Zürich is a crucial investigative junction in the search for Tony Leike: it connects a possible inheritance and bank account to a missing passport, a disputed identity, and a flight bound for Goma. The city is not described through its streets or landmarks. Instead, it enters the story through institutions and records—Credit Suisse, a passport, and an airline booking—whose separate traces begin to point toward the same journey.

Financial leads and public images

The first Zürich clue arrives through the tabloids Harry Hole reads while sitting beside his father’s hospital bed. Their coverage presents Lene Galtung as a figure in a social scandal, using photographs of her at theatre premieres and gala dinners, reports of her new Porsche, and the headline that she misses Tony. One coarse, pixelated image supposedly shows her outside Credit Suisse in Zürich. The paper also claims that her hairdresser has been asked to give her a perm and dye her hair brick red. Harry suspects the hairdresser has been handsomely paid for the disclosure, a detail that makes the coverage look less like reliable reporting than information being sold for effect.

The reports do not establish that Lene is in Zürich: the image is uncertain, and the tabloid’s claims are not direct statements from her. But they give the investigation a concrete financial question. Harry asks Katrine Bratt to check whether Lene has an account at Credit Suisse and whether she received part of her inheritance in advance. He recognizes that Swiss banks may be difficult to investigate and allows that the inquiry could take time. Zürich therefore first matters as the possible location of money connected to Lene, not as proof of her whereabouts.

A detail becomes an identity clue

The brick-red hair report acquires a different significance when Harry recalls that the same hair color appears in the passport of Juliana Verni, a woman from Leipzig. He has asked Günther to check whether Verni’s passport bears a Kigali stamp, but the police have never found the document. Harry believes Tony Leike took it. He then draws a further conclusion: Lene has the passport now.

That chain makes Zürich more than a setting for an account check. A detail circulated by celebrity journalism becomes a possible marker of a false identity: the reported hair color links Lene to the description associated with Verni’s missing passport. The evidence remains circumstantial in the scene. The photograph is indistinct, the hairdresser’s story may have been purchased, and the passport has not been recovered. Yet Harry treats the convergence as significant enough to direct both further checking and surveillance toward Lene.

The departure point and the problem of proof

Harry tells Gunnar Hagen that a woman with brick-red curls has booked a flight from Zürich to Görna, in Congo, for the following morning. He presents this as a journey booked under the name Juliana Verni, though Verni is dead. The apparent contradiction does not end the lead: Harry has contacted the International Civil Aviation Organization and learned that a deceased person’s passport number may remain in the register for as long as a year before being removed. Someone could therefore travel using the passport of Odd Utmo, who has also been dead for two months.

The possibility of more than one usable identity complicates what the passenger information can prove. A name on the list does not securely establish who is travelling, while the continued validity of an identity number may allow a dead person’s name to appear in a living traveller’s itinerary. Harry also warns that there is no police-cooperation agreement with Congo and that an arrest there might be avoided through a bribe. His reasoning shifts the immediate objective: rather than count on an arrest at the destination, the investigators should locate the traveller at Zürich airport before the flight leaves.

From lead to surveillance

Hagen responds by telling Harry to find the woman in Zürich and send the Swiss police to the airport. Harry says they are already watching Lene and believes she will lead them to Tony. The exchange marks a change in how the city functions in the investigation: the suspected bank account remains unresolved, but the airport and the imminent departure provide a time-sensitive opportunity to follow the identity trail in person.

Harry and Kaja Solness travel from Oslo toward Goma while the flight from Zürich is still in the future. When Kaja wakes with her head on Harry’s shoulder, the captain announces their descent into Goma; dawn is approaching, twelve hours have passed since they left Oslo, and the Zürich flight is due to land in six hours. The two journeys thus run on separate clocks toward the same destination. Zürich becomes the point from which the suspected traveller is expected to arrive, while Harry and Kaja move ahead to Goma. The city’s narrative importance lies in that convergence of money, identity, and timing: each clue is incomplete alone, but together they make Zürich the investigators’ best place to intercept the route toward Tony Leike.