Jurisdictional conflict between Oslo police and Kripos

The jurisdictional conflict between Oslo Police District and Kripos is both an institutional contest and a struggle over who gets to investigate the murders. As the two units dispute authority, information, and credit, the case becomes a test of whether investigative power should remain with local police or be concentrated in a national agency.

Origins and Institutional Stakes

The dispute grows out of a broader argument about police savings, rationalization, and the allocation of scarce expertise. Norway’s small size raises a practical question: whether it can sustain two specialist departments with overlapping powers. The disagreement is not merely about administrative boundaries. It concerns who decides when a case exceeds local capacity, and whether knowledge rooted in a particular police district matters as much as a centralized unit’s claim to specialist competence.

Mikael Bellman returns to Kripos as its new deputy head after attending the police academy, working briefly in Norway, and serving at Europol in The Hague. His attempt to recruit a former Europol colleague, Jussi Kolkka, immediately provokes resistance: Kolkka has police training in Finland but lacks the formal qualifications required for police status in Norway. After the union objects, he is appointed temporarily through an exchange arrangement. The episode establishes how recruitment itself becomes part of the larger struggle over Kripos’s authority and identity.

The Battle Over Jurisdiction

Bellman’s next move is to reinterpret the rules governing major murder cases. Under the previous arrangement, the relevant police district decided whether to handle a case itself, seek assistance, or transfer it entirely to Kripos. Bellman’s reading would give Kripos the power to decide whether such a case belonged to the national agency or the local police. The change shifts more than paperwork: it transfers the decision about investigative capacity from the district doing the work to the institution seeking jurisdiction.

Gunnar Hagen regards that reversal as unacceptable. Oslo has the country’s largest murder squad, he argues, and must retain the authority to judge when it needs help and when it should hand a case over. Kripos was established to support local police in complicated investigations with specialist expertise, not to place itself above them as the automatic command center. For Hagen, local knowledge and broadly distributed competence are practical safeguards against institutional narrowness, as well as arguments for preserving recruitment and investigative experience across police districts.

The Norwegian Ministry of Justice turns the dispute into a question of national organization. In the name of using limited resources pragmatically, it considers consolidating murder investigations in a single competence center if Kripos can demonstrate better results without having to accommodate local agencies. To Harry Hole, the implication is a large office for Bellman and the disappearance of Oslo’s murder squad as an independent force. What is presented as efficiency therefore carries a direct institutional prize: Kripos would gain not only cases but the authority to define where its remit begins.

The Cases Become a Test of Control

The jurisdictional argument turns concrete when Charlotte Lolles is found dead behind a Datsun and Oslo investigators recognize similarities to the earlier murder in the basement of a new building. Although both bodies were found in Oslo, Kripos claims the paired killings as its responsibility and begins investigating independently. The case thus becomes a trial of competing institutional claims: the Ministry’s future support for centralizing murder investigations is understood to depend on its outcome, making investigative success a measure of organizational legitimacy as well as a route to solving the crimes.

The division of authority also divides access to information. Bellman refuses to share what Kripos knows with the Oslo police, while the investigation stalls. He appeals again to the Ministry, and Oslo’s police chief receives a call saying that the Ministry would welcome Kripos taking over the case until jurisdiction is settled. The arrangement is presented as temporary, but it places the local investigation under pressure before the underlying dispute has been resolved: the agency pressing for control can withhold information while the Ministry weighs whether it should receive the case.

The investigation’s reach is not limited to formal agency channels. A lead concerning Juliana Verni combines an immigration card found at Kigali airport with a discrepancy in travel records: the name is absent from airline passenger lists and electronically booked hotels in Rwanda on the stated day, but appears on a Rwandair passenger list in Kigali three days later. The account shows the murder inquiry drawing on information gathered across borders and through contacts, even as Oslo and Kripos contest which institution should direct it.

Credit and the Politics of Results

The struggle persists even when the question is no longer simply who holds the file. Bellman accuses Harry Hole of having spoken with Hagen and of arranging matters so the arrest would not belong to Hagen or the Oslo murder squad, which, Bellman claims, had too much at stake. In his account, Harry has surrendered the credit to a provincial officer who knows nothing about murder investigations. Harry answers by treating the officer’s involvement as a natural consequence of a body being found in his district and praising the work that led to the Tony Leike story. Bellman’s visible anger makes the exchange another contest over how success will be represented to the Ministry: the investigation’s result can strengthen one institution’s claim, while the attribution of that result can weaken another’s.

Investigative Limits and the Reader’s Uneven Knowledge

The institutional contest unfolds against a case whose physical evidence demands expertise but does not immediately yield an answer. The forensic examination of Borgny Stem-Myhre’s body placed her death between 10 and 11 p.m. and found Ketanomin in her blood, yet determined that she drowned in blood from wounds in her mouth. Twenty-four symmetrically arranged punctures, each seven centimeters deep except those that pierced her face, suggested an unfamiliar instrument; investigators had no clear idea what weapon could have made them. The case therefore exposes a tension at the heart of the jurisdictional argument: specialist resources may be needed, but the existence of expertise does not itself settle who should direct an investigation or guarantee a solution.

The novel also gives readers knowledge that the police do not yet possess. In an opening passage, an unidentified first-person speaker describes a sewing room lined with newspaper photographs of victims and states that the police have not recognized the connection between the murders, though they soon will. That concealed perspective makes the agencies’ competition over authority and results more than an administrative dispute: while they debate control and withhold information from one another, the killer is already thinking across the cases. The gap between the police’s uncertain grasp of the pattern and the killer’s certainty sharpens the stakes of coordination without suggesting that centralization alone will resolve the mystery.