9 May

9 May is identified in the investigation through a precise Emergency Services recording time: 12:37:50. Ewert Grens and Sven Sundkvist have both listened to the recording repeatedly, making the timestamp a fixed point in a narrative where the significance of evidence depends on what investigators were told, what remained hidden, and when they could recognize the difference.

The timestamp and the recording

The recorded call is not presented simply as a date marker. Sven Sundkvist has analyzed the Emergency Services recording from 9 May at 12:37:50 as many times as Ewert Grens. Its recurrence in their work gives the precise time investigative weight: the recording is a piece of evidence they return to, rather than a detail that resolves the case on its own. In the same sequence, Grens plays Sven another stored voice file; they had both encountered that voice while waiting in a churchyard the previous day. The juxtaposition connects recorded sound with remembered encounters, while leaving the recording’s full significance to emerge through the investigation.

The prison chronology around it

The book’s prison sequence supplies a broader measure of elapsed time, though it does not identify the prison milestones as events at 12:37:50 on 9 May. Piet Hoffmann enters Aspsås prison for the first time under escort, after having studied its buildings from the church tower and learned about Block G’s prisoners and staff while on remand. Ten days later, he has spent twenty-three hours of each day in a five-square-metre cell without visitors or media. The contrast between the exact clock time attached to the recording and the prison’s repetitive confinement is striking: one is a second fixed for later scrutiny, the other a duration imposed day after day.

When the unit is empty, Hoffmann receives a guided tour from the principal officer and learns its routines, including the seven-thirty lock-in. Before the other fifteen prisoners return, he positions himself in the TV corner, where he can see them arrive and make himself visible in turn. Later, when exposure becomes a danger, he demands isolation. Ten members of the riot squad enter Block G; four escort him to the voluntary isolation unit in Block C while six remain to prevent renewed violence. These episodes extend the chronology of his imprisonment without establishing a direct date link to the 9 May call.

From one recording to concealed records

The investigative meaning of time broadens when Grens searches the computer records. He goes back exactly one year and finds 302 secret intelligence reports describing how an informant’s work to uncover one crime had generated another. Some reports concern cases he recognizes, including investigations that collapsed despite relevant knowledge already being held within the system. The date attached to one Emergency Services recording thus sits within a much longer institutional history: the case file available to investigators and the secret report could describe the same incident while conveying different information.

Grens later tells prosecutor Lars Ågestam that the examples before them are only three of the 302 cases from the previous year. He says the secret reports contain the truth that the official investigations did not receive, and identifies twenty-three cases in which Ågestam prosecuted unsuccessfully without the information that would have implicated the informant. The consequence is not merely an incomplete account of one event; it is a split record in which concealed intelligence shaped prosecutions and investigations.

The larger time frame

The closing factual account describes the Swedish Police Service’s long-standing use of criminals as covert human intelligence sources, a cooperation that is denied and concealed. It states that crimes have been marginalized so serious crime could be investigated, leaving preliminary investigations and trials without correct information. It also describes criminal-intelligence databases and reports being used to construct credible backgrounds for informants, with extensive alteration of information becoming standard practice. These claims place the 9 May timestamp within a recurring system rather than an isolated investigative puzzle: the recorded moment can be examined, but its meaning depends on records and institutional decisions that were not equally available to everyone.