The unequal value assigned to lives

The unequal value assigned to lives emerges in the gap between official concern and the resources committed to it. The novel connects that gap to the treatment of murdered boys without papers, whose investigation receives less support than a case involving wealthy, influential Swedes, and to the consequences of treating vulnerable people’s testimony as less credible.

Investigative Resources and the Value of a Life

Before leaving police headquarters, Jeanette Kihlberg learns from Dennis Billing what funding has been allocated to the Silfverberg case. As she drives past Rådhuset, she recognizes that even its preliminary budget exceeds by more than ten times the amount she received for investigating the murdered boys. The contrast sharpens when she learns that Per-Ola Silfverberg is among the donors. In Jeanette’s view, the boys’ lack of papers and the prominence and wealth associated with the other case have become part of an implicit scale of whose deaths merit police attention.

The disparity has practical consequences. Four months earlier, when the first two bodies were found, Jeanette lacked the funds to commission a proper perpetrator profile and had to organize one herself. Sofia Zetterlund is now expected to do further work without payment or recognition. Jeanette feels embarrassed by this arrangement and decides not to pressure her, leaving Sofia the time she needs. The investigation therefore depends in part on unpaid work even as another case receives a far larger budget.

Jeanette considers the standards by which institutions and the public might measure a life’s value: the number of mourners, the estate left behind, media attention, social influence, national origin, skin colour, or the police resources assigned to a murder. She recalls that the investigation into Anna Lindh’s death cost fifteen million kronor by the time the Court of Appeal upheld Mijailo Mijailović’s sentence, while the investigation into Olof Palme’s death had cost three hundred and fifty million kronor and was widely regarded within the police as inexpensive by comparison. These sums make the unequal allocation of attention measurable, while Jeanette’s questions expose the assumptions behind it.

Credibility, Protection, and Institutional Silence

The unequal valuation of lives also appears in whose accounts are believed and whose cases are allowed to disappear. Jeanette Kihlberg tells Ulrika Wendin that the evidence against Karl Lundström is strong and that the rape case Ulrika reported seven years earlier could be reopened. Ulrika seems somewhat relieved by the strength of the case against Karl, but does not want to begin her own case again. When Jeanette later asks prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist about it, she points out that Gert Berglind had led the investigation into both Ulrika’s case and the investigation of Karl, which was also dropped. The question establishes a possible connection between two abandoned investigations, but the evidence here does not resolve it.

The novel places that failure alongside a school’s suppression of humiliating treatment. Annette Lundström says Fredrika Grünewald’s father was both a friend of the headmistress and one of the school’s largest donors, and believes this explains why the matter was hushed up. In her account, Fredrika and other girls singled out three newcomers for an initiation during the first week of the school year. The school’s social and financial ties thus frame whose conduct is protected and whose humiliation is treated as something to conceal.

A girl’s records show how institutional judgments can further diminish a vulnerable person’s account. The file records depression and self-harm, notes that she repeatedly accused her father of sexual abuse, and says those accusations were not considered credible. A pencilled explanation attributes that judgment largely to her mother’s description of the girl as imaginative, while references to her disjointed speech and recurring claims about a farm in Jutland are classified as delusions. The same file includes official authorization for her placement in a family home. The bureaucratic language makes the placement sound settled and benign, even as the record preserves how readily the girl’s allegations were discounted.

Suspicion surrounding money and influence extends this pattern without resolving it. Jeanette knows that half a million kronor has been deposited in Annette Lundström’s account and suspects it may be a bribe, though its source has not been traced. Sofia Zetterlund has also told her that Ulrika had substantial cash and suggested that Viggo Dürer might be behind it. Separately, Karl’s letter to his daughter Linnea names Dürer as a potential paedophile, a suspicion Jeanette sees echoed in Linnea’s childhood drawings. These remain leads and suspicions, not established findings; their significance lies in the contrast between vulnerable people whose testimony was discounted and influential adults whose possible role requires sustained investigation.

The Body and the Limits of Choice

At Karl Lundström’s bedside, the question of whose life is valued takes a more intimate and uneasy form. The visitor reads his medical chart and sees him sustained by life-support equipment; in that moment, he seems reduced to bodily existence rather than a person with agency. The scene does not erase what he has done, but it shifts attention from the public distribution of investigative resources to the immediate fact of a life being maintained.

The visitor considers whether the machines could be switched off or whether Karl could be smothered, then recognizes that neither action could be carried out without an alarm bringing staff into the room. The thought stops at the boundary imposed by the hospital and its procedures. Set beside the earlier disparities in police attention, the scene complicates any simple equation between moral worth and the right to live: the novel shows how institutions allocate concern unevenly, while also making the protection of life a practical limit on private judgment.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, valuation is not announced as a single rule; it takes shape through ordinary institutional decisions about money, credibility, and care. The narrative moves between public measures and private encounters, showing how an unequal scale can operate without any one decision-maker declaring that some lives matter less. Its contrasts do not make the cases interchangeable: they expose different mechanisms by which attention is allocated, testimony is discounted, and a person’s choices are constrained. The concept therefore binds the novel’s investigations and intimate scenes into one question: how institutions recognize a life, and what happens when their recognition is uneven.