Corruption, loyalty, and betrayal

Corruption, loyalty, and betrayal are intertwined forces in the novel: a criminal network gains strength through police and commercial collaborators, while private promises and friendships determine which truths remain hidden and which eventually surface. The central reversal is that Ab Lofthus, publicly remembered as a corrupt officer, had in fact tried to expose the network; the people who knew this kept silent, with consequences for Ab’s family and for the pursuit of justice.

A network disguised as a single traitor

For years, police officers discussed the possibility that a mole was leaking information to the person directing much of Oslo’s drug and sex trafficking. The suspicion remained unproven, and the investigation’s language of a single insider obscured a more complicated arrangement. Ab’s diary reveals that the criminal leadership consisted of two people: their shared identity let one maintain an alibi while the other acted, making both difficult to identify. They had corrupted police officers who turned away from drug dealing, human trafficking, and murder, and the arrangement had become so entrenched that Ab wondered whether confession and forgiveness were possible without ruining the people around him.

The network was not confined to the police. Simon Kefas tells Iver Iversen that Iversen Property did business with the Twin, laundering proceeds from drugs and trafficking in exchange for fictitious losses that generated tax savings worth hundreds of millions of kroner. The episode connects financial respectability to criminal revenue: the operation depends not only on people who commit violence or leak police information, but also on a business structure that can disguise the money. Iver denies knowing the Twin, while Simon says he has evidence of their collaboration.

Other evidence shows how corruption crosses institutional boundaries. When Fidel Lae is confronted over using dogs against a young girl attempting to escape slavery, the question is framed as whether such conduct should be punished. The exchange brings the treatment of trafficking victims into the same moral landscape as the larger network: exploitation is not an abstraction but a practice sustained by people who profit from it and by systems that fail to stop it.

Ab Lofthus and the reversal of betrayal

Sonny Lofthus and Simon both knew Ab, but their attachments were different. Sonny idolized his father; Simon regarded him as his best friend. Both were devastated when Ab’s corruption became public. Simon nevertheless insists that Ab was the least corrupt officer in the Oslo police, grounding that judgment in their friendship and his knowledge of Ab rather than in the official account.

Johannes Halden supplies the missing history. He tells Sonny that he had been Ab’s confidential informant and had overheard Hugo Nestor speak to his superior about removing a policeman named Lofthus before he disrupted their operation. Johannes passed on the warning. Ab, believing that other police officers were already compromised, chose not to involve them and insisted on acting alone. He made Johannes promise to keep the information secret, and Johannes honored that promise for years.

The account reverses the apparent meaning of Ab’s final confession. Ab had been investigating the mole, not serving as one. When Nestor’s people reached the family’s house in Berg, they forced Ab to write a suicide note claiming that he had helped drug dealers and traffickers by revealing raids, evidence, and suspects. They promised to spare Sonny and his mother; afterward, they killed Ab with his own gun. The false confession made the loyal officer appear to be the betrayer and concealed the people who had engineered his death.

Loyalty, silence, and the price of a promise

Johannes’s silence began as loyalty to Ab’s explicit request, but it also kept Sonny from learning what had happened to his father. Johannes had returned to criminal work after prison and later became an informant again, drawn by a police officer who appealed to his conscience. That officer was killed, and Johannes heard the name Twin for the first time in the aftermath. The loss helped pull him back into the criminal world; he took greater risks and was eventually imprisoned after customs officers found heroin hidden in his lorry. His history shows loyalty and betrayal operating together: he had been a source of information for the police, but his promised silence prevented him from correcting the lie that condemned Ab’s reputation.

Johannes finally breaks that silence by telling Sonny what he knows. His disclosure matters even if Sonny may not fully understand it: for Johannes, the confession is a message delivered to its rightful recipient and a release from a burden he has carried for years. The truth does not undo Ab’s death or restore the years in which Sonny believed the false account, but it changes the moral record. Betrayal belongs to Nestor’s network, while Johannes’s belated disobedience to the promise becomes an act of fidelity to the truth.

Simon’s friendship with Ab gives the revelation another consequence. In conversation with his new partner, Simon recalls the old rumors of a police mole and the Twin, then rejects the premise that Ab was corrupt. His certainty is personal, but the diary and Johannes’s testimony give it factual support. The novel thus places private trust beside formal proof: Simon’s loyalty preserved his belief in Ab, while the evidence eventually explains why that belief was right.

The wider pattern of compromised allegiance

The novel repeatedly presents corruption as a chain of exchanges rather than the act of one villain. In the account of Kjersti Morsand’s murder, Yngve Morsand hires Nestor’s organization not to kill his wife for him but to arrange for someone else to take the blame. For three million kroner, the network coordinates the circumstances that will direct suspicion toward Sonny, including his day release, his location, and a corrupt prison officer. The transaction turns a personal crime into a coordinated betrayal of the justice system: the organization sells not only criminal services but also a false account of who is responsible.

These connections explain why identifying a single mole could not resolve the larger problem. Information, money, access, and protection move through different relationships: compromised officers can facilitate operations; prison staff can help frame a prisoner; a property company can disguise proceeds; and criminal leaders can arrange for an innocent person to bear blame. Ab’s diary makes the structure explicit, while the other cases show how its effects reach people who are not part of the police conspiracy.

Corruption, loyalty, and betrayal therefore resist simple oppositions. Ab’s loyalty to his family and to his own judgment leaves him isolated; Johannes’s loyalty to Ab becomes silence, then confession; Simon’s friendship sustains a counter-memory of Ab while the official account condemns him. Across these reversals, the novel distinguishes allegiance to people from allegiance to truth and law. A promise can protect a friend, but when it preserves a criminal lie, keeping it also serves the betrayers.