“Criminals often leave a greeting at the scene of the crime”

Rydberg’s maxim, “Criminals often leave a greeting at the scene of the crime. Sometimes it’s deliberate, sometimes by accident,” gives Kurt Wallander a way to interpret the electrical relay left where Tynnes Falk’s body had been. It turns an unsettling piece of evidence into a possible communication from the person who removed the body—and focuses the investigation on what that person meant to conceal or reveal.

Origin and Wording

Kurt Wallander recalls the saying while considering the relay found in the morgue. Rydberg had offered it many years earlier, when the two first began working together. Its two parts leave room for different readings: a clue at a crime scene may be a purposeful signal, or it may have been left inadvertently.

Application to the Morgue

In this case, Wallander rejects the idea of an accidental “greeting.” A large electrical relay, he reasons, is not something someone would simply happen to carry. Since the relay was left in the place of Tynnes Falk’s body, Wallander concludes it was meant for the police, not the pathologists. The stolen body, meanwhile, suggests an effort to conceal something about Tynnes Falk’s death, though the theft alone does not prove that he was murdered.

Investigative Significance

The maxim helps Wallander treat the relay as a deliberate link between the morgue theft and the investigation rather than as an isolated oddity. Martinsson agrees that the relay is a message and that the body was removed to hide something. The saying thus shapes the detectives’ next questions without resolving them: the significance of the message remains uncertain, as does what the missing body might have revealed.