Adele Vetlesen's Hotel Registration Card

Adele Vetlesen's Hotel Registration Card is a document Harry Hole sees at the Gorilla Hotel in Kigali while investigating the disappearance of Adele Vetlesen. Its importance lies less in any recorded detail—the evidence does not describe the card's contents—than in the questions it prompts: whether Adele's purported travel can be verified, and whether the handwriting on the card can be compared with that on a postcard attributed to her.

Identification and Discovery

Harry tells Kaja Solness that he is at the Gorilla Hotel in Kigali and has seen Adele's guest card there. The conversation supplies no image, date, signature description, or other specific field from the document, so the card cannot independently establish when Adele stayed at the hotel or who completed it. What is established is that a record attributed to her was present at the Kigali hotel and drew Harry's attention during the inquiry.

The card acquires significance against the investigation's existing travel trail. Adele, 28 and from Drammen, had been reported missing by her partner in November. A Norwegian State Railways ticket search showed that she bought a ticket from Drammen to Ustaoset for November 7, the same date Borgny Stem-Myhre bought a ticket to Ustaoset from Kongsberg. Separately, records of hut bookings linked Iska Peller's account to two beds at each of four mountain huts, with the Hävasshütte near Ustaoset among them. These findings connect Adele's disappearance to the mountain investigation; the hotel card introduces a further, geographically distant strand without itself resolving the connection.

Examination and Corroboration

Harry asks Kaja to obtain the postcard Adele wrote and have it brought to the station when her train passes through Drammen. He proposes comparing its signature with the signature on the hotel card, using Jean Hue, a graphologist who had worked for the Kriminalamt before early retirement. The card is therefore treated as a possible handwriting specimen: potentially useful for testing whether the hotel record and postcard were written by the same person, but not a result in itself.

Harry first asks Kaja to arrange for Hue to meet them at the office at seven the next morning. He then revises the plan, offering instead to scan Adele's hotel card and email it so Kaja can take both documents to Hue that evening. The exchange records an intended investigative procedure, not the outcome of the comparison; the evidence supplied does not say whether the scan was sent or what Hue concluded.

Role in the Travel Inquiry

The card sits alongside a separate request to check four women's names against the passenger list for flight RA 101 to Kigali on November 25 and Rwanda's hotel-booking systems for that night. That check is framed as a way to identify which person was absent from both records. The passage does not explicitly state that the card was used in that database search, and its presence at the Gorilla Hotel should not be conflated with proof that the named traveler took that flight or stayed there on November 25.

Its evidentiary role is consequently provisional but concrete. The card gives Harry a document associated with Adele at a Kigali hotel, while the proposed handwriting comparison and the independent checks of travel and lodging records seek to test the identity and itinerary behind that association. The card advances the inquiry by making verification possible; the available account leaves the verification unresolved.