Krongli

Krongli is the Ustaoset police officer whose treatment of Charlotte Lolles and possible presence during an assault witnessed by Elias Skog place him under scrutiny in Harry Hole’s investigation. The evidence presents him not through a confession or a definitive identification, but through allegations and an unresolved confrontation: a local official entrusted with helping visitors becomes a suspect in the very danger they may have sought his help to escape.

Identity and Introduction

Krongli serves as the police officer for Ustaoset, a remote mountain region where travelers move between staffed hiking huts. After Iska Peller and her friend Charlotte Lolles were collected from a hut, he lodged them at his home. While Iska tried to sleep off an illness, he drank with Charlotte in the living room and allegedly made increasingly physical advances. Charlotte called for help; when Iska came in, Krongli had pulled Charlotte’s ski pants down to her knees. He stopped, and the two women decided to leave rather than remain in his home. They went to the station, traveled by train, and stayed in a hotel in Geilo. The account establishes the imbalance at the center of the allegation: Krongli had first appeared as the local officer providing shelter, but his home became a place from which the women chose to escape.

Allegations and Confrontation

Harry Hole confronts Krongli in a private club where Krongli is watching a horse race. The meeting begins almost casually: Krongli greets Harry with evident pleasure and asks how he found him. Harry then raises Iska Peller’s account of what happened after Krongli collected her and Charlotte Lolles from the mountain hut. Krongli shows no immediate reaction, keeping his attention on the race before asking whether Harry expects him to say something. His composure leaves the allegation unanswered rather than disproved.

Harry sharpens the accusation by bringing in Krongli’s former wife. He says that she told him Krongli had beaten and raped her in Ustaoset, and that leaving the area had been more like an escape than an ordinary move. Harry adds that he met her in the teachers’ lounge because, as he infers, she was afraid to be alone in a room with a man. At the mention of his former wife, Krongli knocks over his glass. The small physical disruption punctures the stillness of his earlier response, but he does not offer an explanation. Harry also notes that Krongli had been more intoxicated than he was when the abuse of his former wife occurred.

The investigation supplies a second, less certain connection between Krongli and possible sexual violence. Elias Skog had told a woman in Stavanger that, on the night at the Hävasshütte, he woke to noises outside his bedroom window. In the moonlight, he saw a woman facing outward and a man standing behind her beneath the roof overhang of the outhouse; he could not see the man’s face. At first Elias interpreted the woman’s movements as a dance and assumed the pair were preparing to have sex. He went back to sleep, disappointed that he could not watch what he took to be a sexual encounter. Only after reading about the murders did he reconsider the scene: the woman may have been struggling to get free, and the man’s hand over her mouth may have been meant to stop her calling for help. Harry asks Krongli directly whether he was there. The account establishes the disturbing possibility and the limits of Elias’s identification: he saw an assault-like scene but could not identify the man.

Krongli rubs his chin as Harry lays out Elias’s account, but the confrontation produces no confession or clear denial. Before leaving, Harry tells him that his former wife did not show him anything; they had met in the teachers’ lounge. Krongli responds with a warning that Harry should remember to look behind him more often. The croupier, apparently untouched by the exchange, is already setting up another race. Krongli’s part in the events remains unresolved, while the warning turns the encounter from an inquiry into an open threat.

Local Authority in a Remote Region

Krongli’s position matters in a landscape where distance complicates both travel and emergency response. During the avalanche rescue, he was not at home and did not answer the telephone. Rescuers therefore turned to a person at a hotel who had a snowmobile and could carry avalanche dogs from Ustaoset to the site. His absence does not explain his role in the assault allegations, but it shows the limits of local police availability when events in the mountains demand an immediate response.

The records place Ustaoset at the intersection of several travelers’ routes. On November 7, Adele Vetlesen had a train ticket from Drammen to Ustaoset, while Borgny Stem-Myhre had bought a ticket from Kongsberg to the same destination. A separate set of bookings charged to Iska Peller’s account covered two beds in each of four mountain huts, spaced about a day’s walk apart; the final hut, Hävasshütte, stood roughly half a day’s walk from Ustaoset. These details establish the region’s network of routes and huts, not Krongli’s presence at any particular point on it. They sharpen the contrast surrounding his office: in a remote setting where travelers depended on local arrangements, the authority who could offer shelter was also a figure whose conduct required scrutiny.

Narrative Role and Significance

Krongli’s narrative function rests on the gap between public responsibility and private conduct. Iska Peller’s account makes the officer who offered shelter a source of fear; his former wife’s reported escape from Ustaoset gives that allegation a disturbing history, while Elias Skog’s obscured view at Hävasshütte raises a further possibility without identifying the man. Harry Hole can confront Krongli with these accounts, but neither the encounter nor the evidence presented resolves his role. The uncertainty is consequential: in a remote region where travelers may depend on local authority, suspicion attaches not only to what Krongli may have done, but to the trust his position was supposed to provide.