Sagatoppen

Sagatoppen is the hillside setting of Bjørn Schillinger’s home, where the comfort of a spacious red house and garden meets a dense forest of familiar trails. The location first appears as an ordered, welcoming domestic refuge; as investigators question Schillinger about his dogs, it becomes the place where that refuge is confronted with the consequences of a fatal attack.

Setting and Terrain

Schillinger’s house stands up a steep hillside at Sagatoppen. The spacious red building has fifty square metres of attached outbuildings and a rustic, welcoming appearance. A broad garden lies at the front, where Schillinger made a table and two benches for sitting outdoors. Behind the house, dense forest opens onto several trails: one leads to Saga, another to Glassverket, and a third continues all the way to Snellevann and Svarttjern.

These paths are part of Schillinger’s lived geography, not merely scenery. He knows them from childhood, when he ran through the woods, and from adulthood, when he jogged there to keep fit. The house is thus framed by two kinds of space: a tended garden organized for rest and a wooded network he has known across different stages of his life.

Schillinger’s Home

The house is introduced in a moment of domestic ease. Schillinger drives up the hill in his yellow Land Cruiser after returning from his daughter June’s sixth birthday party. Though his wife, Evy, has recently left him and money is tight, he regards his bachelor life as comfortable and feels optimistic. His affection for June is evident in his pleasure in the party: he gave her roller blades, and she spent more than an hour skating in them, despite the damage to the parquet floor that angered Evy.

The low September sun makes the garden beautiful, hot, and golden. The scene’s warmth belongs to Schillinger’s experience of home and family, even as the account registers the separation that has changed his household. Sagatoppen is presented not simply as an address but as the setting of his daily independence, his memories of the forest, and his enduring bond with his daughter.

The Dogs and the Investigation

Sagatoppen is also where Schillinger lives with seven dogs, kept behind a fence. Hannes Bosch tells investigators that the dogs can be heard howling in the evening, around half past seven, before they are fed. When Konrad Sejer asks whether they have been out on a run, Schillinger reacts nervously. He considers the possibility that they might have entered a horse pasture, recalling that they had gone after a horse before; he then thinks sheep would be more likely prey. His concern is not abstract: he knows the dogs are powerful animals and watches them at the enclosure, where some lie down and others sniff through the fence.

At Sagatoppen, Sejer tells Schillinger that a boy was found near Glenna and Skillet and was likely attacked by dogs. Schillinger turns pale, tears at a splinter in the wood, and asks both whether the boy is badly hurt and whether he will lose his dogs. Sejer answers that the boy is dead and that Schillinger will lose the dogs. The wooded home’s apparent separation from the town does not keep it apart from the investigation; the property and its animals become central to the question of responsibility.

Narrative Significance

Sagatoppen’s significance rests on the contrast between familiarity and danger. The trails are routes Schillinger has run since childhood, and the garden is arranged for ordinary leisure; the same rural setting also contains the fenced dogs whose possible involvement in a child’s death brings police to his door. The story does not make the forest itself responsible. Instead, it places a specific human home, its animals, and a landscape Schillinger knows intimately within the investigation’s unfolding consequences.