Jeanette Kihlberg

Jeanette Kihlberg is a Stockholm police investigator whose pursuit of a series of crimes repeatedly forces her to connect isolated scenes with people and institutions that resist scrutiny. Her work moves from the bodies of murdered boys to the histories of Bengt Bergman, Karl Lundström, and Viggo Dürer, while professional demands collide with her concern for her son, Johan. The investigation’s widening reach makes Jeanette a point of convergence: she gathers evidence, tests links between cases, and tries to act before delay turns uncertainty into irreversible loss.

Identity and Investigative Method

Jeanette’s investigative approach is shown through the way she notices details, revises hypotheses, and tries to make scattered information answerable. At a crime scene on Svartsjölandet, she realizes that the cases probably involve the same perpetrator and that the police are dealing with a double murder. The conclusion is provisional rather than a declaration of identity: what matters is that she recognizes a possible connection and changes the scale of the inquiry accordingly.

The sequence of discoveries gives that reasoning a concrete context. The third boy is found four weeks after the first, at the boules club below Danvikstull. Experts regard the body as an example of successful embalming. The gap between discoveries and the distinctive treatment of the body make each new case both an individual death and potential evidence about a repeated practice. Jeanette’s work therefore depends on comparison: she has to consider what is shared across cases without treating resemblance alone as proof of who committed them.

Her attention extends from forensic particulars to small objects encountered during the investigation. In Fredrika Grünewald’s tent, a bouquet of yellow tulips catches her eye; the card attached to one stem is what makes her react. The available account does not disclose the card’s message, but the moment shows Jeanette treating a seemingly ordinary object as potentially meaningful rather than overlooking it. Elsewhere she studies a diagram of names connected with the inquiry, turning a growing set of people into a problem of relationships and possible links.

From Separate Cases to a Wider Network

Information about the Samuel Bai case prompts an urgent conversation with Jeanette: new facts have emerged, and she says she needs to talk. That case sits within a broader inquiry into violence and possible connections among suspects. Jeanette’s work on it also reaches into the treatment relationship between Sofia Zetterlund and Samuel Bai. At Sofia Zetterlund’s office at Mariatorget, Samuel, a tall and muscular young man who initially seems reserved, becomes more communicative when Sofia suggests speaking Krio rather than English. The detail matters to Jeanette’s wider case because it places the investigation alongside a clinical relationship, though the evidence here does not establish what further information the conversation yields.

Jeanette conducts a formal interview with Bengt Bergman, assisted by Jens Hurtig. She identifies Bengt as a suspect in several crimes and specifies that the interview is primarily concerned with rape or aggravated rape and bodily harm or grievous bodily harm. The recording’s procedural opening fixes the seriousness of the inquiry while also showing Jeanette working in an official, documented capacity. Bengt is later released when his wife provides him with an alibi. That development complicates the distinction between suspicion and proof: being questioned does not itself settle his responsibility, and the investigation must continue beyond the interview.

Jeanette also begins to consider connections among Bengt, Viggo Dürer, Karl Lundström, and Per-Ola Silfverberg. She notes that all four were involved in the foundation Sihtunum i Diasporan. Dennis Billing adds that former commissioner Gert Berglind knew Karl. These are connections Jeanette raises as matters to examine, not proof that the men acted together or that the foundation explains the crimes. Their significance lies in how the inquiry broadens from separate suspects toward a possible network of shared associations.

Sofia Zetterlund, Linnea Lundström, and the Limits of the Case

Sofia Zetterlund occupies more than one place in Jeanette’s investigation. Jeanette learns that both Sofia and Johan have vanished, discovering their absence five minutes after the preceding moment in the narrative. The sudden loss of contact interrupts the investigative thread with a personal emergency: Johan is Jeanette’s son, while Sofia is a person connected to the case and to Jeanette’s wider life. Jeanette later explains that she has to look after Johan and does not know how long it will take. At the same time, she signals to Jens Hurtig that she expects there may be room for other things between them. Her response registers renewed enthusiasm, but the evidence does not turn that feeling into a settled relationship or resolve the conflict between private attachment and police work.

