Simon

Simon’s life is recounted as a passage from intimate loyalty into corruption, betrayal, and a long effort at penance. He was one of the police officers secretly working for the Twin, helped draw his closest friend, Ab Lofthus, into the same criminal network, and eventually killed Ab to preserve his own place in it. He later repented, left the network, and devoted the rest of his life to pursuing corrupt officers. His history complicates the distinction between the detective who sought justice and the man who had once helped undermine it.

Identity and Background

Simon’s connection to the Twin was initially concealed behind the old, unproven rumor of a police mole feeding information to the person who controlled much of Oslo’s drug and sex-trafficking business. Simon himself describes how, at the time, people spoke of a mole and a criminal leader but never produced evidence that either existed. When asked who the person was, he identifies him as the Twin. The later revelation makes the earlier uncertainty significant: the rumor was not merely a story about a lone traitor and a single criminal boss, but a partial glimpse of a concealed arrangement whose participants and structure remained unknown.

A diary entry from Ab’s account exposes the arrangement’s defining safeguard. The Twin’s organization consisted of two corrupt officers, not one: while one was active, the other could provide an alibi, making both harder to suspect. They used separate stolen computers and Hotmail addresses to communicate with the Twin, and passed messages through physical drops, including an envelope taped beneath a bench at Broker’s Restaurant on Bogstadveien. The diary records that the Twin wanted one of them to rise through the police ranks, gaining access to sensitive information and greater usefulness to the organization. Simon’s criminal role was thus sustained not only by personal secrecy but by an information network designed to turn police access into protection for criminal activity.

Love, Debt, and the First Betrayal

Simon had loved Helene, whom he remembered as the love of his life. In Else’s later account, he saw her differently from the other men who courted her: though he considered Ab and Pontius nicer, stronger, and cleverer, he believed he was the one who truly saw her. He and Helene began a relationship, but Simon’s gambling debts made their life chaotic. When Ab entered Helene’s life, Simon felt that he was dragging her down; Ab and Helene moved out, and Simon was heartbroken. Learning that Helene was pregnant intensified his crisis. He gambled recklessly, lost everything, and, close to ruin, sought the Twin and offered the only thing he believed he had left: his soul.

The consequences of Simon’s bargain extended beyond his own life. When the banking crisis drove interest rates up and Ab and Helene faced the risk of losing their home, Simon went to Ab with an offer to join the Twin’s operation. Ab initially refused and threatened to report Simon to their superior. Simon then used Ab’s fear that his son would suffer for his father’s pride and grow up poor. Ab accepted, and Simon later described the act as one of the worst things he had done: he had drawn his friend into the same moral collapse that had consumed him. Yet Simon also admitted that Ab’s corruption made him feel less alone. The recruitment was both a betrayal of friendship and an attempt to share the burden of Simon’s own degradation.

The Mole Network and Ab’s Death

The partnership between Simon and Ab could continue only while the Twin remained unaware that there were two officers. Their anonymous communications concealed their identities from the Twin, but the arrangement became unstable when the Twin wanted his police contact to advance. Simon and Ab were now competing for a single position, and each understood that the other might kill to secure it. Simon later characterized them as having the same nightmare: each feared that the other was trying to kill him.

When Simon realized that Ab was willing to kill him for the place with the Twin, he contacted the Twin and claimed that Ab had discovered their identities and posed an urgent threat. Simon acted first. He arranged for Ab to be eliminated and killed his best friend. His decision protected his position within the criminal arrangement, but it also fixed the personal cost of his betrayal: Simon had not merely recruited Ab into corruption; he had destroyed him when their shared secret became a contest for survival.

Repentance and the Pursuit of Corruption

Simon eventually stopped being a mole. Else says that he could have continued, but Helene’s death left him with nothing more to lose and nothing left to fear. He spent the rest of his life doing penance and making amends, pursuing corrupt police officers with a severity that made him few friends within the force. He grew lonely but did not regard himself as deserving of sympathy; Else remembers his view of self-loathing as a hatred renewed each morning when a person looks at himself in the mirror. His later pursuit of police corruption was therefore not detached from his own history: he was hunting conduct in which he himself had once participated.

Else does not credit her love for Simon with saving him. She says instead that his love for her helped him save himself. That distinction preserves Simon’s responsibility: affection could matter, but it did not erase what he had done or substitute for his own decision to change. His repentance was expressed through the sustained work of making amends and confronting corruption, rather than through a claim that he had been absolved of his past.

Relationships and Narrative Significance

Simon’s relationships reveal the human stakes of the criminal network. His love for Helene preceded his bargain with the Twin, while his friendship with Ab became the route through which corruption spread from one officer to another. The same Simon who believed he had seen Helene truly also used Ab’s love for his son to overcome Ab’s resistance. Affection and moral insight did not keep Simon from exploiting the people closest to him; his capacity to perceive others coexisted with his willingness to damage them.

The revelations about Simon also change the meaning of the police-mole mystery. The police had imagined a single hidden traitor, but Ab’s diary identifies the advantage of two collaborators: mutual cover made the arrangement harder to detect. Simon’s story thereby links private choices to institutional vulnerability. His later campaign against corruption carries force because he knows its methods from within, but it cannot undo the death of Ab or the harm caused by the years in which he helped the Twin. His life ends in the tension between genuine repentance and irreversible responsibility.