Rikshospitalet is the setting for several of the novel’s most intimate encounters with the aftermath of violence and illness. Harry Hole comes there to sit beside his father, Olav Hole, and to find Kaja Solness after she is rescued from the avalanche at Hävasshütte. Later, the hospital becomes a place of shared vigil for Harry and his sister Søs. Clinical routine, public news, and private family history gather around the bedsides, making the hospital less a backdrop than a threshold between investigation and personal loss.

A place of waiting and uncertain news

When Harry sits beside Olav, Dr. Abel has reported no change in his condition. Harry studies his father’s unchanged face while the heart monitor gives out an interrupted plip-plop rhythm. The scene makes waiting tangible: the display supplies numbers, but no evident movement in Olav’s condition. Sigurd Altman enters, greets Harry, and copies those numbers onto a notepad, bringing a precise professional task into the same room as Harry’s anxious attention to his father.

Harry is not at first certain where Kaja is being treated. He explains that he came to visit her but does not know which ward she is on, and asks Altman for help. The exchange shows how the hospital contains separate, urgent stories that Harry must navigate even while he is already at a bedside. Altman identifies Kaja as Harry’s colleague, brought in by rescue helicopter the previous night and kept in intensive care pending test results. She had been under the snow for a long time, so her survival remains accompanied by medical uncertainty.

Kaja’s recovery and the avalanche report

The hospital brings Kaja’s physical ordeal into the same space as the investigation’s public retelling. Altman says that hearing Hävasshütte had made him think she was the Australian witness mentioned on the radio. Harry corrects him: the Australian woman was in Bristol, Sydney, warm and comfortable, with her own guards and extensive room service. The contrast is pointed. Kaja, the colleague who had actually been buried in snow, is in intensive care; the other woman is protected elsewhere under very different circumstances.

When Harry later sits with Kaja, her face is pale against the pillow and her hand is small and cold in his. On the bedside table lies Aftenposten, whose front-page story describes the Hävasshütte avalanche. The report quotes Mikael Bellman calling Jussi Kolkka’s death a great loss, while also expressing relief that the witness Kolkka had been protecting was rescued and is now safe. The newspaper therefore offers a public account of the event within Kaja’s private recovery room, but its language does not settle every question. Kaja asks whether dynamite triggered the avalanche, and Harry answers that there is little doubt. The conversation connects her immediate survival to the lethal circumstances still being examined.

The hospital as a point of departure

Rikshospitalet also marks a transition from bedside waiting back into the investigation. At five past six, Björn Holm stops his Volvo Amazon at the tram stop outside the hospital, where Altman is waiting with his hands in his duffle coat pockets. Harry, seated in the back, signals for Altman to take the front passenger seat. After Altman and Björn greet each other, the car heads toward Sinsenkrysset.

As they leave, Harry explains that he had possessed the elements of the case but needed a catalyst to make them react. He identifies that catalyst as a sick man, a murderer called Schneemann, and a bottle in a bar cabinet, then asks whether he may smoke. The hospital is not the setting for the revelation itself, but the departure gives the scene a clear edge: the vigil and medical uncertainty remain behind as Harry resumes the work of interpreting the evidence. The movement from the hospital entrance into the car links private crisis with renewed investigative momentum without making the two interchangeable.

A family vigil among the flowers

Later, Harry and Søs sit silently at Olav’s bedside. Vases have accumulated on the nightstand and two other tables, sent over the preceding days. Harry reads the cards and discovers one from Lise, a woman he has never heard of. Until that moment, he has not considered that his father might have had other women in his life besides Harry’s mother. The hospital room thus becomes a place where Olav’s past can surface even though he is unable to explain it himself.

The other flowers have come from colleagues and neighbors who somehow learned that Olav was nearing the end. Harry sees their sickly-sweet scent and the senders’ absence together: people who knew Olav could no longer see them have sent flowers, perhaps to compensate for not making time to visit. In his perception, the blossoms crowd around the bed like vultures, their drooping heads and red and yellow shapes turning customary gestures of sympathy into an image of death. The room holds care, regret, and belated attention at once.

Søs quietly reminds Harry that mobile phones are not allowed there. When he returns to Rikshospitalet, she is still beside their father, leafing through a magazine and eating an apple; more flowers have appeared. She tells Harry that he looks exhausted and should go home. He laughs softly and tells her that she should leave instead, since she has sat there alone long enough. Their exchange does not resolve the vigil or Olav’s condition. It shows the siblings taking turns in words, if not yet in action, and makes the bedside a shared responsibility amid a room increasingly crowded with signs of other people’s delayed concern.