Sparbo Dam

Sparbo Dam is a freshwater source for thousands of people, but in Johnny Beskow’s story it also becomes a private stage for transgression and a recurring place of return. Its narrow wall and roaring sluice first offer him a setting for a shocking prank; later, the dam becomes the place where he watches Else Meiner, waits for the consequences of poisoning, and is ultimately found dead. The familiar landscape gathers his escalating acts around water that flows outward into the community, while the evidence at the end leaves the precise cause of his death unresolved.

Setting and Physical Features

The dam lies beyond a narrow forest path. Johnny leaves his moped against a spruce and walks through the woods to reach the water, a route that makes the site feel separate from ordinary streets and houses. In the middle, water rushes through a sluice and into a black pipe, its force audible as a continual thrum. The dam wall is only forty centimetres wide: broad enough to walk on carefully for a time, but increasingly perilous farther out, especially near the sluice.

The sluice is enclosed by a cage that is always locked, and only the people who maintain the dam have its key. The barrier does not make access impossible, however; a person could climb over it and cross to the other side. The risk lies in keeping composure beside the gushing water as much as in negotiating the structure itself. The setting’s danger is therefore practical and immediate: a narrow footing, a powerful current, and a descent into a pipe from which escape would be difficult.

A local story gives that danger a human precedent. A boy, probably during May examinations, had once balanced on the dam in an attempt to capture another badge on his graduation cap, fallen, and been swallowed by the pipe. His body was found several kilometres down the valley. The tale is reported as a rumor, not as a fully verified account, but it shadows Johnny’s later presence on the wall with the possibility that a fall here can carry someone far beyond the place where it began.

Johnny’s Early Visit

Johnny’s visits make the dam a site where he can turn private impulses into acts whose effects reach others. After driving there, he takes in the glimmering water and silent forest, then carefully steps onto the wall and contemplates the sluice. He is elated by the shock he has already caused through the blood-soaked-baby prank. The dam offers a contrast to the newspaper commotion: away from the reporters and headlines, he can regard himself as the author of a drama and relish the response it produces.

He sits on the wall for about fifteen minutes before making his way back to solid ground. The water’s practical destination is part of what gives his next gesture its significance. Johnny knows that the dam supplies freshwater to thousands and that water entering the black pipe will end up in people’s taps. He urinates in the water, making the public supply itself an object in his performance. The act does not establish that the water is otherwise contaminated; its force lies in Johnny’s deliberate knowledge that a shared resource connects this secluded place to everyday life across the community.

A Private Place and a New Target

The dam also becomes a place Johnny regards as his own. On the way home from another prank, he returns through the woods and sees someone on the wall where he likes to sit. The intruder is Else Meiner, the red-haired girl he has seen near her home in Rolandsgata. She is reading and does not notice him. Johnny watches her from behind a tree, fixes on her red plait, and imagines that a small shove could send her into the water. He leaves without approaching her, but forms a threat of returning at a moment of his choosing.

His first retaliation is directed at Else’s bicycle rather than at her body. He pulls his army knife from his belt and slashes both tyres, warmed by the sun and easily cut, then withdraws through the heather and walks some distance before starting his moped. The scene links the dam’s isolation to the way Johnny acts: he can observe without being seen, choose an indirect attack, and leave the object that will reveal the damage. Else later tells the police that someone slashed her bicycle tyres near Sparbo Dam a few days earlier. Her report places the vandalism within a wider run of pranks and gives the private encounter a public consequence: the dam is no longer only Johnny’s secret refuge, but a location attached to an identifiable grievance.

Waiting and Return

After poisoning his grandfather, Henry Beskow, Johnny again rides to the dam. He parks his moped against a spruce, puts his gloves inside his helmet, walks ten steps along the wall, and sits down. He waits for the poison to take effect, restless enough to roam the forest trails, ride around, and watch the time. After four hours he decides that it is over and heads home. The dam serves here not as the site of the poisoning itself, but as a place from which Johnny waits at a distance for its consequence.

The return to the house supplies the stark ending to that interval: Johnny stands listening, and the house has never been so quiet. The dam’s repeated role in his movements makes it a marker of how he separates himself from the people affected by his actions. He can sit beside a public water source and wait, while the violence unfolds elsewhere; the quiet at home then closes the episode without undoing that separation.

Discovery and Narrative Significance

Later, while Konrad Sejer is at a medical appointment, Jacob Skarre calls to say that Johnny has been found at Sparbo Dam. Sejer goes to the site and searches around its edge for clues, asking whether anyone else had been there or whether there had been a confrontation. Johnny’s lean, bluish body is wet, his hair hangs over his face, his hands are bony, and his bitten nails are visible; he is also underdressed. These details establish the grim discovery but do not, by themselves, explain how he died.

Jacob Skarre suggests that Johnny may have been balancing on the wall, fallen, and been unable to swim. The suggestion remains a possibility rather than a confirmed reconstruction. This uncertainty returns the reader to the dam’s physical facts: its narrow wall, the water’s force, and the earlier story of a boy carried into the pipe. Across Johnny’s appearances, the location shifts from a chosen stage for mischief to a hiding place, a site of surveillance and retaliation, a waiting point, and finally the scene where investigators search for answers. Its public function as a water supply stands in sharp contrast to Johnny’s private claim on it, while its recurrent danger gives the last discovery a physical explanation to consider without settling the mystery.