The truth was laughing at him

“The truth was laughing at him” names the gap between Ewert Grens’s growing conviction that he is close to an answer and his inability to recognize or prove it. Repeated as he revisits the Västmannagatan murder investigation and examines new leads, the expression turns investigative frustration into a motif: the truth seems present, almost legible, yet continually slips from his grasp.

The Expression and Its Recurrence

The image first gathers several kinds of uncertainty into one sensation. Grens feels that an answer is staring at him, but he cannot see it; he is close enough to sense its presence and too far away to identify what he has missed. The laughter makes that nearness feel almost taunting. The passage does not establish that the answer is literally concealed in any one document; it records Grens’s perception of a persistent, unresolved problem.

The phrase returns when that feeling intensifies. After studying records connected to three security-firm owners, Grens again senses that the truth is laughing at him and finds that it slips away when he tries to catch it. The recurrence gives the expression more than the force of a passing metaphor: it connects separate stages of his inquiry through the same cycle of apparent proximity and renewed uncertainty.

The Investigation Behind the Feeling

In one scene, Grens takes up the case file and lies on the floor behind the corduroy sofa, leafing through the investigation from the voice that reported a dead man at Västmannagatan 79 through two weeks of intensive work with technical resources and his trips to Copenhagen and Siedlce. The sweep through the file brings no breakthrough. He swears, and the recognition that the investigators have got nowhere sits beside his conviction that something remains just out of reach. He intends to stay on the floor until he can identify whose voice he has heard so many times and what he has failed to understand.

In the later scene, the inquiry turns toward Maciej Bosacki, Piet Hoffmann, and Karl Lager, all owners of security firms that had been used by Wojtek Security International for official Polish state visits. Their work has the ordinary appearance of legitimate security business, with official jobs and invoices; Grens’s curiosity lies in the possibility that official arrangements might conceal unofficial connections to the criminal organization behind another Wojtek. After spending two hours searching the Police Authority, Stockholm databases, he finds that all three have previous convictions and entries in criminal intelligence and suspects’ registers. All have supplied fingerprints; two are in the DNA register and have at some point been wanted, while at least one is a confirmed former gang member. These findings supply concrete reasons for suspicion, but the expression marks the distance between accumulated indicators and a fully grasped truth.

Narrative Significance

The motif sets intuition against evidence without treating them as interchangeable. Grens’s sense that an answer is close precedes a demonstrable connection; the database results sharpen the inquiry but do not, in the cited passage, settle what the suspected links mean. “Laughing” gives that imbalance an ironic edge: the more insistently Grens searches, the more elusive the answer feels.

The repeated image also provides continuity between the broad rereading of a case file and the narrower inspection of three personal identities. In both, information is plentiful—voices, technical work, travel, official contracts, and criminal records—yet the central task remains interpretive. The expression therefore captures not simply a lack of clues, but the pressure of having clues without yet knowing how they fit.