The Monument block is a residential building near the Skanstull metro exit that becomes a crucial point of overlap between the police investigation and Sofia Zetterlund and Gao Lian’s secret actions. An attack there, a boy’s body discovered in its attic, and the later revelation of how Samuel Bai’s body was brought to the same building make the block a place where apparently separate events converge.

Setting and Identification

The block stands close to the exit from the Skanstull metro station and near Mikael’s flat. When Sofia hears Samuel describe being beaten in a doorway near Ölandsgatan, she recognizes the location he calls Monument as the Monument block. The detail links his account of the assault to a specific place in the city, and later investigation makes that location matter for more than the attack itself.

A boy is found in an attic in the block. At first, there is little to indicate that his death belongs to the same series of crimes as the earlier bodies. The condition of his face—his eyes gone and his features badly damaged—makes the discovery a distinct and disturbing crime scene, while the building’s connection to the earlier attack remains to be established.

Sofia and Jeanette Kihlberg connect the assault and the attic when they compare what Samuel had told Sofia with the facts of the case. Jeanette clarifies that Samuel was beaten in the Monument block and was later found hanged there. The exchange turns Sofia’s recollection into a piece of investigative recognition: the place associated with his assault is also where his body was discovered.

The Block as a Disposal Site

While copying a disc at her computer, Sofia Zetterlund remembers a different use of the Monument block: she and Gao Lian drove Samuel Bai’s body to Mikael’s building, carried it up to the attic, and hanged it from the ceiling. The recollection makes the attic’s significance more terrible and more specific. The site is not merely where Samuel was attacked and later found; it is also where Sofia and Gao Lian brought his body and worked together to stage its hanging. Sofia remembers that shared work as something that united them, tying the building’s public place in the investigation to the concealed violence of their own actions.

Discovery and Investigative Uncertainty

The attic discovery is set beside another crisis: at roughly the same time, Karl Lundström was knotting a sheet around his neck in Kronoberg Prison. The parallel places the boy’s death within a wider sequence of violence, but the scene itself initially resists an easy connection to the earlier bodies. Ivo Andrić enters the attic with forensic medical officer Rydén, bringing the investigation into a space whose significance is not yet clear to them.

That uncertainty gives the block a double role in the investigation. Its attic is first approached as a crime scene whose relation to other cases remains unproven; later, Sofia’s recollection supplies a link between the place and her own concealed actions. The shift does not make the building’s evidence simpler: it makes the apparent boundary between the crimes and the investigators’ account of them harder to maintain.

The Tattoo and Sofia’s Recognition

The attack in the Monument block also becomes a thread leading toward Petter Christoffersson. Watching him in an interview room, Sofia recognizes the tattoos on his arms and recalls Samuel Bai describing the men who attacked him. Jeanette Kihlberg corrects one detail in Sofia’s memory: the marks were spiderwebs, not snakes. She explains that in neo-Nazi circles spiderweb tattoos on the elbows were treated as a status symbol associated with having killed someone, though she doubts that claim applied to Petter. The distinction makes the tattoo a clue, but not proof of what he has done.

Sofia’s recognition carries a private association beyond the attack: Petter had delivered the polystyrene, planks, nails, glue, tarpaulin, and duct tape used to construct the concealed room behind her bookcase. The recollection binds the Monument block’s street violence to another hidden space in Sofia’s life. A mark first remembered through Samuel’s account thus joins a crime-scene location to the materials and labor behind Sofia’s secret room, without resolving how much Petter knew about either.