Sonja Hökberg's murder at the power substation

Sonja Hökberg's murder at the power substation is both a killing and, in Wallander's evolving interpretation, a possible instrument of sabotage. Her death appears to connect the investigation to the blackout across Skåne, but the evidence presented here does not settle who killed her or whether the blackout was the murder’s intended consequence.

The murder as a possible act of sabotage

Wallander reconsiders the case after thinking about the power-substation blueprint in Tynnes Falk’s office and the electrical relay found in the morgue. To him, these details make coincidence increasingly unlikely. He wonders whether Hökberg was not simply killed but sacrificed to make society’s vulnerable points unmistakable: the blackout had brought everyday life to a halt, and the crime might have been designed to expose how much depended on a functioning power supply.

The idea remains a hypothesis, not a solved explanation. Wallander writes out the facts again from the perspective that the events form a planned act of sabotage, but he is not convinced he has found the interpretation that will break the case open. He suspects that Hökberg was killed to keep her quiet and asks what someone hoped to conceal by cutting off Falk’s fingers. The pattern is suggestive; its motives and participants are still unresolved.

Competing accounts of Hökberg’s death

After Jonas Landahl is found dead aboard the ferry, Wallander and Martinsson revisit the earlier theory that Landahl drove Hökberg to the substation and killed her there. One possibility is that Landahl killed her to silence her, then fled to Poland—either in panic or as part of a deliberate plan—before someone killed him, perhaps because he had become a liability. Another is that an unknown person killed both Hökberg and Landahl. In that version, Landahl fled because he feared the person responsible for Hökberg’s death, not because he was her killer.

The distinction matters because Landahl’s death closes an investigative avenue and makes Wallander confront how quickly he had settled on the most convenient explanation. He now recognizes that the apparent link between Landahl and Hökberg may not establish his guilt. The murder’s connection to the wider sequence remains plausible, but the identity of the killer is left open among these competing accounts.

The body and the blackout

In discussing the apparent sequence of events, Martinsson and Wallander describe Hökberg’s body as having been used to cause the enormous blackout in Skåne. That possibility changes the murder’s significance: the body is not only evidence of a death but may also have been made part of an attack on essential infrastructure. Wallander’s earlier thought that control of the power supply could mean control over cash machines and other systems gives the killing a reach beyond its immediate victim, without proving exactly how the wider plan worked.

Dr Bexell confirms that the victim was a young woman and recalls the condition of a body burned by what might have been millions of volts. Her observation establishes the extreme electrical damage associated with the death, while offering no answer about who caused it or why. The murder therefore stands at the convergence of physical violence and a suspected assault on the systems on which society depends.

Consequences for the investigation

Wallander initially treats Hökberg’s death as part of a sequence that may also include the release of minks and the later killing aboard the ferry. He and Martinsson consider whether the events are successive pieces in a chain, but they also question whether the murder of Johan Lundberg belongs to that same design. Wallander’s inability to fit Lundberg’s death into the pattern leads him to consider separating the strands rather than forcing every crime into one explanation.

Hökberg’s murder thus becomes a pivotal but unresolved link: it prompts the investigators to see the blackout as potentially planned, while the later death of Landahl undermines their confidence about who killed her. The case’s central tension is the gap between a compelling pattern and proof. The more consequential the suspected sabotage appears, the more damaging it is that the murder’s authorship and precise purpose remain uncertain.