Swedish Police Service

The Swedish Police Service is presented as both an instrument for investigating organized crime and a system capable of obscuring the means by which it does so. Its use of criminal informants provides access to criminal organizations, but secrecy and manipulated records carry costs beyond the operation itself: other crimes can be sidelined, legal proceedings can proceed without the correct information, and an exposed source can be left without protection.

Covert intelligence and institutional purpose

In the novel’s closing account of fact and fiction, the Swedish Police Service is said to have used criminals for years as covert human intelligence sources. The cooperation is denied and concealed. The stated purpose is to investigate serious crime, but the account also identifies a consequence: other offences have been marginalized, and preliminary investigations and trials have been conducted without the correct information. The service’s covert work is therefore not confined to gathering intelligence; it affects what the justice system knows and what it can properly assess.

The same account says the police supervisory authority considers conventional intelligence methods insufficient to combat organized crime and expects covert human-intelligence work to continue developing. That statement places the practice within an ongoing institutional direction rather than presenting it as a temporary exception. The tension is central: the service regards covert sources as necessary, while the secrecy that sustains them also limits disclosure and accountability.

Criminal identities and altered records

The book describes criminal informants as being recruited while on remand or later, and states that police criminal-intelligence databases and reports have been used to build credible backgrounds for them. Extensive alteration of information is described as standard working practice. In this account, records do not merely document an identity; they can help construct one, making a source’s criminal persona convincing enough to function inside an organization.

Piet Hoffmann’s prison entry gives that process a concrete form. Before he encounters the other prisoners, he has studied their backgrounds and chooses a conspicuous place in the unit’s television corner, making clear that he is a newcomer who will not hide or wait to present his papers. Two members of Wojtek, Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki, have already prepared for his arrival and obtained copies of his criminal and prison records and his most recent judgment through Stefan’s lawyer. The episode shows how paperwork travels into the prison’s informal order: Hoffmann’s constructed criminal standing is tested by the other prisoners, while the records help make that standing legible to them.

Exposure, denial, and risk

The institutional account states that when a criminal informant is exposed, the authorities deny having used the source and look away while the infiltrated organization tries to resolve the problem. Hoffmann’s predicament gives this general claim its human stakes. In Aspsås Prison, he recognizes that one of the people who had served as his protection and helped him escape danger has betrayed him. His status shifts from a protected asset to a person exposed among those whose criminal world he entered. The danger is not simply the loss of secrecy: the concealment that enabled the operation also leaves the source vulnerable when it fails.

This account does not describe a formal chain of command or assign every act of concealment to a named official. Instead, it identifies a recurring institutional pattern: use the criminal source, keep the relationship undisclosed, and deny it when exposure makes the arrangement dangerous. The result is a sharp imbalance between the service’s need for intelligence and the informant’s need for protection.

Fact, fiction, and the novel’s critique

The closing fact-and-fiction passage explicitly distinguishes the fictional investigators Ewert Grens, Sven Sundkvist, and Mariana Hermansson from the factual claims about police informants. It presents the service’s covert use of criminals, the manipulation of records, and the denial of exposed sources as the institutional material against which the fictional plot can be read. This framing gives the novel’s prison story a broader reach without making its characters documentary evidence: Hoffmann’s experience dramatizes the risks described in the factual account, while the coda locates those risks in practices the book identifies as real.

The Swedish Police Service consequently occupies an uneasy position in the book. Its covert methods are justified by the difficulty of combating organized crime, yet the same methods can distort records, impair investigations and trials, and abandon the people who made infiltration possible. The service’s operational success and its obligations under a rule-of-law system are not presented as automatically compatible.