The National Crime Viewing Room is a small screening suite at Kronoberg Police Headquarters, where Jeanette Kihlberg reviews recordings from a collection documenting child abuse. Its importance lies in the contrast between the room’s limited, workmanlike equipment and the scale of the archive surrounding it: evidence is available to be examined, but only if investigators make time to enter, inspect, and follow it through.

Setting and Access

Jeanette comes to the collection after reconsidering a recording made in a hotel room. If the film is among the material seized from Karl Lundström, it could help establish evidence against perpetrators beyond Lundström himself, who is dead. Frustrated that the investigation has received too few resources, she calls Lars Mikkelsen to ask whether someone can go through the seized material. When he cannot offer anyone, she proposes collecting the films and examining them herself, then ends the call before he can answer.

Mikkelsen is absent when Jeanette arrives. A young colleague meets her outside his office, explains that Mikkelsen has asked him to let her into the storeroom, and asks her to sign for whatever she takes. The ordinary office door gives little indication of what is kept behind it. Jeanette enters National Crime’s collection herself, aware that the material will change how she sees the world. The moment marks a shift from pursuing the case at a distance to confronting evidence that demands direct attention.

Archive and Viewing Equipment

The archive at Kronoberg is presented as a dense, carefully organised accumulation rather than a single collection of films. There are shelves of VHS cassettes, CDs, hard drives, and boxes of photographs. Each item is marked with its previous owner and with a time, place, and date. That system gives the material an evidentiary order: individual objects are connected to people and circumstances, even as their sheer quantity makes the archive difficult to absorb.

The viewing suite itself is markedly smaller than the archive. A young officer calls it the viewing suite, though the room is claustrophobically small. It contains a desk, a computer screen, and several video players, allowing films in different formats to be played. A mixer board lets the reviewer pause footage and move forwards or backwards frame by frame; controls can zoom in or sharpen the image. The equipment makes close inspection possible, but its many unfamiliar buttons and tangled cables also underscore that examination is a technical, laborious process, not a simple act of watching.

Jeanette’s Investigation

Jeanette’s decision to inspect the material herself grows out of a particular investigative omission. She has not yet asked whether the hotel-room recording might be in Lundström’s collection, although Ulrika Wendin’s account makes the film potentially important. Lundström’s death does not, in her assessment, remove the possibility of charging other perpetrators. The collection therefore becomes a route back into an investigation that she feels has been under-prioritised.

The room is where that search can be carried out in detail. Its equipment permits repeated, frame-by-frame review, while the archive’s labels offer ways to identify and contextualise particular recordings. Jeanette’s entry into the collection and her later work in the viewing suite form connected stages: first she secures access to the seized material, then she confronts the scale of what has been preserved and the task of interpreting it. The film archive is not merely background to her case; it is a body of evidence whose implications depend on someone undertaking that work.

Narrative Significance

The National Crime Viewing Room brings the novel’s concern with looking and not looking into a concrete investigative setting. Jeanette has spent two decades in the police, yet the documented extent of abuse in the archive is beyond anything her career has prepared her for. The room’s carefully labelled records and adjustable playback controls promise precision, but they do not make the evidence emotionally or institutionally easy to face. A frame can be stopped and enlarged; the larger problem of what the records disclose cannot be contained by the equipment.

The contrast between the ordinary entrance, the cramped screening suite, and the shelves of accumulated material gives the location its force. The institution has preserved evidence, but preservation alone has not ensured that it has been fully examined or acted upon. Jeanette’s decision to enter and review it makes the viewing room a threshold in the investigation: a place where neglected material becomes immediate, and where seeing becomes an obligation rather than a passive response.