10 May

10 May marks a crucial evidentiary date in Ewert Grens’s investigation: a recording labeled with the day, combined with a visitor log and security-camera footage, links Piet Hoffmann to a secret meeting at the Government Offices. What first appears to be a question of who entered a building becomes evidence of a concealed police operation and, eventually, of a wider practice that distorted official investigations.

The recording and its date

Grens finds a plain, unmarked disk and plays it on his computer. Its label identifies the recording as coming from the Government Offices on Tuesday, 10 May. The voice is familiar: it is Hoffmann’s, the same voice Grens had heard in an earlier recording with Sven Sundkvist. The date therefore gives Grens a specific point to test against other records, while the voice connects that date to the man at the center of the hidden operation.

Visitors and the documentary trail

Grens checks the security company’s signing-in book and establishes that the state secretary of the Ministry of Justice had four visitors on 10 May. They arrived separately within twenty-five minutes: first the national police commissioner, then Göransson, followed by Erik Wilson, and finally Hoffmann, whose name was difficult to read in the handwritten record. The entry places Hoffmann at the offices at 15:36.

The visitor book is only one part of Grens’s reconstruction. He obtains footage from two cameras: one above the security desk at the entrance to Rosenbad and another at face level in a second-floor corridor, opposite the state secretary’s office. The footage shows the commissioner and Göransson entering the office within minutes of each other. Wilson arrives twenty minutes later; about seven minutes after him, Hoffmann walks down the corridor. Hoffmann looks toward the camera long enough for Grens to recognize that he knows he is being recorded. The log fixes the names and time; the footage makes their sequence visible.

A date amid concealed arrangements

The significance of 10 May lies not simply in Hoffmann’s presence at a government building, but in the contrast between what the records show and what the authorities have disclosed. A senior official had instructed Aspsås prison chief warden Lennart Oscarsson that Grens must not be allowed to question Hoffmann, without explaining the reason. Oscarsson initially obeyed without understanding the instruction; when its implications became clear to him, he recognized the order as a lie. His refusal to carry it out exposes the pressure placed on prison staff to help keep Grens and Hoffmann apart.

The dated recording and the visit record thus belong to a larger pattern of secrecy surrounding Hoffmann’s role. The novel places these traces alongside his entry into Aspsås prison and his movement through tightly controlled prison units, but the date-stamped government evidence is what allows Grens to connect the hidden operation to named officials and an identifiable meeting.

From one meeting to a system

Following the documentary trail beyond 10 May, Grens finds 302 secret intelligence reports from the preceding year. They describe informant work in which uncovering one crime had led other crimes to be marginalized; some investigations had collapsed despite relevant information already being held internally. The official case files available to Grens, Sven Sundkvist, Mariana Hermansson, and Lars Ågestam had therefore presented an incomplete account.

Grens tells prosecutor Lars Ågestam that the concealed reports contain the truth omitted from official investigations. He identifies twenty-three cases in which Ågestam had prosecuted unsuccessfully without the information in the secret reports. The date of the meeting is consequently more than a marker in Hoffmann’s movements: it anchors a chain of evidence that reveals how police use of criminal informants was denied and concealed, and how that secrecy left prosecutions and investigations without the information needed to present the full record.