Runnerströms Torg is the setting of the investigation’s most consequential discovery: a concealed attic workroom belonging to Tynnes Falk. Behind an unmarked security door, Kurt Wallander finds a computer and a blueprint of the power substation where Sonja Hökberg was killed; a second, hidden room deepens the mystery around Falk himself. The address turns a seemingly ordinary building into both a crime scene and an operational base, joining the case’s physical clues to its increasingly urgent computer investigation.

The building and Falk’s second address

Wallander learns of the flat through Carl-Anders Setterkvist, the owner of the building where Falk’s other apartment has been burgled. Setterkvist mentions that Falk also rented a small attic flat at Runnerströms Torg, which he needed for his work. The revelation helps explain why the burgled apartment contained no computers and little to suggest that Falk worked there. Setterkvist supplies the keys, trusting his own judgment rather than asking for a receipt, and Wallander goes directly to the second address.

The building is a three-storey structure dating from the turn of the century. When Wallander arrives, close to seven in the evening, the attic windows are dark. Inside, music comes from one of the flats, but the attic landing has only a single door: reinforced, without a name or letter box. Wallander listens before entering, briefly mistaking his own apprehension for the sound of someone breathing. The sparse, guarded entrance makes the workroom feel detached from ordinary domestic life even before he sees what is inside.

The workroom and its first clues

The attic flat is a large, almost empty room containing only a desk, a chair, a lamp, a telephone, and a computer. Beside the computer lies a blueprint of the power substation where Sonja Hökberg was killed. Its presence brings the separate lines of the case into unsettling proximity: Falk, whose body was found beside an ATM and later disappeared from the morgue, had kept plans of the site of Hökberg’s death beside his work equipment.

Wallander does not immediately touch the computer or call for help. He studies the room, asking what is present and what is missing. There are no shelves, binders, books, or even a pen. He turns the lamp’s beam across each wall, looking for concealed spaces, but sees nothing. The room’s emptiness is not merely a lack of decoration: it withholds the ordinary traces that might explain Falk’s working habits, leaving the blueprint and computer to carry disproportionate weight.

When Wallander returns with Nyberg, the building’s age supplies the clue that visual inspection missed. Nyberg notices a discrepancy in the room’s dimensions, taps the walls, and hears a hollow sound. A loosened skirting board and a crack in the wall reveal tape that had been painted over. Behind it is a low door, about 1.5 metres high, opening into a windowless chamber roughly eight metres square, with only a small air vent. The hidden architecture makes the apparently bare flat a nested space: its visible emptiness conceals a room of its own.

Inside, the chamber contains a table resembling an altar and two candles. A photograph of Falk hangs on the wall; he faces the camera with a serious expression and appears to be holding a remote control. Wallander and Nyberg cannot determine whether the arrangement means Falk worshipped himself, and their uncertainty remains unresolved. Wallander removes the photograph carefully, wearing rubber gloves, but finds no writing on its back. They search for another concealed room and find none. Nyberg observes that the chamber seems to have been cleaned recently; Wallander recalls evidence of Falk’s fastidiousness from the diary and from Siv Eriksson’s account.

From hidden room to computer investigation

The attic address soon becomes a place where Wallander’s colleagues test the digital side of the mystery. When Martinsson switches on Falk’s computer, the screen passes through moving symbols and settles on an image of the night sky. The machine automatically connects to a server, and its files are protected by complicated codes and barriers. Martinsson warns that someone may be notified when they attempt to open a file; the computer’s connection means that the person at the other end could be almost anywhere, or even elsewhere in the same building.

The investigation also establishes that Falk was not the only person to use the machine. Martinsson finds indications that someone accessed it the previous night, without needing to break into the flat. That detail changes the significance of the secured door: access to Falk’s information did not necessarily require physical entry into the attic. The computer becomes evidence not just of Falk’s private work but of a network of access and surveillance whose reach Wallander cannot yet locate.

Later, Alfredsson works at the computer and discovers a message for Falk. It is from Robert Modin, who says that he has been traced and needs help. Wallander and Martinsson leave immediately to find him. The message makes the attic flat a point of contact between the investigation and an immediate threat to a young computer specialist; the workroom’s digital connections have consequences beyond the objects found inside it.

A working base under a deadline

As the inquiry intensifies, Runnerströms Torg shifts from a site Wallander visits to search for Falk’s secrets into a base for examining them. Wallander returns with Martinsson, shows him the hidden room, and then lets him work at the computer. Later, Martinsson, Alfredsson, and Modin gather around the desk to pursue the remaining questions. Wallander recognizes that he is not equipped to follow every technical step and concentrates instead on keeping the investigation’s larger purpose in view.

That purpose becomes sharply time-bound. At eleven in the morning, Wallander tells the group that thirteen hours remain before October 20 officially begins. He frames the central problems as whether that date is real, what is supposed to happen, and how it can be prevented. The date is still uncertain, and no replies have yet arrived from abroad, but the computer work at Runnerströms Torg is now part of an effort to understand a possible wider attack before the deadline.

Narrative significance

The address concentrates the novel’s contrast between the tangible and the elusive. Its old building can be measured, tapped, and opened; hidden behind the wall are candles, a photograph, and a room whose purpose resists explanation. Beside these material discoveries, Falk’s computer connects to systems and people that cannot be located from the attic. The place offers Wallander physical clues, but each clue points beyond the room—to the substation, to Falk’s unseen collaborators, or to a network whose scale remains unclear.

Runnerströms Torg therefore marks a change in the investigation’s method as well as its setting. Wallander begins by searching an almost bare room for what it lacks, then relies on Nyberg’s measurements to uncover what its walls conceal, and finally depends on Martinsson and the other specialists to interpret what the computer hides. The attic is not a solution to the case; it is the point where private architecture, the earlier killings, and the approaching October 20 crisis become connected.