Manipulation and Staging

Manipulation and staging are the means by which the killer transforms separate crimes into a drama under his control. He arranges what investigators can see, directs suspicion toward others, and treats the police—especially Harry Hole—as an audience and cast of characters. The motif joins the physical arrangement of evidence to the novel’s management of information: what first appears as an unconnected sequence of murders gradually becomes a performance whose design Harry must expose.

The killer’s visual grammar

The novel introduces this logic through an anonymous first-person voice in a dark workroom. The speaker has collected photographs of victims from newspaper stories, but has deliberately discarded the accounts of grieving families and the details of the bodies. What remains are images from happier times, supplied to journalists by relatives: faces smiling as if their lives were secure and limitless. The selection turns private loss into a curated gallery. The victims are not shown as they died but as they appeared before their lives were interrupted, and the contrast makes the photographs instruments of the killer’s interpretation as well as records of the dead.

The speaker knows that the police have not yet recognized a connection between the murders, but anticipates that they soon will. This early disclosure gives the reader knowledge of a pattern before the investigators possess it, while withholding the speaker’s identity and the exact nature of the connection. The opening also supplies a rationale that is chillingly at odds with the images: the speaker considers the capacity to kill part of ordinary human nature and frames murder as an acceleration of inevitable death, even as the narrative acknowledges the instinctive will to go on living. The gap between that abstract justification and the victims’ cheerful photographs exposes the self-serving work of the killer’s worldview. Staging begins by deciding not only what is displayed, but what story the display is supposed to tell.

Crimes arranged as scenes

The murder of Borgny Stem-Myhre makes the conflict between appearance and evidence concrete. After leaving the Mono, where she had attended a fashion-magazine launch, Borgny told a friend and colleague that she was going home to prepare for a photo shoot. No taxi driver working nearby recognized her or recalled taking her to Sagene; after she left the venue, no one reported seeing her. Two Polish construction workers eventually found her, fully clothed and lying in a contorted position in a basement after noticing that the padlock on its iron door had been forced. The scene that awaited discovery was sharply at odds with the fashionable, apparently ordinary evening that preceded it.

The forensic details make that scene resistant to easy interpretation. Borgny died between ten and eleven at night, and her blood contained traces of ketamine, but the cause of death was drowning in blood from wounds inside her mouth. The examiner found twenty-four symmetrically arranged punctures, each exactly seven centimetres deep except for those that had pierced her face. Investigators could not identify the instrument. Nor did the cleaned concrete floor yield fingerprints, DNA, or shoe prints. Small grey-black stones found there did not match the site’s gravel; the report noted that similar stones might later help link locations. The wounds, missing traces, and anomalous stones turn the crime scene into a message whose meaning is initially unavailable, not a transparent account of what happened.

The later discovery of the hidden room at the Kadok Factory gives the staging a literal headquarters. Behind its door, Harry finds a windowless space with a black folding chair, a desk, a Dell monitor, and a wastebasket containing paper strips. A newspaper has been cut, and the headline left above the gap refers to someone dying in an avalanche. On the wall are images of Mark Olsen, Charlotte Lolles, Borgny Stem-Myhre, Adele Vetlesen, Elias Skog, Jussi Kolkka, and Tony Leike. Most are clippings or printed pages, but Adele’s photograph is a grainy enlargement showing her in a car with a long knife protruding from her neck. The killer has arranged both a record of the dead and evidence of his own authorship; the room resembles a control centre because it converts separate lives into elements of one private production.

False trails and directed suspicion

Adele Vetlesen’s disappearance shows how that production extends beyond the crime scene into travel, identity, and official records. Harry reconstructs a deception involving a woman who flew from Oslo on a false passport issued in Adele’s name. At Kigali, where passports were machine-read and their numbers checked, the traveller presented her own genuine passport instead. Since passport control did not require passengers to produce their tickets, the difference between the name on the ticket and the identity in the passport could pass unnoticed unless someone checked. The false itinerary made Adele appear to have travelled to Rwanda while obscuring what had happened to her.

Harry’s explanation of the murder links concealment to deliberate misdirection. Adele’s body was hidden in the deep water at an isolated place familiar to the killer, near the old rope works at Lyseren. Juliana Verni was then hired in Leipzig to travel to Rwanda under Adele’s name, stay at a hotel, and send a postcard Adele had written. She was also instructed to bring back the Leopoldsapfel, a weapon associated with the Congo. Harry’s reconstruction presents that choice as calculated: the weapon could point investigators toward Tony Leike, a Congo traveller, while Adele’s apparent African journey made it less likely that investigators would treat a rejected former lover as the obvious suspect. Juliana was paid after returning. The plan ultimately failed to keep her death concealed: she was thrown into a river, but her body surfaced and was found. A staged disappearance could redirect the investigation, but it could not guarantee control over what evidence would return.

The investigator becomes an audience

The killer’s appetite for control becomes explicit in Harry’s interpretation of the evidence. Harry imagines a puppeteer who has built a private universe in which events appear to obey him, and who seeks the heightened pleasure of celebrating victories in the presence of those he has defeated. In this account, apparent submissiveness is part of the disguise: the person directing the drama does not look like its director. Harry also argues that the aim may not always have been simply to kill Tony Leike. The killer may have wanted him imprisoned and convicted, because humiliation—the loss of everything a person possesses—could matter more than physical pain or death.

The revelations about Tony give this interpretation a personal edge. Harry concludes that the incident at Hävasshütte was not a rape, and that this reversal supplies the motive. He then connects the killer’s later actions to a desire to demonstrate superiority: Tony’s left middle finger was cut off, and his phone was used to call Harry from central Ustaoset. The finger was also left outside Harry’s office at the police headquarters, an act that brought the killer’s taunt directly into the investigators’ space. These gestures make the investigation itself part of the performance: the police are not merely following clues but being addressed through them.

Harry’s account also preserves uncertainty. He describes many details of the reconstruction as conjecture, even while distinguishing them from the verifiable plan to leave the country. After the Kadok Factory room is discovered, the killer requests leave and overtime compensation, intending to travel far away. His flight is booked for the day after tomorrow, routing through Stockholm to Bangkok. The escape plan is another attempt to manage the ending, but Harry and Björn Holm recognize the timetable and move toward him. Manipulation and staging therefore define both the killer’s apparent mastery and its limit: he can arrange scenes, identities, and suspicions, yet each arrangement leaves traces that allow Harry to turn the performance back into evidence.