Kirkeby is a local centre for shopping and daily services, but in the novel it is also part of the network through which Konrad Sejer investigates a series of intimidations. Its shopping centre offers Johnny Beskow access to masks, toys, and a pet shop; its local newspaper helps expose how victims may have been selected. The town’s ordinary places thus connect routine community life with the campaign that disrupts it.

Setting and Local Services

Kirkeby serves residents beyond its own streets. Karsten Sundelin tells Sejer that his family must drive to the shopping centre near Kirkeby when they need a bookshop. Their nearby Spar supermarket by Lake Skarve sells a broader mixture of goods than food alone, including medicine and a few toys. Residents of the Askeland housing estate also rely on it after their own Joker shop closed. Some increasingly travel to Kirkeby for a better selection.

Sundelin describes a wider contraction in local amenities: the area once had a bakery, hairdresser, café, and bank, but these businesses closed one after another. What remains is a grocery shop and petrol station, with a small bar beside the station. That account places Kirkeby within a changing service landscape: shopping draws people towards a larger centre even as nearby communities lose the businesses that once met more of their needs locally.

The Shopping Centre and Johnny Beskow

The shopping centre in Kirkeby is a practical destination for Johnny Beskow. After riding around residential streets in late summer, he parks and takes the lift to the second floor, where he wanders through a toy shop. He inspects ordinary playthings before choosing among masks, including a gorilla mask, and buys it along with a white plush bunny. The purchases combine childish attraction to toys with an awareness that the items may serve his plans. He carries them beneath the seat of Johnny's red Suzuki moped and rides towards Bjørnstad.

The centre appears again after Johnny has buried a dead guinea pig. Twenty minutes after leaving the burial, he arrives in Kirkeby and deliberately parks in a disabled space, treating the breach of a rule as an expression of defiance. He takes the escalator to the second floor and enters a pet shop. After looking at the aquarium, he asks for a male guinea pig with black, brown, and white colouring and says that price does not matter. The repeated visits establish the shopping centre as more than background: it is where Johnny can move through public space, choose objects, and turn purchases into preparation for what follows.

Streets, Residences, and the Investigation

Kirkeby’s residential streets reveal the community that Johnny observes. As he rides through them, he sees children on trampolines and adults gardening, washing cars, painting a fence, and taking clothes from a washing line. The details make domestic life visible as a pattern of routine activity. Johnny regards this life with fascination while also wanting to destroy it, setting the neighbourhood’s unremarkable calm against his threatening intentions.

The town’s streets also place the investigation close to the people affected by the hoaxes. The Meiner family lives on Rolandsgata in a large yellow house, where Sejer and Jacob Skarre watch from a distance before approaching. Several old, broken-down Mercedes stand in the driveway. When Asbjørn Meiner answers the door, his angry manner makes clear that the incident has upset him; he calls Else Meiner to meet the investigators. The house becomes a point where suspicion and public blame bear directly on a family, as Sejer warns that Johnny risks becoming a scapegoat for other wrongdoing as well.

News, Information, and Public Trust

Kirkeby’s local newspaper is part of the chain Sejer believes may have helped Johnny choose some of his victims. Sejer explains to Frances Mold that the attacker appears to scan local stories, note names and addresses, and then investigate further, potentially using the operator service. Frances’s saved newspaper provides a concrete example: an article about traffic safety included her photograph and personal details after she answered questions at a dealership where she and her mother had gone to choose a scooter. The story links the local press’s ordinary reporting to the attacker’s capacity to identify people.

Kirkeby also sits within the wider public response to the false funeral pickup at the Landmark home. Residents talk about how a caller could frighten and humiliate people through a telephone, while the polite voice was initially trusted by an employee of Memento Funeral Home. The episode prompts questions about procedures surrounding death. In this way, the town’s familiar institutions and channels of information—local reporting, businesses, telephone calls, and residential addresses—are shown as both the infrastructure of community life and points of vulnerability.