Gao Lian and the woman kill the captive boy

The killing of the captive boy is a joint act by Gao Lian and an unnamed woman, but not an equal one: she arranges the confinement, directs the staged assault, and participates in the violence, while Gao has been conditioned to act without deliberation. The boy’s death connects their private performance to the wider series of child murders that Jeanette Kihlberg investigates, where repeated forms of abuse and the handling of the bodies suggest links between cases.

Capture and Confinement

The sequence begins on a road across Svartsjölandet. The woman encounters a boy alone beside his broken bicycle and in need of a lift. The encounter’s ordinary premise gives way to captivity: the boy is brought into a room and stripped of any practical means of escape. A choker chain fastens him to an iron boathook mounted on the wall, with a two-metre chain allowing movement across only a limited area. The woman watches from a chair, positioned beyond his reach.

The room’s arrangement makes her control tangible. A hidden door connects it with the living room, while an electric cable and a taser lie beside her. These objects are not incidental equipment; they define the roles in the scene. The boy is confined within the space, Gao is to perform the violence, and the woman retains the ability to observe, signal, and intervene. Her choice to give Gao the signal marks the transition from preparation to assault.

Gao’s Conditioning and the Assault

Gao has spent the morning purifying himself and meditating in order to reduce thought and suppress logic. The preparation is presented as part of his training: he is expected to act automatically, without the hesitation that might interrupt the task. The woman’s characterization of him as a machine reflects the scene’s central tension. Gao appears to be the immediate agent of violence, but the woman has arranged both the conditions and the sequence in which he acts.

The boy, confused after losing consciousness, tests the chain and then retreats to the wall. Gao moves in front of him and attacks him. The boy is unable to defend himself effectively; when the woman gives him a knife in an attempt to even the odds, he throws it away in fear. That gesture marks the gulf between the adults’ imposed performance and the boy’s response: he does not accept the role of combatant they have constructed for him.

The woman then supplies Gao with a water bottle containing amphetamine. As the assault continues, she leaves her chair and begins striking the boy’s back with the electric cable, increasing the pace. Her participation changes the scene from one in which she directs Gao’s actions to one in which she becomes a direct perpetrator herself. The narration also links their actions to her imagined sense of unity with him, making the violence part of a relationship she understands as a shared, perfected whole rather than as separate acts by two people.

Death and the Interrupted Procedure

The woman picks up a syringe intending to inject the boy with an anaesthetic, but discovers that he has already died. The intended injection therefore comes too late: the planned sequence has ended in death before she can carry it out. Her recognition closes the immediate scene, while also making clear that the killing has exceeded whatever procedure she had meant to impose on it.

That ending follows a progression from calculated preparation to uncontrolled harm. The chain, the taser, the stimulant, and the syringe all belong to an apparatus the woman has organized around the captive boy. Yet the available evidence does not establish that the anaesthetic would have saved him or explain precisely why she intended to use it. What it does establish is that she reaches for it only after the boy is no longer alive.

Connection to the Murder Investigation

The boy’s death sits within the case Jeanette Kihlberg is assembling. Jeanette is called to Svartsjölandet after a young boy’s body is discovered, and the medical findings lead her to suspect that the same perpetrator may be responsible for a second murder. The examination indicates severe violence and marks on the boy’s back consistent with whipping; investigators also consider whether the body contains high quantities of Xylocain adrenalin. At that stage, the physical leads are limited to two shoe prints, one large and one much smaller, and vehicle tyre tracks.

Four weeks after the first boy is found, a third boy’s body turns up at the boules club below Danvikstull. Experts describe the preservation of that body as successful embalming. The discoveries extend the investigation from an isolated killing to a series with recurring features, while still leaving the police without enough evidence to identify a perpetrator from those traces alone. Read alongside the captive boy’s death, the later crime-scene details establish the wider pattern in which this event belongs: young victims, repeated violence, and deliberate treatment of the bodies. The account’s movement between the tightly controlled room and Jeanette’s accumulating casework contrasts the perpetrators’ private staging with the public effort to interpret material evidence.