Stockholm Police Headquarters, also identified in scene headings as Kronoberg Police Headquarters, is a recurring base for Jeanette Kihlberg’s investigation. Its significance lies less in any described architecture than in the work done there: evidence and names are arranged into patterns, tentative connections are tested, and the consequences of the case reach into the investigators’ private lives.

Setting and investigative work

One scene at the headquarters places Jeanette in her office late on an October afternoon, studying an A3 sheet covered with names from the investigation. She has grouped them and marked the relationships between them; as she prepares to draw another line, Jens Hurtig hurries into the room and the telephone rings. The diagram gives the office a practical function in the novel: it is where a growing set of people and associations can be made visible and examined together.

The headquarters also provides a setting for Jeanette and Hurtig to discuss the Sihtunum i Diasporan Foundation. Jeanette explains that its name joins a Swedish reference to Sigtuna with the Greek idea of living in exile, and that its members share a connection to the boarding school there. She then raises the possible relevance of the foundation to Bengt Bergman, Viggo Dürer, Karl Lundström, and Per-Ola Silfverberg, noting that former commissioner Gert Berglind knew Karl through a foundation. The discussion shifts the inquiry from separate individuals toward a possible institutional network, while leaving the connection open for investigation rather than treating it as proof.

Evidence, connections, and changing suspicions

Jeanette’s work at the headquarters involves repeatedly revising what the evidence seems to mean. A photograph confirms a suspicion, and Annette Lundström identifies Hannah Östlund. Jeanette recognizes that facts can be present without their relationships being clear: she reflects that she may have been staring too rigidly at evidence instead of allowing her instincts to help her see the pattern. The headquarters thus becomes a place where investigative judgment depends on both assembling facts and reconsidering how they fit.

The inquiry widens as Jeanette considers people connected through Sigtuna College for the Humanities, including Charlotte Silfverberg, Fredrika Grünewald, Henrietta Dürer, Annette Lundström, and Victoria Bergman, alongside Hannah and Jessica Friberg. At her desk, Jeanette examines photographs of Hannah and reclassifies a woman who had recently been a stranger as a principal suspect in a series of murders. The change shows how quickly an apparently distant name or image can acquire a new meaning as the investigation’s network takes shape.

Colleagues and private consequences

The office is also a setting for the working relationship between Jeanette and Hurtig. Their discussions move between the case and the personal concerns affecting the people conducting it. When Jeanette asks what is troubling him, Hurtig explains that his father’s hand has been badly affected after an accident: a hospital gave him the wrong medication, gangrene followed, and his fingers must be amputated. The disclosure interrupts the investigative discussion with a consequence in Hurtig’s family life, making the workplace a point where professional cooperation and personal strain meet.

An institutional setting under pressure

The headquarters scenes present police work as a process of linking rather than simply collecting information. Jeanette tries to distinguish a meaningful pattern from coincidence, and she is alert to the risk that intuition might cloud her judgment even as she recognizes that ignoring it can also obscure connections. Her inquiry brings together suspects, school ties, foundation membership, financial questions, and professional associations; the office’s diagrams, photographs, conversations, and incoming calls give these strands a shared working space.

The setting also belongs to a wider institutional conflict. In a conversation with prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist, Jeanette seeks a serious legal measure under the Judicial Procedure Act, while he challenges whether she has sufficient grounds and alludes to earlier disputes over her assertions. The exchange underscores the limits and friction surrounding police action: suspicion must be translated into a legally defensible step, and the investigator’s confidence does not remove the need for evidence.