Lene Galtung

Lene Galtung is both the cherished daughter of a wealthy household and the child of the woman who served it: a hidden history that gives her carefully maintained identity its fault line. She longs to escape the polished role she performs, imagining that Tony Leike might take her somewhere she could be whole. But the escape she associates with love becomes entangled with Tony’s violence, and the final image of her restrained in his car sharply contradicts his account of their shared future.

Identity and the divided self

Lene’s inner life is introduced through her repeated listening to Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. The song belongs to a life unlike the one she appears to lead: its imagined escape from poverty and a drunken father bears little resemblance to Lene’s circumstances. Yet she feels that it sings about the person she might have been—or, as she puts it to herself, the person she really is. In the double reflection of the living-room windows, she sees two versions of herself. One is the ordinary, grey Lene; the other is the constructed figure expected to belong among the wealthy.

That division began as fear of being exposed. At school, Lene imagined the classroom door opening and someone announcing that her fine clothes should be taken away because she was an orphan. She watched the door, scrutinized her friends’ tones for signs that they had discovered her secret, and tried to protect herself by staying quiet. Her fear was read by others as arrogance. She also knew she exaggerated the role of the rich, perfect, pampered, carefree girl, performing beauty, brilliance, and superiority because she did not feel that she possessed them naturally. The performance was exhausting: her wish to leave with Tony is also a wish to stop being split between two false selves.

The concealed family history

The truth behind Lene’s sense of displacement emerges through the account of her birth mother. The woman grew up travelling in a caravan and was removed from her family by child services at eight. At sixteen she began cleaning for the Galtungs’ shipping company. Anders, who was engaged to another woman, made her pregnant. His wife had the wealth, while Anders had gambled on the tanker market and was left with little choice after rates fell. When she learned of the pregnancy, the wife decided that the child would be born and raised in the household, while the mother continued working there as a domestic servant.

The Galtungs’ inability to have a child of their own made Lene a kind of adopted daughter. Her birth mother was persuaded that an uneducated, isolated young woman could not offer the child the life the Galtungs could provide. She agreed, frightened and believing that they might be right. Her account makes Lene’s imagined classroom exposure more than a generalized fear of being an orphan: it echoes a history in which her place in the family was secured through a secret and a separation. The mother describes herself as reduced to a womb for the Galtungs’ heir, while the child was raised as the household’s daughter. The account also shows how easily the people around them could preserve the arrangement by accepting, or choosing not to question, the story they were given.

Tony, escape, and the investigation

Lene’s attachment to Tony gives her longing for escape a concrete destination. In her private imagining, she could get into his car and leave for a place where she would no longer have to live as two incompatible people. Later, when Tony has disappeared, Harry Hole contacts her about a possible person who has fallen beneath a rocky overhang in the mountains near Ustaoset. He asks her to help obtain DNA evidence at Tony’s home. Because she is his fiancée, her consent is needed, and she must bring a key so a forensic technician can collect traces such as hair from a brush or saliva from a toothbrush. Lene agrees immediately, anxious to know whether something has happened to Tony and ready to assist the search.

After Tony vanishes, Lene herself disappears from public view. Newspapers show her in a large pair of sunglasses and a headscarf, under the headline “No Comment.” She has gone underground, reportedly at her father’s house in London, and is seen by no one. Her withdrawal occurs amid a public story in which Tony is called the Kavalier and his apparent exposure is presented as a resolution, although he has not been caught. The concealment of Lene’s whereabouts echoes her earlier habit of hiding, but now it is a deliberate absence from the public gaze rather than a schoolgirl’s fear of discovery.

The mother’s appeal and Lene’s departure

Harry later offers Lene’s birth mother a chance to help bring her daughter back. He says he knows where the end of the world is and can try to reach her, but the mother objects that Lene does not want to be brought back. Harry asks her to help anyway. In agreeing, the mother asks him to swear that he will return her daughter home unharmed. The appeal makes the separation between mother and daughter immediate: the woman who relinquished Lene under pressure is now asked to take a risk in the hope of recovering her.

Lene next appears in transit, almost hidden behind violet sunglasses and the large Black man walking in front of her. Her red hair curls over a denim jacket; she wears khaki trousers and sturdy hiking boots, pulls a small wheeled suitcase, and carries a small, bare metal case instead of a handbag. Kaja Solness watches without drawing Lene’s attention and follows her through the exit. Lene passes the waiting taxis, crosses the street, and gets into the back of a dark-blue Range Rover. The man opens the door for her, closes it, and goes around to the driver’s seat. Lene moves quickly and purposefully, as if she has been carefully instructed. Kaja reads the moment as a chance to do what is right, but the scene leaves Lene’s destination and immediate intentions unstated.

Love, violence, and the final image

In Tony’s account of his past, Lene responds with a smile that he deserves what he has achieved and has worked hard for it. He tells her that he will explain the rest, and she claps her hands, imagining another woman at home as jealous, lonely, and bitter, unwilling to grant their love. The moment shows how readily Lene’s desire for a shared escape can coexist with an account of Tony’s revenge: she receives his success as something earned, while the woman he resents becomes an obstacle to their love.

Tony eventually tells Kaja that Lene now knows he has killed people and understands him. He announces that they will marry that evening and jokes that Kaja is invited. But Lene’s body contradicts the performance of willing union. Her hands are cuffed behind her back with pink handcuffs; when Tony pushes her forcefully into the seat, she turns toward Kaja with a tear-streaked face, one eye swollen, and her mouth held open around a golden ball with a short red cord. Tony’s declaration of love and marriage thus plays against a visible scene of restraint. The distinction between the escape Lene imagined and the journey she is actually making becomes stark: the woman who hoped to leave freely with Tony is being carried toward a future he has announced for her. The narrative ends this glimpse of her not with a confirmed resolution, but with the image of her captivity and the gulf between Tony’s story of their love and what Kaja can see.