"I couldn't see who she was, as a strange mask covered her face. In my confusion, I thought it looked like a goat's head. But why should she look like that?" She stood still, bending over Elisabeth, who was shaking all over in a kind of trance, calling out something I couldn't hear. I looked at the woman with the mask. There was a mark on one of her breasts, a heart-shaped birthmark. I tried to get closer. Suddenly she drew out a shining, flashing knife, raising it slowly above Elisabeth. I felt myself falling backwards among stars of silver, down into a jet-black hole. But before I fell, I saw the knife descending time and time again, down into that white female body." Johan Kristian Homan, antique dealer, bachelor and gourmet, finds the solution to this mystery story set in the Old City in Stockholm. Yet the solution is not quite what the reader might be led to expect...