Jeanette also encounters Sofia in a care setting. At Sunflower Nursing Home, a manager approaches a woman in a wheelchair and identifies her as Sofia, telling her that Jeanette Kihlberg from the Stockholm police wants to speak about one of her former patients. The encounter places Jeanette’s questions inside an institution and frames them through Sofia’s past professional relationship with a patient. The scene does not establish the substance or result of their conversation, but it shows Jeanette following the case across settings rather than limiting her inquiries to police offices and crime scenes.

Linnea Lundström comes to Sofia’s office, where Sofia is surprised by how quickly the girl has trusted her. Jeanette later asks about the material gathered through Linnea’s sessions and drawings, Karl Lundström’s letter, and what Annette Lundström has told Sofia. Her concern is practical as well as evidentiary: she asks how Linnea is and whether she could be a witness at trial. The question exposes the gap between collecting information and being able to use it in court. Linnea is not merely a name in Jeanette’s diagram; her condition and capacity to give evidence matter to what the investigation can accomplish.

Work Under Pressure and the Search for Ulrika Wendin

The institutional pressure on Jeanette becomes explicit in her dealings with Billing and with the prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist. Billing, the police commissioner, calls her and later complains that reports from Schwarz, Åhlund, and Hurtig are complete while he is still waiting for hers. He suggests that she may have more important things to do than bring the matter to an end. The exchange places Jeanette between the investigative work still unfolding and an official demand for completion. The novel does not present the report as a mere administrative detail: it becomes one measure of the conflict between closure and the need to follow new leads.

When Jeanette pauses during a discussion of invoking a provision of the Judicial Procedure Act, von Kwist challenges whether she has sufficient grounds for such a drastic measure and asks whether she is acting too hastily. His objection makes the legal threshold part of the case’s conflict. Jeanette must pursue urgent action through formal authority, while a prosecutor questions both her grounds and her judgment. The disagreement does not by itself establish that her decision is mistaken; it shows that urgency must still be translated into a defensible legal step.

A new lead concerns Ulrika Wendin. Jeanette recognizes one of the men in an image as Bengt Bergman, whom she had questioned on suspicion of rape before his wife’s alibi led to his release. She immediately asks Åhlund to issue a national alert for Ulrika and to check two other men, Anders Wikström and Carsten Möller, identified by name and identification numbers. The action is specific and time-sensitive: Jeanette does not treat recognition as a conclusion, but as grounds to locate Ulrika and investigate the other named men.

The stakes sharpen when Jeanette learns that a woman has been murdered in the caverns beneath St Johannes Church. Later, an unidentified caller from the Ukrainian security police in Kyiv, Iwan Lowynsky, tries to reach her about a missing-person case. The evidence does not establish that this call resolves the Swedish investigation, but it signals that Jeanette’s work has acquired an international dimension. When she calls von Kwist to arrange transport to Lapland, she hopes they are not too late and thinks of Ulrika, praying that she is still alive.

Consequences and Narrative Role

The hope proves tragically insufficient. After a call with Ivo Andrić, Jeanette and Jens Hurtig sit in silence, having listened to a pathologist describe what Ulrika Wendin suffered before she froze to death. The account leaves them speechless. This aftermath gives Jeanette’s earlier urgency its consequence: locating Ulrika was not an abstract investigative objective but an attempt to reach someone whose life might still have been saved. The official descriptions and procedures that structure her work cannot undo the death they now have to confront.

Jeanette’s investigative role is defined by a recurring movement between evidence and human consequence. She evaluates whether cases are connected, attends to a tulip card and a diagram of names, questions suspects, and considers whether Linnea can testify. At the same time, Johan’s disappearance and her concern for Ulrika prevent the inquiry from remaining purely procedural. The novel allows professional judgment to be tested by both legal scrutiny and personal urgency without presenting either as a simple substitute for evidence.

A final message opens rather than closes the larger mystery. Jeanette receives word that an anonymous donor wanted her to know that Victoria Bergman is alive and well; the caller asks whether Jeanette knows her. The disclosure places a consequential fact before Jeanette while leaving its source and implications unsettled. It also reframes the investigation’s reach: behind the cases and names she has been assembling, people presumed absent or lost may still be alive. Jeanette’s work ends not with a complete account of the network, but with another fact demanding to be understood.