The rule of law

The rule of law is the distinction Simon Kefas draws between catching a criminal and deciding what punishment that person deserves. It gives judgment to courts rather than police officers or private avengers, and it makes restraint part of law enforcement: even when a suspect seems guilty, shooting someone who could have been arrested would make the officer a wrongdoer. The principle is presented as a moral commitment, but the novel tests it against suspected vigilante justice and institutions where authority itself has been corrupted.

Simon’s lesson about policing

Simon explains the principle to his young nephew Mats, who is playing at shooting villains. Simon jokes that the game is target practice, then makes the practical boundary clear: even the police cannot shoot villains without permission, and if they shoot someone they could otherwise have arrested, they will go to jail. Mats assumes that catching a criminal would give the police the right to shoot him; Simon corrects him by saying that the judge decides how long a convicted person will be imprisoned.

The exchange makes the division of power concrete. Simon’s work is to catch criminals, not to determine their sentence, and he tells Mats he is glad the decision is not his to make. His description of catching criminals as the enjoyable part of the job gives the lesson a personal as well as institutional dimension: the officer’s responsibility is limited, and that limit protects the difference between law enforcement and punishment by force.

The temptation of private justice

In a conversation with Martha Lian, Simon considers the possibility that Per Vollan did not die by suicide but was killed by someone who wanted to act as judge, jury, and executioner. Martha raises the emotional force behind such an act: a parent whose child has been harmed might feel that the law is inadequate. Her question acknowledges the temptation without establishing that a particular person committed the killing.

Simon rejects the proposed justification. If police officers give in to the same temptation, he argues, the law becomes pointless; justice must be blind. His response is not a claim that the legal system always delivers a sufficient result. It is a refusal to treat dissatisfaction with a possible sentence, or uncertainty about whether Per would be punished, as permission for an individual to impose a private one. The conversation therefore leaves the suspected killing morally troubling and unresolved while making Simon’s position explicit.

Institutions under pressure

The novel also shows how the rule’s protection can fail when people who control institutions use their authority for private ends. In the prison, Arild Franck pressures Johannes Halden by threatening to cut off his cancer treatment unless he reveals where a prisoner is. Franck invokes his access to information and surveillance to dismiss confidentiality, turning the governor’s position into leverage over a vulnerable patient. Halden refuses to be moved by the threat and answers that he believes he has lived long enough and may be ready to die. The scene presents institutional power not as neutral simply because it is exercised by an official, but as something that can be used to compel obedience.

A separate account of danger inside the prison intensifies that contradiction. Franck recounts that a prisoner who had worked for Hugo Nestor may have been killed because someone worried he would talk; the account itself stresses that there was no evidence, only a concern. The reported fear is not merely of other prisoners, but of a cell door being unlocked from the control room. Security mechanisms that should protect inmates can thus become instruments of exposure when access is controlled by compromised or threatening actors.

Principle and practice

Later, Simon questions Iversen about a reported connection involving Kalle Farrisen and the Twin. Iversen denies having heard of Kalle, and Simon responds that Iversen knows who the Twin is; the silence that follows marks the pressure of an undisclosed connection, not a demonstrated confession. The exchange places investigation amid a criminal world in which information and cooperation are guarded, further complicating the ideal of impartial legal process.

The rule of law is consequently more than a maxim Simon teaches a child. It supplies a standard by which the novel distinguishes arrest from punishment, justice from revenge, and legitimate authority from the abuse of official power. Its force lies partly in the gap between Simon’s clear principle and the surrounding evidence of suspected private violence, prison vulnerability, and institutional pressure: the law must restrain those who enforce it, yet that restraint is hardest to trust when its own institutions can be turned into instruments of coercion.