Parr secretly funds Sonny’s home

Parr secretly funds Sonny’s home as an act of private, belated care: after Ab’s suicide, the commissioner paid the utility bills so that Sonny would have a habitable house when he finished serving his sentence. The disclosure complicates the public image of Parr, linking his position within the police to an act of personal responsibility for a family he had failed to support earlier.

The Arrangement

Parr’s support took the form of paying the bills that kept the Lofthus family house habitable. The arrangement was not publicly known; Kari uncovered it while investigating who had been paying the utilities. Her inquiry eventually led to Parr, making the hidden household payments a traceable connection between the commissioner and Sonny’s home.

Parr admitted the arrangement when Kari confronted him at Simon’s wake. He said that he had not broken any laws and described his motive as altruistic: he had not taken care of Sonny and his mother after Ab’s suicide, and the payments were intended to ease his conscience. He acknowledged that the support had not been cheap, but its concrete purpose was to ensure that Sonny would have somewhere habitable to live after completing his sentence.

Purpose and Consequence

The aid was directed toward Sonny’s future return, not presented as a way to secure his release or alter his sentence. Its significance rests in the gap between the years in which Sonny and his mother were left without Parr’s care and the later provision that preserved a home for him. By maintaining the house, Parr offered a material second chance without undoing the loss that had preceded it.

The revelation also sharpens the moral ambiguity surrounding Parr. At Simon’s wake, Kari’s account of the public response describes a police force criticized after the shootings at Aker Brygge and the Catholic church, while Simon himself received a hero’s funeral despite not having followed the rule book or Norwegian law in every respect. Parr, too, presents himself as acting from conscience, but his personal generosity coexists with his own willingness to push legal boundaries in other matters. The novel thus frames his support for Sonny as meaningful care, while leaving it embedded in a wider portrait of compromised public authority.

Narrative Significance

The secret funding makes a domestic object—the family house—carry the consequences of Ab’s death and Sonny’s imprisonment into the aftermath of the main violence. It also establishes a contrast between public recognition and private responsibility: Parr speaks at Simon’s funeral, but Kari’s investigation reveals an unseen form of assistance directed toward Sonny. The house does not erase what Sonny has lost; it gives his eventual return a physical possibility, and exposes Parr’s attempt to answer an earlier failure through a quiet, costly act.