Huddinge Hospital is a large, guarded medical complex where Sofia Zetterlund meets patients whose lives intersect with psychiatric care and criminal investigations. The hospital’s passageways lead from a controlled entrance to wards with sharply different functions: one holds highly difficult patients awaiting transfer, while another contains a shared consulting room for psychologists. Against this institutional setting, Sofia’s attention to patients’ dignity and capacity for trust becomes as important as the cases that bring them there.

Setting and Arrival

Sofia arrives shortly after half past ten and parks in front of the expansive complex. Its grey and blue exterior panels stand apart from the brightly painted houses nearby. She has heard that, during the Second World War, the hospital was designed to resemble a lake from above, while the surrounding houses were intended to look like fields and meadows, disguising the site from potential bombing raids. Whether as historical detail or remembered explanation, the camouflage gives the building an image of apparent openness concealing an institution built for care.

The approach inside is controlled and sequential. Sofia leaves her belongings in a locker, passes through a metal detector, and walks along a long corridor. She passes Ward 113, where shouting and fighting can be heard; the ward houses the most difficult patients, who are heavily medicated while waiting for places in other care facilities around the country. She then turns into Ward 112 and reaches the psychologists’ shared consulting room. On one visit she is fifteen minutes early, with time to sit at the desk, drink coffee, eat a sandwich, and compare the evening papers.

Psychiatric and Investigative Encounters

The hospital brings Sofia into contact with people regarded by staff primarily through the seriousness of their offenses. A psychiatric nurse introduces a woman Sofia is expected to see with dismissive, condemning language. Sofia dislikes the nurses’ habit of speaking about serious offenders in offensive or condescending terms. She does not deny the gravity of their crimes; instead, she maintains that this is no reason to abandon basic respect. She asks the nurse to bring the woman in and leave them alone, establishing the consulting room as a space where the patient can be addressed directly rather than reduced to staffroom judgment.

Tyra Mäkelä’s conversation with Sofia also takes place in the hospital. When Sofia leaves, she feels drained by the meeting, an emotional cost that accompanies her clinical work rather than disappearing at the ward door. The narrative links that exhaustion to the continuing demands of her work: she has also agreed to assist with another investigation involving a man charged with abusing his daughter and distributing child pornography. Huddinge is thus one point in a succession of difficult encounters, not an isolated workplace episode.

Karl Lundström’s case is likewise associated with Sofia’s journey to the hospital. He is to be charged with child-pornography offenses and the sexual abuse of his daughter, Linnea. Before turning into the hospital car park, Sofia recalls his senior position at Skanska, his wife Annette and their fourteen-year-old daughter, and the family’s repeated moves over the previous decade. The police are investigating whether Karl was part of a wider group of offenders. The setting connects the intimate work of psychological assessment with a case whose reach may extend beyond one household.

Work, Attention, and Narrative Significance

The hospital is not presented as a simple refuge from violence. Ward 113’s noise and the security measures at the entrance make the institution’s containment function visible, while Ward 112 offers the more private conditions of consultation. Those spaces sit close together but imply different relationships to care: confinement and medication on one side, conversation on the other. The distinction gives physical form to the pressures under which Sofia works without suggesting that a single conversation can resolve them.

The ordinary details of her visits—arriving early, stopping in the cafeteria, reading the evening papers—place the cases within the routines of a working day. On one occasion, the papers report that a young boy’s mummified body has been found at the Thorildsplan discovery site. Sofia’s response is sorrow at the news of yet more dead children. The juxtaposition makes the hospital part of a wider landscape of harm: while she reads about a child’s death, her professional obligations lead her back to patients and investigations shaped by abuse.

Huddinge Hospital therefore functions as both a concrete workplace and a threshold between psychiatric care and criminal justice. Sofia passes through security to meet people whom others may define by their offenses, and the narrative emphasizes her effort to preserve a humane, listening stance amid cases that leave her exhausted. Its guarded corridors do not make the work emotionally neutral; they sharpen the contrast between institutional control and the difficult, personal effort to understand.