Harry Hole’s return from Hong Kong is both a physical homecoming and a reluctant re-entry into police work. He arrives in Oslo carrying the damage of the Snowman case and the loss of the life he had hoped to preserve, while Kaja Solness and Gunnar Hagen are trying to draw him into an investigation involving two apparently identical murders. His return does not resolve his injuries or restore his confidence; it places him back beside the work he believes he can no longer do.

The journey out of Hong Kong

Before the flight, Kaja asks when it leaves and says she will meet Harry outside in three hours. He refuses that arrangement, saying he has things to attend to and will go straight to the airport. He asks for his passport, and Kaja hands over both the passport and the ticket. Her gesture is an act of trust; his expression gives her no reassurance about what he will do with it.

At Chek Lap Kok Airport, the clock above Gate C4 shows quarter to eight, and Kaja has nearly given up waiting. She knows from Gunnar Hagen what the case files do not say: after the Snowman murders, Harry’s former partner Rakel and her son Oleg had fallen into the killer’s hands, and they left the country as soon as the case was over. Harry responded by putting his resignation on Hagen’s desk and walking away. Kaja has understood the departure as evidence of how badly the case hurt him, not simply as a professional disagreement.

Kaja has shown her boarding pass and is on her way to the gangway when she sees Harry jogging through the terminal in the slanting sunlight. He has a plain shoulder bag, a duty-free bag, and a cigarette. At the counter he stops, sets down the bag, and looks at her with resignation rather than handing over his passport. Kaja returns from the way to the aircraft to meet him. The return begins, then, not with an easy decision but with a pause at the threshold: Harry has made it to the airport, yet has not made himself proceed.

A guarded passage

Harry gives Kaja an opened carton of Camel cigarettes with one packet missing. The duty-free bag contains no bottles, a detail that relieves her. On the flight, Kaja stays awake long enough to see the aircraft take off and Hong Kong disappear beneath the haze. She notices Harry watching the drinks trolley approach and declining the offered drink with his eyes closed. The restraint is small and concrete, but it matters against the background of a man whose injuries include more than the physical consequences of the previous case.

Kaja’s view of him remains uncertain. She wonders whether Hagen is right that Harry is the man they need. Her question is not answered by the journey itself: Harry is present, but presence is not yet confidence, and boarding does not amount to recovery. Kaja falls asleep before the flight can settle that uncertainty. Her dream of a locked door, a lonely cold birdcall from the woods, and warm sunshine leaves the passage suspended between the promise of return and the difficulty of entering whatever waits beyond it.

The search at Oslo airport

The SAS flight from London lands in Oslo ten minutes ahead of schedule, but Harry is suddenly missing from Kaja’s company. Hagen and Björn Holm are told this while on their way to the airport. Hagen spots Kaja sitting on her suitcase by the taxi desk, nods to her, and hurries with Holm toward the arrivals area. Showing his identification, he gets past a guard and moves through the airport, leaving customs officers and dogs behind as he searches the rooms beyond the metal tables.

The episode turns Harry’s return into a problem of access and pursuit. Kaja has completed the journey beside him, yet on arrival he has slipped away from her. Hagen’s urgency reflects more than the inconvenience of finding a missing colleague: the investigation has been waiting for Harry, and the police are not prepared to treat his disappearance from the terminal as the end of the matter. The search also reprises the uncertainty of the departure counter. At both ends of the journey, Harry is close enough to the work to be expected, but not reliably available to the people expecting him.

The case that brings him back

When Hagen speaks with his former chief inspector, he acknowledges that the last case went deeply wrong for Harry and that people close to him were pulled into it. He recognizes that such an experience could make someone wish for another life. Yet Hagen argues that police work is what Harry can do. His appeal is personal, but its urgency rests on the case: there are two murders, their method is not yet known, and they appear identical. Hagen says that the experience bought at such a cost in the previous investigation has taught them what kind of danger they face.

Harry does not present himself as ready to return. He proposes that Hagen assign someone suitable and describes himself as broken. When Hagen says they can put him back together, Harry answers that he is beyond repair. Hagen counters that no one else in the country has his competence and experience with serial murders; Harry’s suggestion to bring in an American does not dislodge that claim. Their exchange makes the return’s central conflict explicit: Hagen treats Harry’s experience as a resource the investigation cannot replace, while Harry experiences the same history as damage that has left him unfit for the job.

From homecoming to renewed investigation

The return’s significance becomes clearer as the investigation develops. The murders are not an abstract appeal to Harry’s reputation. One victim, Borgny Stem-Myhre, was last seen after leaving the Mono; later, two Polish bricklayers found her fully clothed in the middle of a cellar. Her death involved an unusual pattern of wounds in her mouth and drowning caused by blood from those wounds, while investigators found no useful fingerprints, DNA, or footwear impressions. The case offers precisely the kind of unfamiliar, apparently deliberate violence that makes Hagen’s appeal to Harry’s serial-murder experience consequential.

The inquiry also begins to connect separate lives through journeys and mountain accommodation. Kaja’s investigation finds that the missing Adele Vetlesen, aged twenty-eight and from Drammen, bought a train ticket to Ustaoset for November 7; Borgny bought a ticket to the same mountain region from Kongsberg on that date. A search of Iska Peller’s account reveals payment for two beds in each of four mountain huts, roughly a day’s walk apart, including Hävasshütte, about half a day on foot from Ustaoset. Later, Elias Skog’s account of a moonlit night at Hävasshütte supplies a disturbing possible witness perspective: he had seen a man pull a woman into the outdoor toilet, initially mistaking her movements and the hand over her mouth for part of a sexual encounter. Only after reading about the murders did he reconsider what he had seen.

These later findings give the return a consequence larger than Harry’s arrival or his immediate argument with Hagen. The case draws together disappearances, travel records, isolated mountain routes, and a witness’s belated recognition of possible violence. Harry comes back without claiming that he has recovered; the investigation instead begins to demonstrate why his experience is needed. The homecoming is therefore deliberately incomplete: he is returned to the place and work he fled, while the question of whether he can withstand that work remains open.