The Criminal Investigation Service in Bryn serves as both an operational setting for the murder investigation and a stage on which its progress is presented to the public. Its surroundings connect forensic work with the Service’s more visible role, while its monitored interrogation rooms turn the investigation into a controlled contest over evidence and authority.

Setting and Investigative Work

The Service’s presence in Bryn is associated with forensic investigation as well as police administration. Harry Hole and Kaja Solness bring Beate Lønn to the forensic-technology facility there; after the drive, Harry asks Kaja to wait while he gets out to speak with Beate. The scene places technical expertise within the same local investigative network, though it does not establish that the forensic facility and the Service’s main building are the same premises.

The Service also has newly established, video-monitored interrogation rooms. Their recording equipment is part of the procedure rather than a background detail: Mikael Bellman checks that the red recording light is on before Tony Leike is brought in. Bellman prefers to be seated in the room before a suspect arrives, using the wait to establish control and allowing the suspect’s nervousness to build before questioning begins.

Public Face of the Investigation

Outside the Service building in Bryn, Bellman addresses personnel from the Norwegian National Criminal Investigation Service (Kripos) through a microphone. He announces that a man suspected of five murders, including the murder of Marit Olsen, has been arrested and will be questioned before being brought before an examining judge. The announcement follows a jubilant response from the gathered officers, whose celebration is loud enough to interrupt the report until someone calls for quiet.

The scene makes the building’s public role distinct from the uncertainty of the investigation itself. Bellman’s statement presents an arrest and the next procedural steps, while a reporter’s question immediately presses the larger issue of whether the case has actually been solved. The Bryn premises thus become a place where police authority is publicly asserted even as the limits of what the arrest proves remain in question.

Interrogation and Authority

Leike’s questioning gives the Service’s rooms a more private, tactical function. Bellman watches as Leike is brought from a police headquarters detention cell into an adjoining office, accompanied by Jussi Kolkka and another officer. Leike has declined the offer of a lawyer, a choice Bellman regards as giving the police greater latitude, though he also reads it as evidence that Leike is confident in his position.

Bellman enters the interrogation believing he has a specific evidentiary advantage: he says he can prove that Leike called Elias Skog shortly before Skog was murdered, despite Leike’s claim that he did not know Skog’s name. The recorded room, the deliberate arrangement of who waits where, and Bellman’s carefully staged opening all make the Service a setting where evidence is pursued alongside control over how the suspect experiences the questioning.