Ab Lofthus’s diary

Ab Lofthus’s diary is both a hidden family record and evidence of the corruption that Ab tried to leave behind. Bound in black leather, it preserves fragments of his life as a father and police officer, including his financial desperation and his role in a two-person mole arrangement. When Sonny finds and reads it, its contents transform his understanding of his father and lead him to write Martha a farewell letter before disappearing.

Discovery and Physical Form

Sonny finds the diary in the house and reads it alone. He is naked, with a bandage at his side, and initially appears happy as he stands by the window with his eyes closed. After taking a towel from a cupboard, he notices a book on the table and begins reading. He sits with it for several minutes; his expression changes and his body stiffens before he throws the book against the wall. He then throws the table lamp as well. The diary is not simply a record he can consult without consequence: reading it abruptly alters the scene, turning apparent contentment into distress.

The next day, Markus finds the house put back in order. The bed has been made, the lamp’s shards gathered in the waste-paper basket, and a crumpled letter lies beneath them. The diary remains on the bedside table. Its black leather cover and yellowing pages mark it as an old, privately kept object, but its placement under the mattress had been obvious enough that Sonny wonders whether Ab intended someone to find it. That uncertainty—whether the hiding place reflects a wish to be discovered or mere carelessness—hangs over the record.

A Father’s Private Record

Markus recognizes the book as a diary, though its entries are irregular: some are separated by months, while others consist of a date and only a few sentences. The fragments form a compressed account of Ab’s family life. He records the breakup of the troika, then Helene’s pregnancy and the couple’s purchase of a house. Later entries turn to the strain of living on a policeman’s salary, the absence of help from either set of parents, and his happiness when Sonny takes up wrestling.

The entries also expose mounting financial pressure. When the bank raises interest rates and the mortgage becomes unaffordable, Ab writes that he must find a solution before the house is repossessed and reassures himself that he has promised Helene everything will be all right. In a dated passage, he says Sonny wants to follow him into the police force, while Helene thinks their son worships him. Ab accepts that devotion and describes Sonny as a good boy in a hard world. The diary thus preserves both Ab’s pride in his son and the precarious circumstances beneath the reassuring image of a stable family.

The Mole and the Twin

The diary’s most consequential revelations concern Ab’s corruption and the identity of the police mole. In an entry dated 4 August, Ab describes the station’s recurring suspicion that the Twin has a plant in the force. He rejects the assumption that the traitor must be one person: the arrangement works because there are two participants, each able to provide the other with an alibi when one is active. Their divided identity repeatedly keeps them above suspicion.

Ab names what this arrangement has cost them. He and his partner have become corrupt police officers, turning a blind eye to drug dealing, human trafficking, and murder. The diary’s account makes the mole mystery more than a question of one officer’s betrayal: the secret depends on a pair whose shared method defeats the investigation’s expectation of a single culprit. Ab wonders whether confession, penitence, and forgiveness are possible without ruining those around him, but records no answer beyond the need to get out.

Other entries show how the Twin maintains contact and offers advancement. The two police officers communicate through separate Hotmail accounts on computers taken from the evidence room and exchange messages by concealed drops. One envelope is left beneath a bench at Broker’s Restaurant on Bogstadveien. The Twin proposes helping Ab rise to a senior police position, promising access to sensitive information and more money; Ab sees the offer as another means of extending the Twin’s power. A criminal who recognizes Ab from an old arrest tells him that being arrested helped him leave bad company and build a fish farm with his brother. That encounter offers a rare counterpoint to the diary’s corruption: police action can redirect a life, even as Ab has become part of a system that enables serious crimes.

The Break with His Partner

The diary’s entries dated 6 and 7 October record the partnership’s collapse. Ab’s fellow officer, whom he identifies as Z, urges him to quit while they are ahead. At the same time, the Twin has stopped replying to Ab’s email. Ab suspects that the Twin and Z may have spoken, and concludes that mutual trust has failed: each has seen the other’s true face.

Ab then interprets the danger through the logic of the Twin’s arrangement. The Twin needs only one of the two officers, he believes, leaving the other as a rejected witness who must be eliminated. Ab decides that he must act before Z acts against him. He asks Helene to take Sonny to a wrestling competition the next day, saying he has other business, and arranges to meet Z at midnight among the medieval ruins in Maridalen. The diary makes the meeting’s purpose legible in advance: Ab is preparing to kill his partner, not simply to discuss leaving their criminal arrangement.

In the entry dated 8 October, Ab writes that he has loaded his pistol and questions what brought him to this point. He cannot settle whether he acted for his family, for himself, or from a desire for the social standing and security he had seen others enjoy. He measures his choices against the kind of father Sonny might have wanted him to be and recognizes that his son’s place in the same situation would make the answer clear. He writes that he is going to Maridalen and may return changed into a killer. His hope that someone will find the diary gives the private record the form of a possible confession, even though it cannot undo what he has done.

Sonny’s Reading and the Farewell

After reading the diary, Sonny leaves a letter addressed to Martha. He recalls a story Ab told him about a father who drowned after his son briefly believed he had been rescued, and connects that story to his own understanding of Ab’s death and the diary. Sonny has finally found his father’s record and wonders whether Ab meant it to be discovered or hid it carelessly. The diary therefore does not give Sonny uncomplicated comfort: it provides an explanation of his father while sharpening his sense of betrayal and loss.

Sonny’s letter tells Martha that she has her whole life ahead of her and that he cannot do the same. He asks her to forgive him, says he will disappear, and affirms his lasting love. Markus reads the letter while the diary remains on the bedside table, then flicks through the diary’s blank pages and reaches its torn-out final pages. The absent pages leave the record incomplete precisely where its account might have continued; the surviving entries expose Ab’s choices, but they cannot supply a full resolution for Sonny. In the scene, the diary links the father’s concealed past to the son’s departure, making an object kept in the family home the trigger for a final act of separation.