The theft of Tynnes Falk’s body from a morgue overturns the police’s provisional assumption that his death was natural and makes his case an apparent link to Sonja Hökberg’s death at the Ystad power substation. The body vanished between 6 and 8 p.m.; in its place lay a large electrical relay. For Kurt Wallander, the relay was not merely an odd object left behind but a possible message, while the missing body raised the more urgent question of what someone wanted concealed.

From an Apparently Natural Death

Tynnes Falk, a 47-year-old divorced computer consultant, had been found dead beside a cash machine. A blood-spattered bank receipt showed that he had checked his account balance at 12.02 a.m.; he had taken no money, and his wallet, with its contents, remained with him. The wound to his head was the only sign that suggested a crime. Nyberg’s initial view was that Falk had probably suffered a heart attack, and the police had not investigated his life in depth before treating the death as natural.

That early conclusion shaped the meaning of the theft. By the time the body disappeared, the police had not interviewed Falk’s children or established why he might have had enemies, although his ex-wife had described him as nervous and said he believed he had them. The theft did not prove he had been murdered, but it made the original explanation harder to accept without question. Wallander and Martinsson recognized that the case they had set aside now required a fresh investigation.

The Discovery and Its Timing

At about 8 p.m., Sture Pålsson of the coroner’s office in Lund found that a morgue locker had not been properly closed. When he pulled out the gurney, Falk’s body was gone and an electrical relay had been left in its place. The janitor, Lyth, confirmed that the body had been there when he left at 6 p.m., narrowing the disappearance to the interval between 6 and 8. A rear entrance opened onto the yard, and Pålsson found that its lock had been broken.

Pålsson contacted the Malmö police, whose patrol arrived within fifteen minutes. Once they learned that the missing body came from Ystad and had been part of an investigation, they directed him to contact the local police. The search itself fell to their colleagues in Malmö, but Wallander insisted that the evidence be treated as significant: he asked for fingerprints to be sought on the relay and around the morgue. The relay had been put in a plastic bag, preserving it for examination; at the time Martinsson reported the theft, the body had not been found and there were no known witnesses.

The Relay as a Message

The relay connected the morgue theft to the earlier discovery of Hökberg’s body at the Ystad power substation. When Wallander learned where such a large relay normally belonged, the resemblance ceased to look incidental. He recalled Rydberg’s observation: “Criminals often leave a greeting at the scene of the crime. Sometimes it’s deliberate, sometimes by accident.” In this instance, Wallander judged that the object had been left for the police to find. Its placement made the theft look like communication as well as concealment.

The distinction mattered because the relay pointed toward a specific relationship between cases, but did not explain it. Wallander reasoned that removing Falk’s body might hide something about the manner of death; Martinsson agreed that this was plausible, while cautioning that the theft alone did not establish that Falk had been murdered. They considered the possible links among Falk, Hökberg, Eva Persson, and the taxi driver Johan Lundberg, but none had yet been demonstrated. The relay offered a direction for inquiry, not a solved connection.

Consequences and Uncertainty

The disappearance forced Wallander to reopen the question of who Falk had been. The police had closed his case quickly, leaving little knowledge of his work, family, or associations. Now his reported fear of enemies and the deliberate-looking relay made those omissions consequential. Wallander’s working explanation was that the body had been removed to conceal something, but he kept that as a hypothesis rather than a proven account of the death.

The episode’s force lies in the collision between a body treated as evidence of a finished case and the physical signs that make it newly uncertain: an unsecured locker, a broken rear-door lock, an empty gurney, and a relay from the same substation implicated in Hökberg’s death. The body’s absence withheld the evidence the investigators most needed, while the object left behind directed their attention toward a connection they could not yet explain. The theft therefore changed Falk from a closed file into a central question in the investigation.