Harry

Harry is presented as an investigator who builds connections from records, witness accounts, and details that acquire a different meaning after the fact. His inquiries into Borgny Stem-Myhre’s murder link her last known movements to Adele Vetlesen’s disappearance and to the mountain huts around Hävasshütte; later, in Hong Kong, he has recast his life as a well-paid but uneasy job locating debtors.

The Murder Investigation

Harry studies the file on Borgny Stem-Myhre, including the only photograph in it taken while she was alive. She had left the Mono after an evening event and told a colleague she was going home to prepare a fashion shoot. No taxi driver identified her or recalled taking her to Sagene. After she left the bar, nobody was known to have seen her until two Polish bricklayers found a forced cellar door and her fully clothed body inside.

The medical evidence makes the murder unusually difficult to interpret. Borgny had Ketanomin in her blood, but she died by drowning in blood from wounds in her mouth. The examiner found twenty-four symmetrically placed punctures, each exactly seven centimeters deep except for those that pierced her face. Investigators had found no comparable weapon or instrument, and the cellar’s concrete floor yielded no footprints. Harry’s attention to these particulars is part of a broader effort to make the apparently disconnected cases legible without pretending the evidence has already supplied an answer.

Records, Connections, and Testimony

Katrine Bratt brings Harry a link between the cases: Adele Vetlesen, a twenty-eight-year-old from Drammen, had been reported missing by her partner in November. The Norwegian State Railways ticket system showed that Adele bought an online ticket from Drammen to Ustaoset for November 7. Borgny Stem-Myhre had bought a ticket from Kongsberg to the same destination for that date. The records place both women on a route toward the same mountain region, though the tickets alone do not establish that they travelled together.

A further transaction brings Iska Peller into the pattern. Her account was charged on November 20 for two beds in each of four huts belonging to the trekking association, roughly a day’s walk apart. The last was Hävasshütte, only half a day’s walk from Ustaoset; the pair had been there on November 7. Harry recognizes the significance of the hut’s position in the route, where distance and sparse habitation could leave people moving through the same landscape without reliable witnesses.

Harry also revisits an account given by Elias Skog to a woman in Stavanger on the night he was murdered. Elias had woken to sounds outside a bedroom window at Hävasshütte and seen a man and a woman in shadow by the outhouse. At first, he mistook the scene for a sexual encounter: the woman appeared to be belly-dancing, while the man held a hand over her mouth and then dragged her inside. After reading about the murders, Elias reconsidered what he had witnessed as a possible assault, with the woman struggling to escape and the hand silencing her. Harry recounts the revised interpretation and directly asks Krongli whether he was there, turning an ambiguous memory into a pointed line of inquiry.

Work, Physical Presence, and Self-Control

In a later scene, Harry meets Oystein after surgery has left his face badly injured. Oystein remarks on the damage and warns him that laughing could reopen it; Harry promises not to laugh. When Oystein adds that it is his birthday, Harry offers him a cigarette. The exchange is brief and unsentimental, but it shows Harry responding to a friend’s ordinary occasion even while visibly hurt.

In Hong Kong, Harry has taken a job from Herman Kluit as a locator of debtors who have disappeared without paying. The work means Kluit no longer has to sell the debts at a steep discount to the Triads or reckon with their violent methods. Harry does not collect the money himself; he finds the debtors. The job pays well and is simple, though he does not claim to enjoy it. His height of 193 centimeters and the scar running from the corner of his mouth to his ear often persuade people to hand over what they owe without further pressure. He only rarely uses the search engine on a server in Germany.

Harry identifies abstaining from drugs and alcohol as the secret of keeping the arrangement workable, and says he has managed it so far. The qualification matters: his new livelihood is not presented as a settled transformation, but as a practical routine he is trying to maintain. His physical appearance, once simply a mark of injury, has become an instrument of work, while restraint rather than force is what he claims as his method.

The Hong Kong Pursuit

Katrine Bratt informs Harry that Sigurd Altman is staying at a hotel in Shanghai, less than an hour’s flight away. Harry is sitting near the Victoria Peak cable car with the evening’s Happy Valley Racecourse program; after reading it, he gets up and heads toward the cable car. He has also received a tip on a promising horse in the third race. The juxtaposition leaves his immediate attention divided between the information about Altman and the racing world around him, without resolving what he will pursue first. Across these scenes, Harry remains a figure in motion: reading records, testing testimony, and taking up work that carries him between the demands of survival and the habits of investigation.