Knife used in Lundberg's murder

The Knife used in Lundberg's murder is both a weapon and a contested piece of evidence: its fingerprints connect Sonja Hökberg and Eva Persson to the assault on Johan Lundberg, while the sequence of injuries shows that the knife was used after the hammer. The object sharpens the investigation without resolving its central uncertainty. It supports more than one account of the girls’ roles, and the distinction between handling a weapon and using it remains crucial.

Identification and Place in the Case

The knife enters the investigation as one of two weapons used in the attack on Johan Lundberg, a taxi driver. The case initially appears straightforward: Hökberg and Persson admitted taking part, shared the blame, and said they had acted for money. Wallander’s early account of the assault describes the girls attacking the driver after travelling by taxi to Rydsgård, then leaving separately for their homes. The weapon’s significance changes as Persson withdraws her confession and says she was innocent, claiming that Hökberg was responsible for both the knife and the hammer.

The knife becomes important because it bears on this reversal. Persson’s new account does not simply deny involvement; it assigns the use of both weapons to Hökberg. The physical evidence can test parts of that claim, but it cannot automatically establish the full story. Its presence in the case is therefore not a simple confirmation of guilt or innocence: it forces the investigators to separate what the object proves from what a witness says it proves.

Fingerprints and Changing Testimony

When the fingerprint results arrive, Nyberg reports two different sets of prints on the knife: Hökberg’s and Persson’s. Wallander immediately asks whether this means Persson may not be lying in this particular respect. Nyberg is careful not to make that conclusion for him. He says only that it is a legitimate possibility that Hökberg was responsible for the murder; determining what the evidence means is not his role as a forensic technician.

That caution matters. The prints establish that both girls handled the knife, but the passage does not say when or under what circumstances either did so. They do not, on their own, establish who inflicted the knife wounds. Persson’s account—that she had the knife in her bag and gave it to Hökberg when asked—offers one possible explanation for the two sets of prints. It remains an account, not a conclusion proved by the fingerprints. The object thus preserves a physical trace of both girls’ contact even as their statements divide responsibility differently.

The Sequence of the Attack

Forensic analysis establishes a specific order: Lundberg was first struck with the hammer and then with the knife. The pathologists rule out the reverse sequence and say the attacks were not simultaneous. Wallander asks whether Hökberg switched weapons during the assault. Nyberg believes that she did, adding that Persson had the knife in her bag and gave it to Hökberg when Hökberg asked for it. Wallander compares the exchange to an operation in which a surgeon requests tools—a chilling image of the assault as a succession of deliberate acts.

The sequence gives the knife a distinct place in the violence. It was not simply another weapon present at the scene; it was used after the hammer, making the attack a staged progression rather than a simultaneous struggle with two weapons. Yet the order of injuries and the interpretation of how the knife changed hands are separate kinds of knowledge. The former is a forensic finding; the latter is Nyberg’s reconstruction, based partly on Persson’s account. The investigation therefore gains a firmer chronology while still having to evaluate the testimony that might explain it.

Recovery and Evidentiary Limits

Nyberg later shows Wallander the knife in a plastic bag on his desk, alongside the hammer used in Lundberg’s murder. The bag makes the weapon available for examination and turns an object from the assault into a trace that can be scrutinized: fingerprints can be compared, and the injury sequence can be assessed against the weapons’ reported use. The scene also places the knife beside the hammer, but the forensic results distinguish their histories. Both girls’ prints are on the knife; only Hökberg’s are on the hammer.

That contrast complicates any account that treats the girls’ involvement as identical. Persson’s prints on the knife are consistent with her having handled it, while the absence of anyone else’s prints on the hammer links that weapon only to Hökberg in the reported results. Neither finding supplies a complete narrative of the attack. The knife’s evidentiary force lies instead in the questions it allows the police to frame: who possessed it, who passed it, and who used it after the hammer had struck.

Narrative Significance

As evidence, the knife marks the difference between a shared confession and a later effort to transfer responsibility. Its two sets of prints resist a clean division between Hökberg as attacker and Persson as bystander, yet they do not erase the possibility that Hökberg wielded it. The object makes the investigation’s uncertainty concrete: contact is visible, but intention and action must still be reconstructed.

Its role also exposes the limits of inference. Wallander and Nyberg move from fingerprints and injury order toward an explanation of the attack, but Nyberg distinguishes those observations from what he can properly conclude. The knife helps establish a sequence and connect both girls materially to the weapon; it cannot speak for itself about the moment it changed hands. In that gap between a physical trace and a complete account, the case’s competing versions remain alive.