The general rule in Sweden was that all public governance should be open for review by the general public. This principle formed the foundation of Swedish democracy. Some information, however, needed to be kept confidential, such as sensitive information about personal circumstances. Within social services, the rule was that confidentiality was required for information about individual relationships, therefore it wasn’t so unusual that an adoption would be closed, she decided, lifting her computer from her lap and allowing it to cool slightly.

She laid it back on her knees and returned her hands to the keyboard.

The second question that bothered her was about her father’s perpetual preference for his work. Information on this issue was easy to collect. She found newspaper articles from 1991 in which he cropped up in connection with the police making a crackdown on a thirty-six-year-old man who was suspected of financial crimes. When the police searched his row house for his ledgers, they found one hundred kilograms of narcotics under the stairs. The thirty-six-year-old and another man were prosecuted on a felony narcotics charge. According to the prosecutor, Karl Berzelius, there were clear connections between the two men and “they can now expect many years in prison for possession and intent to sell.”

Karl Berzelius’s career as a prosecutor was straight as an arrow. According to a graph in one newspaper, he had won almost every single case he took on during the early nineties. He was also profiled, as Prosecutor-General, in an editorial piece about promoting positive administration of justice, a debate that was initiated by the bar association. The background of the initiative was a development in recent years that resulted in the tone between prosecutors and defense attorneys at trial becoming strikingly aggressive. This had become particularly obvious in certain legal cases that had garnered great media attention, like for example “The Goal of the Game,” where a network in Nyköping had been conducting, among other things, illegal gambling and collection using violence and extortion as their chosen methods. One of the accused men had claimed the whole time that police and prosecutors had been out to get him and that the investigation had been manipulated, that they had held back important proof and failed to follow clues that would have led the investigation in a different direction. The Court of Appeals’ verdict stated that there was no proof to support these claims and that “the involved authorities had carried out their duties in an objective and lawful manner.”

Jana put her laptop aside and thought that her father hadn’t only had a straight-as-an-arrow career path. It had also been incredibly successful.

Almost too successful.

* * *

When he had gone back and forth along the hill for more than an hour without seeing a single sign of life, he gave up. Filled with frustration, he went back toward the building.