Jeanette Kihlberg–Jens Hurtig professional relationship

Jeanette Kihlberg and Jens Hurtig’s professional relationship is built on years of close police work, but the novel distinguishes knowing a colleague’s habits from knowing the person behind them. Jeanette can read Hurtig’s body language and depends on him in investigations; only when she reflects on how little she knows about his life does she begin to act on the difference. Their partnership is both operational and human: the same colleague who holds a crime-scene cordon for her also shows how deeply the cases affect him, and how much of his private life has remained outside their working routine.

Four years of working together

Jeanette and Hurtig have worked together for four years by the time she arrives at the cordon at Thorildsplan Metro Station. She reads his posture before he speaks: he looks worried, almost pained. When he sees her, however, his expression brightens. He comes over and lifts the cordon tape so she can pass. His easy teasing about her ageing car, and her joking reply about needing a raise for a convertible, establish a familiar rhythm between them. The gesture and banter suggest comfort earned through repetition, while Jeanette’s attention to his first, troubled expression shows how carefully she observes him.

Their familiarity does not mean that Jeanette knows his personal history. At lunch in the police headquarters canteen, Hurtig joins her after returning from an arrest in Danderyd. He describes a construction businessman found with child-abuse material on a hard drive, the wife’s collapse, and the couple’s fourteen-year-old daughter standing silently as police arrest her father. The report brings the consequences of an investigation into the canteen with them: Jeanette responds with dismay, while the scene gives Hurtig’s work a human weight beyond the arrest itself.

Jeanette then inventories what she knows about her colleague and finds it is mostly biography. Hurtig grew up in Kvikkjokk, went to school in Jokkmokk and high school in Boden, entered the first group of police trainees at Umeå University, completed police work experience in Luleå, and later transferred to Stockholm. She cannot remember what he did between school and police training. She knows that he lives alone in an apartment in Södermalm, but has little sense of his relationships or private circumstances. The contrast is pointed: she has worked beside him for years and can interpret his signals, yet his life remains largely a set of facts rather than a personal acquaintance.

From colleague to attentive supervisor

That recognition prompts Jeanette to reconsider her role as Hurtig’s boss. When she learns that he is Sami, she registers it as something she had not known and decides that next time he asks her to go for a beer, she will say yes. She frames the decision as part of being a good boss rather than merely appearing to be one. The moment does not instantly transform their relationship, but it marks a deliberate change in how she understands her responsibility to him: management should include an effort to know the people whose work she directs.

Her concern becomes more concrete when Hurtig tells her about his father’s medical difficulties. After a saw accident, the hospital gave his father the wrong medication; he developed gangrene and would need fingers amputated. Hurtig also reports that his father had been struck on the head by a Ferrari. Jeanette recognizes that something has been weighing on her colleague and gives him room to explain before returning to the work they have to do. His disclosure brings family worry into their professional conversation, while her response shows that she is trying to attend to both the case and the person investigating it.

Shared investigations and a difficult subject

The partnership is most visible in the investigation of the dead boy and the other children living at the margins of adult attention. Jeanette arranges to meet Hurtig at Central Station so they can speak with children who gather beneath Central Bridge. When she arrives, he is waiting beside a fast-food stall with two hot dogs. His slightly embarrassed smile and offer of one make the meeting feel less like a formal briefing, though they are there to pursue urgent police work.

At the gathering, Jeanette introduces herself as a police officer and Hurtig as her colleague Jens. A fifteen-year-old girl named Aatifa asks what they want. She usually spends time in the city centre; her parents fled Eritrea, are unemployed, and live with her and six siblings in a four-room apartment in Huvudsta. Neither Aatifa nor the other children recognizes the dead boy or knows anything about him. After two hours, Jeanette and Hurtig leave without identifying him through the group. The inquiry produces no immediate lead, but it exposes the distance between a child’s disappearance and the likelihood that anyone will notice.

Hurtig reacts to that distance with visible distress. He calls the children little adults and says they should be playing and building forts, not living as they do. Jeanette sees how upset he is. Her own response is bleak: children can disappear without anyone missing them. Their exchange is more than agreement about the case; it shows them registering the same failure from different angles, Hurtig through the childhood denied to the children and Jeanette through their social invisibility. The scene makes his compassion legible to her and gives their professional partnership an emotional dimension.

Coordination and mutual confidence

Jeanette continues to rely on Hurtig as the investigation widens. She arranges to meet him promptly to speak with the children, later asks for school registers and yearbooks from Sigtuna, and discusses how people associated with the Sihtunum i Diasporan foundation may connect the names emerging from the inquiry. Hurtig listens as she links several men and the foundation, and his interest sharpens when she adds that former commissioner Gert Berglind knew Karl Lundström through a foundation. The exchange shows a working relationship in which Jeanette lays out developing connections and Hurtig responds as an engaged investigative partner.

Their conversations also accommodate the personal. When Jeanette asks whether anything is troubling him apart from work, Hurtig tells her that his father’s condition has worsened. He gives the news briefly because there is still much to do, but Jeanette notices that he has had something on his mind and asks rather than assuming it is case-related. The work continues around the disclosure; neither role cancels the other. Their relationship rests on this practical interweaving of investigation, supervision, and concern.

Significance of the relationship

Jeanette and Hurtig’s connection is not presented as an already intimate friendship. Its defining tension is precisely that years of proximity have left Jeanette short of personal knowledge. She knows how he carries worry, sees his response to harmed children, and works beside him in complicated inquiries, but must consciously choose to learn more about his life. The decision to accept a future invitation for a beer gives that realization a modest, specific consequence rather than turning it into a sudden transformation.

The relationship also gives the police investigation a measure of moral intimacy. Hurtig’s distress at the children’s circumstances and his own fear for his father are not detached from his work; they shape what Jeanette sees in him as a colleague. In turn, her growing attentiveness complicates her role as his supervisor. Their partnership is therefore sustained not only by assignments and leads, but by the gradual recognition that effective cooperation can coexist with, and sometimes require, care for the person beside whom the work is done.