Skai

Skai is a village policeman whose loyalties and judgments are shaped by intimate knowledge of the people around him. His connections to the Leike family began long before the murder investigation: he knew Tony Leike as a boy, and, years later, helped Tony’s mother hide him from a dangerous father. In the present investigation, Skai’s arrest of Ole becomes both a practical act of cooperation with Harry Hole and a public image that the press mistakes for proof that the Kavalier has been caught.

Identity and Local Ties

Skai works as a village policeman in Ytre Enebakk, where personal histories overlap with police work. He tells Harry Hole that the area is a small place and recalls that his own father and Tony Leike’s grandfather were good acquaintances. Tony spent every summer with the older man, giving Skai the opportunity to know him over time rather than through rumor alone.

Skai remembers Tony as funny, popular, charming, and somewhat mysterious, with a manner he compares to Elvis. He had an easy appeal among women, and, as Skai recalls it, the attraction was mutual. That popularity could bring trouble. Local talk held that Tony had grown up alone with an unhappy, alcoholic mother until she threw him out because her partner disliked him. Skai presents this as something people said, not as a fact he personally witnessed; his account moves between firsthand familiarity and the stories circulating in the community.

Mia, Ole, and Skai’s Judgment of Tony

When Harry asks whether Skai ever suspected Tony of rape, Skai answers through the lasting consequences he believes Mia suffered. She was never again the cheerful girl she had been. She still wanted Tony, Skai says, while Ole moved away; whenever Ole spoke, he and the others were reminded of a terrible humiliation. Skai therefore calls Tony a rapist, yet immediately distinguishes that judgment from a belief that Tony would sexually assault someone. He reasons that Tony would have tried to do so with Mia if he were capable of it, whereas, in the incident he recalls, Mia refused him and Tony accepted her refusal.

The tension in Skai’s account is important: he uses a grave label while denying the kind of sexual violence the word ordinarily suggests. His certainty rests instead on the damage he associates with the episode and its aftermath. Harry later explains that, in Skai’s view, the night outside the disco marked Mia for life. People locally said Mia and Ole were lovers and that Ole caught her and Tony in more than an innocent kiss at the edge of the woods. Harry concludes that Skai holds both men responsible for his daughter’s troubles. The story does not make Skai’s painful interpretation equivalent to an established account of what happened; it shows how a father’s knowledge of his daughter and the town’s gossip inform his assessment of Tony.

The Arrest and Its Public Image

Skai later arrests Ole for a series of murders. He gives the arrest a deliberately ordinary, almost domestic tone: he tells Ole to put both hands on the dashboard, promises handcuffs and a clean cell, and mentions that his wife has made meatballs with mashed turnips, a dish Ole likes. The homely offer sits beside the gravity of the accusation. Skai’s manner makes the arrest feel personal without obscuring that he is taking Ole into custody.

The next morning, a newspaper prints a photograph of Skai standing with folded arms outside his station, wearing a green cap with a long brim and looking, in the caption’s description, like a bear hunter. With no photograph of Sigurd Altman, also known as the Kavalier, the paper places Skai’s image beneath the headline asking whether the Kavalier has been arrested. A separate headline announces a new body found in Ustaoset. Mikael Bellman scans the page for mention of the Kriminalamt or his own name and finds neither. The picture therefore turns Skai into the apparent face of a sensational case, although it does not establish that he has captured the Kavalier.

Harry explains that he offered Skai no inducement to take part. In Harry’s account, Skai said nothing untrue: the press, not the arresting officer, drew the mistaken conclusion, and no police rule required a particular officer to make an arrest. Skai had considered Harry less unlikeable than Bellman, which was enough to earn his help. His participation is thus presented as voluntary, grounded in personal preference rather than a bargain, even as the publicity around the arrest distorts what the image can prove.

An Earlier Act of Protection

Skai’s local knowledge has an older and more consequential history. While fishing with Harry on a rain-beaten floating dock, he listens as Harry reconstructs the Utmo family tragedy from Odd Utmo’s file. Odd had been known for his temper and had served eight years in prison for a jealousy murder as a young man. Afterward he withdrew to an isolated life, married Karen Leike, and had a son. Harry suggests that Karen secretly sent the boy away and staged his disappearance in an avalanche, hoping to avert a catastrophe in a household where a volatile, formerly jealous killer lived with his wife and a son who was growing up handsome and charming.

Harry then describes Karen’s murder: her body has been found on a scree slope with a bullet hole in the skull, while her husband, her murderer, lies beneath his snowmobile after being tortured. Skai says he had not known this history. The disclosure reframes the quiet local policeman’s earlier involvement in the family’s affairs. In Tony’s account, Karen did not report her son missing as he believed; she told only one person what had happened and why. That person was the village policeman Roy Stille, who helped her erase Tony’s trail because he understood that the police could do little to protect the boy from his father—or the father from the boy. The narrative identifies Roy Stille as Skai, linking the policeman’s present-day role to his earlier, secret assistance.

Character and Narrative Role

Skai’s actions are defined by proximity. He knows the Leikes through his father’s friendship, remembers Tony’s place in the community, and measures the old incident partly by what he believes it did to Mia. That closeness gives him useful knowledge, but it also shapes his judgments: his accusation against Tony is entangled with his conviction that the disco episode permanently changed his daughter’s life.

His history with Karen and Tony adds a different dimension to the same local loyalty. As a village officer, Skai once helped a mother protect her son when he believed formal police action could not keep either the boy or his father safe. In the later investigation, he again acts outside the conspicuous machinery of authority, assisting Harry without payment and accepting that his cooperation may bring trouble if misunderstood. Yet the newspaper image makes him a public symbol before it makes him a source of explanation. Skai’s role consequently joins private memory, informal protection, and the gap between what an officer does and what the public thinks a photograph proves.