Stavanger City is more than a place-name in the murder investigation: it is the setting where an emerging arts scene, a witness’s encounter with Elias Skog, and a local police officer’s communications with Harry Hole converge. The city’s oil-driven business identity forms a counterpoint to its bid for cultural reinvention, while its streets and transport links become part of the effort to reconstruct what happened before Skog’s murder and test Tony Leike’s movements.

City, Oil, and an Unsettled Arts Scene

The city is presented as an oil town oriented toward business and money, but not as a place without artistic life. A newly opened bar, Krabbe Bar, advertises itself as a meeting place for Stavanger City’s young, upwardly mobile arts scene: musicians, filmmakers, and writers are among the people it hopes to draw. Its claim remains unproven. The trendsetters have not yet decided whether the venue merits their approval, and that uncertainty gives the bar a distinctly provisional place in the city’s cultural life. Stavanger City’s identity is therefore shown as divided between an established commercial character and a newer scene still trying to define itself.

Krabbe Bar makes that uncertain cultural claim tangible. Its music is loud, its lighting appears to strobe, and Stine studies a bearded man in a woollen hat who approaches her. At first she mistakes him for a young snowboarder, then recognizes that he is a man over thirty, with pale lines in his tanned skin. He tells her that few people who rode a motorcycle through Burma’s southern delta returned alive enough to tell the story. He says he promised himself that, if he made it back to Stavanger City, he would buy a beer and tell the prettiest woman he could find what had happened. Stine finds his performance appealing but odd; after he leaves, she remarks on his eyes, teeth, and eastern Norwegian dialect, and wonders whether the bar’s lights account for what seems wrong with his appearance. The scene makes the venue’s self-conscious trendiness part of the action, not just background: its atmosphere shapes how Stine reads a stranger and his carefully staged story.

Stine, Skog, and the Bus Conversation

Stavanger City also supplies the setting for a more consequential encounter. On a bus heading out of the city, Stine meets Elias Skog on the evening he is later murdered. Skog tells her that he had been at Hävasshütte with the women whose murders had appeared in the newspapers. He has noticed that nobody seems to have connected their presence at the same hut, and is considering going to the police. At the same time, he is reluctant to become entangled in the case. His disclosure links an apparently peripheral local encounter to the investigation and gives the city a role in carrying information from the mountain setting back into the murder inquiry.

Skog tells Stine more than the shared location of the victims. He describes waking during the night at the hut after hearing noises outside his bedroom window. In the moonlight he sees two people in the shadow beneath the outhouse roof: a woman facing him and a man behind her whose face he cannot see. The woman appears to him to be dancing, while the man covers her mouth. He thinks the pair may be preparing to have sex, and returns to bed when the man pulls the woman into the outhouse. Only after reading about the murders does Skog reconsider what he witnessed as a possible rape. The account Stine later gives the police thus changes the significance of the episode: what Skog had dismissed at the time becomes a potentially important observation about the women’s experience at the hut.

Stine is not an uncomplicated witness. She says she was afraid of Skog, describing him as an extreme, eccentric man who travelled alone, and the police had received two stalking complaints about him. At the same time, she recalls that he seemed nervous on the night he spoke to her. These details complicate the weight of his disclosure without erasing it: the local encounter connects the investigation to Skog’s account, while his history and Stine’s fear leave the police to assess both what he observed and the circumstances in which he told her.

A Local Police Link to the Wider Investigation

Colbjornsen, a police commissioner from Stavanger City, becomes an important channel between the local inquiry and Harry Hole. After recognizing Colbjornsen’s number among calls to his phone, Harry returns the call. Colbjornsen tells him that the newspapers have attacked him and asks whether they are still on the same side. He describes both of them as conducting an illegal, solitary investigation, making their exchange a fragile act of cooperation rather than a formal handover. He has spoken with the few people who knew Skog, including Skog’s landlady and Stine, and passes on what Stine said about the bus conversation. He also says that he has delayed sending his report to Mikael Bellman, leaving Harry another day to use the information. Stavanger City functions here as the source of evidence and as the base of a police contact prepared to share it outside official channels.

The city’s role resurfaces when Harry questions Leike about his recent presence there. Leike says he visited in the summer, but not since. That answer becomes relevant as Mikael Bellman recounts checking Leike’s account of the night Skog was murdered. Leike had said he was alone at home and therefore had no alibi. He could not clearly remember when he appeared at work the next morning, but suggested that he was there around seven. Bellman checked further: Leike had reserved a meeting room for 9:15, and colleagues confirmed that he attended the meeting. If Leike had left Skog’s apartment at three in the morning, Bellman reasons, he would have needed to take a flight to make the meeting; no passenger list records his name. The discrepancy does not establish that Leike travelled from Stavanger City, and Bellman notes the possibility of a false passport or assumed identity, but the city remains part of the inquiry into Leike’s movements and the gaps in his account.

A Place That Sends Evidence Outward

Stavanger City’s importance lies in the way separate kinds of evidence leave it. A bus conversation carries Skog’s delayed interpretation of what he saw at Hävasshütte; Colbjornsen carries Stine’s account into Harry’s clandestine investigation; and the city’s connection to Leike becomes one element in checking a contested timeline. Even the phone call is geographically legible: Harry recognizes that an unfamiliar number begins with the digits associated with Stavanger and remembers that the same caller contacted him two days earlier. The city is at once a lived setting, a point of origin for testimony, and a clue in the reconstruction of movement. Its commercial and cultural contrasts establish a recognizable local texture, while its links among witness, police, and suspect make it consequential to the investigation.