The Head of Baphomet

Every camera was on. Nobody saw a thing.

Stockholm, November. A boy has been shot dead by a police officer who trusted a number, and the city is angry. Ten thousand people stand in the rain at Sergels torg demanding that the surveillance system be shut down, while the cameras on the walls look on and a drone hangs motionless against the clouds. Freelance journalist Moa Viklund works her way around the edge of the crowd, photographing faces.

Three blocks away, an old man is walking too slowly through the rain on Kungsgatan.

Jakob Reiser has spent fifty years explaining horror away. Every ghost story has turned out, in the end, to have an earthly cause: a poisoned well, an epidemic, a human being. It has been his profession and his armour. That evening he arrives a quarter of an hour late to meet a friend, and he will carry that quarter of an hour for the rest of his life.