Fredrik Ansgar

Fredrik Ansgar is Simon Kefas’s former Serious Fraud Office colleague, a financially successful investor whose history makes him a consequential, compromised figure in Simon’s investigations. His importance lies not in being identified as the long-sought police mole, but in the narrower and more revealing position he occupies: he once investigated Iver Iversen, later became connected to Iversen as a client, and appears to have let information about Simon’s request for a loan reach Hugo Nestor. Simon’s ability to recognize Fredrik’s lies turns their old professional familiarity into a means of testing him—and exposes the limits of what that test can prove.

Identity and Background

When Simon meets him, Fredrik is no longer working alongside investigators. He has moved into managing investments for very wealthy clients, and his polished clothes and carefully maintained appearance mark the social distance between his present life and Simon’s police work. Their meeting takes place at Fredrik’s suggestion, at a Japanese restaurant on Tjuvholmen. Simon’s dry attention to Fredrik’s expensive presentation contrasts with the question he brings: whether his old colleague will help him obtain a loan.

Their professional past gives the conversation a sharper edge. Fredrik had worked at the Serious Fraud Office, where Simon says he had been a suspect in connection with Iver Iversen. Simon also reminds him that they once shared a view that the property business needed reform. Fredrik’s present position as an investor, and his association with Iversen, therefore sit uneasily beside his former role investigating financial wrongdoing. The story establishes that collision without supplying a full account of Fredrik’s career or his precise responsibilities.

The Request for Help

Simon asks Fredrik for a loan to pay for Else’s eye operation. Fredrik does not agree to provide the money at their first meeting. After Simon persists, Fredrik says only that he will ask around, cautioning him not to raise his hopes. Simon thanks him and leaves, aware that Fredrik is watching him pensively.

The refusal is not the end of the matter. Nestor later offers Simon enough money for a very expensive operation, making Simon immediately suspect that Fredrik has passed on the request. Nestor confirms that he knows of Simon’s predicament and identifies Fredrik as the former Serious Fraud Office colleague Simon approached. Simon is furious, but he does not use that anger as an excuse to arrest Nestor; instead he challenges him to provide grounds for an arrest. The episode makes the loan request more than a private appeal: information about Else’s medical need has become a point of access for the criminal network.

The Investigation and the Lie

Simon goes to Fredrik’s home while ostensibly on the way to visit an art exhibition with Else. After speaking with him, Simon tells Kari that Fredrik’s denial of any contact with Nestor is precisely what he expected. Simon had gone to look at Fredrik while asking about the loan disclosure, because he believed their shared history would let him recognize when Fredrik was lying.

That recognition depends on Fredrik’s voice, not on a general claim that deception can be read reliably from appearance. Simon explains that Fredrik could manage his word choice, reasoning, and body language, but under the pressure of a direct question his voice lost its natural tone. Because Fredrik could hear the tell in his own voice, he sometimes answered direct questions by nodding or shaking his head instead. When Simon asked about a connection between Kalle Farrisen and Iver Iversen, Fredrik shrugged rather than giving a straightforward answer. Simon treats the gesture as part of a recurring pattern of evasion.

The method gives Simon a personal advantage, but not omniscience. Fredrik’s denial helps Simon conclude that information was being concealed; it does not by itself establish the full extent of Fredrik’s dealings with Nestor or prove that he was the original mole. Simon distinguishes Fredrik from the suspected central figure: Fredrik was not yet working for the police when the mole began operating. In Simon’s assessment, he had been a minor player at that point, but could have done significant harm if allowed to advance. Simon says that he stopped him from rising further.

The Twin and the Wider Network

Simon’s inquiry into Fredrik is framed by a longer-running mystery. He recalls years of rumors about a police mole leaking information to the person responsible for much of Oslo’s drug and sex trafficking, but says that no evidence had ever proved either the mole or the criminal figure existed. Simon says the latter was called the Twin, a name that conceals rather than identifies him. The Twin uses several names, and Simon reflects that a person’s importance may be inversely related to visibility: the most powerful figure is not necessarily the most conspicuous.

Fredrik is therefore a lead within a network, not the answer to the network’s central question. Simon believes that Fredrik’s lies have once again helped the Twin elude him, while maintaining that Fredrik himself was not the original police plant. The distinction matters because the criminal arrangement is not reducible to one visible traitor. Later evidence from Ab Lofthus’s diary reveals two corrupt police officers working as a pair, using separate stolen computers and anonymous email accounts to communicate with the Twin. That disclosure confirms the structural possibility behind Simon’s earlier account of a mole, but it does not identify Fredrik as either officer.

The network also reaches beyond police information. Simon accuses Iver Iversen of conducting business with the Twin through Iversen Property: laundering money from drug trafficking and human trafficking in exchange for fictitious losses that reduced taxes by hundreds of millions of kroner. Iversen denies knowing the Twin, and Simon says he has evidence that they worked together. Fredrik’s client relationship with Iver and his earlier work on the case place him near this convergence of business and criminal power, but the evidence presented about the financial arrangement is Simon’s accusation against Iver, not proof that Fredrik participated in it.

Narrative Role and Significance

Fredrik’s defining contradiction is the distance between his professional appearance and his compromised history. He occupies the respectable world of investment and once held a position investigating financial crime, yet Simon has reason to suspect that he concealed information and that his conduct helped Nestor learn about a vulnerable private need. The story does not collapse suspicion into certainty: Fredrik’s apparent lie is significant, but it does not establish that he was the original mole or that he belonged to the pair later described in Ab’s diary.

His role also tests what Simon’s experience can and cannot accomplish. Familiarity lets Simon hear a change that might escape another listener, and the voice becomes a more dependable clue than polished language or controlled gestures. Yet recognition of a lie is only a beginning; it does not automatically disclose the whole truth. Fredrik’s evasions bring Simon closer to the network while leaving its most important identity hidden, preserving the central irony that a former investigator can recognize deception in a colleague and still fail to see the full structure behind it.