Sigtuna College for the Humanities is both an elite boarding school and the setting of a formative act of humiliation whose consequences extend far beyond its grounds. Its reputation, tightly managed student hierarchy, and links to wealthy former pupils make the school more than a backdrop: it is where an initiation ritual becomes a lasting source of trauma, and where Jeanette Kihlberg’s investigation begins to uncover connections among people who have powerful reasons to keep the past obscure.

Institution and social setting

The school is described as Sweden’s largest and most prestigious boarding school. Its alumni include the king, Olof Palme, Povel Ramel, and Peter and Marcus Wallenberg. In Jeanette’s account to Jens Hurtig, that standing helps distinguish this school from another institution commonly associated with Sigtuna. The college’s prestige is not merely a point of local color: it frames the considerable social authority held by its students, families, and donors.

Former pupils also remain connected through Sihtunum i Diasporan Foundation. Jeanette explains that the name combines a runic Swedish reference to Sigtuna with a classical Greek term for living in exile, conveying the idea of Sigtuna in exile. The foundation’s members share a past or connection with the boarding school. Jeanette identifies Dürer, Lundström, and Bergman among those said to have donated large sums since the mid-1970s; Per-Ola Silfverberg is also associated with the foundation in the investigation. The members are presented as successful businessmen and politicians with unblemished public records, not as an official continuation of the school.

The foundation’s administration appears unusually opaque. Jeanette finds no record of it in local council records, although it operates in Sweden. It once owned property in Denmark, later sold, and its only asset of significant value was the motor yacht Gilah, aboard which Dürer and his wife died. These details give the school’s alumni network a material dimension: its ties persist not just through shared memories but through money, property, and institutions that are difficult for investigators to trace.

The initiation ritual

During the first week of a new school year, Fredrika Grünewald and her followers select three girls for a degrading initiation. Annette Lundström later recounts that the older girls wear dark capes and homemade pig masks, take the three pupils to a tool shed, and pour ice-cold water over them. She identifies what follows as Fredrika’s idea. The episode presents the school’s student culture as a mechanism for coercion: a small group controls the ceremony, while those subjected to it are made to perform obedience before their peers.

A surviving film gives the ritual a second form, turning private recollection into recorded evidence. The footage appears to have been copied from an old VHS recording and shows masked figures, three girls kneeling behind a plate, and water being poured over them. Jeanette and Hurtig identify two of the girls as Hannah Östlund and Jessica Friberg from a school yearbook; Jeanette recognizes the third as Victoria Bergman. The film’s final sequence shows Victoria beginning to eat from the plate. A masked participant briefly removes her mask and is identified by Jeanette as Annette.

The image and the accounts do not provide identical kinds of knowledge. In the footage, the plate’s contents cannot be clearly identified. In a separate recollection, Sofia Zetterlund remembers that the girls had expected chocolate pudding but were served real dog excrement instead. She recalls feeling fury as she watched the scene, but also pride in having fought back and taken responsibility for the final shock. The contrast makes the ritual’s cruelty inseparable from its staged quality: the girls are not only humiliated but made part of a performance governed by Fredrika and her followers.

Students, complicity, and consequences

Charlotte Silfverberg’s account helps establish how the school’s hierarchy operated. In an interview with Jeanette and Hurtig, Charlotte acknowledges that she had been one of Fredrika’s underlings and had helped bully both students and teachers. She describes Fredrika as someone who persuaded others to do things they would not otherwise have done. Charlotte and Henrietta Nordlund were among Fredrika’s closest friends. Her testimony complicates any simple division between a single instigator and passive witnesses: influence flowed through a group, and Charlotte admits to participating in its abuses.

The aftermath of the ritual reaches beyond the shed. Hannah and Jessica leave the school, and Jeanette’s investigation connects their departure to the filmed ceremony. Charlotte cannot supply the names of two other girls whom Jeanette suspects may also have undergone the humiliation and later disappeared. Jeanette therefore asks the school for registers and, if available, yearbooks, hoping to identify pupils who have otherwise dropped out of the record. The school’s own archives become essential because the surviving personal accounts are incomplete.

Annette offers a possible explanation for why the abuse was hushed up: Fredrika’s father was, as Annette understood it, a close friend of the headmistress and one of the school’s largest donors. This is presented as Annette’s explanation rather than an independently established finding, but it sharpens the connection between the school’s elite status and its silences. The same combination of influence and concealment that surrounds the alumni foundation appears, in miniature, in the account of the initiation.

The school as a continuing clue

The school’s importance changes as the novel moves between remembered experience and police inquiry. For Sofia, its past returns through a recording made months earlier, and the filmed ritual brings back her sense of having played a part to its conclusion. For Jeanette, the footage is evidence to compare with interviews, yearbooks, names, and donor records. The school is thus encountered both as a place where the original humiliation occurred and as an archive whose gaps obstruct the effort to reconstruct it.

A memory of the shed also becomes an image for consequences that its perpetrators may have failed to recognize. The novel describes a snowball set in motion there a quarter of a lifetime earlier, continuing onward while those who began it may have treated the incident as a game that ended at the shed. That contrast between a momentary ritual and its prolonged effects gives the school its decisive narrative significance. Sigtuna College’s prestige and traditions do not erase the harm done within its walls; instead, the authority attached to the institution helps explain how the harm could be hidden, while its surviving records and alumni ties offer a route toward bringing it back into view.