Sven Sundkvist

Sven Sundkvist is a veteran City Police investigator whose steady, practical partnership with Ewert Grens links a murder investigation to the crisis at Aspsås Prison and, ultimately, to evidence of concealed police informant operations. He is not defined by a single dramatic intervention: his importance lies in a lifetime of investigative work, a close knowledge of Grens’s habits, and his capacity to turn unease and scattered records into material that can be examined.

Identity and working life

Sundkvist has spent his entire adult life working for City Police in Stockholm. From an office in the homicide unit, near the pigeonholes and vending machines, he has investigated every category of crime in the penal code. His routine takes place in the unit’s long, dark corridors, which he has never learned to like. The setting establishes him as an experienced working investigator rather than a newcomer: he belongs to the everyday machinery of the department, even when its surroundings remain oppressive.

His professional steadiness is also visible in the way he approaches Grens. When he finds his boss on the office floor, he does not demand an explanation or force a conversation. He sits on the corduroy sofa and waits, as he has done before. Later, he and Grens walk together through headquarters; Sundkvist slows to match a man whose limp has worsened over the years and who still refuses a walking stick. Their habits convey a familiar partnership built as much on patience and quiet accommodation as on formal rank.

Partnership with Ewert Grens

Sundkvist knows that Grens’s periods of distress are not simply ordinary interruptions to work. Eighteen months earlier, he had found Grens sitting on a basement floor with papers from an old case, repeating that Anni Grens was dead and that he had killed her. The case concerned an assault on a young policewoman who was seriously injured and would never again live outside a nursing home. Sundkvist later encountered her name in the report, but had not known that she and Grens were married. His recollection shows both the private history that shadows his boss and the limits of what Sundkvist had previously understood about it.

His response to Grens’s distress is characteristically restrained. He does not try to supply words or explanations; he remains present and lets Grens return to him when he is ready. The same familiarity shapes their work. Grens calls when he needs an answer immediately, often in the middle of the night, and Sundkvist recognizes this as an established pattern. Their connection is dependable without being sentimental: it is sustained through repeated calls, shared investigations, and an understanding of when silence is more useful than questions.

Following the investigation

Sundkvist works with Grens on the investigation connected to Västmannagatan. When Grens is absorbed in his thoughts, Sundkvist gives him concrete investigative information: fifteen flats were in the block, every person present at the time of the murder had been interviewed, and three observations might matter. His account turns a stalled search into a set of specific leads, while his check that Grens is listening captures the friction between the detective’s inward preoccupations and the demands of the case.

He also accompanies Grens to Poland to follow up yellow stains found on an item of clothing. The inquiry leads them to the remains of an amphetamine factory in Siedlce, where they work for several days with police assigned to a special force against organized crime. The work gives Sundkvist a close view of the scale and difficulty of the criminal landscape: the police are confronting hundreds of groups, including many with international connections, and the investigation offers no easy sense of progress. This experience places the clothing evidence within a larger network of synthetic-drug production without making the broader problem disappear into a single forensic clue.

The response to Aspsås Prison

When Grens learns of the prison emergency, he retrieves a rarely used gun and orders Sundkvist and Mariana Hermansson to meet him in the garage. He wants to know what the database contains for a specific criminal-record number. On the journey north, Hermansson drives with the sirens and lights on while Sundkvist searches the glove compartment for two cassettes of Siwan’s sixties hits. He puts one on, continuing a familiar practice of using Grens’s music to fill the silence between them. The small routine does not resolve the danger ahead, but it reveals how the partners manage tension without pretending they have much to say.

At the prison, Sundkvist finds the relevant document in an envelope. Its first page comes from the criminal intelligence database and carries a special code used for only a handful of criminals; he passes it to Grens. The information helps the group interpret the person at the center of the crisis as more than an unknown prisoner. Later, after the injured warden Martin Jacobson has been questioned, Sundkvist and Grens eat at a hospital café. Jacobson’s answers accompany their meal in silence: Hoffmann had left the hostages in view behind a glass partition on two occasions to use the office phone, once near the beginning and once shortly before the explosion. Sundkvist is present as these observations are gathered, preserving the difference between what was seen and what investigators can infer from it.

The crisis also draws Sundkvist into the urgent decisions being made around the prison. He runs up the church stairs with a mobile phone after receiving a clear countdown from central security. On the balcony, where Grens is with a marksman and observer, Sundkvist announces that there is no time left to reopen matters already discussed. His intervention is practical and timed to the emergency: he conveys the pressure of the countdown and insists that the group act within the remaining time, rather than claiming authority over the decision itself.

Records, recordings, and concealed operations

After the immediate crisis, Sundkvist’s work shifts toward the documentary record behind police operations. Searching the computer, he goes back exactly one year and finds 302 secret intelligence reports. They describe cases in which an informant’s work to uncover one crime gave rise to another. Sundkvist recognizes several reports and recalls other investigations that collapsed even though the relevant knowledge was already inside the organization. The archive changes the scale of the problem: these are not merely gaps in an individual case file but recurring instances of information being held outside the ordinary investigative process.

He brings the material to Grens as evidence of a parallel account of police work: the official investigations they handle and the confidential reports available to police management. In another revealing exchange, he moves a candle and its silver candlestick, places a laptop between them, and opens a program of sound files. He plays a clip lasting exactly seven seconds. The recording matters not just as sound but as a testable object: it allows the men to compare what they have been told with a captured conversation. Later, Erik Wilson confirms that the May 10 meeting took place and that the recording is genuine, every word of it. Sundkvist also goes to meet Wilson carrying the laptop, connecting the preserved file to the person who can authenticate it.

Character and narrative significance

Sundkvist’s defining contribution is the movement between patient accompaniment and concrete intervention. He can sit quietly while Grens confronts a painful memory, offer a precise count of interviews and leads, locate a coded intelligence document, or interrupt a discussion when the prison countdown makes delay untenable. These actions make him a practical counterweight to Grens: not a rival investigator, but a partner who helps keep the work connected to evidence, timing, and procedure.

His domestic life briefly shows that the unease of the investigation does not remain at the station. He has a wife, Anita, and after a sleepless night he sits downstairs doing crosswords, but the anxiety he has discussed with Grens will not leave him. The passage echoes the partners’ habit of talking around thoughts that have nowhere to go, while distinguishing Sundkvist’s private unease from Grens’s bereavement.

Sundkvist also helps bring the investigation beyond the archive. Four days before a later account, he had asked Grens to drive seventy kilometers to the state line and Jacksonville for lunch at a restaurant where a laptop could be opened among security-camera images. Grens had seen Paula’s face in a prison window, then an explosion and black smoke as the sniper’s shot killed a person. Sundkvist’s request places him in the chain of events through which the recorded and visual evidence is pursued. The novel’s closing institutional finding—that police have long used criminals as covert human intelligence sources, while denying and concealing that cooperation—gives his work its larger consequence. By helping uncover secret reports and preserve a recording, Sundkvist participates in exposing how information withheld from official investigations allowed some crimes to be marginalized even as others were pursued.