Ystad Police

Ystad Police is the local investigative force at the center of the novel’s widening criminal inquiry. Its officers begin with a brutal attack on taxi driver Johan Lundberg, but the investigation soon forces them to reconsider what counts as a separate case: evidence surrounding Sonja Hökberg’s death, the unexplained death of Tynnes Falk, and the disruption of the regional power supply increasingly resist being treated as isolated incidents.

The local force and its investigators

The police station in Ystad is the setting for much of the force’s work, and its investigation is conducted through a team whose members bring different experience and responsibilities. Kurt Wallander leads the inquiry, drawing on reports and fieldwork from Martinsson, Hansson, Nyberg, and Ann-Britt Höglund. Chief Lisa Holgersson also directs Wallander’s attention to broader policing concerns: she insists that he attend a national conference on violence associated with motorcycle gangs after one gang buys a farm outside Ystad. The detail places the local force between immediate casework and the need to prepare for threats that may affect the town in the future.

The Lundberg case initially appears unusually clear. Two girls are arrested after attacking the taxi driver with a hammer and a knife, and the force recovers the hammer, Lundberg’s empty wallet, and his mobile phone. When Lundberg dies, Wallander tells colleagues that the case is a homicide and considers the police role nearly complete, with the younger suspect’s case to go to juvenile court. Yet his confidence in closure is qualified by persistent questions about motive and the girls’ relationship. The investigation demonstrates the difference between establishing what happened and understanding why: the force has a strong account of the attack, but not an explanation that satisfies its lead investigator.

Ystad Police also has to manage the public consequences of its work. At a press conference, Wallander confirms that Hökberg has escaped from custody and that the case is now a homicide, while declining to answer questions beyond what the investigation can safely disclose. The exchange exposes the strain between public demands for certainty and the force’s incomplete knowledge. Wallander leaves the station ill and exhausted, but the inquiry soon calls him back: after a power failure, a report from Sydkraft leads police to a burned body at a substation outside Ystad. The local force is thus drawn from a contained murder investigation into an emergency with consequences across Skåne.

Reassessing the evidence

The first response to Tynnes Falk’s death shows how the force’s working conclusions could change as new evidence arrived. Martinsson reported that Falk had been found beside a cash machine with a head wound, but his wallet still held money, and the receipt in his hand showed a balance inquiry at 12:02 a.m. Because nothing beyond the wound pointed clearly to a crime, the initial assumption was that Falk had died of natural causes. Wallander noticed that the balance might have disappointed him, but treated that as speculation and waited for the autopsy. A later report confirmed a natural death, and the case was shelved. The force’s provisional closure was reasonable on the evidence then available, but it would not hold.

When a power failure brought the police to a substation outside Ystad, the scale of the emergency changed the investigation. Sydkraft reported a burned body inside the transformer building, and the outage had left a quarter of Skåne without power. At first the officers did not even know the victim’s sex. The identification came when a technician found a handbag by the fence: its distinctive oak-leaf clasp let Wallander recognize it as Sonja Hökberg’s. Her presence at the substation connected the death of the escaped suspect to the blackout, but it did not settle whether she had killed herself or had been murdered. The gates had been forced while the building door had not, so Wallander ordered the team to account for everyone who could have possessed the keys.

The force’s assumptions shifted again when Falk’s corpse disappeared from the morgue in Lund. Between six and eight in the evening, someone had taken the body through a back entrance with a broken lock and left a large electrical relay on the stretcher. Martinsson brought the details to Wallander, who treated the relay as a deliberate clue rather than an accidental object. The team considered whether it might be a false trail, but the possibility that it came from the substation made a connection between Falk and Hökberg harder to dismiss. The body theft also reopened the question of why a case already judged non-criminal had become the target of such deliberate interference.

Wallander responded by rebuilding the investigation as a timeline rather than accepting the original case boundaries. He set the taxi-driver attack, Hökberg’s escape and death, Falk’s death, the blackout, and the morgue break-in alongside the restaurant encounter involving a man using a fictitious American Express account in the name Fu Cheng. The exercise did not immediately produce an answer; it made the missing explanation more visible. Wallander suspected that Hökberg had been killed to prevent her from talking and that Falk’s body had been removed to conceal something, while carefully recognizing that these were hypotheses, not established facts. He began to see the substation not merely as the place where Hökberg died but as infrastructure that could be used to disrupt a much larger region.

