Tynnes Falk dies beside an ATM in an incident first judged to be probably natural, not criminal. The details that seemed to make the case ordinary—a solitary walk, an account-balance check, and an apparent heart attack—later acquire a different weight when his body disappears from the morgue and an electrical relay is left in its place.

Falk and the circumstances of his death

Falk was 47, divorced, and living alone in a rented top-floor flat at 10 Apelbergsgatan. He worked for himself as a computer consultant. On the Sunday before his death, he cleaned his flat and then went out for an evening walk. He was later found in front of a cash machine, with a head wound and Tynnes Falk's ATM receipt still in his hand.

The receipt recorded an account-balance inquiry at 12:02 a.m. Falk had not withdrawn money. His wallet was still there, with money inside, and records showed that his last withdrawal had been on Saturday and was not a large sum. These details weakened the straightforward possibility that he had been attacked for cash, but left the reason for the head wound and his presence at the machine unresolved.

The initial assessment

The first examination offered little to support a crime apart from the wound to Falk's head. Nyberg considered a heart attack the likely cause of death, and the police set the case aside pending the autopsy report. Wallander wondered whether Falk had seen a lower account balance than he expected, but this was speculation rather than an established explanation.

The initial investigation was consequently brief. Because the police believed the death to be natural, they did not closely examine Falk's life or interview his children. His ex-wife later described him as nervous and said he had claimed to have enemies, details that gained importance only after events forced the detectives to reconsider the case. Even then, Wallander and Martinsson recognized that a stolen body did not by itself prove Falk had been murdered.

The stolen body and the case reopened

After the police had provisionally closed the case, someone removed Falk's body from the morgue and left an electrical relay from the Ystad power substation in its place. The substitution transformed the case: the relay appeared too conspicuous to be accidental, while the missing body suggested that something about Falk's death—or the body itself—was to be concealed. Wallander and Martinsson treated the relay as a possible message intended for the investigators, not as proof of a particular motive.

A subsequent review placed Falk's death alongside Sonja Hökberg's death at the substation and the blackout affecting much of Skåne. Wallander considered whether Falk had been murdered and whether his death might connect to Hökberg's, but the connection remained a working hypothesis. The case's significance lies in this reversal: an apparent natural death, initially peripheral to the investigation, becomes a possible part of a larger pattern precisely because someone takes the extraordinary step of removing the body.

The ATM as an investigative clue

Falk's final transaction makes the cash machine more than a detail of the discovery scene. Much later, while the investigators are searching for a practical trigger mechanism in the larger plot, Wallander seizes on the routine act of inserting a card and obtaining cash and a printed receipt. Modin's notes contain the underlined phrase workable trigger, and Wallander suspects that an everyday ATM transaction could initiate an event whose nature he does not yet understand.

That later insight does not establish that Falk's death itself activated such a mechanism. Instead, the recurrence gives the original scene new investigative resonance: the machine first appears as the setting for an unexplained death and a peculiar balance check, then reappears in the detectives' thinking as an ordinary point of contact through which a wider threat might be set in motion. The narrative keeps observation and inference distinct, leaving the death's exact cause unresolved even as its clues become central to the inquiry.