Rosengård is the setting for Stefan Fredman’s funeral and the aftermath that follows it. In this suburban landscape, Kurt Wallander moves from a street where boys play football to an almost empty church and then to the Fredman family’s shabby rental flat; the sequence makes the place a setting for grief that is largely private but repeatedly exposed to public judgment and media intrusion.

Setting and Arrival

Wallander reaches Rosengård shortly after ten in the morning for a funeral scheduled for eleven. The church is a modern building, with boys playing football against a concrete wall nearby. There are seven of them: three are Black, three more seem to Wallander to have immigrant parents, and the last has freckles and unruly blond hair. Their energetic game briefly draws him toward joining them, but he stays apart.

The game continues as the funeral unfolds. The contrast is not presented as a simple escape from grief: the boys’ ordinary activity carries on beside a ceremony attended by almost no one, while the future of the family’s youngest child weighs on Wallander. The street establishes Rosengård as a lived environment, not merely a backdrop to the church scene.

The Funeral and Its Witnesses

A man outside the church dismisses Stefan as better off dead. Wallander answers angrily that Stefan was not yet eighteen and that someone so young could never be better off dead. His response makes the funeral a confrontation over whether the dead boy is to be remembered only through what he did or also as a young person whose death is a loss.

When Wallander realizes that no flowers have been brought for the coffin, he asks one of the boys to buy roses. He gives the boy a hundred-kronor note and promises ten kronor for the errand. The boy questions Wallander’s claim to be a dangerous police officer because he is not in uniform and does not look like one; after Wallander shows his badge, the boy sets off. Though Wallander doubts he will return, the boy does, and Wallander gives him twenty kronor. The brown coffin has only one wreath, making the roses a small, concrete gesture of regard.

Stefan’s mother, Anette Fredman, arrives with her younger son, Jens. At the church she explains that only the family and the minister are expected. Agneta Malmström, a doctor who had helped Jens when he was unwell, also attends. Her presence links the funeral to earlier efforts to support the family, while her later uncertainty about how Anette and Jens will manage underscores how little the ceremony can resolve.

Exposure and Aftermath

Outside the church, a press photographer takes a picture of Jens as he begins to cry. Anette raises her hands to shield her face and asks to be left alone. Wallander tries to stop the photographer, takes his camera, removes the film, and destroys it under his shoe. The photographer threatens to call the police and accuses Wallander of assault; Wallander identifies himself as a detective with the CID in Ystad and tells him to contact his colleagues in Malmö if he wishes.

The intervention protects the family from the photograph, but it does not undo the intrusion or the boy’s distress. The boys are still playing football nearby as the church bells stop. Wallander says there will be no pictures in the paper, while Anette’s repeated plea for privacy goes unanswered by anything that can make the loss bearable. Rosengård’s public space thus holds both the family’s vulnerability and the photographer’s calculation that images of a serial killer’s funeral will sell.

After the service, Wallander accompanies Anette, Jens, and Agneta to the family’s shabby rental flat. They wait for coffee; Jens plays quietly on the floor with a toy car. Anette speaks vaguely about managing one day at a time, then bursts into tears when Wallander prepares to leave. Agneta stays with her, while Wallander promises to call and awkwardly pats Jens on the head. The movement from church to flat gives Rosengård’s funeral sequence its intimate ending: public spectacle recedes, but the family’s grief and uncertain future remain.