Ministry of Justice

Institutional Presence

The Ministry of Justice is identified during Ewert Grens’s visit to the Government Offices of Sweden. After walking from Sveavägen through Sergels Torg and along Drottninggatan to Rosenbad, he is challenged by a young security guard checking his identification against the meeting book. Asked whether he has come for the Ministry of Justice, Grens confirms that he has. The brief exchange places the ministry inside the controlled procedures of government: entry depends on a name, identification, and an appointment record.

Grens arrives carrying breakfast and four cinnamon buns, which he has asked to be put in a bag. The ordinary errand-like detail accompanies a visit that is anything but routine. He has brought a recording of a secret conversation and intends to make its contents audible to the official whose assurances it preserves. The ministry is therefore presented as a real administrative setting, but also as the place where concealed decisions can be confronted with their own record.

The State Secretary’s Assurances

The recording captures a state secretary promising Hoffmann that he will not be charged for what happened at Västmannagatan 79 and that the authorities will do their best to help him complete his operation in prison. The assurance goes further: she recognizes that the work will leave him under a death threat and marked throughout the criminal world, and promises a new life, a new identity, and money to begin again abroad. She explicitly makes the guarantee in her capacity as a state secretary of the Ministry of Justice.

When Grens plays the recording back, he first draws attention to the placement of the microphone: it had been at about knee height, on a person sitting directly opposite the state secretary. He adjusts the speakers and brings them closer, making sure she hears the promise in her own recorded voice. The sequence turns the physical recording into more than a reminder of a secret meeting. It is a durable trace of commitments made to an undercover operative, including assurances about legal exposure, operational support, and what would happen after the work ended.

The scope of the evidence matters. The recording establishes what the state secretary promised and the capacity in which she promised it; it does not, by itself, establish that every part of the ministry knew of or authorized those commitments. The novel keeps the distinction between an official speaking under ministerial authority and the institution as a whole, while making the use of that authority central to the confrontation.

Exposure and Legal Consequences

Grens’s playback is accompanied by a direct accusation of criminal conduct. He names failure to report a crime, protection of a criminal, and conspiracy to commit crime. The state secretary’s earlier words, once replayed in this setting, are no longer merely assurances to Hoffmann; they become part of the case Grens is assembling against those who used public office to sustain a concealed operation.

The consequences move beyond the meeting room. Grens takes from a desk drawer a summons concerning court proceedings on applications for arrest warrants. The proceedings are to lead to convictions and long sentences for three high-ranking officers who abused their power. The narrative thus connects the ministry encounter to formal legal action, rather than ending with the exposure of an embarrassing recording. The official promise and the later summons belong to different stages of the same reckoning: first the hidden arrangement is made audible, then those responsible face proceedings.

The Ministry in the Novel’s Institutional Critique

The meeting sits within a broader account of secret police intelligence. Grens discovers 302 confidential reports from the preceding year describing cases in which an informant’s work to uncover one crime gave rise to another. Several investigations had collapsed despite relevant information already being held internally. He recognizes that the official investigations available to him and his colleagues had been based on incomplete information, while a separate account existed in secret reports for police management. The figure of 302 gives the concealment scale and recurrence; it is not presented as a single lapse surrounding Hoffmann.

The novel’s closing factual statement describes the Swedish Police Service as having used criminals as covert human intelligence sources for years, while denying and concealing that cooperation. It says that other crimes were marginalized so serious investigations could proceed, and that preliminary investigations and trials consequently took place without correct information. It also describes police records and reports being used to construct plausible criminal backgrounds, with extensive alteration of information treated as standard practice. These claims concern police practices, not a general finding about the Ministry of Justice. The ministry’s specific place in that critique is narrower but consequential: a state secretary invokes her official capacity to promise legal protection and future support to an operative working inside this compromised system.

By bringing the recording to the ministry and carrying the matter toward arrest-warrant proceedings, Grens reverses the direction of official secrecy. The institution that appears first as a source of assurance becomes a setting in which the assurance can be heard, tested, and connected to accountability. The Ministry of Justice is therefore less a fully depicted organization than a point of pressure in the novel’s examination of how public authority can be enlisted in covert work—and how recorded evidence can make that enlistment answerable to law.