Martha Lian

Martha Lian is a worker at the Ila Centre whose work places her at the threshold between people seeking help and the criminal world that reaches into Oslo’s drug trade. Her attachment to Stig Berger transforms her private life: a relationship she once kept safely in imagination becomes a choice with consequences, and at the novel’s close she waits for him on the ferry route from Oslo to Nesodden, with no plan if he does not arrive.

Identity and Work

At the Ila Centre, Martha is responsible for the practical boundary between the centre and the street outside. One encounter finds her blocking the front door while studying two visitors, one of them a tall, very thin woman whose appearance seems familiar. Martha considers whether the woman might be with the Drug Squad, an uncertainty that places her in the centre’s wary environment without establishing the visitor’s identity.

The centre’s security measures are visible in its reception. CCTV images let Martha watch the entrance, while Plexiglas protects the doorbell from people who react angrily when refused access. When a man later appears on the monitor, staring into the camera before he has rung, Martha is again the person positioned between the institution and whoever is outside. Her work is not abstractly separate from the plot’s dangers: the centre becomes a place where criminal activity and police intervention can reach her directly.

Martha also pays attention to what people’s faces might disclose. Her father used to say that a person’s past could be read in their eyes, though not their future. Later, Martha looks back on her first encounter with the man calling himself Stig Berger and wonders whether she could have read anything of his future plans. The distinction matters: she has learned to look for signs, but the events that follow reveal the limits of reading character from appearance.

Love and the Choice to Act

Martha’s feelings for Stig develop into an attachment she experiences as overwhelming rather than as a passing crush. She thinks about him continually and describes being in love as something like an illness: an unwanted force that takes over thought and action. The language conveys both the intensity of her desire and her sense that it is not fully under her control.

When Martha and Stig finally become physically close, the scene marks a change in the relationship. She reaches for him without deliberation; their embrace is hesitant in its balance, as though neither knows who should lead. Their eventual kiss is different from the many kisses Martha has imagined. The contact awakens her from a private fantasy in which nothing had consequences. The turning point is not simply that desire is returned, but that it can no longer be kept harmlessly in imagination.

Martha’s engagement to Anders provides a counterpoint to this new attachment. Anders presses her to set a wedding date and asks what conversation she is willing to have, making the future he expects concrete. Later, Simon sees Martha near the altar, while a woman in an elegant suit discusses flowers, the ceremony, Anders, and the guests. To Simon, Martha looks empty, alone, and miserable. The scene connects the public arrangements of a wedding to her private unhappiness, without reducing her decision to a simple rejection of commitment.

The Centre and the Criminal World

Martha’s work brings her close to people whose histories and circumstances are bound up with crime. In a conversation with Simon, she argues that Per Vollan may not have been using heroin himself. Simon accepts the possibility that the heroin was intended for someone else and says they will have to wait for the medical examiner’s findings. The exchange shows Martha contributing to the interpretation of events rather than serving only as a witness to them.

The danger around the centre becomes explicit when a colleague urgently calls to warn Martha that armed people are raiding it and asks where she is. The warning establishes that the centre’s vulnerability is immediate, but the available account does not specify Martha’s precise actions during the raid. Elsewhere, Simon is shown looking around room 323, a separate glimpse of the investigation’s settings that does not by itself establish Martha’s presence there.

The wider criminal structure is not explained by a single suspected traitor. Simon recalls that years earlier there were rumours of a police mole leaking information to the person running much of Oslo’s drug and sex-trafficking activity, but that no one produced proof that either the mole or that person existed. The later revelation of two corrupt police officers gives that uncertainty a specific form: their partnership lets one have an alibi when the other is active, helping both evade suspicion. They acknowledge having turned a blind eye to drug dealing, human trafficking, and murder. This hidden arrangement forms part of the danger surrounding the world in which Martha works, even though the evidence does not establish that she knows its full structure.

Love, Violence, and Refusal

Martha’s feelings for Stig do not make the surrounding violence disappear. In one confrontation, she challenges the claim that allowing a dog to bite a young girl in the face could count as desirable behaviour. The question shows her resisting the language of punishment when it is used to justify harm to a child. Her response gives her moral judgment a direct place in the story: she can be drawn into a dangerous world without accepting its excuses as neutral discipline.

Her love for Stig is also bound to an act of recognition that is unsettling rather than reassuring. Martha eventually enters a yellow house, finds Agnete Iversen’s earrings on the kitchen counter, and puts them on. The evidence presents this as the moment she realizes that she is as mad as the man she loves. The small object makes the recognition concrete: Martha’s attachment has led her across a boundary, and she sees that her own actions now belong to the same alarming reality as his.

At the same time, Martha’s later words to him are unambiguous: she tells him she loves him too. The declaration does not erase the danger or resolve every consequence; instead, it confirms that she understands the attachment as reciprocal and chooses to acknowledge it. Her love is therefore neither a purely imagined refuge nor a simple cure for the circumstances around them.

Departure and Narrative Significance

Near the end, Martha waits in a convertible with its hood down, her head resting against the neck rest, as a ferry approaches the dock. She is watching for Stig, who may have managed to reach the crossing. The previous ferry left thirty minutes earlier without him, but Martha has treated that absence as too early to count against him. She has repeated a prayer since leaving Tomte & Øhre an hour and a half before, and she has no plan B because she did not want one.

The destination is Nesodden, and the waiting makes departure an act of trust under uncertainty. Martha does not know whether Stig will arrive; what she knows is that she has chosen to go and to wait. The scene returns the narrative to the limits of foresight that her father described: the past may leave signs, but the future remains unknown. Martha’s ending does not promise safety or certainty. It gives her a decisive action in place of the fallback arrangements she has refused to make.

Across these episodes, Martha is defined by the collision between care, desire, and judgment. She works at a centre exposed to criminal pressures, notices how little appearances can guarantee, challenges violence when it is dressed up as acceptable behaviour, and finally commits herself to a future she cannot read in advance. Her story’s movement is from watching the threshold to crossing it: first at the Ila Centre’s guarded door, then in a love that ceases to be only imagined, and finally at the ferry where she waits without a second plan.