Roger Gjendem

Roger Gjendem is a crime journalist at Aftenposten whose inquiry into Mikael Bellman depends on people and memories outside official accounts. By tracing informants from Manglerud and locating Julie in an MC club, he assembles a damaging account of Bellman’s earlier conduct and relationships.

Identity and Introduction

Roger appears as a working reporter, calling Truls Berntsen to ask for a few answers. Truls initially assumes the questions concern Jussi Kolkka; Roger offers his condolences, then makes clear that the interview is about someone else. The exchange establishes both the immediate tact of his reporting and the distinction he draws between the subject Truls expects and the one Roger is pursuing.

His larger investigation is focused on Bellman. After speaking with Bent Nordbo at Stopp Pressen!, Roger spends the day, and part of the night, looking into him. A rumor about Bellman beating a police trainee in Stovner is the one apparent blemish he has found so far, leaving Roger to test the polished public impression against older, less formal testimony.

Sources and Reporting Method

Roger has cultivated a loose network of unreliable informants, people he understands may trade information for a bottle of liquor or a hit of heroin. Rather than treating any one source as decisive, he follows leads across several people: three of his informants live in Manglerud, and all three grew up there. Their shared local history gives his inquiry a specific route into Bellman’s past, although the sources’ reliability remains an explicit complication.

The three informants all remember Bellman. They describe him as a particularly disliked police officer in Stovner, but their sharper recollection concerns his pursuit of Ulla Swart while her boyfriend Julie was imprisoned. According to the account they pass on, Julie’s original suspended sentence was revoked after someone disclosed that he had stolen petrol in Mortensrud. When he left prison determined to confront Bellman, two masked men were waiting in a garage as he went to collect his Kawasaki. They beat him with iron bars and warned him to stay away from Bellman and Ulla. Roger’s reporting brings together the old sentence, the assault, and the threat as parts of a single remembered history; the available account presents these details as what the informants say and what rumor holds, not as independently verified findings.

Finding Julie

Roger eventually tracks Julie to an MC club in Alnabru. Julie eats and sleeps there and lives as a free man, but his movements are tightly bounded: he goes no farther than the Prix shop for snus and bread. Roger recognizes this attachment to familiar surroundings, routines, and security as something he has encountered in other former prisoners. That observation shapes the circumstances of the interview without turning Julie’s restricted life into proof of Bellman’s conduct.

Julie is surprisingly quick to discuss the past once Bellman becomes the subject. He recalls Ulla as his wife and as the most desired woman in Manglerud, then singles Bellman out as the man whose pursuit of her seemed most obsessive. Roger takes notes as Julie speaks. The reporting scene therefore supplies a personal account to accompany the informants’ shared recollections, while making clear that the disclosure rests on Julie’s perspective and memory.

Narrative Role and Limits

Roger’s importance lies in the way he redirects attention from Bellman’s apparently clean record toward the testimony of people connected to his youth. The contrast is between the thin rumor attached to Bellman’s police career and the more intimate, troubling story preserved in Manglerud: a relationship, a prison release, a masked beating, and a warning. Roger does not appear as an investigator with official authority; his means are calls, informants, and a conversation in an MC club, and the evidence he gathers remains mediated through those sources.

The passages portray reporting as patient accumulation rather than a single revelation. Roger follows the Bellman lead through multiple contacts, recognizes the limits of unreliable informants, and records Julie’s account when the name of Bellman opens the conversation. The result is not a final adjudication of the past but a concrete, source-based challenge to the impression that Bellman has nothing to hide.