Carl-Einar Lundberg

Carl-Einar Lundberg is the son of taxi driver Johan Lundberg and a former defendant in a violent rape case. Although he was acquitted, the case contained indications that he had been responsible. When a drawing later links him to Sonja Hökberg’s account of an assault, investigators begin to consider whether her killing of his father was revenge for a rape that had never been reported. The possibility transforms the meaning of the murder investigation, but remains an investigative theory rather than a proven account of Lundberg’s guilt.

Identity and Case Record

The evidence presents Lundberg through police files, other people’s accounts, and an image rather than through a direct encounter. Ann-Britt Höglund tells Kurt Wallander that Lundberg had been tried for a particularly violent rape and acquitted, though several indications had pointed toward his guilt. That earlier case gives investigators a possible connection to Hökberg: if Lundberg had assaulted her before, his acquittal in the other case would not have prevented a further crime. It does not, however, establish that he raped Hökberg.

The distinction between accusation and proof remains important throughout the inquiry. Höglund finds no police case involving Hökberg, and the theory depends on information that she had confided to Kalle Ryss. According to Ryss, Hökberg told him that she had been raped several years earlier and remained traumatized by it. The account supplies a possible history behind her silence, but it is second-hand and does not by itself identify Lundberg as her attacker.

The Connection to Sonja Hökberg

Ryss’s account changes the investigators’ reading of Hökberg. He had broken up with her because, as he described it, she was uninterested in sex; only after Höglund pressed him about the relationship did he explain that Hökberg had told him about the rape. Höglund then connected that disclosure to Lundberg’s earlier trial. She proposed that Hökberg might have killed his father as revenge for the assault, even though she had never gone to the police.

The theory also gives a possible motive for the killing of Johan Lundberg, but leaves practical questions unanswered. Wallander and Höglund wonder how Hökberg could have known that the older Lundberg would be driving the taxi, and whether she knew he was Carl-Einar’s father. They consider the possibility that she had become consumed by vengeance, while acknowledging that they do not know how she responded to the rape. In this account, the proposed revenge is neither simple nor confirmed: investigators are trying to explain a murder while still determining what Hökberg herself knew and did.

The Drawing and Identification

A drawing kept by a boy provides the most concrete link between Lundberg and Hökberg’s account. It shows Hökberg and a man looming over her, his fist striking her nose. Wallander recognizes that the image may help identify the man, and notices a mark on the figure’s wrist that first appears to be a bracelet but proves to be a tattoo.

Wallander takes the drawing to Höglund, who identifies a snake design on Lundberg’s right wrist from the case files and photographs. The correspondence persuades them that the man in the drawing is Carl-Einar Lundberg. Wallander treats the match as confirmation of the investigative theory, while still warning that a charge may be difficult to sustain. The drawing therefore does two things at once: it gives the police a specific identification to pursue, and it strengthens the proposed connection between Hökberg’s past assault and the killing of Lundberg’s father.

Investigative Consequences and Unresolved Guilt

After the identification, Wallander insists that Lundberg be brought in for questioning, and the team agrees to pursue the matter. The case is not settled by the drawing. Wallander allows that other factors may remain unknown, and the investigators still need to establish what Hökberg knew, how it related to Tynnes Falk, and who became afraid that she might disclose it. Lundberg’s possible role in the earlier assault is thus one strand in a wider inquiry, not an explanation for every event.

The final accounting preserves that uncertainty. No one can be charged because all the suspects are dead, yet a report is left with the prosecutor that could have led to an indictment of Carl-Einar Lundberg. The ending distinguishes a plausible and consequential case theory from a verdict: investigators have assembled a drawing, a tattoo match, and the history of an earlier rape trial, but the surviving account does not establish Lundberg’s guilt in Hökberg’s assault or provide a judicial resolution.