Investigative Interviewing

Investigative Interviewing is the dialogue-centered approach to police questioning that Mikael Bellman encounters at a mandatory seminar and distrusts as impractical. The novel defines it chiefly through his opposition to the traditional nine-stage FBI model: the disagreement is less a neutral account of procedure than a glimpse of Bellman’s assumptions about suspects, guilt, and the work of interrogation.

The Method as Presented

Investigative Interviewing is described as placing openness, dialogue, and trust at the center of questioning. Bellman remembers academics advocating it as an alternative to established police methods, which they criticized as inhumane and manipulative. They argued that the traditional model could lead innocent people to confess to crimes they had not committed, making it counterproductive as well as ethically troubling.

The account does not provide a step-by-step description of Investigative Interviewing or show its use in a complete interview. Instead, its defining features emerge through the contrast Bellman draws: a cooperative exchange built on trust on one side, and an interrogation organized around pressure and control on the other. That limited presentation matters; the method reaches the reader filtered through the perspective of a practitioner who has already decided it does not fit the people he investigates.

Bellman’s Opposition

Bellman and his colleagues had been required to attend the seminar, and he says he listened without openly objecting because the model had been approved by senior management. Internally, however, he questions the academics’ image of criminal suspects as tender, cooperative people who would disclose everything if offered a sympathetic ear. In his view, the seminar’s principles underestimate the people encountered by the Kriminalamt.

His objection is bound up with a stark comparison of errors. Bellman concedes that the traditional approach may occasionally cause a suggestible novice to be imprisoned, but sets that risk against the people he believes escape justice and mock the language of openness and trust. The reasoning reveals his priorities: he treats wrongful accusation as an acknowledged cost while giving greater weight to the danger of failing to secure convictions. The novel presents that calculation as Bellman’s judgment, not as an independently established measure of either method’s effectiveness.

The Interrogation of Leike

Bellman’s questioning of Tony Leike puts his preferred practice on display. Leike has declined an offer to consult a lawyer, and Bellman reads that choice as evidence of confidence. Bellman knows that Leike contacted Elias Skog shortly before Skog’s murder, despite claiming not to know Skog’s name. Before beginning, Bellman deliberately pauses over a file and silently counts to ten, using the closed-room silence as a controlled opening to the interrogation.

He then presents the call and Leike’s later presence in Stavanger as facts and asserts that Leike killed Skog, before asking why he did it and whether he had a motive. The scene places Bellman’s conduct beside the seminar’s preference for dialogue and trust: rather than begin by inviting an open account, he establishes an accusation and asks for an explanation within its frame. Investigative Interviewing therefore functions as both a named alternative and a point of contrast, exposing the distance between an officially endorsed approach and Bellman’s entrenched conception of police work.