Juliana Verni’s Passport

Juliana Verni’s Passport is a missing identity document whose clues help Harry Hole connect Juliana Verni to a suspected journey to Görna in Congo. Its recorded description of her brick-red hair, its possible Kigali stamp, and the disputed chain of custody make it more than a lost document: it is a potential link between Juliana, Lene Galtung, and Tony Leike’s concealed movements.

Description and Disappearance

The passport lists Juliana’s hair as brick-red. Harry recalls this detail after reading a gossip-magazine report that Lene had dyed her hair the same color. He had already asked Günther to check whether Juliana’s passport bore a stamp from Kigali, but the police had never recovered it. The stamp is therefore a question Harry wants investigated, not a feature confirmed in the evidence.

Harry suspects Tony took the missing passport and tells Gunnar Hagen that Lene has it now. The document’s whereabouts thus become part of a larger problem of identity and possession: the police cannot inspect a passport that Harry believes has passed from Tony to Lene, while its distinctive description gives him a reason to connect the two.

The Passport and the Congo Lead

The passport clue helps Harry explain why he is pursuing a journey to Congo. He says that Katrine Bratt checked Juliana’s recent activities and found that, in Zürich, Juliana Verni—or a woman with brick-red curls—had booked a flight to Görna for the following morning. Hagen objects that Juliana is dead; Harry’s response is that the booking suggests the dead can still travel. The passport’s hair description supplies the identifying detail behind his qualification that the traveler may have been another woman.

The evidence does not establish that the missing passport was used to book the flight or to travel. Rather, Harry combines its description and disappearance with the booking information to form a lead. That distinction matters: the document sharpens the suspicion but does not, by itself, prove who made the booking or what identity the traveler used.

The Passport Among Stolen Identities

Tony’s later account places Juliana in the chain of events surrounding Adele Vetlesen and Borgny Stem-Myhre. After receiving a blackmail letter signed by Borgny, Tony says he contacted Juliana and sent her to Görna. She traveled in Adele’s name, sent a postcard from Kigali, and obtained the apple Tony intended for Borgny from Eddie van Boorst. When Juliana returned, Tony met her in Leipzig, where she became the first victim of the apple he had arranged for Borgny.

This confession confirms Juliana’s role in a journey conducted under Adele’s identity, but it does not explain whether Juliana Verni’s Passport enabled that journey. The passport remains a separate, unresolved trace: Harry believes Tony took it and Lene possesses it, while Tony’s account shows that Juliana’s movements already involved another woman’s name. Its narrative significance lies in that gap between what the document might establish and what the confession actually confirms.