Congo

Congo matters to the novel as more than a far-off setting: it is a landscape of mineral extraction and danger in Tony Leike’s account, a link in the chain of evidence around the murders of Borgny Stem-Myhre and Charlotte Lolles, and the destination of Harry Hole and Kaja Solness’s search for Lene Galtung. The country’s importance shifts as the investigation develops. First it seems to explain Leike’s business and experience; then it becomes a misleading trail deliberately constructed by the murderer; finally, it is where the detectives pursue a living witness and encounter Leike’s own account of violence and history.

A Distant Place with Investigative Reach

Congo enters the murder inquiry through travel and geography. A woman with an East German accent had been in Görna, described as roughly a three-hour drive from Kigali, where she bought what the investigators believed was the weapon used to kill Borgny Stem-Myhre and Charlotte Lolles. A passport copy from Leipzig matched the description of Juliana Verni, whose distinctive rust-red curls helped connect the purchaser to the wider investigation. The route made Congo appear to be a concrete link between the killings and Tony Leike, whose business interests were known to be there.

The country’s connection to the earlier victims also sits beside a separate mountain-route investigation. Adele Vetlesen and Borgny Stem-Myhre had each bought a ticket to Ustaoset on November 7, while Iska Peller’s account showed payment for pairs of beds at four mountain huts, including Hävasshütte. These journeys do not establish that the victims travelled to Congo; instead, they show how the case gathers connections across very different places. The hut records establish one route through Norway, while the weapon’s reported origin in Görna appears to open another, international one.

Mines, Minerals, and Leike’s Ambitions

Leike describes first working for a security company at a diamond mine in what was then called Zaire. He recalls that the group could be unsure which country it was in, surrounded by green and black darkness until sunrise. He learned to read a map and compass by headlamp, though he says the compass was unreliable because of the amount of metal in the ground. The account establishes both his practical experience in the region and his familiarity with work conducted far from ordinary infrastructure.

His later ambitions centred on coltan. Leike recounts travelling with his group in the northeast of Congo during the boom in mobile-phone production in the 1990s. At a mine run by French operators with local partners, children used picks and shovels to dig out material that looked like ordinary rock but could yield tantalum. Leike says he saw the financial possibility in modernising such a mine and operating it properly, provided he could find sponsors. His account places the mineral within a supply chain extending from Congolese excavation to phones and game consoles, while exposing the harsh labour behind that market.

The venture did not bring the security he sought. Leike says he borrowed money, was cheated by partners, lost everything, borrowed again, was cheated again, and continued until he began to earn some money. By the time Harry questions him, the Congo project is still financially precarious: the future father-in-law’s money is supposed to help rescue it. That pressure gives the country an intimate importance in the Norwegian investigation, linking a remote enterprise to Leike’s public engagement and to the possible concealment of his private conduct.

The Weapon and the False Trail

The murder weapon’s Congolese connection initially appears to reinforce suspicion of Leike. He has travelled in the region, operates mines there, and needs money for his project; the woman identified through the Leipzig passport material is associated with the weapon’s purchase in Görna. But Harry ultimately explains that the apparent connection was engineered. The murderer paid Juliana Verni to travel to Congo because any trail leading there would inevitably draw attention to Leike.

The country is therefore both a real part of Leike’s history and a constructed piece of evidence against him. The weapon, called the Leopoldsapfel, was selected not only for its use in the murders but also for the geographical association it would create. The resulting clue is persuasive precisely because it rests on true circumstances: Leike has Congolese business interests and a history in the region. The investigation’s reversal lies in recognising that a genuine connection can still be made to serve a false conclusion.

The Pursuit to Goma

Congo becomes a present destination when Harry decides to return there to find Lene Galtung. He tells Gunnar Hagen that the search is for a missing person, although Hagen points out that Galtung is not officially missing. The urgency comes from a cluster of circumstances rather than a confirmed disappearance: Juliana Verni, or a woman with rust-red hair, has booked a flight from Zürich to Görna; Galtung recently withdrew two million euros from a Zürich account; and the sum, Harry argues, could keep Leike’s mine project afloat through a difficult period.

The pursuit is complicated by the practical limits of policing. Harry notes that there is no agreement for police cooperation between Norway and Congo, and that a traveller using a deceased person’s passport might not be stopped simply because the passport holder had died. The possibility of bribing one’s way out of arrest further weakens any expectation that formal procedure will secure a quick result. These obstacles make the journey more than a change of scene: the detectives are moving into a place where their authority and access are uncertain.

Harry and Kaja Solness leave Oslo and reach Goma after a twelve-hour journey. As Kaja wakes with her head on Harry’s shoulder, the captain announces their descent; a flight from Zürich carrying Juliana Verni is due to land six hours later. The timing places two possible lines of pursuit in the same destination, but the passage does not yet resolve what the detectives will find. Congo remains a space of anticipation, where travel documents, money, and the identity of the person arriving all matter to the search.

Leike’s View of the Country

In the later Congo sequence, Leike presents mining as both economic necessity and moral justification. Riding along a narrow road, he claims that without the mine there would be no road and that entrepreneurs like him are the only hope of helping people in countries such as Congo progress. He contrasts that claim with a brutal picture of armed survival, insisting that those who feed a hungry child may later see the same eyes through the sight of an automatic weapon. His speech turns local poverty into an argument for his own enterprise, while revealing the severity with which he understands the world around him.

Leike describes life in Africa as a cycle of rainy and dry seasons, night and day, predator and prey, life and death. In his account, inherited experience determines how people think and behave, and survival means taking what can be gained. The speech is not presented as a neutral description of Congo: it is Leike’s attempt to explain and defend a worldview in which violence appears inevitable. Kaja does not answer. Her attention remains on Lene Galtung, seated in the passenger seat with her shoulders pressed back, silent and motionless. That visible captivity gives the scene a counterweight to Leike’s abstractions: the country he describes through cycles and necessity is also the setting of an immediate imbalance of power.

Congo’s narrative function thus changes from clue to destination and finally to contested reality. It first offers the investigators an apparently decisive link to Leike; Harry’s explanation exposes how that link was planted; and the later journey places the detectives within the unstable conditions that Leike invokes to justify his ambitions. The same place holds mineral wealth, exploited labour, investigative uncertainty, and the pursuit of a captive woman, without reducing any one of those realities to the others.