Grens uncovers the surveillance of Hoffmann and the informant secret

Ewert Grens uncovers the surveillance and informant secret surrounding Piet Hoffmann through a chain of physical evidence and recorded voices. A blacked-out transmitter on the church-tower railing explains how Hoffmann could hear Grens speaking with the sniper; a matching receiver and a government-meeting recording then disclose that Hoffmann was not a mafia operative but a police informant performing that identity. The discovery turns a concealed listening device into proof of a larger institutional deception—and forces Grens to reconsider his own part in Hoffmann’s presumed death.

The device on the church tower

The first break comes when Sven Sundkvist examines the railing. Something gives way beneath his fingers: a small black rectangular piece, with a lead attached. As he follows the lead, he draws out a round metal component. Grens and Sven recognize it as an electronic transmitter. Its solar cell has been painted black to match the railing, an effort to keep the device from being noticed. The components are inconspicuous, but together they establish that the tower has been used for covert listening.

The location gives the discovery its immediate force. Grens and Sven realize that Hoffmann heard everything said between Grens and the sniper. The tower stands 1,503 metres from the workshop window that has been blown out, and the discovery comes less than twelve hours after Sven first handled a transmitter there. The device therefore changes the meaning of the earlier exchange: words spoken in what Grens and Sven understood as a private operational setting had reached Hoffmann. The evidence identifies the listening system and its reach, though it does not establish who installed it or how it came to be on the railing.

Testing the connection

Grens later examines two objects on his desk. One is a receiver with a small silver earpiece, the kind of device that can pick up conversations transmitted by equipment of the same frequency. It has arrived in an envelope. The other object is an unmarked CD. Grens considers whether the receiver may have been sent on Hoffmann’s behalf, perhaps after Hoffmann’s death, but that possibility remains a suspicion rather than a confirmed account of its origin.

He tests the receiver before trusting what the objects might imply. Leaving the room, he places it near a talking clock and listens through the earpiece as the clock marks intervals of ten seconds. The receiver works. Its frequency matches the transmitter found on the church-tower railing. That test joins two previously separate pieces of evidence: the concealed device above and the receiver delivered to Grens. The connection is established technically before the recording reveals what the surveillance may have captured.

The recorded meeting and the false identity

The CD bears no identifying text. Grens plays it on his computer and hears that it records a meeting at the Government Offices on Tuesday, May 10. The voice is Hoffmann’s—the same voice Grens and Sven had heard earlier. The recording makes the name Paula part of the evidence, not merely a label attached to an unknown operative: Hoffmann says that Paula is his name within the operation.

Grens reconstructs the meeting as a table with five participants. One was probably a state secretary from the Ministry of Justice; another called himself Paula; a third served as Paula’s handler; a fourth was the most senior police officer in the country. The fifth was Göransson, Grens’s immediate line manager and also Erik Wilson’s. Because Göransson oversaw both men’s workloads, Grens understands that he had known why there were no answers in the Västmannagatan 79 case. The recording thus links the undercover operation to the stalled investigation through a senior officer’s knowledge, rather than leaving the absence of progress as an unexplained failure.

Most decisively, the meeting’s recorded explanation overturns Hoffmann’s apparent criminal identity. The account Grens hears is that Hoffmann was one of them, employed to pretend he was part of the mafia. The role that had made him appear to be a criminal was instead an assignment from the state. Grens’s conclusion that he had been a useful idiot expresses the personal cost of the disclosure: he had acted without knowing the truth that the people above him possessed.

The prison identity and its vulnerability

The revelation also recasts Hoffmann’s place in Aspsås Prison. Before entering, he had mapped the buildings from the church tower and, while on remand, learned about prisoners and staff in Block G with Erik Wilson’s help. Yet the first time he passed through the prison’s gates was still his first actual entry into one of the country’s highest-security institutions. The distinction between knowing a prison from observation and living inside it becomes part of the operation’s risk: Hoffmann must turn preparation into a credible inmate identity under the prison’s rules.

After ten days, he has spent twenty-three hours a day in a small cell, without visitors or ordinary media. When shown the unit, he learns its routines from the principal officer and sits in his own cell to confront the fact that it is now his home. Before the other prisoners return, he chooses a place in the television corner where all can see him. He deliberately occupies another prisoner’s familiar chair, takes marked cards, and begins solitaire at someone else’s table. These acts establish a visible presence rather than the deference of a newcomer seeking permission to belong.

At supper, two older prisoners demand to see his papers. Hoffmann allows them to question him, while Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki—Wojtek members who have prepared for his arrival—stand ready to intervene. They have already circulated information about the case against him, his associates, his mafia status, and records obtained through Stefan’s lawyer. Hoffmann’s constructed identity is therefore supported by documents and by people positioned to help him seize the prison drug market; at the same time, those supposed protectors are also his potential executioners if they discover that he is Paula.

What the discovery changes

The danger of that exposure is not abstract. At another point, Hoffmann realizes that one of four people he regarded as protection and a possible means of escape has betrayed him. The name Paula reaches him from elsewhere in the unit, while wardens dismiss the voice as noise. That moment shows how readily a covert identity can travel beyond the operation’s control. Grens’s later discovery supplies a different kind of exposure: not a prison rumor, but documentary proof that official figures authorized the identity Hoffmann had been forced to inhabit.

The receiver and CD also transform the tower from a vantage point into part of the evidence. The railing concealed a working transmitter; the receiver confirms the frequency; the recording connects Hoffmann to the May 10 meeting and identifies his role. Grens’s final recognition is therefore both institutional and personal. The state had employed Hoffmann to impersonate a criminal, Göransson had known why the murder investigation remained unanswered, and Grens had acted against a man whose true status had been withheld from him. The discovery does not resolve who sent the envelope or every detail of the surveillance, but it makes the central deception unmistakable: Hoffmann’s apparent place on the criminal side of the investigation had been manufactured by the authorities themselves.