Formation of Harry Hole's clandestine investigation team is the moment a politically risky murder inquiry becomes a three-person operation: Harry Hole, Kaja Solness, and Björn Holm investigate on the understanding that their department can disown their work. Gunnar Hagen approves the team but attaches a condition of secrecy and deniability. Their headquarters, a stark room inside Botsen Prison, gives the arrangement a physical form: the investigators are close to the police institution, yet hidden from its ordinary offices and oversight.

The Case and the Need for Secrecy

Harry asks Hagen for a team of three, consistent with his preference for working without a large investigative group. Hagen accepts the small size partly because fewer participants mean less chance that the Kriminalamt or Justizministerium will learn that they are investigating the murders. Their disagreement over the case’s scope is immediate. Hagen refers to a double murder and hesitates over whether Marit Olsen belongs in the same series; Harry insists that the pattern makes it a triple murder. He points to the repeated circumstance of a woman alone at night being taken somewhere and killed in an unconventional way, and argues that Oslo is small enough for the investigators’ paths to cross with the Kriminalamt’s if they are not careful.

The secrecy is not merely administrative. Hagen sets out what will happen if the investigation becomes public: the department will express regret that some of its personnel were involved, while presenting the inquiry as a lone operation conducted by the notorious outsider Harry without the department leadership’s knowledge. Harry is expected to confirm that account. The team therefore begins with an explicit division between the work it undertakes and the version of events its institution is prepared to acknowledge. Its small size limits exposure, but the cost of that protection falls especially on Harry, who is assigned the role of scapegoat in advance.

The underlying evidence helps explain why Harry is unwilling to treat the deaths as separate cases. Borgny Stem-Myhre had last been seen leaving the Mono after an evening event; neither the available taxi drivers nor the records Harry reviews place her in a cab to Sagene. Two Polish construction workers later found her fully clothed in a basement, lying in a twisted position. The medical findings were unusually specific: she died between ten and eleven at night, ketamine was present in her blood, and blood from wounds in her mouth caused her to drown. The examiner recorded 24 symmetrically arranged punctures, each seven centimeters deep except for those that passed through the face. No fingerprints, DNA, or shoe impressions were found. The baffling method, combined with the absence of ordinary traces, gives the investigation a distinctive puzzle rather than a routine case file.

Recruitment and the Team’s Terms

The team takes shape through a separate act of institutional permission. Beate Lonn tells Kaja that she is being released for fourteen days to work on the murders, with a first report due on her desk in five working days. Kaja’s response is intensely enthusiastic, though she tries to keep it under control. Harry then confirms that Hagen agrees to her participation. The declared membership is limited to Holm, Kaja, and Harry; the case they are working on is confidential, and they are to meet in Harry’s office at seven the next morning.

That instruction makes the operation both definite and provisional. The three investigators have a start time, a reporting obligation, and an agreed boundary around who knows their subject, but they do not have an ordinary office or an openly sanctioned major investigation. The strict early report deadline also sits beside the demand for secrecy: Kaja must report upward on their work while the team avoids attracting the attention of the organizations that might take control of it. Harry’s condition that the team remain small is thus reflected in the roster, while Hagen’s condition determines how the roster can be represented if discovered.

A Headquarters Beneath the Institution

The choice of headquarters is made when Harry asks Hagen where they will establish it. Hagen looks toward the gray walls of Botsen Prison, and Harry recognizes the suggestion as a joke—until it proves to be their destination. At 6:58 the following morning, Harry, Kaja, and Holm walk through a 400-meter underground tunnel connecting police headquarters to the Oslo District Prison. The passage has served practical and less benign purposes: it can be used to bring prisoners to questioning, as a winter running route, and, in earlier times, for unofficial rough treatment of especially resistant prisoners.

At the tunnel’s end, the trio duck beneath the stairs leading to the cell block. Harry unlocks an iron door, and stale warmth meets them. The room is a windowless concrete space lit by cold blue neon, with gray-blue linoleum and bare walls. It has no heating of its own and none of the usual comforts of a working office. Its equipment is limited to tables, chairs, and three computers, with a brown-crusted coffee machine and a jug of water on the floor. The nearby prison boilers account for the room’s heat; the practical necessities are present, but only just. Kaja accepts the place with dry good humor, while Holm compares its atmosphere to hell. Mobile reception is unreliable, though the room has an internet connection.

The location gives the clandestine arrangement its defining contrast. The team is not outside the police system: its room lies beneath the police-and-prison complex and can be reached directly from headquarters. Yet the tunnel, locked iron door, lack of windows, and uneasy history of the passage make the work feel secluded from ordinary institutional life. The room is at once a functioning workplace and a deliberately marginal one, equipped for investigation but stripped of visibility and comfort.

What the Team’s Investigation Connects

The subsequent investigative clues show the kind of pattern Harry’s insistence on a third murder is meant to pursue. Kaja finds that Adele Vetlesen, a 28-year-old woman from Drammen reported missing by her partner in November, bought a train ticket online on November 7 from Drammen to Ustaoset. Borgny Stem-Myhre bought a ticket from Kongsberg to the same destination for that date. The shared destination turns a missing-person report into a possible link with a woman whose murder had already resisted explanation.

A further transaction connects the inquiry to Iska Peller. Her account was charged on November 20 for two beds in each of four mountain huts, with the huts about a day’s walk apart. The final hut was Hävasshütte, where the pair had been on November 7, roughly half a day’s walk from Ustaoset. These details supply a route and a date, not yet a complete explanation: tickets and hut bookings establish converging movements, while the relationship between those movements and the killings still has to be tested.

An account from Elias Skog adds another layer to the team’s eventual reconstruction. At Hävasshütte, he woke to noises and saw a man behind a woman beneath the outhouse roof. The man covered her mouth and pulled her into the outhouse. Elias initially interpreted what he saw as the beginning of sex; after reading about the murders, he reconsidered whether the woman might have been struggling to escape and the covered mouth meant to silence a cry for help. Later, when Harry learns that Tony Leike raped Adele at Hävasshütte, he realizes that the apparent explanation still does not fit: it was not a rape, and that distinction is the motive. The eventual reversal demonstrates why the team’s work cannot rest on a pattern alone. The shared night and isolated setting matter, but the meaning of what happened there has to be re-examined as new information arrives.

Significance of the Formation

The team’s formation establishes two parallel investigations: the search for what connects the victims, and the struggle to keep that search alive without exposing its members to institutional interference. Harry supplies the forceful claim that the murders form a series; Hagen supplies a narrow authorization whose survival depends on concealment; Kaja and Holm complete a deliberately small working group. Their first office is not a conventional command center but a room reached by a tunnel beneath the prison, where three computers and a water jug stand in for the resources and security the team lacks.

The arrangement also foreshadows the investigation’s method. The investigators must follow scattered particulars—an unrecognized woman after a bar, matching train destinations, two beds booked across four huts, and a witness’s mistaken reading of a night-time encounter—without assuming that an apparent connection has already disclosed its meaning. Hagen’s proposed public account makes that uncertainty personally dangerous for Harry: if the work fails or is exposed, the department has already prepared to describe it as his unauthorized solo venture. The team begins, then, with cooperation among its three members and institutional abandonment waiting as its fallback.