Nydalen is an Oslo district whose changing landscape frames two very different spaces in the murder investigation: a cellar in an unfinished office complex where Borgny Stem-Myhre is found, and the derelict Kadok factory where Harry Hole later discovers a hidden room of evidence. The district’s mixture of polished redevelopment and abandoned industry gives these sites a shared setting without making them the same crime scene: one is a place of bodily violence, the other a concealed workspace used to arrange and preserve the story around it.

A district between redevelopment and decline

Nydalen is presented as a visible example of Oslo’s industrial decline and reinvention. Former industrial buildings have either been cleared for carefully designed glass-and-steel offices or converted into television studios, restaurants, and large lofts. Some lofts retain exposed ventilation and water pipes as part of their appeal. Advertising agencies rent these raw-looking spaces to project an innovative identity, although their rents are no cheaper than offices in the city centre. The district’s apparent informality is itself a fashionable, costly choice.

That bright redevelopment has not transformed every industrial site. The abandoned Kadok factory stands apart from the district’s converted buildings, on a remote parcel behind wooden fences on the western bank of the Akerselva. Its neglect makes it nearly disappear from view, while its locked gate seems incongruously secure. Nydalen is therefore not simply a backdrop of new offices: its contrasts preserve the possibility of hidden spaces amid conspicuous urban change.

The cellar where Borgny is found

The first newspaper accounts Harry reads describe a murder in Nydalen, in the cellar of an unfinished office complex. The cause of death is initially unclear, though the police do not rule out a violent crime. As Harry reviews the case material, he recognizes that description as the site where Borgny Stem-Myhre was found. The setting is a building still under construction, not one of Nydalen’s polished, occupied offices.

Borgny had left the Mono after an evening event and was believed to be heading for a taxi stand. No driver working nearby recognized her in the available images or recalled taking her toward Sagene. After she vanished from view, two Polish bricklayers arriving for work noticed that the cellar’s iron door had been forced open. They went inside and found her fully clothed in the middle of the room, her body twisted. The cellar’s unfinished, enclosed character makes the place a stark counterpoint to the public social event from which she had disappeared.

The press archive gives Harry a way to reconstruct how the case first entered public view: the second murder appears in the papers two weeks after the first. Nydalen thus anchors the investigation not only to a crime scene but also to its unfolding chronology, as Harry moves from scattered reports toward a pattern linking separate cases.

The Kadok factory and its hidden room

The factory’s abandonment began fourteen years before Harry searches it. After years of losses and competition from Chinese dumping, PSG Manufacturing Company closed Kadok. The founder’s heirs then fought over the inheritance, leaving the remote property to deteriorate rather than sharing in Nydalen’s redevelopment. Scrub and trees gradually screened the factory from curious eyes. The overgrowth helps explain why a substantial padlock on the entrance strikes Harry as suspicious rather than reassuring.

Harry obtains a search warrant and has an officer cut through the lock. Inside, he and the police encounter another barrier: a door that takes three attempts to force open. Beyond it is a windowless room roughly three metres square, smelling of ammonia. Harry’s flashlight picks out a black folding chair, a desk, a Dell monitor, and a neatly arranged workspace. The keyboard’s E and N keys remain intact; the desk edges are cleanly sanded and unmarked. In the wastebasket are strips of paper, alongside a copy of Dagbladet with part of its front page cut away. The surviving headline announces a death in an avalanche, making the clipping a concrete link to the case Harry is pursuing. Photographs hang on the wall, turning the room from an anonymous hideaway into a place where evidence and images of the victims have been assembled.

Discovery, fire, and narrative significance

The abandoned factory is not the cellar where Borgny was found. Its importance lies in what the search reveals: a concealed room within a neglected industrial site, furnished as a working space and filled with material connected to the murders. The district’s two crime-related locations consequently serve different functions in the investigation. The unfinished office cellar is where a victim is discovered; the factory is where Harry reaches a store of evidence that changes what the investigators can establish about the case.

After Harry leaves the factory grounds, Björn Holm calls with the forensic result from semen on Adele Vetlesen’s ski pants: the laboratory has obtained a DNA profile. The call follows the discovery closely, adding a new investigative consequence to the factory episode. Later, Harry stands watching smoke pour from the factory windows into the fire crews’ lights. His grim reference to feeling as though he had been freshly nailed in Nydalen binds the district to the cost of the search as well as its discoveries. Nydalen’s significance is therefore spatial and investigative: its uneven urban fabric shelters both the exposed aftermath of violence and a hidden archive that helps make the murders legible.