Beate Lonn

Beate Lonn is a forensic investigator whose technical findings help drive the murder investigation and whose measured interventions expose weaknesses in the team’s assumptions. She supplies a lead on the rope used to kill Marit Olsen, helps Harry Hole disguise how that lead reached the Kriminalamt, and later challenges the apparent case against Tony Leike. Her combination of practical expertise and reluctance to speak without preparation makes her a consequential participant in the investigation, not merely a source of laboratory results.

Identity and Working Method

Beate’s authority rests on the care she brings to evidence. When she enters the team’s discussion of motive, the narration stresses that she does not generally comment on matters she has not studied thoroughly. That description gives weight to her interventions: she is not presented as a habitual contrarian, but as someone whose questions merit attention because she has considered the details first.

Her work joins physical traces to investigative decisions. A technician had found that the rope used to hang Marit Olsen came from an old rope-making operation near Lyseren. Beate recommended that police search the surrounding cabins, turning a material identification into a concrete investigative step. The rope is therefore more than a technical clue: its origin directs the team toward a place where further inquiry might be possible.

Evidence, Secrecy, and Institutional Pressure

The Lyseren lead also places Beate inside the team’s conflict with the Kriminalamt. Harry had asked her to leak information about the rope-making operation to the agency while presenting forensic technicians as the source. Beate promised to make the information appear to have come through that channel. The arrangement was a deliberate attempt to conceal the team’s unauthorized investigation, and the exposure of the group made the tactic consequential rather than merely procedural.

The plan did not remain hidden. A police officer from Ytre Enebakk told Mikael Bellman that Harry had been among the investigators working at Lyseren. When Gunnar Hagen later announced that the Kriminalamt had discovered the secret inquiry and that he had no choice but to stop it, Harry acknowledged his part in directing the rope information through Beate. Hagen identified the village officer as the person who had exposed Harry. The episode shows the fragile boundary between covert investigation and official oversight: Beate’s cooperation helped the team act, but it could not protect them once their presence was reported.

Motive and the Case Against Tony Leike

Beate also resists an overly simple division between a motive that seems irrational and one that seems ordinary. When the team considers whether to abandon the theory of a deranged serial killer, she points out that the Snowman, too, had a motive, however extreme or mad it might have been. The observation does not settle the current case; it cautions the investigators against treating the existence or apparent simplicity of a motive as a sufficient explanation.

Later, she applies that caution to the evidence surrounding Tony Leike. Although Leike had an alibi for the murders, Beate asks the team to account for the clues that point toward him: a call from his home telephone to Elias Skog’s phone, and a murder weapon obtained in Congo, in the area where Leike had a business project. She presents these details as a problem requiring explanation, not as proof that Leike committed the murders. Her questions reopen the reasoning at precisely the point when the team might otherwise mistake a plausible suspect for a solved case.

Harry answers that the Kavalier had deliberately directed the investigation toward Leike. He says the Kavalier paid Juliana Verni to travel to Congo because traces leading there would be associated with Leike, and explains that calls from Leike’s direct office line were made around the time of the call from his home. Beate’s intervention thus helps shift the discussion from the apparent force of the clues to the possibility that they have been arranged to mislead. The evidence she raises remains important, but its meaning changes when the team considers who might have planted that trail.

Collaboration with Harry and the Final Exchange

Beate’s exchanges with Harry combine professional candor with personal concern. After Harry has an office overlooking Bryn, she brings him the result of a fingerprint search: the print found on the desk is not in the database. Harry says he had not expected a match. The finding provides no identification, but Beate reports it plainly, preserving the distinction between a negative database result and a solved question.

She then asks how Harry’s father is doing. Harry answers that he has days left. Beate expresses sympathy, and the two look at one another. Harry suddenly imagines seeing her at the funeral: a small, pale face, tearful and marked by the grief of other funerals he has seen. The moment does not turn Beate’s concern into a promise about what will happen; it records Harry’s anticipation of bereavement and the way he sees her compassion through that expectation. After the covert work, disputed clues, and forensic uncertainty, their exchange brings the investigation back to a private loss that cannot be handled as evidence.