Police

Police are the institution through which the novel’s private fears become an official investigation. Their response to the Vällingby ritual murder moves from a carefully prepared suspect sketch to an arrest and an apartment search, then to interviews and evidence-gathering at the school swimming pool. Yet the investigation does not resolve every uncertainty: the alleged killer’s label, an unknown body in an apartment, and students’ reports of an angel leave the police account incomplete.

Public suspicion and the composite sketch

Before Police identify a suspect, public speculation supplies its own image of the ritual murderer. Rumors cast the killer as a foreigner and connect the crimes to imagined blood rituals. That prejudice is unsettled when Police release a composite sketch based on a young girl’s sighting. The image is described as an ordinary Swedish man with a vacant, ghost-like expression, and the care taken in constructing it gives the sketch an official authority that rumor lacks.

The sketch also turns suspicion outward. Men in the western suburbs who resemble the image are watched closely; some even reconsider whether changing their appearance might make them seem suspicious. The search thus reaches beyond the investigation itself, making an official likeness a template through which residents judge one another. Its influence is real, but its limits are plain: resemblance prompts scrutiny, not proof.

The timing exposes how quickly public attention can shift. While residents are absorbing the sketch, news of a Soviet submarine running aground outside Karlskrona draws attention toward a national crisis. At school, a teacher passes on what he heard on the radio, and by lunchtime children are saying that the Russians are there. The two anxieties are not the same investigation, but their succession places Police work inside a community where fear is repeatedly redirected by new reports.

Apprehension and the apartment search

On Monday morning, Police apprehend the man called the so-called Ritual Killer in a basement office in Blackeberg. The newspaper account preserves the provisional quality of the announcement: a police spokesman confirms that a person has been apprehended, without providing further identification. The label has already given the arrest a public meaning, but the restrained statement does not itself establish what the man has done or what investigators have proved.

That evening, a call from a member of the public helps Police locate an apartment believed to belong to the apprehended man. It is in Blackeberg, about fifty metres from where he was arrested. Police enter the apartment, and emergency technicians carry out a man whose identity has not yet been established. The report leaves open whether the apartment has been visited recently; it does not make the body’s identity or the circumstances surrounding it certain. The search therefore deepens the case without supplying a complete explanation.

The approach to the building is also seen from outside the official investigation. Lacke arrives in the courtyard, notices a patrol car, and assumes the officers are pursuing the same matter as he is, though he believes their information is less useful. He continues into the building. His brief assessment shows the investigation running alongside private efforts to understand what has happened, rather than controlling everything residents know or attempt to do.

Door-to-door inquiries and the school investigation

Police officers also ask residents whether they have heard or seen anything. One officer tells Oskar Eriksson that something has happened in the neighboring building and explains that Police are going door to door. Oskar’s alarm eases when he learns which building the officer means. The exchange shows the investigation reaching ordinary residents through direct questioning, while also revealing how a nearby police inquiry can make a person fear that attention has turned toward his own home.

On Friday the thirteenth, Gunnar Holmberg sits in the empty principal’s office at Blackeberg School, trying to organize his notes after spending the day examining the crime scene and speaking with students. Two technicians and a bloodstain analyst from the National Laboratory of Forensic Science are still securing evidence at the pool. The passage presents the inquiry as collaborative evidence work: Holmberg gathers accounts while specialists continue their examination of the site.

The immediate stakes are two youths killed at the pool and a third boy, Oskar Eriksson, missing. Holmberg recognizes Oskar as the pupil who had answered his question about heroin several weeks earlier. He remembers having thought that the boy might be the first to come out to the police car, and that he could have taken him for a ride and encouraged his confidence. Oskar never came out; now he is absent from the school and the investigation has to account for his disappearance as well as the deaths.

Evidence, testimony, and the limits of explanation

The students’ accounts of the pool broadly agree, Holmberg notes, and one word recurs: angel. They say an angel rescued Oskar Eriksson and was also responsible for the deaths of Jonny Forsberg and Jimmy Forsberg. The witness reports offer Police a repeated description, but not an explanation that fits an ordinary account of the event. The crime-scene photographer’s dry response to Holmberg makes that tension explicit: the reported figure does not sound like an angel from heaven.

Across these episodes, Police work by collecting and testing partial accounts: a child’s sighting informs a composite sketch; a member of the public supplies the lead to an apartment; residents are questioned; students’ stories are compared; and specialists secure evidence at the pool. Each step narrows what can be asked, but none of the supplied findings settles every question. The public title of ritual killer is therefore more decisive than the facts publicly disclosed at the moment of arrest, while the school investigation ends its known account with an absent boy and testimony about an impossible rescuer.

Police are neither absent from Blackeberg nor omniscient within it. Patrol officers appear in courtyards and stairwells, investigators work through interviews and physical evidence, and news reports translate their actions into public announcements. But residents hold information and suspicions the officers do not necessarily share, and the students’ description of the pool events strains the categories available to an investigation. The institution gives the community a process for responding to violence; the evidence presented here leaves that process short of a fully resolved truth.