photograph of the three friends

The photograph of the three friends links Sonny Lofthus’s childhood discovery to the truth about Simon Kefas’s past and Ab Lofthus’s death. A blood-specked image of three young friends beside a mountain cairn, it first identifies Simon to Sonny as the Diver; in the final church scene, Sonny places it in Simon’s jacket as a token of friendship and a form of absolution.

Appearance and Provenance

The photograph shows two men and a woman standing by a cairn in the mountains, all three young and laughing. When Sonny produces it in front of Simon, dried specks of blood mark its surface. The image is not just a record of the friends at an earlier time: its history in the Lofthus family album gives Sonny the knowledge that allows him to connect Simon’s old nickname to the man before him.

The Photograph as Evidence

As a boy, Sonny often looked through his family’s photo album and asked his mother about the mysterious photographer in the mountain picture, whose nickname was the Diver. She told him the photographer was Simon, the third of the three best friends, and explained that she had given him the name because he dived in where no one else dared. The photograph thus preserves a piece of the friendship that Sonny could later use to recognize Simon’s concealed identity as the person behind the code name.

Sonny brings the image into the confrontation after learning from Arild Franck that there were two moles and that Ab was about to expose Simon. He tells Simon that the evidence made the pieces add up: Simon killed Ab before Ab could reveal him. The photograph makes that accusation personal as well as evidentiary, joining the criminal betrayal to the earlier friendship Sonny discovered in the album.

Return to Simon

At the end of the encounter, Simon tells Sonny that he is a stranger who took away the people Sonny loved. Sonny rejects that distance, telling Simon that he is the Diver, who had always been with the others even though he was not in the picture. He lifts Simon’s jacket and slips the photograph into its inside pocket, asking him to take it on his journey because the people pictured are his friends.

Simon closes his eyes and accepts the gesture. The returned photograph cannot undo Ab’s death or restore the friendship to what it was, but it changes what the image means in the present: what had served Sonny as a clue and proof of betrayal becomes, in Simon’s keeping, a reminder that he belonged to the bond he damaged. Its final movement—from the family album, into Sonny’s hands, and back into Simon’s pocket—makes the object a quiet sign of recognition and forgiveness.