The Mole

The Mole is the long-running question of who inside the police force supplied the Twin with confidential information. The answer is not one traitor but two: Simon Kefas and Ab Lofthus, partners whose arrangement made each appear less suspicious. Ab’s murder was then staged as a suicide to hide the surviving informant and close the inquiry. The mystery’s resolution links the Twin’s apparently effortless access to police knowledge with a private betrayal among three former friends, and turns the investigation into a reckoning with both corruption and Simon’s responsibility for his father’s death.

The mystery and its apparent disappearance

For years, Hugo Nestor cannot establish how his boss gets information. The Twin is not seen on the streets, and Nestor has met no one who claims to have spoken with or seen him. Yet the Twin seems to know everything. When a police mole is active, Nestor can explain that reach as access to nearly everything the police do. After Ab Lofthus is killed just as he is about to expose the Twin, however, the apparent flow of information stops. Nearly fifteen years later, Nestor has accepted that he may never learn the mole’s identity.

The case’s apparent closure rests on a false premise: that there was one mole, and that Ab was that person. When Sonny Lofthus later asks who helped the Twin, Nestor can offer no name; he says that no one among them knows, though perhaps someone in the police does. His answer captures the information vacuum around the conspiracy, but also shows how effectively the assumed death of the mole has concealed its surviving half.

The two-mole arrangement

Ab’s diary supplies the decisive account. In an entry dated 4 August, he records that officers at the station are discussing the possibility that the Twin has a plant in the force. The officers imagine one killer and one traitor, Ab notes, failing to consider the advantage of two collaborators: when one is active, the other can provide an alibi, and together they can remain above suspicion. He acknowledges that both are corrupt police officers, implicated in turning a blind eye to drug dealing, human trafficking, and murder. He also records his uncertainty about whether confession and forgiveness are possible without ruining those around him, and concludes that he has to get out.

The diary makes the conspiracy more than a simple leak of information. The two moles communicate through Hotmail accounts accessed from separate computers stolen from the evidence room, and pass messages in concealed drops. The Twin tries to recruit Ab into a more useful position in the force, offering advancement, access to sensitive information, and money. Ab recognizes that the offer is not a way out: the Twin is someone who must be stopped. The entry reveals how the criminal arrangement recruits and compromises police officers, while the diary’s private account preserves the doubts that the public investigation cannot reach.

By 6 October, Ab suspects that the partnership between the moles is breaking down. The Twin has stopped replying to his messages, and Ab wonders whether the Twin and the other mole have been communicating without him. He no longer trusts the second mole, whom he calls Z; Z, in turn, wants them to quit while they are ahead. Ab concludes that the Twin needs only one of them and that the other will become a dangerous witness. On 7 October, he decides that he must act before Z acts against him, and arranges to meet him at midnight at the Maridalen medieval ruins.

Ab’s final diary entry, dated 8 October, records that he has loaded a pistol and is preparing to go to the ruins. He questions whether his involvement began as a way to provide for his family or from a desire for status and opportunity, and measures his conduct against what he would want his son to do. He anticipates returning as a changed man—a killer—and hopes that someone will find the diary. The entries establish that the planned confrontation was no spontaneous attack: Ab knew the other mole, expected a lethal outcome, and left a written account of the conspiracy and its collapse.

The Diver and the clues

When Sonny confronts Arild Franck, he identifies the two questions that remain: who killed his father, and who was the mole who helped the Twin. Franck’s reaction confirms to Sonny that he has reached information Franck is afraid to disclose. Later, Simon recognizes the significance of Sonny’s determination to break into the prison to question Franck: Sonny believes Franck knows something about the mole that the boy could not have learned otherwise.

Franck gives Sonny a crucial fragment: the mole had a code name. Sonny identifies it as the Diver, the name Simon used when contacting the Twin. The name becomes legible through a photograph Sonny has kept from his family’s album. It shows three young friends together by a cairn. Sonny remembers asking his mother about the mysterious photographer with the unusual nickname; she told him that the photographer was Simon, the third of the three friends, and that she had called him the Diver because he went where others did not dare. The photograph connects a childhood memory to the secret communications of the corrupt police partnership, while the code name turns Simon’s concealed identity into something Sonny can recognize.

Ab’s death and the exposure of Simon

The Twin confirms the purpose of Ab’s death when Sonny confronts him. He admits that he and his counterpart killed Sonny’s father because the mole had warned that Ab planned to kill him. According to the Twin, the mole said the police were closing in on him and that exposure was only a matter of time. The Twin agreed to make the killing look like a suicide, so the police would believe Ab was the mole and end their search. The staged death did not merely conceal a crime; it converted Ab into a false solution that protected the surviving informant.

The diary and the Twin’s account clarify how that false solution worked. Ab’s planned meeting at the Maridalen medieval ruins was real, but the account that identifies him as the sole mole was manufactured. Ab had gone there prepared to confront the other informant; the Twin’s testimony establishes that the killing was arranged to protect that informant and divert police attention. The distinction between Ab’s own written anticipation of violence and the Twin’s later explanation of the murder supplies the causal link between the moles’ breakdown and the cover story.

Once Sonny connects Franck’s clue to the childhood photograph, Simon’s role is no longer an abstract suspicion. Simon has been both a police officer pursuing Sonny and the surviving mole who helped the Twin. At the final confrontation, he puts his gun back in its shoulder holster rather than intervening as Sonny prepares to pass judgment. The exposure therefore does not end with identifying a name: it forces Simon to face his part in Ab’s death and leaves Sonny’s judgment, rather than police procedure, to determine what happens next.

Narrative significance

The mystery is structured around a misleadingly simple question—who was the mole?—whose apparent answer, Ab, is designed to stop further inquiry. Its solution depends on separate forms of evidence: Ab’s diary reveals the existence and breakdown of the two-person arrangement; Franck provides the code name; the photograph gives Sonny the personal association needed to identify it; and the Twin explains why Ab was killed and why the death was presented as suicide. No single clue is sufficient. Together they turn remembered family history into forensic recognition and expose the cost of reducing a conspiracy to one culprit.

The Twin’s advantage comes from a form of structural camouflage: two informants can protect one another with alibis, while an engineered death supplies the authorities with a convenient answer. The revelation also binds institutional corruption to private loyalty. Simon’s code name belongs to an earlier friendship, but in the present it marks his hidden service to the Twin and his betrayal of Ab. The Mole mystery thus resolves not only how information reached the criminal organization, but how the police’s search was manipulated—and why Sonny’s pursuit of the truth becomes inseparable from judging Simon.