Värmdö is more than a destination in the novel: it is a home address, a setting for a family’s history, and a place where police reports and remembered experience converge. Its connection to Grisslinge gives the location an intimate domestic dimension, while journeys toward it repeatedly carry the weight of danger, return, and confinement.

Setting and routes

Grisslinge is identified as the place where a man lives on Värmdö. He tells police he was stopped south of the city while travelling home and says he had picked up a blood-covered woman at the roadside so he could take her to Södermalm Hospital. His account presents the journey as an attempt to help; the surrounding interview makes clear that the police are questioning him about the woman’s injuries. Värmdö therefore enters the investigation through a claimed route home, not simply as a scenic setting.

The island is also a destination reached by ordinary public transport. From Slussen, the bus to Värmdö and Grisslinge takes half an hour. Victoria Bergman uses that time to prepare small, innocent-sounding anecdotes about her journey because she expects someone at home to want details and to be dissatisfied if she cannot provide them. The trip’s mundane length contrasts with the pressure she anticipates at its end: returning requires her to manage what she says before she has even arrived.

A separate journey toward Värmdö is marked by physical difficulty. Sofia Zetterlund drives away in first gear, accelerates toward the Värmdö road along Hammarbyvägen, and passes Orminge as heavy rain begins. She struggles to breathe, and the damp, cold conditions accompany her sense that the waiting is over. The passage establishes the island as the direction of a consequential journey while keeping the destination and its immediate purpose distinct from the other visits described in the novel.

Grisslinge and the family landscape

Victoria’s return to Grisslinge brings her back to a landscape that has accumulated childhood meaning. After arriving by bus, she walks along the road and recognizes places she once named for herself: the Climbing Tree, the Stepping Stone, the Mountain, and the River. The names preserve a child’s personal map of the area, making the familiar surroundings legible through memory rather than through official geography.

Her age and sense of self do not align neatly on this return. Victoria is seventeen, yet part of her feels only two years old. At the house, a white Volvo stands in the drive and her parents are outside in the garden. Her father has his back to her, occupied with something in his hands, while her mother weeds beside a flower bed. Victoria removes her rucksack and leaves it on the terrace; only then does her father hear her and turn around. These concrete details make the arrival a re-entry into an established family scene, while the contrast between her teenage steps and the much younger part of herself reveals how little psychological distance she has from childhood.

The family setting also recurs in an account of a villa on Värmdö. Inside, Victoria stands looking at fetish figures on the living-room wall and experiences Grisslinge as a prison. The house is presented not as a refuge but as a place in which the hours are difficult to inhabit: time runs through her irregularly, and she does not know what to do with the day’s dead hours. The figures and the villa’s interior anchor this feeling in a particular domestic space rather than leaving it as a general statement about unhappiness.

Police records and the fire

Värmdö appears in Jeanette Kihlberg’s search through tax records. Of the people on her list, a Victoria Bergman registered in Värmdö is the one whose returns she cannot retrieve. Jeanette checks the previous year and finds the same absence of information about income and possible deductions. The address gives the investigation a point of connection to Victoria, but the records do not explain why the information is missing.

The location is also associated with reports of a fatal fire. Göran Andersson, who works in Värmdö, tells Jeanette that two people died in a serious fire that appeared accidental; they had been using a sauna. In a separate call, he informs a woman that her parents are believed dead after their house burned that evening, with the bodies found there assumed to be theirs. These reports place a family home and a local investigation within the same geography, but the accounts alone do not establish further details about the cause of the fire or the identities of the dead.

Narrative significance

The novel gives Värmdö several connected but not interchangeable functions. It is where a suspect says he was going home, a destination approached by Sofia through rain, the setting of Victoria’s return to her parents, and an address recorded in Jeanette’s inquiries. Each use adds a different kind of evidence: spoken explanation, bodily strain, remembered landscape, or administrative trace.

Grisslinge makes these strands especially close. Its childhood landmarks remain vivid enough for Victoria to revisit by name, yet the villa’s interior is bound to her experience of confinement and empty time. Värmdö consequently holds both the familiarity of home and the unease of a place shaped by family history. The location’s significance lies in that tension, not in any single view of it as either shelter or threat.