Stockholm is both a working city and a landscape of memory in the novel: Ewert Grens crosses its roads to pursue an investigation, connects decisions made at Rosenbad to events unfolding at Aspsås Prison, and eventually walks to the North Cemetery with a map in his hand. The city’s significance lies in these crossings. Official business, routine movement, and private grief occupy the same urban geography, even as the prison crisis draws the action beyond it.

Urban setting and institutional geography

Stockholm appears through specific working environments rather than a panoramic description. In the homicide corridor, Fredrik Göransson confronts the consequences of a decision made at Rosenbad. He had weighed the prison infiltration against controlling the Polish mafia and chosen to restrict criminal expansion. The corridor’s flickering strip lights and the sound accompanying them give this institutional setting a persistent, irritating quality, while Göransson’s recollection connects the city’s police work to a choice with consequences beyond the city itself.

Rosenbad functions as a point where policing and government decision-making meet. Grens later walks there from his neighborhood after breakfast, carrying four cinnamon buns for the meeting. His route ends at the Government Offices of Sweden, where a young security guard checks his identification against the meeting book more than once. The detail makes access to government tangible: the destination is not an abstract seat of authority but a guarded building approached on foot through the morning city.

The novel also situates police work in the everyday infrastructure between institutions. In one scene, Grens is caught in slow traffic on Klarastrand road, where vehicles fill both lanes. A passenger leaves a bus and walks along the edge of the road toward the E4. Grens considers stopping him, then decides against it; he understands the impulse to move rather than remain trapped in the congestion. The moment places the detective’s attention among ordinary commuters and small decisions, not only in interview rooms or official meetings.

Routes between the city and Aspsås Prison

Stockholm is the starting point for Grens’s repeated journeys to prison. He has visited the prison at least twice a year over three decades, in the course of investigations, questioning, and prisoner transport. The drive from the city takes him past Haga and a large cemetery, then continues along the E4. At one point he hesitates as he passes the cemetery before driving on. The route thus carries both professional habit and a private association with burial and loss.

His work around the prison is shaped by the difficulty of obtaining information there. Grens knows that uniforms are met with particular hostility and that interviews can yield a sneering laugh or silence rather than an answer. This experience explains why he leaves early on a later visit: sleepy prisoners, he expects, may be less insolent, and he has no time to build trust. His approach is practical and impatient, formed by years of returning from Stockholm to an enclosed environment where the usual police methods may fail.

The distance between the city and the prison also marks the reach of the case. From Rosenbad, Göransson’s choice concerns infiltration behind prison walls as well as the restraint of criminal expansion; the consequences cannot be confined to the city offices where policy is considered. Stockholm anchors the investigation, but it does not contain all the places where its risks unfold. The recurring journey northward on the E4 makes that separation part of the story’s structure.

Investigation and the limits of the city

Grens’s inquiry moves outward from Stockholm through interviews with people on the periphery of the case. He meets two owners of security firms with official links to Wojtek International, first in Odensala outside Märsta and then in Södertälje. After only a few minutes with each, he concludes that neither man is responsible for executions in city-centre flats. The meetings narrow the investigation while showing that the city’s criminal questions extend into surrounding communities and professional networks.

That distinction matters to the way Stockholm is represented. The city is where the murders under investigation have their urban setting, but leads and possible connections do not remain within its centre. Grens’s movement between the city and nearby locations is part of the work of ruling people in or out, not a break from it. His accumulated familiarity with police cases and prison routines gives the investigation a long institutional backdrop, while the short interviews show how quickly that knowledge can produce a practical judgment.

Daily life, grief, and the North Cemetery

The city also appears through a routine that resumes after an unsettled night. Grens sleeps for nearly four hours in his own bed, without dreaming of running or being pursued. He then eats a familiar breakfast near the corner of Odengatan and Döbelnsgatan: thick brown bread with seeds, black coffee, and freshly pressed orange juice. He has eaten there a couple of times a week for as long as he can remember. The established habit gives his return to ordinary life a concrete measure, without suggesting that the underlying grief has disappeared.

That grief is tied to the North Cemetery. After walking through the mild night along Vanadisvägen, Gävlegatan, and Solnabron, Grens reaches Solna kyrkväg and an opening in the fence marked Gate 1, one of ten entrances. He has brought a map that had lain at arm’s length on his desk for months before he took it home the previous day. Inside the cemetery, he follows an asphalt road across extensive lawns edged by trees. Its scale—150 acres and thirty thousand graves—makes his passage through it part of a much larger landscape of the dead.

For years, Grens has avoided looking closely at the gravestones, preferring the branches overhead to the markers of loss. On this visit he notices older stones that identify the buried by titles, as well as large family stones and imposing monuments. The cemetery becomes the destination of a memory he has carried for twenty-nine years: the death of Anni Grens, which he repeatedly relives in brief, intrusive recollections. Stockholm’s streets lead him there, but the city’s most intimate significance is not simply that it holds the grave. It is that familiar routes, routines, and places keep bringing Grens back into contact with the past.