Forensic confidentiality oath

The Forensic confidentiality oath is an enduring professional boundary in the novel: Annette Lundström insists that Sofia Zetterlund cannot reveal what she and Karl Lundström discussed, even after Karl’s death. Its force lies in the collision between secrecy and a grieving family’s demand for understanding, while the surrounding investigations expose how confidentiality can be distinct from institutional silence and unresolved failures of justice.

Scope and Principle

Annette frames the rule explicitly during a conversation with Sofia about Karl and Linnea Lundström. She says she understands forensic psychiatry and knows that even death does not cancel the oath of confidentiality. She does not ask Sofia to recount the conversations; instead, she acknowledges that this route is closed and asks about something Karl told her afterward: that Sofia understood his problem.

The distinction matters. Annette is seeking an explanation of Karl’s abuse of Linnea, which she had believed happened only once, when Linnea was three and the family was in Kristianstad. She separates his viewing of abusive films from the fact that he and Linnea were involved, and recalls that Linnea liked him. Her question is not simply what Karl said in treatment, but how Sofia could have understood him. Sofia shudders, and Annette says she never understood his problem herself. The scene leaves the oath intact while showing the emotional need pressing against it.

Confidentiality Under Pressure

The oath operates amid an active criminal investigation, not in an abstract ethical debate. Jeanette Kihlberg tells Ulrika Wendin that the evidence against Karl is strong enough to make a conviction likely and says Ulrika’s rape complaint from seven years earlier could be reopened. Ulrika does not want to begin the process again. Her refusal is not presented as a confidentiality dispute, but it places the rule’s restraint beside another limit on what the justice system can recover: a case may be available to reopen without the person harmed being willing to relive it.

Jeanette also questions prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist about the Ulrika Wendin case and its connection to the investigation of Karl. She points out that Gert Berglind led both investigations and that each was dropped. Earlier, von Kwist had told Jeanette to forget Furugård, explaining that he had an alibi and admitting that listening to Jeanette about him had been a serious mistake. These episodes do not establish that the confidentiality oath caused investigative failures. They instead distinguish a professional duty to keep patient conversations private from the broader pattern of decisions and abandoned inquiries that leaves other questions unanswered.

The Oath and Unresolved Evidence

The boundary becomes especially consequential as suspicion shifts toward Viggo Dürer. Jeanette knows that half a million kronor has been paid into Annette’s bank account and suspects it may be a bribe, though its source has not been traced. Sofia has told her that Ulrika has substantial cash and implied that Dürer may be behind it. Karl’s letter to Linnea and the pictures Linnea drew as a child also suggest that Dürer may have been a paedophile. These clues give the investigation grounds to examine Dürer without turning Sofia’s confidential conversations with Karl into evidence she can disclose.

Jeanette’s questioning of von Kwist about the old Per-Ola Silfverberg interview supplies a further contrast. He recounts that Copenhagen police called him in to attend the interview, which was conducted by former police commissioner Gert Berglind, with Per-Ola represented by his lawyer, Dürer. He gives the details from memory, without checking facts, and Jeanette senses that he is repeating a rehearsed account. The passage depicts an official narrative that can be recited fluently even as a questioner doubts its reliability; it does not equate that performance with the oath’s specific protection of clinical conversations.

Ethical and Narrative Significance

The oath protects a defined confidence, but the novel sets that protection against a world where reports of abuse and possible evidence have repeatedly failed to produce resolution. At Sigtuna, Annette recounts how Fredrika Grünewald and other girls selected three girls for a humiliating initiation: dressed in dark capes and homemade pig masks, they took them to a tool shed and poured ice-cold water over them. Elsewhere, a social-service document authorizes a girl’s placement in a family home after records describe depression, self-harm, accusations of sexual abuse by her father, and a history dismissed in the margin as recurrent delusions. These accounts are not breaches of the oath; they show the wider stakes of deciding whose disclosures are protected, believed, or acted upon.

The rule therefore remains ethically specific rather than a blanket defense of silence. Sofia does not disclose Karl’s treatment conversations to satisfy Annette’s need for an explanation, while Jeanette continues to pursue independent leads about money, Dürer, and earlier investigations. The tension is left unresolved: confidentiality preserves a professional boundary, but it cannot by itself answer what happened to Linnea or repair the consequences of cases that were dismissed or dropped.