Harry Hole’s decision to investigate the deaths as a connected case marks the shift from separate, baffling crimes to a developing serial-murder inquiry. The turn is driven not by a single confession or obvious clue, but by repetition across forensic reports, travel records, and a witness’s belated reinterpretation of what he saw at Hävasshütte. As Harry connects those fragments, the investigation’s central question changes: the deaths may be linked, but the apparent explanation for one key episode is itself mistaken.

From separate cases to a pattern

Harry studies the files on Borgny Stem-Myhre and Charlotte Lolles and finds an unnerving correspondence. Both women had traces of a sedative in their blood, and both autopsy reports recorded the same unusual pattern of 24 punctures in the mouth. In each case, the cause of death was drowning. The reports also noted iron and coltan on the victims’ teeth, a detail that had gained significance only after the material was found in both cases. For Harry, the recurrence makes the reports read less like accounts of unrelated killings and more like repeated parts of a single method.

The cases nevertheless differ in their circumstances. Borgny had last been seen leaving Mono after an evening event; she had told a colleague she was going home to prepare for a photo shoot. No nearby taxi driver recognized her or recalled taking her toward Sagene. Two Polish construction workers later found her in a cellar after noticing that its padlock had been forced. The medical estimate placed her death between 10 and 11 p.m. Charlotte’s death was estimated to have occurred between 11 p.m. and midnight. These distinct timelines do not undo the forensic resemblance; instead, their close succession strengthens Harry’s suspicion that the same person may be responsible.

The physical evidence offers no easy identification. Investigators had found no fingerprints, DNA, or footwear impressions at Borgny’s scene. The cleaned concrete floor provided a specific explanation for the absence of shoe marks, but not an identity. A later report recorded two small, grey-black stones that did not match the gravel there and could have come loose from a boot on hard ground. It also noted the iron and coltan traces. The stones remain a possible investigative lead rather than a solved clue, illustrating how Harry’s inquiry must work with evidence that points outward without yet naming a suspect.

Reconstructing the victims’ movements

The investigation broadens when Kaja Solness reports a connection involving Adele Vetlesen, a 28-year-old woman from Drammen who had been reported missing by her partner in November. A search of Norwegian State Railways ticket records showed that Adele had bought an online ticket from Drammen to Ustaoset for November 7. Borgny Stem-Myhre had also bought a ticket to Ustaoset for that date, travelling from Kongsberg. Their shared destination and date bring the missing-woman inquiry into the developing murder investigation.

Further transaction searches disclose another link. Iska Peller’s account had been charged for two beds in each of four mountain huts, with the huts roughly a day’s walk apart. The bookings described a four-day route; the final hut, Hävasshütte, was only half a day’s walk from Ustaoset. These records give the inquiry a concrete route to follow and place more than one of the women’s movements in the same remote mountain region. They do not, on their own, establish who travelled together or what happened there, but they make Hävasshütte a significant point in the investigation.

That landscape also sharpens the practical stakes of reconstructing events. Kaja later crosses the snow-covered terrain by snowmobile with Utmo, travelling through a broad, featureless expanse beneath Hallingskarvet. The journey underlines the distance between the mountain area and ordinary help or observation: a route that can be traced in records may still be difficult to reconstruct on the ground. In the inquiry, geography is not decorative background; it shapes what witnesses could see, how people moved, and how much evidence might remain.

A witness’s mistaken interpretation

Elias Skog’s account supplies a crucial scene from the night at Hävasshütte. On the night of his own murder, he had told a woman in Stavanger that he had seen something there that he later thought might have been a rape. He had been awakened by sounds outside a bedroom window and looked out into a moonlit night. Beneath the roof overhang of the outhouse, he saw two people: the woman faced him, while the man stood behind her, keeping his face out of view. Elias interpreted the woman’s movements and the man’s hand over her mouth as part of a sexual encounter, and went back to sleep without seeing what followed.

Only after reading about the murders did Elias reconsider what he had witnessed. The woman might have been struggling to get free, and the man might have been stopping her from calling for help. His account therefore enters the investigation in two stages: first as a possible observation of an assault, then as a scene whose meaning may have been misread. Harry asks Krongli whether he was present, but the evidence here does not establish an answer. What it does establish is the danger of treating a witness’s interpretation as equivalent to what the witness actually saw.

From suspicion to investigative commitment

Harry’s response to the case files is physical as well as analytical. While reading Charlotte’s report, he recognizes how closely it resembles Borgny’s, and the repeated pattern triggers an intense reaction. He tears the file in two, carries the pieces to a rubbish container, and tries to push them beneath the other bags. He then returns to his apartment and waits through the night. As traffic begins along Pilestredet, successive police sirens draw his attention; the first could mean anything, but by the third he no longer finds that explanation convincing. The scene places his recognition amid an accumulating sense that the crimes are not isolated.

When Harry speaks with Gunnar Hagen, he asks for a team of three. Hagen points out Harry’s missing middle finger, while Harry drinks coffee and insists on keeping the investigative group small. Hagen agrees that fewer participants reduce the risk that the Kriminalamt or the Ministry of Justice will learn that they are investigating the case. Harry corrects the working description: this is not merely a double murder, but a triple murder, because he believes Marit Olsen belongs to the same pattern. His conclusion is an investigative judgment, not yet a confirmed finding, but it determines the inquiry’s scope. Hagen makes clear that if the investigation becomes public, it must not be attributed to the Violent Crime Division.

The event’s decisive change is thus both intellectual and procedural. Harry moves from comparing two files to treating three deaths as connected, then organizes a deliberately small inquiry under conditions of institutional secrecy. The early first-person account of a killer who says the police have not yet recognized the connection forms a dark counterpoint: the reader knows that a link exists before the investigators do. Harry’s work closes that gap gradually, through repetition and re-reading rather than immediate certainty. Later, the novel’s abrupt recognition that the Hävasshütte episode was not a rape, and that this mistaken assumption concealed the motive, further revises the apparent meaning of the evidence. The investigation begins with a pattern of deaths; its progress depends on learning not only which details repeat, but which explanations must be discarded.