Truls Berntsen

Truls Berntsen, better known as Beavis, is Mikael Bellman’s longtime subordinate and enforcer. His willingness to take beatings and his talent for intimidation make him useful to Bellman, while their history reveals a loyalty formed through childhood dependence and sustained by violence.

Identity and Background

Berntsen’s nickname dates to the early 1990s, after secondary school, and follows him into adulthood. The comparison is to the blond, undershot-jawed character Beavis from Beavis & Butt-Head; Berntsen also has a blond head, a pronounced underbite, and a snorting laugh. The laugh, which he has had since preschool, comes out particularly when someone else is being beaten—or when he is the one taking the blows. His response to violence is both conspicuous and unsettling: he laughs, and the sound can enrage the people hurting him further.

His capacity to endure punishment has roots at home. As a boy, he was beaten often enough to become accustomed to standing his ground even when blood ran. At school, that toughness became a role he could play for Bellman. When older boys turned on Bellman after he had outwitted them, Bellman would put Berntsen in front of him; Berntsen absorbed the blows and hoped to earn his friend’s acknowledgment afterward. The arrangement gives their bond an early imbalance: Bellman directs events, while Berntsen takes the physical cost.

The two first met when Bellman caught the twelve-year-old Berntsen trying to set fire to a dead rat at a large construction site in Manglerud, Bellman's Childhood District. Bellman showed him a more explosive way to dispose of it, and let him light the fuse. From then on, Berntsen followed Bellman wherever he went, when Bellman allowed it. Berntsen admired the ease with which Bellman managed school, sports, and social encounters, areas where he himself struggled. Their closeness did not make them equals: Bellman’s confidence and initiative repeatedly set the terms, while Berntsen’s usefulness lay in following and enduring.

From Friendship to Police Work

Bellman eventually turned Berntsen’s admiration into a practical route into the police. After Bellman told him he had applied to the police college, he urged Berntsen to consider doing the same, pointing to Berntsen’s police-uncles as a reason he might get in. Berntsen scraped through the entrance examination with their recommendations and later struggled through the final examination, helped by the classmate sitting beside him—Bellman, his friend since childhood. The qualifications were not evidence of independent success so much as another instance of Bellman opening a door and Berntsen following through it.

After secondary school and police college, both men obtained posts at the same station in Stovner, a district in northeastern Oslo where their work brought them into contact with gang crime, domestic violence, and occasional murder. Bellman married Ulla Swart a year later and became Berntsen’s superior; Berntsen was already calling him his boss by the third day. Their friendship had thus become an institutional hierarchy, formalizing a pattern established in childhood: Bellman led, and Berntsen stood behind him.

That arrangement was interrupted when a payroll employee accused Bellman of breaking his jaw after a Christmas party. There was no evidence, and Berntsen knew Bellman had not done it, but Bellman requested a transfer and went to Europol’s headquarters in The Hague. He rose quickly there. When he returned to Norway and joined the Kriminalamt, he contacted Berntsen on his second call and brought him back into his orbit; his first call had been to hire Jussi Kolkka. The distinction in the order of those calls places Berntsen within Bellman’s trusted circle, but also shows that Bellman’s return involved assembling people for his own purposes.

Berntsen’s usefulness to Bellman extended beyond police work. In a later account of a fire at an empty work shed on the Manglerud property, a gas-station attendant recognized Berntsen as resembling the young man seen stealing a petrol can shortly before the blaze. Bellman supplied the attendant with names and an address, presenting himself as someone seeking accountability rather than a reward. The episode shows Bellman managing the story others would hear, while the suspicion around the stolen fuel remained attached to Berntsen.

Enforcer and Instrument of Bellman's Power

Berntsen’s role as Bellman’s follower becomes physical when he confronts Harry Hole at a crime scene. He arrives with Bellman and Jussi Kolkka; a semiautomatic Steyr is aimed at Harry, and Berntsen’s blond hair, underbite, and snorting laugh make him recognizable as Beavis. Bellman orders Harry to leave, then has him arrested after Harry fails to comply with repeated demands. Berntsen seizes Harry’s arm; when Harry bends to retrieve the cigarette knocked from his mouth, Kolkka drives a knee into his back and sends him to the ground. The division of labor is plain: Bellman gives the orders, while Berntsen and Kolkka enforce them.

The arrest also exposes how readily Bellman uses Berntsen’s physical presence to provoke a response. As Harry lies face down, Bellman speaks softly and places a hand on his backside, angling for an assault charge that could carry a five-year sentence. Harry understands the trap and submits, turning his thoughts to Rakel instead of retaliating. Berntsen’s snorting laughter and Bellman’s calculated touch make the scene an exercise in controlled humiliation: the police power on display is not merely force, but force arranged to make resistance incriminate its target.

Berntsen’s own hostility surfaces in the detention cell. He challenges Harry over the shooting of a police officer and frames Harry as a man who kills good policemen. Harry corrects him: Waaler was not a good policeman, and Harry did not shoot him but tore off his arm at the shoulder. Berntsen is left speechless. His accusation reveals the loyalties through which he reads police violence; Harry’s answer punctures that account without persuading him to defend it.

Julie’s account of an earlier Manglerud feud gives Berntsen’s violence a more personal edge. After Bellman reported Julie for petrol theft, Julie’s suspended sentence was revoked and he went to prison. When Julie returned, he says, Beavis nearly beat him to death in a garage and warned him to stay away from Ulla Swart, Julie’s wife, whom Berntsen claimed belonged to him and Bellman. Local rumors had already identified Berntsen as one of two masked men who attacked Julie with iron bars. In this telling, Berntsen is not only Bellman’s instrument: he asserts a possessive claim of his own, using the same blunt violence that had made him useful as a boy. Much later, when Kaja Solness encounters him, he identifies himself as a colleague of Bellman’s, a concise description of the allegiance that has shaped both his career and his conduct.

The Enforcer’s Place in Bellman’s Circle

Berntsen’s loyalty also gives him a place in the institution Bellman seeks to control. When Bellman returned to Norway and joined the Kriminalamt, he called Berntsen after first arranging to bring in Jussi Kolkka. The invitation reached back to their childhood bond, but it also recruited Berntsen into a working circle whose power depended on personal allegiance as much as formal rank. Berntsen understood the return as a restoration of their old partnership: when Bellman was absent from a later gathering at Justisen Bar, Berntsen believed that he, Kolkka, Bellman, and the Kriminalamt had won together—and that they could take charge.

The announcement on the bar’s television that the Kriminalamt had arrested a man suspected of five murders, including the murder of Marit Olsen, becomes Berntsen’s public moment of triumph. He calls for silence so the room will hear the news, but the colleagues’ cheers drown out the report that follows. His nervous, snorting laugh accompanies the celebration. The scene makes belonging feel like victory: Berntsen is no longer merely the boy who absorbed Bellman’s blows or the subordinate who enforced his orders, but a member of a team claiming success. Yet the interruption of the broadcast also narrows what the celebration can know; the men cheer before hearing the rest of the announcement.

That claim to authority remains vulnerable to the violence on which Berntsen’s loyalty rests. When Roger Gjendem seeks leverage over him, he raises an allegation that Berntsen once beat Stanislav Hesse, a police recruit at the Stovner station, on Bellman’s orders. The call ends in silence, leaving the allegation unconfirmed in this exchange. Set beside Julie’s account of Berntsen’s attack on him, however, it shows how reports of Berntsen’s violence can be turned into pressure against Bellman’s circle. Berntsen’s strength is also its exposure: the reputation that makes him useful as an enforcer gives others a way to threaten the men he serves.