Sigtuna College is both the setting of a remembered school hierarchy and a source of evidence in the investigation of Fredrika Grünewald’s murder. Through Charlotte Silfverberg’s account, Annette Lundström’s testimony, and the school’s registers and yearbooks, Jeanette Kihlberg and Jens Hurtig connect an initiation ritual to a group of former students, including the missing Victoria Bergman. The college’s significance lies not only in what happened among its pupils, but also in the questions its records and reported silence leave open.

The school in the investigation

The college enters the inquiry when Jeanette explains to Charlotte that the police are investigating another murder and that the dead woman, Fredrika Grünewald, was Charlotte’s former classmate. Charlotte is genuinely shaken by the news. Jeanette says that evidence suggests the same murderer may be involved and tells her that a card was found beside Fredrika’s body. The school is therefore not introduced as a neutral biographical detail: knowing who attended with Fredrika may help the investigators understand both her past and the wider case.

Jeanette and Hurtig ask Charlotte about her time at Sigtuna, then let her speak without interruption for more than half an hour. Jeanette finds her account genuine. Charlotte does not deny that she was one of Fredrika’s underlings and helped bully students and teachers. At the end of the interview, Jeanette summarizes the social structure Charlotte has described: Fredrika could induce the others to do things they did not really want to do, while Charlotte and Henrietta Nordlund were among Fredrika’s closest friends. The school’s past thus emerges through a hierarchy of influence, participation, and friendship rather than as a collection of isolated recollections.

The remembered initiation

Annette Lundström’s testimony gives the school’s social history a more specific shape. She describes humiliation and the pressure young girls could exert on one another, recalling that during the first week of a new school year Fredrika and her followers selected three girls for a degrading initiation. Wearing dark capes and homemade pig masks, they took the girls to a tool shed and poured ice-cold water over them. Annette attributes what followed to Fredrika’s idea. Her account identifies the ritual as planned and directed, while also showing how the group’s participation could draw other girls into actions they might not have chosen on their own.

The detail that three girls were selected matters to the investigation because Charlotte cannot remember the names of two other girls who underwent the ritual and later disappeared. Jeanette recognizes that the school episode may offer a way to identify them. She asks Hurtig to contact the college for its registers and, if available, its yearbooks, giving him the names of Fredrika, Charlotte, and their friend Henrietta. She singles out Victoria Bergman as the person she is most curious about and asks what the missing woman looked like. The records are sought not simply to complete a list of classmates, but to connect a past group experience to a present disappearance.

Records and institutional silence

The records soon narrow the search. When Hurtig hands Jeanette class registers for the students who attended at the same time as Fredrika, the name she finds is Annette Lundström. The discovery links Annette’s account to the college’s documented cohort and gives the investigators a specific former student to approach. Later, three yearbooks from Sigtuna College for the Humanities arrive at Jeanette’s office. She finds Victoria Bergman in them, turning the yearbooks into a means of recognition after Jeanette’s questions about what the missing woman looked like.

Annette also says the initiation should never have been hushed up. As she understands it, Fredrika’s father was a close friend of the headmistress and one of the school’s largest donors, which she presumes explains why the matter was suppressed. This is Annette’s account of the reason for the silence, not an independently established explanation. Still, it places the college’s authority and donor relationships alongside the ritual itself: the students’ treatment of one another is one part of the history, and the alleged failure to address it is another.

Narrative significance

The college’s past reaches the present through distinct acts of recall and verification. Charlotte supplies an account of Fredrika’s influence but cannot supply all the names; Annette recalls the initiation and offers a possible explanation for why it was concealed; registers identify Annette among Fredrika’s contemporaries; yearbooks let Jeanette locate Victoria. Each source answers a different question, and none alone gives the investigators the whole picture.

That gradual movement from memory to documents makes Sigtuna College a crucial point of connection in the inquiry. The school’s records preserve identities that a witness cannot retrieve, while the testimony gives those names a troubling shared context. In particular, Jeanette’s focus on the ritual’s two unnamed participants turns the college from a backdrop to the investigation into an evidentiary bridge: its former pupils may help explain who disappeared and how their histories intersect with Fredrika’s murder.