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price for a handshake. Especially if the hand in question belonged to a corpse. Ingmar didn’t think he would be very popular in the country, either. Murderers of kings seldom were.
    So he turned round.
    He left the hire car outside the Communists’ meeting hall in Södertälje, in the hope that his father-in-law would get the blame. From there he walked all the way home to Henrietta and told her that he might have just killed the king he loved so dearly.
    Henrietta consoled him by saying that everything was probably fine down there at the king’s curve, and in any case it would be a good thing for the family finances if she were wrong.
    The next day, the press reported that King Gustaf V had ended up in the ditch after his car had been driven at high speeds, but that he was unharmed. Henrietta had mixed feelings upon hearing this, but she thought that perhaps her husband had learned an important lesson. And so she asked, full of hope, if Ingmar was done chasing the king.
    He was not.
    The third considerable undertaking before everything went topsy-turvy involved a journey to the French Riviera for Ingmar; he was going to Nice, where Gustaf V, age eighty-eight, always spent the late autumn to get relief from his chronic bronchitis. In a rare interview, the king had said that when he wasn’t taking his daily constitutional at a leisurely pace along the Promenade des Anglais, he spent the days sitting on the terrace of his state apartment at the Hôtel d’Angleterre.
    This was enough information for Ingmar. He would travel there, run across the king while he was on his walk and introduce himself.
    It was impossible to know what would happen next. Perhaps the two men would stand there for a while and have a chat, and if they hit it off perhaps Ingmar could buy the king a drink at the hotel that evening. And why not a game of tennis the next day?
    ‘Nothing can go wrong this time,’ Ingmar said to Henrietta.
    ‘That’s nice,’ said his wife. ‘Have you seen my cigarettes?’
    Ingmar hitchhiked his way through Europe. It took a whole week, but once he was in Nice it took only two hours of sitting on a bench on the Promenade des Anglais before he caught sight of the tall, stately gentleman with the silver cane and the monocle. God, he was so grand! He was approaching slowly. And he was alone.
    What happened next was something Henrietta could describe in great detail many years later, because Ingmar would dwell on it for the rest of her life.
    Ingmar stood up from his bench, walked up to His Majesty, introduced himself as the loyal subject from the Royal Mail Service that he was, broached the possibility of a drink together and maybe a game of tennis – and concluded by suggesting that the two men shake hands.
    The king’s reaction, however, had not been what Ingmar expected. For one thing, he refused to take this unknown man’s hand. For another, he didn’t condescend to look at him. Instead he looked past Ingmar into the distance, just as he had already done on all the tens of thousands of stamps Ingmar had had reason to handle in the course of his work. And then he said that he had no intention, under any circumstances, of socializing with a messenger boy from the post office.
    Strictly speaking, the king was too stately to say what he thought of his subjects. He had been drilled since childhood in the art of showing his people the respect they generally didn’t deserve. But he said what he thought now, partly because he hurt all over and partly because keeping it to himself all his life had taken its toll.
    ‘But Your Majesty, you don’t understand,’ Ingmar tried.
    ‘If I were not alone I would have asked my companions to explain to the scoundrel before me that I certainly do understand,’ said the king, and in this way even managed to avoid speaking directly to the unfortunate subject.
    ‘But,’ Ingmar said – and that was all he managed to say before the king hit him on the forehead with his silver cane