The Kadok Factory Arson is the moment Harry Hole finds the hidden archive connecting several murders—and nearly dies before he can secure its evidence. In a windowless room, photographs of victims and a page from the Hävasshütte guestbook point toward the investigation’s concealed pattern. Then a fire erupts, the extinguisher brought to fight it proves to contain a combustible liquid, and the attempt to preserve the clues becomes a desperate escape. The blaze destroys the room’s contents and spreads into the factory, leaving the discovery both decisive and costly.

The Factory Room and the Evidence

Harry enters a dark, windowless room that he estimates at three metres by three. Its sparse contents appear orderly: a black folding chair, a desk with a Dell computer and lamp, and cleanly finished edges. Paper strips in the wastebasket and a copy of Dagbladet with part of its front page cut away suggest that someone has been collecting and altering printed material. The excised headline reads that a person had died in an avalanche. To Harry, the missing piece and the hidden room together signal that he has reached the place he was looking for.

The wall supplies the discovery’s larger significance. Photographs or printed images show Mark Olsen, Charlotte Lolles, Borgny Stem-Myhre, Adele Vetlesen, Elias Skog, Jussi Kolkka, and Tony Leike. Juliana Verni, a prostitute from Leipzig, is not among them. Most of the images appear to have been cut from newspapers or printed from online newspaper pages. Adele’s image is different: a grainy enlargement of her in profile on a car’s passenger seat, with a long knife bearing a bright yellow handle protruding from her neck. The photograph makes her apparent disappearance look like concealment of a killing, not a journey that ended beyond the police’s reach.

Letters are pinned beneath the images. Harry reads their opening lines, then notices that one text continues beyond what he can examine. The room also contains a rough-edged sheet divided into columns, with handwritten entries in several different hands. He recognizes it as a page from the Hävasshütte guestbook and reaches for it. Its importance is sharpened by the investigation’s earlier trail: Adele Vetlesen and Borgny Stem-Myhre had tickets to Ustaoset on the same date, while Iska Peller’s account had been charged for pairs of beds at four mountain huts on a four-day route, including Hävasshütte. Elias Skog had later described seeing a woman and a man outside the hut’s outhouse; in retrospect, the scene he had taken for a sexual encounter might have been an assault. The page could preserve a record bearing on that night, but the fire interrupts Harry before he can secure it.

The Fire Takes Hold

The danger is first legible as a set of details Harry has not yet assembled. The room smells of ammonia. He notices the desk lamp and a blue ceiling, then sees the ragged, handwritten sheet and understands that the alarm in his mind is not about the paper. A later fire-brigade account explains the ignition: a spark from electrical wiring entered a box containing ammonia gas, which ignited the PSG coating on the ceiling and part of the wall. What follows is described as an explosive fire rather than an explosion in the strict sense.

Harry is struck by the heat as the flames consume the room’s oxygen. He drops to his knees, checks whether his hair is burning, then forces himself upright and reaches toward the guestbook page. An officer appears in the doorway with a fire extinguisher under one arm and a hose in his hand. The extinguisher does not deliver the expected foam or powder. Its stream is brownish yellow and liquid; Harry recognizes the smell of gasoline, and the burning liquid carries the flames toward the officer. The equipment that should have offered rescue becomes part of the hazard. Its conspicuous placement in the break room, and its apparent sabotage, make the attempt to fight the fire look like a prepared trap rather than a simple accident.

Escape and Destruction

Harry charges the officer at waist height and knocks him backward into the break room. They scatter chairs and get beneath the tables as the burning extinguisher rolls after them, its hose dripping rubber. Harry hauls the dazed officer toward the door and onto the gallery, then pulls him down with him. The fire captain’s later term for what happens next is a fire explosion: the windows are forced out and the break room becomes a mass of flames. Harry’s intervention changes the immediate outcome from entrapment to escape, but it cannot save the room or its contents.

Afterward, darkness has fallen over the factory grounds. Harry stands beside Björn Holm with a wool blanket over his shoulders and a large paper cup in his hand while firefighters remove the last buckets of PSG that will ever leave the factory. When Holm asks about the victim images, Harry confirms that they were all there except for Juliana Verni. The investigators ask whether the sheet was definitely the Hävasshütte guestbook page, but the fire has deprived them of the clearest chance to examine the material in place.

The fireman’s report on the blaze does not restore the destroyed evidence. When asked for the result rather than the cause, he says that the room has burned out completely: the papers, furniture, and computer are all gone. The secret archive has yielded a powerful visual connection among victims and a possible link to the mountain-hut investigation, yet its records cannot now be recovered from the room. The scene therefore delivers a reversal: Harry reaches the evidence, but a mechanism that turns the room itself into a weapon destroys the archive almost as soon as he finds it.

Significance to the Investigation

The wall makes the factory room more than a hidden workplace. By placing the images of Mark Olsen, Charlotte Lolles, Borgny Stem-Myhre, Adele Vetlesen, Elias Skog, Jussi Kolkka, and Tony Leike together, it presents the scattered cases as part of a single field of attention. The omission of Juliana Verni is also concrete: the display is extensive, but not a complete inventory of everyone connected with the murders. Adele’s photograph is especially consequential because it challenges the false travel trail. A woman had flown from Oslo using a passport in Adele Vetlesen’s name, while the passport control in Kigali recorded no arrival under that name; the image at the factory instead indicates that Adele had been killed.

The guestbook page ties the room’s archive back to Hävasshütte, where the route, the shared date, and Elias Skog’s belatedly reinterpreted sighting converge. Yet the event does not supply a complete explanation of who caused the blaze or how every item on the wall was assembled. What it establishes is the cost of reaching the evidence: the archive’s contents become visible at the very moment the fire makes them inaccessible. Harry and the officer get out, but the papers, computer, and furniture are lost, and the factory is left to the firefighters. The Arson thus marks both an investigative breakthrough and the destruction of the material record that might have carried it further.