The dual scent of Laura Helanto and the cinnamon buns. Laura with her bushy hair and large, dark-rimmed glasses on the other side of the table, the cinnamon buns the size of dinner plates in the middle. The coffee maker is gurgling away, and I’ve got my work cut out trying to control myself. For some reason, I feel the need to explain why I have slept this late, that this wasn’t a trivial matter of oversleeping. That the real reason is that I saved my skin by the shores of a dark pond with ten thousand euros, half of which – a down payment – I took from an ATM in the wall of a large hypermarket I’d never seen before, and that I was already tired from lack of sleep the night before when, in self-defence, I killed a man with the enormous rabbit’s ear, which you described as especially ‘unpredictable’, and because dragging the man’s body into the freezer in the café’s kitchen was a two-hour operation requiring raw physical exertion. Instead, I remain quiet, raise a hand to check my tie is straight and notice that my hand is trembling.