PSG

PSG is connected to the Kadok Factory, an industrial concern that closed after years of losses and whose abandoned premises become the setting for a dangerous discovery by Harry Hole. The company’s significance in the novel lies less in an active corporate presence than in what remains after industry has withdrawn: a derelict factory, a highly flammable material associated with PSG, and a fire that nearly kills the investigator searching the site.

Industrial background and closure

The Kadok Factory belongs to a larger change in Oslo’s industrial landscape. Nydalen is described as a model of industrial decline: surviving factory buildings have been converted into television studios, restaurants, and expensive lofts, while other sites have given way to glass-and-steel offices. The Kadok premises stand apart from this redevelopment. Their owners did not share in the area’s commercial boom, and the factory remained neglected behind a fence on the west bank of the Akerselva.

The factory had shut its doors fourteen years before Harry arrives. Its closure followed years of losses and Chinese dumping, while the founder’s heirs turned against one another in a dispute over the inheritance. Their conflict did not revive the business or produce a new use for the site. As the family fought over what each should receive, the factory decayed; brush and trees grew unchecked until they screened the buildings from curious onlookers. The contrast is pointed: the surrounding industrial district has been remade for new forms of commerce, but the Kadok site has been left outside that transformation.

The factory’s material legacy

PSG’s connection to the site is also expressed through the material associated with the factory. Harry recalls what Øystein had told him about the substance produced at the factory where his father worked: it was so flammable that workers had to smoke outside beside the river and throw their cigarette ends into the water. This account gives the abandoned premises a concrete industrial danger. The factory is not merely an old workplace whose machinery has fallen silent; its materials retain the capacity to make an ordinary room hazardous.

That danger becomes immediate when Harry discovers a hidden room behind a locked door. Its furnishings are spare and orderly: a black folding chair, a desk with a Dell screen, and paper scraps in a wastebasket. A copy of Dagbladet has been cut, and the headline above the removed section—reporting someone killed in an avalanche—tells Harry that he has found what he was looking for. Photographs of the murder victims are pinned to the wall. The concealed room turns the factory’s neglected interior into a repository of evidence, linking its past as a production site to the present investigation.

The fire and its consequences

The search exposes another, more immediate danger. A red fire extinguisher hangs conspicuously in the break room, and Harry uses it as a battering ram against the locked door to the hidden room. The object appears to offer a practical way to enter, but its prominence has been staged: when a police officer later tries to use it, the extinguisher sprays a brownish-yellow liquid rather than foam or powder. Harry recognizes the smell of petrol and understands that the device was made to be used—and to set the room alight.

The fire is described as an explosive blaze rather than an explosion in the ordinary sense. A spark from electrical cables ignites ammonia gas, which in turn ignites PSG used to coat the ceiling and part of the wall. Harry is inside the room and reaches for a page from the Hävasshütte guest register as the flames spread. The officer stands in the doorway, shocked, still holding down the extinguisher’s lever. Harry tackles him out of the danger; they scramble beneath tables and then flee onto the gallery. The break room erupts into a sea of fire, with its windows blown out. The factory’s material history thus becomes part of a present-day attempt to destroy evidence and kill those who have found it.

Narrative significance

After the fire, Harry stands under a blanket beside Björn Holm while firefighters carry out the last buckets of PSG ever to leave the factory. The image brings together the site’s industrial past and the violence of the investigation: material once made or used there has become a source of immediate peril, and what remains is being removed as the building burns. The closure of the factory was not simply an earlier economic event; its abandoned structures and hazardous contents continue to shape what can happen in the present.

PSG’s significance is therefore mediated through place and material consequence. The company is associated with a factory lost to commercial failure and family conflict, while the factory’s product survives as a combustible coating in a concealed criminal setting. The conspicuous extinguisher reverses the expectation attached to a safety device, and the resulting fire transforms a search for evidence into a struggle to escape. The novel gives the industrial site no neat second life as a fashionable loft or office: its dereliction, its stored danger, and the evidence hidden within it converge in a blaze that nearly consumes Harry and a police officer.