Nonexistence and erased identity

Nonexistence and erased identity names the pattern Jeanette Kihlberg sees emerging from the case: people and histories seem not merely lost, but made difficult to trace, while violence and suspicious deaths are filed away as accidents or allowed to disappear from public view. The idea begins as an uneasy recognition of connections and becomes a working suspicion that influential people helped black out the past.

A pattern noticed in the aftermath

Jeanette’s understanding takes shape after work, as she rides down to the garage beneath police headquarters and drives home through Gamla Enskede. She mentally places Madeleine Silfverberg and Linnea Lundström beside their fathers, Per-Ola Silfverberg and Karl Lundström, both suspected paedophiles; Karl Lundström is also suspected of raping Ulrika Wendin. She adds another link: Charlotte Silfverberg and the murdered Fredrika Grünewald had attended school together at Sigtuna. The connections do not yet prove a single conspiracy, but their accumulation makes separate family histories and investigations feel less separate.

The same impression gathers around shared professional contacts. Viggo Dürer represented both Per-Ola Silfverberg and Bengt Bergman, whose missing daughter Victoria Bergman had also been at Sigtuna. The deceased police commissioner Gert Berglind had interviewed both Per-Ola Silfverberg and Karl Lundström. Jeanette recalls that these people were connected to the same foundation. The foundation’s importance remains a suspicion, not an established explanation, but it gives her scattered names a possible common center.

The apparent endings sharpen her doubts. Per-Ola Silfverberg and Fredrika Grünewald have been murdered, possibly by the same person. Karl Lundström is dying in hospital. Bengt Bergman and his wife, Birgitta Bergman, have died in a fire; Viggo Dürer has also died in a fire. The police investigations classify the fires as accidents. Jeanette does not accept that classification as enough to settle what happened: she suspects someone means these people ill and that the foundation may be involved. The contrast between official closure and her growing sense of connection is central to the concept. An event can be recorded as an accident while its relationships and possible causes remain, in her view, unaccounted for.

Histories that stop

In conversation with Sofia Zetterlund, Jeanette makes the idea more explicit through Victoria Bergman’s missing history. Victoria was Bengt Bergman’s daughter, but Jeanette finds no trace of her after November 1988. She has spoken to Victoria by telephone, and says Victoria was unusually open about her relationship with her father. Jeanette suspects that Bengt Bergman sexually abused her and that the abuse explains her disappearance. This is Jeanette’s interpretation of the gap, not a fact independently established in the exchange.

The absence extends beyond Victoria. Jeanette tells Sofia that Bengt Bergman and Birgitta Bergman no longer exist either: both have recently died in a fire. She describes the Bergman and Lundström families as sharing a lack of existence, because their histories are blacked out. The language reaches beyond literal death or a person being missing. It points to records and accounts that fail to make a life legible, leaving gaps where an explanation should be. The novel makes those gaps investigative evidence: what cannot be found becomes a reason to ask who had the power, opportunity, or interest to keep it from view.

Jeanette’s account of the Lundström connections complicates the pattern further. Karl Lundström is suspected not only of child abuse but also of the rape of Ulrika Wendin. Jeanette tells Sofia that Ulrika was raped by several men, including Karl Lundström, in a hotel room seven years earlier, after the men injected her with an anaesthetic. The case was dropped by prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist, and no medical examination was conducted. Jeanette calls it another blacked-out case. The lack of examination does not prove that the suspected cover-up occurred, but it leaves the allegation without an important means of investigation and helps explain why Jeanette reads the case as part of the same pattern of erasure.

Suspicion, complicity, and revision

Jeanette’s view of Kenneth von Kwist shifts across these exchanges. While driving, she initially dismisses him as not involved, though she regards him as a useful idiot. Later, speaking to Sofia, she says she thinks both Viggo Dürer and Kenneth von Kwist participated in blacking out the histories. This is an evolving hypothesis rather than a settled finding. The change matters because it shows Jeanette moving from identifying a network of suspicious associations to considering whether professional intermediaries helped keep that network’s actions out of sight.

The distinction between evidence and inference remains important. The deaths, disappearances, interviews, and dropped case are the circumstances Jeanette assembles; coordinated concealment is her explanation for how they fit together. She does not yet offer proof that the foundation directed the events or that every death was deliberate. Instead, she recognizes a pattern in what official accounts leave unresolved, and seeks Sofia because she needs someone she trusts with a personal and uncertain theory. The investigation thus depends not only on discovering what happened, but on deciding whether the apparent blank spaces are accidental gaps or signs of active suppression.

Narrative significance

Nonexistence and erased identity turns missing information into a subject of the investigation rather than a mere absence of evidence. Victoria Bergman’s history ends in the record after November 1988; the deaths of Bengt Bergman, Birgitta Bergman, and Viggo Dürer are officially attributed to accidents; and the case involving Ulrika Wendin was dropped without a medical examination. These are different circumstances, and the text does not establish that one mechanism produced them all. Jeanette’s effort is to test whether they nevertheless belong to a shared structure of concealment.

The concept also describes a conflict over who gets to define a life’s public account. When family histories are blacked out and a case closes without examination, a person may remain physically real while becoming difficult to recognize within official records or accepted explanations. Jeanette’s insistence on connecting names, relationships, and unanswered questions resists that disappearance. Her suspicion may still be incomplete, but it changes the meaning of the apparent endings: rather than treating them as isolated conclusions, she asks what has been made to vanish along with the people involved.