People's thoughts about a coming assassination began to seem like mass hysteria and mass psychosis. There was gossip about the murder of Palmer everywhere, despite the fact that he was alive and in the best of health. The exaggerations in the press had long since passed the permitted limits, with the result that there had been a number of legal actions. But nothing seemed to have any effect on the mass hysteria, and when the press chose to write about other things their sales crashed. People just wanted to read about the death of Olof Palmer. They wanted him to die!

Olof Palmer was no chicken-hearted person and he took the storm about his impending death with good humour. The Conservative's public opinion polls beat all previous records. It was as if people were afraid he would be degraded to leader of the Opposition. At the same time, the hatred of Palmer by the Swedish left grew much stronger. In the streets of Stockholm the social outcasts and the homeless had increased in number and a hundred Swedish soldiers had returned in black bags from the EU:s war in Algeria. Then came February 2036 and soon February 28 would dawn.