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Oskar's desire to impress his new neighbour overcomes his fear of taking on three boys at once. He swings his rod with all his might and hits Conny on the ear. Conny screams and is rushed to the hospital. Now that Oskar has triumphed over the class bully, the other kids start to treat him with respect, and he finds with some of them the friendship he had hoped to find with his neighbour.
That night he waits by the jungle gym, eager for his neighbour to appear so that he can boast to her about his triumph. She never does. Looking at her apartment, he discovers that the windows are no longer covered over. Apparently, she and her father have moved away. He is disappointed that his show of courage has come too late to enable him to make friends with her, but soon thereafter something happens that turns his disappointment into relief: he notices that the talk about murders has ceased. It occurs to him that the murders started when the girl and her father moved in and stopped when they moved away. The man who lived next door to Oskar may have been a serial killer, responsible for all the murders and attempted murders! Now that he has moved away, Oskar no longer has any reason to fear being murdered. Furthermore, Conny and his friends are unlikely to be bothering him any more, and with his newfound popularity, he expects to begin living a normal life.