Odd Utmo

Odd Utmo first appears as the local man enlisted to take Kaja Solness to Hävasshütte after an avalanche closes a tunnel and disrupts travel. On a yellow snowmobile, he wears a red overall, a fur hat, a scarf, and large sunglasses. Beneath them, one eye is clouded by a milky film; his upright bearing seems youthful, while his face looks old. His brusque manner makes the journey feel less like a welcome than a practical transaction: he expects payment, checks the time, and prepares to set off without waiting for conversation.

Identity and Background

Utmo is both a mountain-hut supervisor and a figure familiar to the people who live in the area. He carries a scoped rifle, though Aslak Krongli says he had been a good bear hunter before becoming half-blind. The reported cause of the eye injury is an accident involving a glass of acid knocked over by his son, but Krongli stresses that only Utmo knows what actually happened. That uncertainty accompanies the story of his family: his son disappeared at fifteen, and his wife vanished soon afterward. Both events took place eighteen years before the investigation, long before Krongli moved to the area.

After the disappearances, Utmo withdrew to live alone in the mountains. He kept apart from ordinary channels of information, with no television or radio and, Krongli says, not even a newspaper. The landscape around his home—ravines, steep slopes, and snow—made the family’s fate difficult to establish. A shoe belonging to the boy was found beside a recent avalanche, but when the snow melted no body appeared. Local explanations ranged from a bear attack to suspicion that Utmo himself had killed his son. The shoe offered the appearance of an accident without resolving what had happened.

The later investigation supplies a darker history behind that isolation. Harry Hole discovers that Utmo had spent eight years in prison as a young man for a murder motivated by jealousy, then moved into the remote wilderness. He married Karen Leike, and they had a son. That earlier conviction changes the meaning of the villagers’ suspicions: Utmo was not merely a difficult, solitary man caught in an old family mystery, but someone with a documented history of lethal violence.

The Family's Secret

The disappearance of Utmo’s son was not an accident in the snow but a carefully staged escape. Tony Leike later recalled that he and his father had come to circle one another like animals, while his mother, Karen Leike, understood that only one of them might survive. When she learned that Utmo had gone to Geilo to buy ammunition for his shotgun, she told Tony to leave: she had already discussed a plan with his maternal grandfather, a widower living at Lyseren. The grandfather could hide the boy, provided Utmo did not discover where he had gone.

Karen made the disappearance look like an avalanche burial by placing one of Tony’s shoes near the slide. Utmo believed she had reported their son missing, but she had actually confided what had happened and why only to Roy Stille, the village policeman. Stille understood that the police could do little to protect either father or son, and helped Karen erase Tony’s trail. The deception explains why a shoe remained as apparent evidence of a mountain death while no body emerged when the snow melted: Tony had survived, hidden far from his father. He stayed with his grandfather until news reached him that Karen herself had disappeared in the mountains, turning the escape that had saved her son into another unresolved family loss.

Identification and the Family's Reckoning

The mountain mystery returned in the form of a body beneath a snowmobile. At first, the wrecked machine seemed to offer a way to identify Tony Leike; instead, Aslak Krongli reported that the dead man was Odd Utmo. The snowmobile belonged to him, and the identification rested on his distinctive dental remains: one rotten stump where the rest of his teeth and the brace were gone. Harry Hole remembered the local recluse Kaja Solness had described, the man who had taken her to Hävasshütte. The supposed fugitive son and the father who had vanished into the mountains had been confused in death as well as in the rumours surrounding them.

A search also brought the remains of Karen Leike to light on a cold scree slope, where they had lain for eighteen years. The discovery might have seemed to confirm the village story that she had thrown herself into the ravine out of grief for her missing son. But the skull had a bullet hole in the forehead and no exit wound. Harry later explained that Karen had been murdered, while Odd was found beneath his snowmobile after being brutally tortured: much of the skin on his back and arms had been burned, and his teeth knocked out. The remains replaced a tale of maternal despair with evidence of violence inside the family.

The connection between Odd and Tony emerged through details that had looked incidental. Harry recognized a family photograph in a tourist hut as the picture of Odd’s family, not Tony’s; the boy in it already had the large white teeth that marked the adult son, while Odd’s lips were tightly closed. A black-brown stone Harry had found on the hut’s bathroom floor might have been a tooth. Both men also suffered from gout, a hereditary condition that helped redirect Harry’s attention from the apparent killer, Altman, to the father-and-son link. DNA testing of flesh fragments by the stove and Tony Leike’s hair confirmed that Odd was Tony’s father. The clues joined the Leike Farm to Ustaoset and gave a human explanation to the local talk of the missing boy’s ghost: the supposed apparition belonged to a family history that had never truly disappeared.

Flight, Haunting, and Narrative Significance

Harry’s reconstruction gives Odd’s final disappearance a motive rooted in fear rather than simple flight from the police. He believed that the murders associated with Hävasshütte had made him the quarry of his vanished son’s ghost, and had retreated from his farm to a remote, difficult-to-reach tourist hut. He took the family photograph with him: the image of the household he had helped destroy, carried into isolation. Harry can only imagine the state of the man there—terrified, perhaps remorseful, alone with his thoughts—but the photograph makes that solitude more than a hiding place. It is a small, concrete remnant of the family history Odd could neither escape nor erase. The local ghost story is thereby recast without requiring a supernatural explanation: the past returns through Tony’s survival, the father’s fear, and the clues that finally join the family to the murders. Odd’s role is not merely to supply a mistaken identity or a body in the mountains; his life connects the investigation’s scattered places and rumours to a buried history of violence between father and son.