Metallkugel mit Nadeln

Metallkugel mit Nadeln is a metal device whose transformation inside Borgny Stem-Myhre’s mouth turns a small, enigmatic object into the instrument of her murder. Its central role is both physical and evidentiary: it inflicts the wounds that make her death appear to result from drowning, while its distinctive construction links the crime to other murders.

Appearance and Use

The object is about the size of a billiard ball, made of shiny metal and marked with small punched holes, figures, and signs. A red wire ending in a loop protrudes from one of the holes. In the room where Borgny is held, the object lies on a white camping table among sparse furnishings: two chairs, two empty beer bottles, and a lamp leaning against a bare concrete wall. Its strange appearance contrasts with the ordinary objects around it, but the red wire makes it part of the immediate threat. With a knife held at her throat, Borgny is told to put the ball in her mouth. She pushes it in until only the wire remains outside.</final

Trigger and Fatal Mechanism

The ball does not kill Borgny Stem-Myhre merely by puncturing her. When she wakes, it has expanded inside her mouth; its pressure holds steady even as she opens her jaws, while the knobs press against her palate, the soft tissue beneath her tongue, the insides of her teeth, and her uvula. She tries to speak, but produces only inarticulate sounds. The killer studies her mouth with the concentration of a dentist checking a brace, then injects her in the throat and warns her not to touch the wire. Within seconds, she loses consciousness.

When the anaesthetic briefly wears off, Borgny senses someone behind her in the dark and reaches into empty air. Pain and swelling in her throat make her believe she will suffocate; the ball has left her no way to speak or call for help. Her fingers find the wire at her lips. She draws it carefully until it tightens, then pulls it out. The warning has made the wire the mechanism’s visible point of danger, but the pressure and terror of the trap leave her trying to act with almost no room to choose.

The release drives seven-centimetre needles out of the knobs. The account specifies four piercing both cheeks, three entering the sinuses, two the nasal passage, two emerging through the chin, one penetrating the oesophagus, one the right eyeball, and two passing through the rear palate into the brain. The forensic report later counts 24 symmetrical punctures in Borgny’s mouth, each exactly seven centimetres deep except those that pass through the face. Yet the narrative identifies neither the brain wounds nor the other punctures as the direct cause of death. The ball blocks her mouth, preventing her from spitting out the blood flowing from the wounds in her throat. She inhales it instead; it enters her windpipe and lungs, prevents oxygen from reaching her blood, and leads to cardiac arrest and cerebral hypoxia. The report’s clinical conclusion is that Borgny drowned.

Forensic Signature and Investigative Meaning

The device’s operation left a distinctive pattern, but not an immediately recognizable weapon. Borgny Stem-Myhre was found fully clothed in a basement after two Polish bricklayers noticed the broken padlock on its iron door. The medical examiner placed her death between 10 and 11 p.m. and found ketanomin in her blood, consistent with the rapid incapacitation described in the scene. The 24 symmetrical punctures in her mouth, most exactly seven centimetres deep, were unlike anything the investigators had encountered; they did not know what instrument could have produced them. The medical report’s finding that she had drowned therefore concealed a mechanism whose physical signature was extraordinary.

The crime scene offered little immediate help in identifying its maker or user. There were no fingerprints, DNA, or shoe or boot impressions. The concrete floor had been cleaned the previous day in preparation for heating cables and new flooring, a mundane circumstance that had erased traces the investigation might otherwise have used. A later report documented two small grey-black stones that did not match the gravel at the scene. The examiner suggested that stones lodged in heavily treaded boots could fall out on a hard surface such as concrete, and noted that these unusual fragments might become useful if similar ones appeared elsewhere. This left the object with an inverse kind of forensic visibility: its effects were unmistakable, while the person who brought it to the basement had left no conventional trace.

The comparison with Charlotte Lolles’s murder made the device’s pattern more consequential. Her medical report repeated the combination of a sedative, 24 punctures in the mouth, and death by drowning, with no other external violence and no sign of sexual assault. Her death occurred later, between 11 p.m. and midnight. Traces of iron and coltan on the inside of two of her teeth prompted investigators to recognize that the same substances had also been found on Borgny’s teeth. The recurrence turned what might have seemed like an isolated atrocity into a material link between victims, even before investigators could identify the weapon itself.

That link became part of a wider and unstable chain of inference. Harry’s reconstruction placed Charlotte in the company of a missing woman while also locating Charlotte, Borgny, and Marit Olsen near Ustaoset. Later, Beate Lønn challenged the assumption that Tony Leike’s apparent alibi settled the case: the weapon had been procured in the Congo, where Leike had a business project, and other traces also pointed toward him. Harry argued that the Kavalier had deliberately arranged those connections, paying Juliana Verni to travel to the Congo because evidence leading there would implicate Leike. The object thus functioned not only as a killing device and a recurring forensic signature, but also as a means of directing suspicion. Its clues mattered; their apparent destination did not, by itself, establish who had wielded it.

Clues, Materials, and Misdirection

The traces on the victims’ teeth helped turn the device from an inexplicable instrument into part of a larger investigative pattern. In reviewing Charlotte Lolles’s report, Harry recognized that iron and coltan had been found on the inside of her teeth as well as on Borgny Stem-Myhre’s. The coltan prompted an association with a robot he remembered as being assembled from that material; the clue was not yet an identification of the weapon, but it made the repeated residue harder to dismiss as incidental. Later, Beate Lønn pointed out that the murder weapon had been obtained in the Congo, in the same region where Tony Leike had a business project. Harry’s answer changed the meaning of that connection: he argued that the Kavalier had paid Juliana Verni to travel there precisely because any Congolese trail would lead investigators toward Leike. The device’s material evidence therefore carried two kinds of force at once: it linked murders through a recurring physical signature, yet its apparent geographic lead could be manipulated to misdirect the investigation.