Lacke

Lacke is a heavy-drinking regular whose life is organized around a small circle of acquaintances, one profound friendship, and a troubled bond with Virginia. Jocke’s disappearance and Virginia’s death strip away the ordinary arrangements that had sustained him: his place at the restaurant table, his hope of building a future with her, and finally his certainty that he can answer violence with violence. His arc turns on the difference between the group he spends time with and the one friend he believes cannot be replaced.

Identity and Place in the Group

Lacke belongs to the regular crowd at the Chinese restaurant in Blackeberg, where he sits with Morgan, Larry, and Jocke. Their table is a familiar social setting: Jocke and Lacke can spend time discussing fish that live in both fresh and salt water, while Larry reads the evening paper and Morgan keeps time to music no one else can hear. The restaurant’s owner has drawn portraits of the regulars on the wall, making the men’s faces part of the place’s everyday decor. The group’s routine gives Lacke company, but it does not make every member a close friend.

His place in that circle is also marked by financial insecurity and a casual readiness to take what he can. After a solitary customer buys whisky for the group, Lacke watches the man leave five hundred-kronor bills on the table. He pockets one while the waiter is occupied, then takes the remaining whisky from the man’s glass. The scene is played as a small, opportunistic success, but it also shows Lacke attentive to money and willing to exploit a moment when he thinks no one is watching.

The group’s work and finances vary. Larry has taken early retirement, Morgan works intermittently at an auto scrap yard, and Karlsson, who joins the gang, calls his full-time toy-store job in Vällingby a real job. Karlsson had owned the store before financial difficulties forced him to sell it; after thirty years in the business, he says, the new owner eventually employed him. Lacke’s own livelihood remains unclear. Sometimes he appears with a few bucks, but the uncertainty is part of his place in the group rather than a story the others can explain.

Jocke and the Meaning of Friendship

Jocke is the one person Lacke unequivocally counts as a friend. Before his disappearance, Jocke made even a visit to his brother on Vaddo Island into an occasion, telling the others about it a week ahead and describing what he planned to bring and do. Lacke recalls this habit as evidence of how unlike him Jocke was: dependable, communicative, and present in a way that made friendship tangible.

The absence of Jocke’s body deepens the loss. For Lacke, a funeral and a visible corpse would establish what has happened and give him a moment in which to recognize his friend as dead. Without that confirmation, disappearance feels unnatural and unfinished. The missing body is not merely an unresolved detail for him; it denies him the ordinary evidence and ritual by which grief might become real.

When Lacke speaks to the others about Jocke, he describes the friendship as singular and inseparable. He makes a fist to represent their closeness and insists that nothing can replace what he has lost. In the same outburst, he dismisses the group as hollow and accuses them of speaking lightly about loss when they cannot understand his. His language divides the world between the friend who mattered and the companions who remain. That distinction clarifies why the restaurant crowd can be his regular company without being a substitute for Jocke.

Virginia: Rupture, Pursuit, and Loss

Virginia is the only person Lacke says he likes being with, even though he doubts his own capacity for happiness. He still hopes they might make their relationship work. That hope makes his drunken outburst at the apartment especially consequential. While grieving Jocke, he rejects Virginia’s attempt to comfort him and insults her, accusing her of being cold and of seeking other men. Virginia slaps him and leaves in tears. Morgan tells Lacke he may never see her again; Lacke recognizes what he has said and hurries after her.

His pursuit becomes a desperate attempt to reach her before he has to face the consequences of the quarrel. He sees a shadow fall from above onto Virginia and knock her down. The attacking child runs away toward the school, and Lacke turns from pursuit to care: he kneels beside Virginia, removes his jacket and sweater, and presses the sweater against her throat. He calls her his darling and beloved. The tenderness of this response does not undo the insult that sent her out alone, but it makes the separation immediate and irreversible.

Lacke later carries a box of Aladdin chocolates, stolen because he has no money, hoping to give Virginia something. He also picks up a fist-sized rock and keeps it in his pocket. He does not believe the stone will protect him from what he has seen; its weight and cold simply offer some comfort. After asking around the apartment courtyards without success, he goes to Virginia’s door. He considers taking her to hospital and decides he will return the next morning and bring her whether she wants to go or not if she has not improved. Sitting on the stairs in the dark, he thinks of himself as responsible. The chocolates, the stone, and the decision to return register care alongside fear and uncertainty, rather than any confidence that he can control what is happening.

Grief, Withdrawal, and a Plan to Leave

Lacke’s distress continues to separate him from the restaurant group. After spending about an hour with the regulars on Saturday night, he tries to share his concerns, but they do not want to hear them. He senses that he might lose his temper and leaves. The episode confirms a judgment he had already begun to form: these men are not the people he thought they were, and their incomprehension is another loss layered over Jocke’s disappearance and the crisis with Virginia.

In the night, he decides to leave Blackeberg, and to take Virginia with him. He calculates that his stamp collection might bring about three hundred thousand and that the apartment could bring another two hundred. With that money he imagines buying a country house, perhaps two houses, or a small farm. He plans to propose it once Virginia has recovered and believes she would welcome the idea. The plan gives shape to a future beyond the neighborhood, but it depends on a recovery that will not come. His imagined departure is therefore both a practical calculation and a fragile promise of shared life.

Confronting the Cause and Its Limit

After Virginia’s death, Lacke walks as if weighed down by the manner of her dying. At a kiosk, a newspaper headline and photograph catch his attention: the man labeled the Ritual Killer is the same customer who bought him whisky at the Chinese restaurant. Lacke believes he knows what the case is really about. The discovery connects an apparently casual encounter at the restaurant with the violence he has witnessed, and redirects his grief toward action.

He does not find agreement among the regulars. Larry invokes spontaneous combustion, while Morgan listens to Lacke’s account of what happened at the hospital but balks when Lacke proposes destroying the cause of it. The others choose an explanation that requires less of them than confronting vampires, and Lacke understands that they will not help. In this respect, the group’s earlier failure to receive his grief becomes a practical refusal as well: he must face the danger without their participation.

Lacke goes to the building where he believes he should act. Outside, he sees police officers and assumes they are pursuing the same matter with poorer information. Near the basement door is a bottle of T-Rod, and he stops to consider it. The fuel recalls Virginia’s death and makes the possibility of setting something alight part of the immediate decision before him. But when he reaches the bathroom and sees the small, bloodied child at the bottom of the tub, his resolve breaks. The body appears defenseless; its heart is beating only a few times a minute, and Lacke sees a wounded child rather than a creature proportionate to the horror he has experienced. He cannot kill it.

That hesitation is the decisive limit of Lacke’s revenge. He has lost the friend he could not replace and the woman with whom he imagined leaving, and he has come to believe that the people around him will not act. Yet when the supposed source of the horror is before him as a helpless child, he cannot translate grief and fear into an attack. His story leaves him caught between the need to stop what has happened and the recognition of vulnerability in the person he would have to destroy.