Swedish police

The Swedish police investigate the boys’ deaths and the network that may connect them to powerful adults. Their work moves from border interviews and searches for missing children to archival records, suspected bribes, and an armed search of a lawyer’s villa. The investigation gains reach as separate clues are connected, but it also exposes how easily people can remain unseen or be misread by the institutions meant to find them.

Investigative Work and the Missing Children

A border-police interview introduces the consequences of the hukou registration system for a young migrant worker from Wuhan. Registered in his home village, he had almost no rights in the city where he worked; after his uncle was injured, he had no one to care for him. He told the police that he and his uncle had been treated like slaves and that he had spent five months carrying bricks and mortar at an Olympic construction site. He arrived in Sweden with the clothes he wore, a mobile phone, and fifty American dollars. Its contact list was empty, and he concealed from the police a telephone number written on paper in his left shoe, which he intended to call after escaping the camp. The interview thus presents police questioning as a point of contact with a person whose precarious circumstances are not fully legible in official accounts.

In the investigation of the dead boys, Jeanette Kihlberg and Jens Hurtig consider door-to-door inquiries, Interpol, refugee centres, and the Central Bridge. Jeanette resists the assumption that the children have simply vanished: they seem to have appeared rather than gone missing. The distinction changes the problem the police face. Their task is not only to locate a conventional missing-person trail but to determine how children with little recognized presence could have entered the city and escaped notice.

Building a Network from Records and Relationships

As the inquiry develops, Jeanette connects names associated with Sihtunum i Diasporan Foundation, whose members had links to the Sigtuna boarding school. She identifies Bengt Bergman, Viggo Dürer, Karl Lundström, and Per-Ola Silfverberg as people involved in the foundation, and learns that former commissioner Gert Berglind knew Karl Lundström through a foundation as well. These links widen the inquiry beyond individual households and cases: institutional and social connections become possible routes through which the investigators can understand how apparently separate people are related. At this stage, the connections are investigative leads, not proof that every person named shared responsibility for the crimes.

The police also work with documentary evidence. A fax delivers a 1988 National Board of Forensic Medicine report stating that Victoria Bergman had suffered serious sexual abuse before reaching full maturity; Nacka District Court had consequently granted confidentiality for her personal details. Jeanette’s disgust at the report’s clinical phrasing marks the distance between administrative language and the abuse it records. Later, she directs colleagues to investigate Dürer’s past, noting a suspected half-million-kronor payment into Annette Lundström’s account, Sofia Zetterlund’s information that Ulrika Wendin had substantial cash, and a letter from Karl Lundström that names Dürer as a possible paedophile. These clues remain at different levels of certainty: the payment is untraced, and the suspicions require corroboration.

Authority, Coordination, and Institutional Limits

Police work in the novel depends on cooperation as well as internal hierarchy. Jeanette discusses routine inquiries and awaits findings from Ivo Andrić while Jens Hurtig speaks with the violent-crime unit. Her supervisor, Kenneth von Kwist, presses for a rapid solution, yet his attitude toward her is marked by his earlier opposition to her promotion to detective superintendent. His intervention in another lead is abrupt: he tells Jeanette to forget Furugård because the man has an alibi, and calls listening to her a serious mistake. The episode shows how investigative direction can shift through supervisory judgment, even as Jeanette continues to test the available evidence.

The investigation’s most visible use of force comes when a police van arrives at Viggo Dürer’s Villa in Hundudden with nine masked officers: eight carry submachine guns and one a bolt-action rifle. Dennis Billing has authorized the search, persuaded by paint-sample evidence, information from Skåne, and fingerprints believed to be Dürer’s in Ulrika Wendin’s apartment. Jeanette questions whether the rifle is necessary. The scene places the escalation in context: it follows specific evidence and authorization, but the display of force is striking enough to provoke scrutiny from the detective leading the inquiry.

Reach and Narrative Significance

The Swedish police have six EC135 helicopters. Jeanette demands one to reach northern Norrland quickly, with response-unit backup, and Kenneth von Kwist agrees. On the roof of police headquarters, Jeanette and Jens Hurtig wait together and look out over the Stockholm night. The helicopter request conveys the investigation’s urgency and expanding geographic reach; the quiet pause with Hurtig contrasts with the armed search and bureaucratic records elsewhere in the inquiry.

Across these episodes, police procedure can surface evidence, connect people, and mobilize substantial resources, but it does not make every person equally visible or every clue equally certain. The empty phone, the concealed number, the confidential forensic report, and the unresolved financial trail each represent a different limit on what investigators can immediately know. The institution is therefore both an instrument of discovery and part of a world in which identity, protection, and credibility are unevenly distributed.