Murder of Borgny Stem-Myhre is both a death and the opening of a mystery: the novel places the reader inside Borgny’s disoriented awakening before explaining how she died, while the investigation later establishes the method without immediately identifying the killer. The contrast between her limited, fearful perspective and the case file’s measured details makes the crime’s hidden mechanism central to the event’s significance.

Opening and Discovery

Borgny wakes in darkness after being sedated. She is distressed and unable to understand what has happened to her; she senses that someone may be nearby and imagines a predator moving silently behind her. When she tries to turn and defend herself, she meets only empty space. The scene gives the reader no reliable view of her attacker, only Borgny’s fear and her uncertainty about how long she has been unconscious.

The account later reveals that Borgny tried to remove the object obstructing her mouth. Her attempt precipitated the fatal mechanism, though the opening withholds its full explanation. The delay matters: the reader first encounters the event as Borgny does, without the knowledge needed to interpret the danger.

After she leaves the Mono, nobody is known to have seen her again. Investigators considered whether she had gone toward a taxi stand, but records from Norgestaxi and Oslo Taxi did not connect her to a ride to Sagene. Two Polish bricklayers discovered her when they arrived for work, noticed that the padlock on the basement’s iron door had been forced, and went inside. Borgny was found fully clothed in the middle of the room, her body in a twisted position.

Forensic Findings and Cause of Death

The medical examiner placed Borgny’s death between 10 and 11 p.m. and found traces of Ketanomin, a fast-acting sedative that could be administered intramuscularly. The report identified drowning as the cause of death: blood from wounds in her mouth entered her airway, preventing oxygen from reaching her blood and leading to cardiac arrest and cerebral hypoxia. The clinical finding reframed the apparent mechanics of the murder. The needles caused the wounds, but the obstruction in her mouth made it impossible for her to clear the blood.

The report recorded 24 symmetrically arranged puncture marks in Borgny’s mouth, most of them exactly seven centimetres deep. Investigators had no explanation for the pattern or a known instrument that could have produced it. The opening scene supplies a partial answer before the case file does: Borgny finds a wire across her lips and pulls at it, setting the concealed mechanism in motion. The forensic account later clarifies why that attempt proved fatal, while the evidence available to investigators still leaves the device and its maker unidentified.

The crime scene yielded little conventional trace evidence. There were no fingerprints, DNA, or shoe impressions; the concrete floor had been cleaned the day before for heating cables and new flooring. A later report noted two small grey-black stones that did not match the gravel at the scene. The medical examiner suggested they could have fallen from the tread of a boot onto the concrete, making similar stones found elsewhere potentially useful as evidence. The report was subsequently supplemented with traces of iron and coltan on the inner surfaces of two of Borgny’s molars, another unusual detail whose significance the evidence presented here does not resolve.

The Murder in the Novel’s Wider Pattern

The account of Borgny’s death is followed by a December passage from an unnamed first-person voice in a dark editing room. Around the work lamp are newspaper photographs of people who appear happy and unaware, taken before their families’ grief became public. The speaker says the police have not yet recognized a connection among the murders, though that will change. This shift widens the crime from a single unexplained death into part of a pattern, while withholding the speaker’s identity and the nature of the connection.

The passage also sets the speaker’s abstract belief that killing can be an act of mercy against the victim’s concrete desire to live. That contrast gives the crime’s staged, concealed mechanism a second significance: the reader has encountered Borgny’s fear and struggle before hearing a voice that reasons about murder at a distance. The narrative lets those opposed perspectives coexist without resolving the identity of the speaker or explaining, at this point, how Borgny’s murder connects to the others.

Later Reinterpretation and Narrative Design

The novel later shifts into Part III in Stavanger, where its pattern of delayed explanation continues through a separate investigative revelation. Harry Hole suddenly understands that Tony Leike’s encounter with Adele Vetlesen was not a rape, and that this was precisely the motive. That reversal belongs to another strand of the case, not an established explanation of Borgny’s murder; its relevance here is structural. The book allows an apparent account to stand until a new recognition changes what the investigators—and the reader—think the evidence means.