Ewert Grens’s trust in and regard for Mariana Hermansson

Ewert Grens’s trust in and regard for Mariana Hermansson become clearest when professional failure and personal feeling meet in the aftermath of the explosion at Aspsås. He sees in her something like the daughter he never had, and when she reveals that she carried information he needed before ordering a sniper to fire on Piet Hoffmann, he responds not by making her a scapegoat but by telling her she did the right thing. Their connection is expressed through a private recognition, a difficult disclosure, and a gesture Grens has never made before.

Recognition and Regard

In a conversation that turns from an ordinary exchange toward more consequential matters, Grens looks at Mariana Hermansson and thinks of the child he might have had: a son or a daughter, someone kind of like her. The thought is not presented as a declaration to her. It is an inward comparison, and its significance lies partly in its restraint: Grens’s regard appears as an unspoken recognition rather than a sentimental speech. His imagined family remains hypothetical, but Mariana gives that possibility a particular human shape.

The detail matters because the scene does not reduce their connection to the exchange of information between colleagues. Grens’s attention to Mariana contains an explicitly familial association, while the conversation itself remains grounded in the work they share. She is with him over a file, and after he has answered nothing to a remark that was not really a question, she asks whether there is something else. She opens the file and takes out a plastic sleeve from the back: two more things. The working documents and the unspoken thought coexist. The file is the immediate business between them; his private comparison reveals another dimension of how he sees her.

The Information She Could Not Deliver

Mariana has been trying all morning to tell Grens why she came. She has even left his office without explaining the real purpose of her visit. By the time she tells him that she knows something that may hold the key, she is aware that he should have known it the previous day and that she failed to reach him in time. Her distress is not simply about having information; it is about the timing of its arrival and the possibility that the delay mattered.

She explains that, the night before Grens went to Aspsås, Lennart Oscarsson was ordered to let a lawyer visit a prisoner in the same unit as Piet Hoffmann, then prevent Grens or anyone else from questioning or meeting that prisoner. The orders also required moving him back to his former unit despite the rule against returning threatened prisoners, and keeping the gates shut even if Hoffmann asked for them to be opened, contrary to prison regulations. Mariana’s account is precise about the restrictions and their contradiction of established safeguards. It brings into their conversation the possibility that the prison’s handling of Hoffmann was shaped by orders whose source Grens does not yet know.

Mariana had the information but did not get it to him before the explosion. She says that afterward it did not seem relevant to raise it just then. That qualification gives the disclosure its painful chronology: she is not presenting the facts as though she had knowingly withheld them through the crisis, but explaining that she could not reach Grens in time and then judged the immediate aftermath differently. Her admission puts the gap between knowledge and action directly between them, without resolving who issued the orders or what Grens would have done if he had known sooner.

Anger Without Blame

Grens’s response makes his regard for Mariana concrete. He puts a hand on her shoulder, something he has never done before, and tells her that he is furious but not at her. He affirms that she did the right thing, then asks who made the orders. The gesture does not erase his anger or turn the disclosure into a comforting exchange. Instead, it marks a distinction: Mariana is someone he can hear and trust even while he is burning to know who manipulated the circumstances around Hoffmann.

That distinction is important because Grens’s anger has an immediate object and a consequence. He says that with the information Mariana has supplied, he would not have ordered the sniper to fire; if he had known what he now knows, Hoffmann would never have died. His statement connects her delayed disclosure to his own lethal decision, but it does not convert that connection into an accusation against her. The hand on her shoulder precedes the question about responsibility, and his words separate her failure to reach him from the person who gave the orders. Their trust is tested by a fact that arrives too late to undo the shooting, yet he tells her directly that she acted rightly.

A Relationship Shown Through Disclosure

The scene builds their relationship through contrasts rather than a formal description of it: the private thought of a possible daughter beside the professional file; Mariana’s admission of lost time beside Grens’s need to know who was responsible; his fury beside his reassurance. Her information changes what he understands about the orders surrounding Hoffmann, while his response establishes that she can bring him painful and potentially incriminating facts without being treated as their cause.

The aftermath also leaves the relationship within an institutional process that does not share the emotional immediacy of their exchange. Chief Superintendent Göransson sees Mariana leaving Grens’s office with a file and understands that they are preparing reports required after a lethal shooting at Aspsås. For him, the meeting fits the expected procedure; for Grens and Mariana, the information in the file bears on whether the shooting might have been avoided. Their conversation therefore makes their connection consequential in two registers: it is a bond of personal regard, and it is a working trust through which Grens receives facts that alter his understanding of his own decision.