Forensic work gave the team firmer grounds for revising its account of the taxi attack. Nyberg found two sets of fingerprints on the knife, belonging to Hökberg and Eva Persson, while the hammer bore only Hökberg’s prints. The pathologists concluded that the blows had been delivered in stages: first with the hammer, then with the knife. This sequence supported the possibility that Persson handed the knife to Hökberg, rather than proving that both girls had performed the same acts. Nyberg also tested the position of Hökberg’s handbag at the substation. Its location among towers, wires, and barbed fencing could not readily be explained by an accidental throw; it appeared to have been carried there and placed where it would eventually be found. These details led the force to ask not only who had committed each act, but what the evidence had been arranged to make investigators see.

From inference to intervention

As the investigation widened, Ystad Police had to act on a possibility that was not yet a conclusion. Wallander’s attention turned to an ordinary cash-machine transaction after he remembered that Robert Modin’s notes contained the phrase workable trigger. The team had reason to fear that a routine act—using a card and receiving a printed receipt—might set something in motion on a particular day. The clue was suggestive, not explanatory: Wallander could not yet say what the transaction would trigger, only that the everyday nature of the act might make it difficult to anticipate or prevent.

The response was an improvised attempt to control access to cash machines. Officers took up positions, and Ann-Britt Höglund reported that Alfredsson was having trouble with young men who insisted on making withdrawals; he called for a patrol car to assist. Wallander instructed the team to keep a car moving between the officers, anticipating that the problem could grow as more people got up and about. He knew the explanation of a temporary malfunction would not keep the public away indefinitely. The operation rested on an inference that the team could not publicly justify, and the practical limits of enforcing it were already apparent.

At 5:27 a.m., Wallander was stationed beside the cash machine near the Inland Revenue building. A local electrician arrived expecting to use it and asked whether it was out of order. Wallander told him that withdrawals were being stopped for the time being, but the exchange exposed how tenuous the police cordon was: the man could simply go elsewhere, while the explanation offered no reason for the restriction. Wallander also feared that word would spread and that Lisa Holgersson would end the operation. The force was trying to prevent an event whose mechanism and consequences remained unknown, while confronting the ordinary public routines that its hypothesis depended upon.

The danger became immediate when Modin appeared in the car park and an armed man approached Wallander from behind. The gunman took Wallander’s weapon, threw it into a rubbish bin, and directed him to pick up a credit card and use the machine. Wallander understood that resisting could put both himself and Modin in greater danger; the young man’s presence mattered more to him than the unresolved threat. He inserted the card as instructed. The scene turns the investigation’s abstract concern with a routine transaction into a coercive act carried out under a gun, while leaving the mechanism and intended outcome still unknown at this point.

The force as a working team

The investigation depends on a division of labor rather than on Wallander’s judgment alone. Martinsson supplies reports, coordinates with colleagues in other towns, and keeps the inquiry moving, though Wallander recognizes that his impatience can undermine otherwise sharp work. He has also seen how close Martinsson came to leaving the police after his daughter was attacked at school because she was a policeman’s child; Wallander talked him out of resigning then and fears losing him now. The force’s continuity therefore rests partly on personal trust: casework is conducted by colleagues whose commitment can falter under pressures that have little to do with any single crime.

Different forms of expertise alter what the team can responsibly conclude. Wallander assigns Ann-Britt Höglund to question Eva Persson, trusting her judgment about how to pursue answers, while Nyberg’s forensic testing and practical reconstruction of the handbag’s position produce questions that a purely testimonial inquiry might miss. These contributions do not instantly resolve the case. They refine what can be said, distinguishing a possible account from a proven one and redirecting attention when the evidence resists the team’s first interpretation.

That collective method is repeatedly tested by fatigue, public scrutiny, and incomplete information. Wallander leads meetings while sick and exhausted, and the officers work through long reviews without a clear center to the crimes. Their uncertainty is not simply a failure of police procedure: the force must make provisional decisions, preserve evidence, and assign tasks even when the motive and connections remain obscure. At the cash-machine stakeout, that institutional dilemma becomes concrete. The officers attempt to restrict an ordinary public action on the strength of a clue they cannot yet explain, exposing the gap between the urgency of their suspicion and the limited grounds on which they can justify intervention.