Home of Shadows as a secret place

Home of Shadows as a secret place is Karl Lundström’s metaphor for a hidden, forbidden refuge, not a clearly identified physical location. In a letter to Linnea, the image gathers his sense of personal damage and attraction to shadow, while Sofia Zetterlund’s recognition of the phrase makes it a clue connecting Karl’s private writing to the wider case.

Meaning and formulation

Karl explains the image to Sofia during their first meeting in Huddinge: the home of shadows is a metaphor for a secret, forbidden place. The letter later gives that explanation a more personal and unsettled form. Addressing Linnea, Karl writes that talent requires patience and fear of defeat, then turns from encouragement to the conviction that his own life is past and that wounds can quietly consume the soul. His resolve to seek shadow culminates in the declaration, “I shall seek a home in the home of shadows.” The doubled image of home makes the phrase sound at once like a destination and a state of withdrawal, but the text does not identify a literal house or explain what the forbidden place contains.

The letter’s shifting argument

The phrase appears within a letter written during a flight a few weeks before Karl’s arrest. Its handwriting is beautiful, but the writing grows fragmentary and incoherent; several lines are illegible, and a large dark-red stain—presumed by Sofia to be red wine—interrupts the page. The letter’s broken form matters to the image: the search for a home in shadow emerges alongside an effort to make sense of thoughts that do not settle into a coherent account.

Karl turns to a book that, he says, is about both himself and Linnea. He argues that his desires have been acted upon by thousands or millions before him, and that history and other people’s desires have therefore sanctioned his actions. Yet he also admits that his conscience continues to tell him something is wrong. His invocation of the Oracle of Delphi and Socrates ends not in certainty but in a question about whether recognizing one’s ignorance makes one wise. In this passage, shadow is associated with a refuge from the demands of judgment, while the letter’s continuing return to conscience prevents that refuge from becoming a settled moral answer.

A clue within the case

The letter’s final turn brings Socrates back as a figure Karl compares to himself: both, he suggests, are accused of corrupting youth. He contrasts the state’s honored gods with the demons attributed to others, asks whether he and Socrates are wrong, and then asks Linnea what happened in Kristianstad when she was little, naming Viggo Dürer and Henrietta Dürer as part of what the book contains. The connection is presented as a question and a claim about the book, not as an explanation of what happened there.

Sofia recognizes the home-of-shadows phrase from her earlier conversation with Karl and also recognizes his ambivalence about right and wrong. When the letter names Viggo and Henrietta, she recalls that Annette Lundström had mentioned the Dürers and that Viggo appeared in Linnea’s drawings. The metaphor thus works both as Karl’s image of a forbidden inward refuge and as a point of recognition in Sofia’s investigation: the letter’s private, unstable language begins to align with names and material already encountered elsewhere.