Kriminalamt

Kriminalamt is the investigative agency that takes command of the murder inquiry and turns the case into a contest over jurisdiction, public credit, and political control. Under Mikael Bellman, it assembles a 36-person team, draws Harry Hole into its work, and pursues leads connected to Hävasshütte; at the same time, Bellman manages pressure from the Norwegian Ministry of Justice and the competing Morddezernat. The agency’s authority is therefore shown not simply through investigative resources, but through the power to define who leads, who receives credit, and which version of events reaches the public.

Command and Resources

The scale of the inquiry gives Kriminalamt a visible institutional presence. Its team numbers 36 people, three times the size of a normal murder investigation. Bellman acknowledges that the investigators have worked for a long time without a genuine result and periodically needs to raise their morale. He nevertheless praises their effort and lets them share in what he presents as a triumph: the arrest of Tony Leike. The arrest soon ceases to provide a secure basis for the investigation, but the episode shows how the agency’s leader frames both setbacks and apparent successes for the people working under him.

That effort takes place under time pressure from above. Bellman tells the team that the head of Kriminalamt has briefed him on a call from the ministry asking for the investigation’s status. He reads the inquiry’s available time as running out. When he announces that the team no longer has a principal suspect, he pairs the loss with a forward-looking claim: new leads all point toward Hävasshütte in Ustaoset. The meeting thus makes the agency’s position precarious without presenting its investigation as finished. A suspect has fallen away; the location-based leads provide the next direction.

Investigation and Jurisdiction

Kriminalamt’s work reaches beyond managing its own personnel. In a conversation about the case, Tony Krongli questions why Harry is still investigating when the matter is supposed to belong to Kriminalamt, especially after damaging headlines. His remark makes the jurisdictional transfer an active dispute rather than settled background. Harry, meanwhile, proposes checking Krongli’s DNA: even if Krongli did not kill Charlotte Lolles and Borgny Stem-Myhre, Harry says, he might still have raped Adele Vetlesen. The investigation therefore remains open to connections among separate crimes even as responsibility for pursuing them is contested.

The practical contrast between agencies appears in the handling of a search. Harry obtains a warrant through a Kriminalamt prosecutor, who hands him a completed form with little ceremony and makes clear that he considers warrant paperwork a minor demand on his time. Harry privately thinks the Morddezernat could use similarly relaxed lawyers. The episode does not establish that every part of Kriminalamt works this way, but it gives the agency a concrete procedural advantage in this instance: its prosecutor can facilitate the search without the delay Harry associates with the other department.

Kriminalamt also provides a setting for the continuing coordination of the inquiry. A long morning briefing takes place there, after which Harry says he knows someone and leaves while making a call. The evidence does not specify the contact or the result, but the moment places Harry’s initiative inside the agency’s ongoing casework. Bellman has explicitly made him part of the team, with Harry reporting to him; that arrangement gives Kriminalamt access to Harry’s specialized investigative knowledge while also placing that work under Bellman’s command.

Bellman’s Institutional Strategy

Bellman presents his handling of Leike’s release as a success in dealing with political risk. He tells an associate that the Norwegian Ministry of Justice called to thank him for acting decisively and releasing Leike. In Bellman’s account, officials had feared what Galtung and his lawyers might do if Kriminalamt had not acted quickly. They also wanted his personal assurance that he controlled the investigation and that nobody outside Kriminalamt would disrupt it. The call, as Bellman describes it, recognizes his intervention while underscoring the ministry’s concern about who holds the reins.

His strategy is not limited to directing the investigation; it includes trying to shape the institutional contest around it. One instruction is to inflame the conflict between Kriminalamt and the Morddezernat over responsibility for murder investigations, including by writing about a supposedly psychopathic leadership style, and then to wait for the minister’s response. The exchange presents public controversy as a tool for testing political reaction. It also places the agency’s jurisdictional dispute within a wider struggle over how murder cases should be assigned and who has the authority to decide.

Bellman’s public posture is more controlled. After the arrest of the Kavalier by the village police of Ytre Enebakk, he declines to comment on why a local force made the arrest or on the suspect’s interrogation. Instead, he presents police work as teamwork and says that Kriminalamt does not value prestige. The statement sits uneasily beside the agency’s competition with the Morddezernat and Bellman’s evident attention to institutional advantage. In public, cooperation is the governing principle; within the dispute, control and recognition remain at stake.

Harry Hole and the Agency’s Public Face

Harry’s recruitment makes the division between expertise and authority explicit. Bellman announces that Harry is now part of his team and will report to him. The arrangement brings Harry’s knowledge into Kriminalamt’s inquiry, but it also allows Bellman to present the work as agency-led. Later, after declaring that Harry’s specialist knowledge is no longer needed, Bellman returns him to the Morddezernat with immediate effect. He thanks Harry in front of the group, remarks that the team did not solve the case this time, and leaves for a press conference. The formal courtesy of the announcement does not conceal the abruptness of the transfer or the public distinction Bellman draws between the two departments.

The agency’s communication with the press is carefully guarded. At seven in the morning, as Kriminalamt begins to stir, Bellman arrives at Harry’s doorway carrying a briefcase and a copy of Aftenposten. On another occasion, he scans a newspaper article for the word Kriminalamt or, worse, his own name; finding neither on the front page reassures him. When questioned about the Kavalier, he withholds comment pending the interrogation and avoids explaining the village police’s role. These scenes show that press attention matters to Bellman not merely as a channel for case updates, but as a measure of whether the agency and its leader are exposed or credited.

Institutional Stakes and Significance

Kriminalamt’s command of the inquiry is powerful but not self-sufficient. The team is large, its prosecutor can expedite a warrant, and its leader speaks directly with the ministry; yet the investigation loses its principal suspect, depends on new leads, and remains entangled with the Morddezernat’s claim to murder cases. Bellman’s authority also requires continual performance: he must sustain morale, reassure political officials, manage the press, and present actions such as Leike’s release as decisive rather than damaging.

The agency’s most revealing contradiction lies between its public language of teamwork and its internal struggle over jurisdiction and credit. Bellman tells the public that prestige is not Kriminalamt’s concern, while his attention to headlines, his effort to control the inquiry, and the carefully staged reassignment of Harry show how much institutional standing matters. The later prospect of reorganization, staff cuts, and transferring responsibility for murder investigations makes that contest consequential beyond one case. When Hagen refers to everything eventually coming to light, Bellman understands that reorganization, reductions, and the transfer of murder-case responsibility are under discussion, though he does not understand why Hagen has brought them up. Kriminalamt thus appears both as a working investigative organization and as an institution whose future depends on the same political arrangements its leadership is trying to influence.