Thorildsplan is where a murdered boy is found concealed in a black bin bag, making the place a starting point for an investigation that expands across several crime scenes. The discovery is tied to the ordinary routines of the city: a paper carrier, his pram, and a stop in the bushes near a metro station. Later, tracks associated with a pram help investigators reconsider the scene, while photographs and files connect the boy’s case to a broader series of crimes.

Setting and discovery

The boy’s body is discovered in bushes beside a metro station. The man who finds it has finished work and stops there to urinate; when he notices the black bin bag and opens it, he is shocked by what is inside. Half drunk, he nevertheless gives a detailed account without gaps. He backs away to the path, takes the pram he uses to carry newspapers, and hurries through the park toward Rålambsvägen. When he reaches the DN Tower, he calls the police.

These details make the discovery a brief intersection between routine movement through the city and a concealed crime. The pram is not initially just a means of carrying papers: because it is present at the scene and leaves tracks, it becomes something the investigators can use to rethink who might have been moving through the area. The evidence does not identify the carrier as the perpetrator; his account instead supplies a sequence of actions and a route away from the discovery.

The pram clue

Jeanette Kihlberg recalls that investigators found tracks from a pram at Thorildsplan. In a later discussion with Jens Hurtig, she connects that clue to the possibility that people delivering newspapers used prams rather than bicycles with trailers. She asks who would be out early in the morning, and Hurtig recognizes the relevance of paper delivery. Their exchange turns a minor trace into a practical line of inquiry: the marks might correspond to an ordinary occupation whose hours and equipment fit the circumstances.

The clue matters because it offers a way to interpret the scene without treating one detail as proof of identity. A pram track can connect the crime site to a possible pattern of movement, but it cannot by itself establish who made it or why. The investigators’ reasoning proceeds by joining the trace to the timing and the carrier’s account, while keeping the larger case open.

Part of a sequence of murders

Thorildsplan later appears alongside Svartsjölandet and Danvikstull as one of the sites where the bodies of three boys were found. The investigation at Svartsjölandet leads Jeanette to suspect that the new murder and the earlier one may have the same perpetrator; the similarities prompt her to regard the cases as a double murder investigation. Four weeks after the first boy was found, a third boy is discovered at the boules club below Danvikstull. His body has been embalmed, another detail that broadens the pattern under investigation.

The connection among these places is established gradually, through repeated crimes and accumulated evidence rather than through the geography alone. At Thorildsplan, the pram tracks offer a possible clue about access and movement. At the other scenes, investigators encounter further evidence relevant to whether the cases belong together. In the later accounting of the investigation, Thorildsplan is named with Danvikstull and Svartsjölandet as part of the same group of boy-murder cases.

From crime scene to case file

The investigation’s eventual evidence trail reaches Viggo Dürer’s cellar at Hundudden. Among the files there are copies of photographs of the bodies from Thorildsplan, Svartsjölandet, Danvikstull, and Barnängen. This record places Thorildsplan within a set of four cases whose connections can be examined through material gathered beyond the original scenes. The location is no longer only where a body was found: it has become one entry in an archive that preserves evidence of the crimes and their relation to one another.

The photographs also make the distinction between solving the four cases and understanding the full extent of the crimes consequential. The investigation uncovers evidence of another forty bodies, and the files are to be passed to Europol. The known sites therefore sit within a much larger field of violence that the police cannot resolve simply by establishing what happened in the four cases.

Place in the novel’s geography

Thorildsplan recurs in a late recollection alongside Danvikstull and Svartsjölandet, the names that remain associated with the boys whose bodies were found there. That memory also widens beyond the three sites: it includes places where other children may remain undiscovered, among them Möja, Ingarö, the Norrtälje channel, and the forests of Tyresta. The recollection refers to more than fifty children in all, including girls associated with other burial places. It does not make Thorildsplan the explanation for those crimes; it makes the site one remembered point in a geography that extends well beyond the solved cases.

The novel thus gives Thorildsplan two connected roles. It is a concrete urban discovery site, marked by a black bag, a path, and the trace of a pram; it is also a name that returns when the scale of the crimes becomes clearer. Its ordinary surroundings sharpen the contrast between everyday movement and the hidden violence the investigation uncovers, while its recurrence in both police files and later memory shows how one scene can remain legible as evidence even as it becomes part of a much larger, unresolved history.