A firearms-register search turns an uncertain clue in a murder investigation into a name: Piet Hoffmann. For Ewert Grens, the discovery offers the inquiry’s first concrete lead, connecting a nine-millimeter Radom pistol to a registered owner whose past, weapons, and criminal associations demand scrutiny. Its significance is sharpened by the fact that Hoffmann is already inside Aspsås Prison, building a position among prisoners while Grens begins to look for him outside the prison’s walls.

The search for a name

Grens is investigating a killing and wants to check names against the firearms register. The register is restricted to a small number of authorized users for security reasons, so he needs Chief Superintendent Göransson to access it. The encounter is strained: Göransson remarks that Grens is standing too close, while Grens insists that he wants everything the search can provide. Their personal discomfort does not stop the practical work, but it gives the exchange a guarded edge.

Grens supplies three personal identification numbers. The search produces three names, and the investigation narrows when the records show that one of the people has a firearms licence for work and four hunting guns. Grens presses on the apparently incongruous work licence. The answer is pistols, and then, more specifically, Radom, chambered in nine millimeters. That make and calibre give the killing investigation a possible connection to a registered weapon rather than merely another name to pursue.

The information is incomplete. The register does not explain the reason for the licence, and Göransson says Grens will have to ask its holder. But the screen has already supplied what the investigation lacked: Piet Hoffmann’s name. Grens can now connect the weapon lead to a person and contemplate the next step—finding Hoffmann and questioning him.

A lead inside the prison

The name matters because Hoffmann is not simply a gun owner whose address can be checked. He is in Aspsås Prison, a fact that brings Grens’s developing inquiry into contact with a separate and highly controlled world. Nils Krantz tells Grens where Hoffmann is. Grens’s response is immediate in intention: he says he will speak to Hoffmann when he finds out where he is; once told, he has the location he needs. The lead has acquired a destination, but not yet an interview or an answer.

Hoffmann’s prison entry has its own chronology and pressures. Before arriving, he had mapped the prison buildings from the church tower and, with Erik Wilson’s help while on remand, learned about prisoners and staff in Block G. Yet those preparations had not brought him inside the high-security prison itself. On arrival, he is taken through the security entrance, processed, searched, issued clothes, and left waiting. Ten days later, he has spent twenty-three hours of each day alone in a small cell, with no visitors or access to newspapers, television, or radio. These circumstances make the prison more than a location on Grens’s search: it is the closed setting in which Hoffmann has to establish a credible inmate identity.

When Hoffmann is introduced to the unit, he uses its ordinary arrangements to make himself visible. He chooses a place in the television corner from which he can see the other fifteen prisoners return, but also ensures that they see him. Rather than waiting quietly for permission to settle in, he occupies another prisoner’s familiar chair, takes marked cards, and begins a game of solitaire at someone else’s table. The calculated display helps him avoid appearing afraid or tentative in a place where status must be negotiated as well as formally assigned.

Hoffmann’s constructed standing

Two prisoners matter especially to Hoffmann: Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki. Both are members of Wojtek serving long sentences at Aspsås; they are his helpers in removing competitors and taking control of the prison drug market, but could also turn against him if his identity as Paula were exposed. Their presence makes the new inmate’s introduction a test with consequences beyond the ordinary hierarchy of the unit.

At supper, two older prisoners sit close and demand to see Hoffmann’s papers. Stefan and Karol get up to intervene, but Hoffmann signals them to wait. He lets the questioning proceed, treating the encounter as an opportunity to establish standing through a shared hostility toward people accused of sexual offences. The exchange is not merely about documents: it is a public assessment of whether the newcomer can withstand pressure and whether his background will be accepted by the men around him.

The papers are part of that performance. In the days before Hoffmann’s arrival, Stefan and Karol have circulated information about him, including why he has been imprisoned, whom he has worked with, and his supposed standing with Eastern European criminal groups. Through Stefan’s lawyer, they have also obtained copies of a national police criminal record, criminal-intelligence and prison records, and Hoffmann’s latest judgment. The records give the other prisoners material with which to test his story; his conduct at supper shows that he understands the social encounter cannot be settled by paperwork alone.

What the lead exposes

The firearms entry makes Hoffmann a plausible investigative link, but it also complicates the picture. He owns a security firm that has received official bodyguard assignments from Wojtek International during state visits. He holds a licence for Polish-made pistols for work despite having served a five-year sentence for aggravated assault. The firearms that appear in the register have already been seized by police, two weeks earlier. Each detail adds a different connection—to weapons, a criminal conviction, private security work, and Wojtek—without itself proving Hoffmann’s involvement in the killing.

Grens recognizes the importance of the match as he leaves Göransson and the homicide offices. The Radom and nine-millimeter details have given the investigation a name it did not have before, but that name is new to him. Hoffmann’s registered weapons are already in police hands, while their owner is in prison; the evidence therefore points toward questions that cannot be answered by the register alone. Grens goes on toward the forensic unit, and the lead remains a beginning rather than a resolution.

The wider investigation later exposes the institutional conditions surrounding such apparent leads. Grens finds 302 secret intelligence reports describing cases in which an informant’s work to uncover one crime gave rise to another, while incomplete information contributed to investigations being downgraded or collapsing. He confronts prosecutor Lars Ågestam with cases in which the official files lacked information present in the secret reports. Against that later disclosure, the firearms search is an especially sharp hinge: Grens finds a concrete name through an official system, but the novel’s eventual account shows how official investigations could still proceed without the information held elsewhere by police management. The lead is real; the larger record of how truth was managed remains concealed.