Oslo Police

Oslo Police is both the investigative force pursuing crimes across the city and an institution vulnerable to infiltration from within. The novel sets its formal duties—investigation, custody, and public protection—against a criminal network able to exploit police information, prison access, and individual officers’ discretion. Its central institutional crisis is therefore not simply whether the police can identify offenders, but whether the organization can distinguish its own agents from those serving the criminals it is meant to stop.

Mandate and Structure

The force has a continuing presence in the novel’s murder investigations. Simon Kefas has served with Oslo Police for years when he receives a new murder case and a new partner on the same day. Kari Adel joins the Homicide Squad and is told that Simon will mentor her, placing professional training and investigation inside a partnership shaped by the force’s wider crisis.

The institution also operates through distinct roles and layers of authority. Police investigators pursue evidence and make decisions at scenes, while the Commissioner speaks for the force publicly. In a statement following arrests connected to trafficking, Pontius Parr presents the police response as a prioritized campaign and credits Simon and his colleagues. The public account of progress sits beside Simon’s independent actions, making the difference between institutional messaging and operational judgment visible.

Infiltration and Criminal Networks

Simon explains that rumors had circulated for years of a police mole leaking information to the person who controlled much of Oslo’s drug and sex-trafficking activity. The suspected criminal was known as the Twin, but the rumors had not produced public proof that either the mole or the figure behind the network existed. The uncertainty itself matters: a force searching for a single traitor could overlook a structure designed to make its members difficult to identify.

Ab Lofthus’s diary later reveals how that structure worked. He records that the Twin’s operation involved two corrupt police officers, not one: while one was active, the other could provide an alibi, and the pair could appear to be separate from the crimes under investigation. They had enabled drug dealing, human trafficking, and murder, and used stolen computers and separate email accounts to communicate anonymously. Their exchanges included a message from the Twin encouraging Ab to rise within the police and gain access to sensitive information. The diary turns earlier rumors into an account of coordinated betrayal, showing how police authority and privileged information could be redirected to serve a criminal enterprise.

The network also crossed the boundary between police and prison. Arild Franck and Hugo Nestor arranged the circumstances of Sonny’s day release, including his location and the corrupt prison officer assigned to accompany him, so that Sonny could be made to take the blame for a killing. Franck’s participation shows that the vulnerability was not confined to an unidentified officer inside the police force: criminal arrangements could also depend on trusted staff within the prison system. The result was a chain of institutional access linking police information, prison control, and the manufacture of a false suspect.

Rules, Discretion, and Institutional Practice

The novel repeatedly shows how formal rules meet practical decisions. At the Ila Centre, admission depends on whether a person is still actively using drugs; someone who has quit does not qualify under the stated rule. Elsewhere, staff may search a resident’s room without warning or permission if they suspect weapons, although searches are normally supposed to involve two staff members. These examples concern another public-service institution, but they illuminate the broader setting in which the police work: protection and access are mediated by rules whose application depends on judgments made by individual staff.

Police work likewise turns on what officers decide they can do in the circumstances. When Simon receives an anonymous text and chooses to enter alone, Pontius Parr objects and warns him against acting impulsively. Simon invokes the principle that an assessment by the officer at the scene takes precedence over orders from officers at a distance, then ends the call, gathers firearms and protective vests from his car, and proceeds. The episode places operational independence beside oversight: a field officer may claim authority to act on immediate conditions, while senior command remains responsible for the risks and consequences.

Evidence can also depend on close institutional knowledge rather than a broad category. A recurring blue-shoe print seems unhelpful because Salvation Army and Bymisjonen footwear is widely distributed among people who are homeless or use drugs. Simon narrows the clue by identifying a fresh tread and learning that the Salvation Army’s last batch of blue shoes had gone to the centre in March; he then asks whether the centre had distributed size 8½ shoes since spring. The investigation makes the force’s work a matter of tracing a specific object through the organizations that supplied it, rather than treating a common mark as proof of identity.

Public Authority and Narrative Significance

When arrests connected to trafficking are announced, Parr describes them as an important step and praises Simon and his colleagues. That public claim of progress is set against the evidence that corruption and trafficking have been sustained through relationships inside and around the institutions meant to prevent them. The contrast does not make every police action meaningless: investigation, evidence-gathering, and arrest remain consequential. It does show why visible success cannot by itself establish that the force has repaired the channels through which information and authority were abused.

Oslo Police thus functions as more than the procedural backdrop to the murder case. It is a contested institution, at once a means of pursuing justice and a resource that criminals can capture through secrecy, access, and compromised loyalty. The reveal of two moles rather than one sharpens that tension: corruption is presented not as a lone breach but as a concealed arrangement capable of surviving the appearance of ordinary police work.