Lundin’s Undertakers, bending my head as I go in. The premises seem to strain under the weight of the house’s five floors, like a delivery boy under a piano. The office consists of a little tobacco-smelling reception, a desk, a couple of visitors chairs, a telephone and a potted palm tree with brown fronds.
    A woman is sitting with her back towards me. Under her black hat is a grey knot of hair. Her head is bowed and her shoulders shake from time to time, although she doesn’t make a sound. Her long skirt has dragged through the gutter on the way here.
    ‘We can arrange for a more elegant hearse from Frey’s rentals agency if you wish,’ says Lundin in his timid salesman’s manner. He looks her over and nods at the wall-mounted telephone. I shake my head. Out in the street a car honks its horn and a couple of agitated voices are swearing. A gang of excitable boys are causing a racket. I move an invisible bottle to my lips, as if having a drink. Lundin nods again, and the old woman blows her nose sonorously. I start pacing about on the spot.
    ‘And what do we do about flowers?’
    I run my hand across my chin several times and make a dry, smacking sound with my lips. One after the other, the clocks of St Stefan and St Johannes, and Lundin’s American timepiece inside the flat behind him, toll, seven times each.
    Weddings and funerals entitle one to extra rations of schnapps, and Lundin often takes a part-payment for his services in spirits, which he then sells on at high prices or dilutes with embalming fluid and flogs on the cheap. The rationing system, he likes to say, is the best thing to happen to the country apart from the Spanish Flu. He keeps the bottles in the safest place in the funeral home: a child’s coffin in the cool room. I take a deep breath and button up my overcoat.
    The room hardly measures twenty metres square and has no windows. The walls are tiled in white