Rikshospitalet Hospital is where Harry Hole keeps vigil beside his dying father, Olav Hole, and where the novel makes waiting itself an intimate encounter with mortality. The bedside gathers the slow passage of time, the care of hospital staff, and the visits of Søs Hole; beyond the room, the corridor connects that vigil to Harry’s police work and the life continuing outside it.

The bedside vigil

The hospital room is defined by duration rather than action. Minutes lengthen into quarter-hours and hours as nurses and other caregivers come and go, Søs Hole visits and leaves, and the flowers seem almost imperceptibly to draw nearer. The measured, recurring details hold attention on the next breath and heartbeat. For Harry, the wait does not produce the familiar impatience of relatives who long for a loved one’s death to end their own ordeal. He instead feels closer to his father than ever, experiencing Olav’s fragile existence as a peaceful interval between life and nothingness.

A later morning at the bedside extends this quiet routine. It is still dark when Harry sits down; a nurse brings coffee, asks whether he has eaten breakfast, and leaves an illustrated magazine on his lap. Her small gestures—along with her concern that he should think about something else—set ordinary care against the gravity of Olav’s condition. Harry turns the pages while she attends to his father, but the news inside follows him back into the murder investigation.

The corridor and the outside world

The magazine’s coverage of Lene Galtung shows how the hospital cannot fully insulate Harry from the public life of the case. Photographs place Lene at theater premieres and gala dinners, beside her new Porsche, while a headline claims that she misses Tony Leike on the strength of comments attributed to celebrity friends. The magazine also prints an image of a London house gate and a coarse, pixelated photograph said to show Lene outside Credit Suisse in Zürich. Her hairdresser reportedly says she asked for a perm and brick-red hair; Harry suspects the hairdresser was paid handsomely for the disclosure. The presentation makes the disappearance and murder investigation resemble a society scandal, rather than one of the most brutal murder cases in Norwegian history.

Before seven in the morning, Harry leaves the bedside for the corridor and calls Katrine Bratt. She is already awake and due to leave the clinic that day; after the weekend, she is to return to the police headquarters in Bergen. Harry hopes she will take things slowly, though he knows that calm is difficult to imagine for her, and asks whether she will take one last job. The brief exchange places a possible return to investigation alongside the departure from hospital care, without suggesting that Katrine is herself a patient at Rikshospitalet Hospital.

A threshold of loss

The hospital’s significance culminates in a call that reaches Harry while he is with Kaja Solness. She wakes to the subtle change in the room and sees him put his phone back into his jacket pocket. He says the call came from the hospital and tells her that his father is dead. The institution that has sustained the vigil through repeated visits, coffee, flowers, and the rhythm of care thus becomes the source of its final news. Its role is not only to contain Olav’s dying, but to give Harry a place from which the vigil ends and bereavement begins.