Appearances versus reality

Appearances versus reality is a recurring principle of the novel’s investigations: the first convincing account of a crime may be a construction designed to divert attention from what happened. Simon Kefas repeatedly challenges explanations that fit the surface, using overlooked details to expose how evidence, motive, and apparent certainty can mislead.

Competing Accounts of a Crime

At the outset, the murder of Kjersti Morsand seems to have a familiar explanation. A friend reports that Kjersti feared her husband, Yngve Morsand, after he accused her of an affair and threatened her; she had met someone and was considering leaving him. That account supplies a recognizable motive, but it does not explain the boy’s apparent connection to the case. Nor do the other details settle the matter: Kjersti had not been raped, nothing had been stolen, and although Yngve claimed that sleeping tablets were missing, the evidence raised questions about why someone with access to harder drugs would want a few pills. The signed confession appears to close the case, yet the questions left behind make that certainty itself suspect.</numerusform

The Burglary That Was Not

A similar gap between official theory and physical evidence emerges in the investigation of Agnete Iversen’s death. Åsmund Bjørnstad proposes that a burglar entered, shot her, took valuables, and fled, treating the killing as a robbery that went wrong. Simon challenges that account by reconstructing how the scene was staged: Agnete’s picture frame was crooked, and nail polish on its edge matched damage to her finger, suggesting that she had staggered back into the house. Blood along the hall had been cleaned, as had the door handle and the killer’s shoes; a bloodstain in the bedroom carpet could, Simon argues, have absorbed traces from the soles. These details do not merely correct the proposed sequence of events. They point to deliberate evidence removal, incompatible with the picture of a panicked intruder.

The supposed robbery also fails as a motive. A burglar entering a house like the Iversens’ could have forced Agnete to disclose the safe’s combination, Simon reasons, rather than shooting her where neighbors might hear. The killer appears instead to have taken only enough to support a convenient burglary explanation and discourage an inexperienced investigator from looking further. Simon’s account exposes the difference between a scene that resembles a robbery and a crime whose circumstances actually support that conclusion.

Clues That Connect Separate Killings

At the factory, Bjørnstad describes a gang attack near closing time: two men were shot where they fell, a third was made to open the safe, and money and drugs were taken before he was killed. The account casts the deaths as a warning to criminal rivals. Simon tests that explanation against the ammunition and the scene. A large-looking entry wound, he observes, consists of two small, overlapping bullet wounds; the first bullet had been removed, leaving fresh plaster dust below the hole. What might look like an old mark or evidence of a larger-calibre weapon is therefore part of an effort to disguise what happened.

The shell casings supply a further connection. One casing bears no firing-pin mark, indicating an older gun, and Simon identifies its ammunition as the same type used to kill Agnete Iversen. He revises his own earlier interpretation: the killer had not taken the casing from Agnete’s house simply because it bore a firing-pin mark, but because he was already planning another killing and wanted to make the two crimes harder to link. The ammunition is common, so it cannot identify the killer by itself; its force comes from its place in a chain of clues. A detail that initially seemed incidental becomes evidence of planning across separate crime scenes.

Confessions, Alibis, and Hidden Networks

The distinction between an account and the truth also governs the case against the boy. A confession initially appears to give investigators a straightforward solution, but Westad notices that the suspect’s attitude does not fit the certainty of the case. When questioned again, the boy withdraws the confession and offers an alibi: a man named Leif Krognæss had seen him at a lay-by on the old road parallel to Drammensveien. Krognæss recalls two men waiting silently at a picnic table for hours; one checked his watch and said it was time to leave, while the other stopped to speak with him as they passed. The seemingly incidental witness and his recollection undermine the apparent simplicity of the confession and make the circumstances surrounding it newly significant.

A second hidden reality lies behind the old rumor of a police mole. Simon explains that the police had long suspected someone was leaking information to the person controlling much of Oslo’s drug and sex-trafficking operations, but had never produced evidence that either the mole or the criminal figure existed. He identifies that figure as the Twin. The later disclosure in Ab Lofthus’s diary gives the rumor a more unsettling shape: the Twin is not one person but two corrupt officers, whose partnership lets one have an alibi whenever the other is active. Their secret arrangement turns the familiar search for a single traitor into a misdirecting premise. They communicate through separate Hotmail accounts on stolen computers and exchange information through concealed drops; the Twin also tries to draw Ab into a higher position in the police force, where he could provide access to sensitive information. The deception is therefore not only a false story told about a crime, but a false assumption built into the investigation itself.

False Roles and Manufactured Certainty

The novel extends the problem of appearances beyond crime-scene interpretation to the roles people occupy and the accounts they offer. The factory victims’ deaths are presented as a gang-related warning, while the ammunition and the connection to Agnete Iversen’s murder point toward a killer concealing a wider sequence of crimes. Likewise, the boy’s confession seems to resolve the case until Westad’s doubts about his manner lead him to check the alibi and locate Leif Krognæss. In each instance, the first version is plausible enough to close inquiry, but closer attention reveals what it leaves unexplained.

