Norwegian Police Service

The Norwegian Police Service is at once a public authority tasked with protecting the city and an institution penetrated by the criminal interests it is meant to oppose. Its crisis is not reducible to one corrupt officer: a pair of police insiders secretly served the Twin, while compromised prison personnel and institutional decisions helped the criminals shape investigations and evade accountability. Simon Kefas’s passage from mole to relentless pursuer of corruption gives this institutional story its sharpest personal dimension.

The force and the hidden network

For years, police officers heard rumours that a mole inside the force was leaking information to the person who controlled much of Oslo’s drug and sex-trafficking activity. The rumours persisted without evidence sufficient to prove either that the mole or the criminal figure existed. When Simon identifies that figure as the Twin, the wording initially suggests one hidden traitor and one hidden master. Ab Lofthus’s diary later exposes the more unsettling arrangement: Simon and Ab were both corrupt officers, and the Twin’s supposed single police plant was in fact two.

The pair’s structure turned their partnership into protection. In the diary, Ab explains that one of the two could always have an alibi when the other was active, making them difficult to suspect as a unit. They used separate, stolen computers and Hotmail addresses to communicate, and exchanged messages through concealed drops, including an envelope taped beneath a bench at Broker’s Restaurant on Bogstadveien. The anonymous channel connected the officers to the Twin while helping preserve the appearance that there was only one mole. Their betrayal encompassed turning a blind eye to drug dealing, human trafficking, and murder.

Institutional compromise and public accountability

The criminal network reached beyond police intelligence. In the account of the scheme against Sonny Lofthus, Hugo Nestor says the criminals arranged details with Arild Franck, including Sonny’s day release and location, and used a trusted, corrupt prison officer to accompany him. Franck, meanwhile, faces pressure from the prison governor to publicize Sonny’s escape: the governor rejects a requested media blackout and insists that Sonny’s photograph be circulated, both to warn the public and to aid the search. Franck doubts the old photographs and grainy camera images will help, but cannot prevent the decision. The episode shows institutional reputation and the handling of information becoming part of the escape crisis, even as the prison service’s own security has been compromised.

The force’s failures are measured against the harm the criminal network enables. Simon confronts Iver Iversen with an allegation that Iversen Property did business with the Twin, laundering proceeds from drugs and trafficking in return for fictitious losses worth hundreds of millions of kroner. Elsewhere, a police investigation links a wanted suspect to the killing of a man in a dog kennel, the murder of Agnete Iversen, and the triple homicide in Gamlebyen. Such investigations place police attention on the consequences of organized crime, but the deeper revelation is that information and protection have also flowed from within law enforcement to the criminals.

Simon’s complicity and reversal

Simon was not merely a detective confronting an abstract institutional problem. Else later explains that after making his deal with the Twin, he recruited his closest friend, Ab, whose family was in debt following the banking crisis. Ab initially refused, but Simon invoked Ab’s son and the prospect of his growing up poor. Simon therefore helped reproduce the betrayal inside the force by drawing another officer into the same corrupt arrangement that had compromised him.

The partnership could not last once the Twin wanted his mole to rise through the police ranks. Simon feared that Ab would take the one available place and, after learning that Ab was prepared to kill him for it, contacted the Twin and acted first: he killed Ab. The crime makes Simon’s later role as an opponent of corruption inseparable from his own record. He did not uncover the network from outside; he helped build its police connection and eliminated the friend whose participation he had secured.

Penance, reform, and the force’s legacy

After Helene died, Simon stopped being a mole and devoted the remainder of his life to penance and making amends. Else says he pursued officers who were corrupt as he once had been, a course that left him lonely and unpopular within the police. His later conduct does not erase his earlier betrayal or Ab’s death; the story presents reform as a sustained effort to answer for wrongdoing rather than a return to innocence. Simon also hoped that Kari would learn from his mistakes as a police officer, though he knew she did not intend to remain in the force.

In the aftermath of the shootings at Aker Brygge and the final confrontation at St Paul’s Church, public criticism is directed at police brutality and at Simon’s mission. Yet Simon receives a hero’s funeral and is remembered as a public servant who fought the city’s criminals and died in the service of justice. Commissioner Parr’s eulogy acknowledges that Simon did not follow every rule or Norwegian law. The uneasy public judgment mirrors the novel’s institutional portrait: the police can be compromised by corruption and criticized for excess, while still containing officers whose actions are understood as service and sacrifice.

Kari’s investigation into who paid the utility bills for Sonny’s house leads to Parr, who admits that he secretly funded it so Sonny would have a habitable home after prison. Parr says he acted from guilt at not having cared for Sonny and his mother after Ab’s suicide, and that no laws had been broken. The disclosure complicates the boundary between official responsibility and private conscience, just as Simon’s history complicates the distinction between the corrupt officer and the officer who later fights corruption. The Norwegian Police Service emerges not as a uniformly virtuous or uniformly criminal body, but as an institution whose legitimacy depends on whether its members expose, enable, or attempt to repair the networks of betrayal within it.