Lyseren Lake is a secluded-looking but heavily investigated site where Adele Vetlesen’s body is concealed beneath the water. The lake’s depth, the nearby abandoned Seilerei am Lyseren, and Tony Leike’s past association with the area turn it into more than a landscape: it is at once a place used to hide evidence, a source of a crucial investigative deduction, and a setting chosen to encourage suspicion of the wrong person.

Setting and Search

The search begins near the Seilerei am Lyseren, on the lake’s shore. In the fog, the water appears black and smooth, with trees standing along the bank like silent onlookers. The search operation is methodical rather than dramatic: divers enter from a rubber boat, spread out in a fan formation, and are tracked on a grid-marked map. Search leaders use tugs on the divers’ lines to signal interruptions or their return; professional rescue divers can also communicate through lines connected to their full-face masks.

The operation’s practical conditions matter. Jarle Andreassen has been a certified rescue diver for only six months, and his pulse still rises during dives, increasing his oxygen use. More experienced divers call him Korken because he often has to surface to change his oxygen cylinders. This detail gives the search a human scale: the lake must be examined through slow, coordinated labor, while each diver’s physical limits shape the work.

The Body and the Dispute over the Site

Mikael Bellman arrives by helicopter as the search yields a body. He inspects the naked, pale, bloated corpse on a stretcher before looking down toward the lake and the people gathered beside it. Among the divers and personnel are Beate Lonn and Kaja Solness; farther away, Harry Hole is speaking with the local police officer Skai. The recovery transforms the lake from a search area into the focus of a dispute over who controls the investigation and what the discovery means.

Bellman treats the area as his crime scene and challenges Harry’s presence. Harry counters that it is not a crime scene, explaining that he has been searching for missing people and that they appear to have found what they sought. He then asks whether the murder investigation has produced anything and whether Bellman received the information about Hävasshütte. The exchange makes the lake a point of collision between parallel inquiries: Bellman asserts authority over the murder investigation, while Harry’s presence follows the search for missing people.

Adele Vetlesen and the Logic of Disposal

Harry later reconstructs why the murderer came to the lake. The trip, he reasons, was not made simply to obtain rope from the abandoned Seilerei am Lyseren, because rope from that site could be traced. The murderer had another purpose there and took the remaining rope home afterward, where it was later used to kill Marit Olsen. The lake was therefore the destination for disposing of a body; the rope was a separate consequence of the visit, not its original reason.

Harry’s deduction identifies the submerged body as Adele Vetlesen’s. He recalls that Skai had earlier pointed out the deep side of the lake. Adele’s trousers had been filled with stones, and straps were tied around both the waistband and the legs before her body was thrown into the water. The method depends on the lake’s depth: the water is not merely a backdrop but part of the means by which the body was hidden. Harry further suspects that Adele was already dead before entering the lake because she had a deep cut in her throat; he expects the autopsy to show that she had not inhaled water.

A Place Chosen to Mislead

The lake’s connection to Tony Leike makes the disposal site appear to point toward him. Bellman explains that Leike had nearly become a murderer while living with his grandfather at Lyseren, and that his assault conviction was public information associated with Ytre Enebakk. In Bellman’s account, the killer could exploit those records by placing Adele’s body at a location the police might connect with a known violent offender. The lake thus functions as planted context: its association with Leike is useful precisely because it can pull attention toward him.

That apparent connection contrasts with Harry’s material reconstruction. The body’s location, the deep water, and the weighted clothing explain how Adele was concealed; the rope factory explains an object later used in Marit’s murder; and Leike’s history offers a ready-made route to a false attribution. These are related clues, but they do not all establish the same thing. Lyseren Lake matters because it joins concealment and misdirection in one place, while Harry’s discovery that the clues fit together changes the significance of the lake from an apparent link to Leike into evidence of a killer’s deliberate choice.