The contrast is especially sharp in Nestor’s account of Yngve Morsand’s arrangement. Nestor initially understood Yngve to be seeking a hired killer, but Yngve insisted on killing his wife himself and paying for someone else to take the blame. He offered three million kroner for that substitution, exploiting the expectation that a jealous husband would be an obvious suspect. The plan relied on appearances working in two directions at once: Yngve would perform the murder, while the police were steered toward the boy as the apparent culprit. Arild Franck helped arrange the boy’s day release and location, and a corrupt prison officer accompanied him. The false account was not an accidental mistake but a coordinated construction supported by money, institutional access, and a planted suspect.

Simon’s confrontation with Iver Iversen exposes another carefully maintained public surface. Simon states that Iversen Property did business with the Twin, helping launder proceeds from drugs and trafficking in exchange for fictitious losses that reduced taxes by hundreds of millions of kroner. Iver denies knowing the Twin, but Simon says he has evidence that they worked together. Here the respectable appearance of a property business conceals its alleged role in a criminal financial relationship; denial preserves that appearance, while the evidence Simon invokes challenges it.

Ab Lofthus’s diary makes the police corruption more than a rumor and explains why the investigation’s assumptions could be manipulated. It records two officers’ partnership: because there were two of them, one could have an alibi while the other acted, making the search for a single mole fundamentally misleading. Their communications through separate Hotmail accounts and stolen computers, and their concealed information drops, show how secrecy was built into the arrangement. The diary also records that the Twin wanted Ab to advance within the police force, gaining access to sensitive information. Its revelation changes the meaning of the earlier suspicion: the apparent lone traitor was a two-person system whose structure itself produced cover.

Compassion and Conduct

The same distrust of appearances also applies to the language used to describe wrongdoing. When Sonny asks whether it is desirable to let a dog attack a young girl who is trying to escape slavery, he forces Fidel to confront the difference between labeling conduct and judging what it does to another person. The question turns an abstract standard of acceptable behavior into a test of whether a convenient description can conceal violence and exploitation. In a novel where official accounts can disguise calculated crimes, the exchange insists that moral judgment, too, must look past a reassuring label.

Patterns of Misreading and the Limits of Appearance

Across these cases, appearances are not merely misleading because evidence is incomplete; they are often made persuasive through the selective arrangement of evidence. Bjørnstad’s robbery theory, the factory gang-attack account, the boy’s confession, and the rumor of a lone police mole each offer a legible explanation. Yet each leaves details unresolved or mistakes a coordinated scheme for an individual act. Simon’s investigations proceed by returning to those gaps: a cleaned floor, a casing, an uncertain alibi, or a structural flaw in the assumption that there can be only one traitor. The novel makes interpretation part of the action, showing that what investigators call a fact depends on how they connect observations—and that a plausible story can itself become an instrument of concealment.

This recurring pattern also links physical clues to institutions and moral language. The removed bullet and cleaned blood point beyond a staged burglary; the shared ammunition connects apparently separate killings; the Twin’s partnership turns the expected profile of a single mole into a false premise; and the arrangement against Yngve Morsand’s wife uses a planted suspect to make that premise operational. Even a respectable property business can conceal an alleged financial tie to criminal activity, while a reassuring label for conduct can obscure its human consequences. In each instance, closer scrutiny does not make every uncertainty disappear, but it distinguishes what the visible account can support from what it merely invites the observer to believe.

Interpretive Pattern and Its Limits

The recurring contrast between appearance and reality is not simply a warning that evidence may be incomplete. The novel shows how a persuasive account can be manufactured by selecting, removing, or misreading evidence: a cleaned crime scene supports the appearance of a burglary; a casing links killings that first seem separate; a confession encourages premature certainty; and a two-officer conspiracy defeats the assumption that a mole must be a single person. Simon’s method is to return to details the first explanation cannot accommodate and ask what sequence of actions would account for them. That method makes investigation a contest between competing narratives, each answerable to the physical traces and testimony it claims to explain.

The pattern also extends from crime scenes to institutions and moral judgment. The Twin’s partnership makes an organizational structure look like the work of one hidden traitor, while the proposed arrangement against Yngve Morsand’s wife uses a planted suspect to make a false account plausible. Simon’s allegation about Iversen Property similarly challenges the respectable surface of a business by connecting it to money laundering for the Twin. Sonny’s question to Fidel presses the same scrutiny into the language of conduct: a label such as desirable behavior cannot settle what the conduct means when a girl is being punished for trying to escape slavery. Across these examples, the novel distinguishes what visible evidence can establish from the conclusions that an observer is merely invited to accept; closer scrutiny exposes deliberate deception, even when it cannot erase every uncertainty.