Stockholm Police Department

Stockholm City Police is the institutional setting for the novel’s homicide work and the local handling of confidential informants. Seen through the careers of Sven Sundkvist and Ewert Grens, it is an organization with deep practical experience but, in Grens’s assessment, diminishing power to keep pace with increasingly complex organized crime.

Work and experience

Sven Sundkvist has spent his entire adult working life with Stockholm City Police. From an office in the homicide unit, he has investigated crimes across the penal code. His long familiarity with the unit’s corridors and routine places him within an established working institution, even as the atmosphere around its offices feels oppressive to him.

Grens’s career is longer still: after thirty-five years in the city police force, he measures the present against the hopes he had as a young officer who believed he could make a difference. The comparison is bleak. In his view, organized crime has become more varied and violent, bringing drugs, weapons, trafficking, and new criminal groups into police investigations. Officers continue to investigate separate cases, he thinks, without catching up; the force risks losing both its members’ resilience and its control over events. This is Grens’s judgment, not an official institutional account, and the distinction matters: the force is shown through both its continuing daily work and the weariness of one of its most experienced detectives.

Homicide work and internal systems

The homicide unit is where the force’s investigation of the Västmannagatan 79 killing takes shape. Erik Wilson finds in the Duty Management System that a detective has already been assigned: Grens, assisted by Sundkvist and Mariana Hermansson. Wilson and Grens have worked in the same unit for years, although Wilson feels he never came to know the older detective well. The assignment nevertheless brings Wilson’s inquiry into contact with the established homicide team.

The case-management systems give this work an administrative structure. Wilson moves from the Duty Management System to the Crime Reporting system and searches for the address, finding earlier records connected with it. The databases provide prior case information, while the homicide assignment identifies the investigators responsible for the new inquiry. These tools connect separate police tasks, even though they do not by themselves resolve the killing.

Command and confidential informants

The force’s hierarchy also includes the management of confidential human intelligence sources. Wilson sits before Göransson, who is both Wilson’s boss and Grens’s boss, as well as the CHIS controller in the city police district. The arrangement places confidential-source oversight within the same local command structure as the detectives’ work, linking the informant system to the homicide unit without making the two roles identical.

That connection becomes consequential when police authority meets prison administration. A general director tells Aspsås prison chief warden Lennart Oscarsson that Grens, coming from city police to question Piet Hoffmann, must not be allowed to meet him. Oscarsson initially follows the instruction without asking why, then recognizes the directive as a lie. During the later prison crisis, Grens sends Hermansson to find Oscarsson and obtain an explanation, convinced that the apparent irregularities are connected. The episodes show police work extending beyond the force’s own offices, where access to a prisoner can be affected by orders issued elsewhere.

Institutional limits and narrative role

Stockholm City Police is neither presented solely as an effective investigative machine nor reduced to Grens’s despair about crime. Sundkvist’s and Grens’s long service, Wilson’s use of case systems, and the formal assignment of investigators establish the force’s accumulated experience and working procedures. Against that continuity, Grens sees criminal networks multiplying faster than investigations can contain them.

The force’s significance lies partly in this tension between procedure and control. Its homicide unit can assign investigators and retrieve a site’s record; its command structure can oversee confidential sources. Yet the story also places its detective at the edge of a prison investigation in which senior authority obstructs access and demands an explanation. Stockholm City Police thus anchors the official investigation while exposing the limits of what its personnel can know, reach, or command.