Blackeberg school swimming pool becomes the setting for the novel’s final confrontation at school: a shared place of swimming turns into a space of exposure and mortal danger for Oskar, before witnesses later describe his rescuer as an angel.

Setting and the Attack's Opening

Oskar is still in a corner of the pool, blowing bubbles, when Jonny Forsberg and Jimmy enter wearing their outdoor clothes and shoes. His first response is annoyance at their disregard for the pool, but that reaction gives way to fear when Jimmy stops to survey the water. Oskar recognizes something threatening in the way Jimmy moves and looks. The difference between them is stark: Jimmy is clothed, carrying what Oskar experiences as armor, while Oskar is naked in the water, with every part of his body exposed. Jimmy signals to Jonny, and the two move toward Oskar from opposite sides of the pool. Jimmy orders the other boys to get out; when they hesitate, he takes a stiletto from his jacket and points it toward them. The boys leave Oskar alone in the water. Fernando Avila, whose return Oskar hopes for, is absent, and the pool’s open space offers him no protection.

The Pool as Crime Scene and Place of Rescue

Jimmy pushes Oskar’s head beneath the surface before he can take more than half a breath. Oskar loses his footing and floats with his head bent toward his chest, only a few decimeters underwater. The chlorine stings the torn skin on his scalp; above him, his kicking legs disturb the pale blue water, while the ceiling’s halogen lights waver in his vision. At first he struggles for a hold where there is nothing to grasp. When water enters his nose, a strange calm begins to spread, but his heart keeps pounding, and his body fights to live. His thought, “Better this. Than an eye,” registers the violence of the choice imposed on him: the pool’s water is at once the instrument of an attempted drowning and the immediate alternative to another injury.

By the following day, the pool has become a secured crime scene. Gunnar Holmberg has spent the day at Blackeberg school studying the scene and speaking with students, while technicians and a bloodstain analyst continue collecting evidence by the water. Two youths were killed there the previous night, and Oskar Eriksson is missing. The witnesses’ accounts repeatedly invoke an angel: they say Oskar was rescued by one, and that the same figure tore off Jonny Forsberg and Jimmy’s heads, leaving them on the bottom of the pool. The crime-scene photographer’s underwater images fix that terrible aftermath in the place where the heads were found. The pool’s transformation is complete: a site where boys had been swimming becomes both the scene of an attempted drowning and the evidence of a rescue whose violence defies an ordinary explanation.

Investigation and the Limits of Explanation

The next day, the pool is no longer simply a place associated with what happened to Oskar: it has become part of a police investigation that must reconcile physical evidence with accounts that sound impossible. Gunnar Holmberg sits alone in the principal’s office, trying to organize his notes after spending the day at Blackeberg school studying the crime scene and talking with students. Two technicians and a bloodstain analyst from the National Laboratory of Forensic Science are still securing evidence by the pool. The work is painstaking and material, but the witnesses’ repeated description of Oskar’s rescuer as an angel pushes the account beyond what those procedures can readily explain.

Holmberg’s notes connect the missing boy to an earlier encounter: three weeks before, Oskar Eriksson had raised his hand and answered a question about heroin, and Holmberg remembers him. The detail gives the disappearance a human scale, setting the known schoolboy against the inexplicable violence reported by the other students. The crime-scene photographer, who used an underwater camera to preserve the image of the two heads where they were found, answers Holmberg’s account of the angel with a dry qualification: “Hardly one from heaven, in that case.” The remark acknowledges the witnesses’ description while refusing its comforting implication. Looking out from the office, Holmberg tries to think of a reasonable explanation; outside, the school flag hangs at half-mast. The pool’s aftermath thus remains suspended between evidence that can be secured and an event the investigation cannot make ordinary.

Narrative Significance

The Blackeberg school swimming pool joins two kinds of knowledge that never fully meet: the bodily fact of what happened in its water and the witnesses’ extraordinary account of who intervened. Its aftermath can be recorded and secured, but those procedures cannot make the rescue intelligible on ordinary terms. The pool therefore marks the limit of the investigation as well as the climax of the school violence: it preserves the consequences of an event while leaving its decisive cause beyond explanation.