Friendship, Loyalty, and Betrayal

Friendship, Loyalty, and Betrayal is tested repeatedly through Harry Hole’s suspicions about who has shared information, his refusal to explain his choices as loyalty, and his response when Kaja Solness appears to have compromised their work. The theme’s defining tension is between Harry’s stark claim that friendship has no value against a good enough offer and his behavior, which is more complicated: he acts from fear, lets others make their own choices, and gives Kaja room to have had a reason.

Loyalty, Fear, and Complicity

When Gunnar Hagen demands that Harry tell him something, Harry warns him that the disclosure will bring trouble. Hagen presses him to continue, without noticing the contradiction in his own demand. His attention is instead fixed on why he is once again about to get involved. Harry, he thinks, has a way of pulling people down with him when he falls. The moment presents loyalty less as a declared bond than as a choice made despite misgivings: Hagen recognizes the danger and still participates. His unease does not cancel his involvement; it makes the decision visible.

Harry later rejects loyalty as the explanation for another choice. Recalling a moment when Øystein and Holzschuh were waiting for him with free whiskey, he says that he did not leave because he was afraid. He had told them he could not simply abandon two friends, but now calls that explanation a lie. The distinction matters: the outward act might look like solidarity, yet Harry attributes it to fear of the Killer Queen. His blunt account refuses to let a socially acceptable motive stand in for the one he says actually governed him. Friendship is not absent from the scene, but it is not the force he credits with keeping him there.

Suspicion Around the Investigation

The same skepticism shapes Harry’s interpretation of information reaching Mikael Bellman. After Skai says Bellman called him on the evening of the day Harry and Kaja first visited the Lyseren Rope Factory, Harry compares that timing with Beate Lønn’s account: she told Bellman about the rope only the following morning. Björn Holm’s promotion to coordinator for technology and tactics adds to Harry’s suspicion. Taken together, the timing and advancement make Holm seem like a possible source of information, though they do not prove that he leaked anything.

Kaja objects to the suspicion because Harry and Holm have worked together often and are friends. Her protest sets the emotional cost of Harry’s reasoning beside its investigative logic: a possibility inferred from information and timing threatens a relationship that has accumulated through shared work. Harry answers with his claim that friendship means nothing when an offer is good enough. The maxim sounds conclusive, but the evidence in the scene is circumstantial; his certainty about what friendship cannot withstand is stronger than what he knows about Holm.

The Correction and Kaja’s Position

Harry later revises that suspicion after seeing Holm in the doorway at Holmenveien. He considers Holm an excellent forensic technician but a poor actor, and reads his genuine surprise as evidence that Holm did not know Harry was tracking Leike. If Holm had not seen the information on Harry’s computer, Harry reasons, he could not have passed it to Bellman. The earlier suspicion therefore falls away, but the possibility of a leak does not: Harry concludes that another person must have been involved. The change turns an apparently simple judgment about a friend into a more unsettled problem of trust, evidence, and proximity.

In the ensuing exchange, Kaja asks why Harry said nothing, took no action, and did not berate her. His answer is that he thought she must have had a good reason. This response places her conduct within the theme of betrayal without treating the evidence as a fully narrated confession. Harry suggests that Bellman may have offered her a senior position in the new, powerful Kriminalamt. He also supposes that Bellman, to whom she had given her heart, promised to leave his wife and children, although Harry believes he would never do so. These remain Harry’s interpretations of what she may have been promised, not independently established motives.

The Maxim and Its Limits

Harry repeats the proposition about friendship and a sufficiently good offer after Holm’s innocence becomes apparent, as he puts out his cigarette and invites Kaja to Schrøders Tavern. Repetition gives the claim the force of a personal rule, but its circumstances complicate it. He had first used fear, not betrayal, to explain why he stayed with friends; he then suspected Holm on incomplete evidence; and when faced with Kaja’s apparent breach, he says he assumed she had a reason rather than confronting her. His conduct thus resists the absolute form of his own maxim.

Across these episodes, betrayal is not reduced to a single act or a simple opposition between loyal friends and corrupt opportunists. Hagen’s reluctant participation, Harry’s correction about Holm, and his restraint toward Kaja show different responses to compromised trust. The recurring maxim is both an accusation about what people will do for an attractive offer and a defense against the pain of depending on them. Yet Harry’s willingness to keep investigating with Kaja, and to grant her an explanation he does not yet know, leaves the question open: even when friendship cannot guarantee loyalty, it may still shape what a person chooses to do after trust has been damaged.