Odd Numbers Read online

  “But was it out of the question for you to change your job so that Karen could be appointed?”

  “Christ, Silje, you’re being pigheaded now. My point stands. Bye.”

  Håkon Sand suddenly halted, as he was about to leave. A man in his thirties, dressed in a pinstripe suit, snowy white shirt, and a tie so tight you would think it had been knotted half an hour ago, almost collided with him.

  “Switch on the TV,” he said, sweeping back his thick head of hair with a nervous, almost feminine gesture. “They’ve sent a video to TV2.”

  “Who are ‘they’?” Grabbing a remote control, Silje turned on the TV set in the corner, a forty-six-inch Bang & Olufsen on a black-lacquered stand, before repeating, “Who are ‘they’?”

  Her secretary did not respond. Instead, he snatched the remote control from her hands, unbidden, and pressed one of the buttons.

  “ . . . name, The Merciful, The Beneficent.”

  A serious-looking man, with a kufi on his head and a scarf over his face, blinked.

  “Norwegian,” Håkon Sand said softly. “He’s speaking Norwegian.”

  “Allahu akbar,” the man onscreen intoned.

  The image went black for a moment, before a solemn news presenter took over in the studio.

  “This video was sent to us twenty minutes ago. Naturally it has been relayed immediately to the police, but at TV2 we regard it as our duty to communicate everything we know in such a serious case as the one we are now faced with.”

  “Damn it,” the Deputy Chief of Police whispered.

  “Shit!” the Police Chief said. “Are they accepting responsibility?”

  “Yes,” her secretary replied. “At present, no one has any idea who he is. But the head of the Security Service is requesting a meeting. Shall I insist on it taking place here at headquarters?”

  “Yes. What did he say, actually?” She pointed at the screen.

  “As far as I understand, they assume responsibility for the explosion: the Prophet’s True Ummah. An organization I’ve never heard of. To be honest, I’ve a bit of a problem comprehending all these conflicts between the Muslims.”

  Brushing an invisible speck of dust from his left shoulder, he tensed his spine.

  “I don’t mean that negatively, not by any manner of means, but it’s almost incomprehensible—all of what these people get up to, you know.”

  His eyes widened as if he were shocked by his own admission.

  “But of course I don’t have an opinion on that. The meeting will be convened here, then. I’ll pass on that message right away.”

  “The Prophet’s True Ummah,” Håkon Sand mumbled with his hands covering his face. “What the hell is that? I’ve never heard of them.”

  He slid the wet snuff into a better position under his lip.

  “Throw them out, that’s what I say now. On their asses. Out.”

  But he said it so quietly that no one heard him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Linus was obviously doing his level best to make sure he was not heard. He emerged from his room with his sneakers on and crept past the closet in the narrow hallway without grabbing his outdoor clothes. He carefully opened and closed the front door behind him, unaware that his father was observing him from his own bedroom, with his blue eye pressed to a tiny crack at the door.

  Billy T. let thirty seconds pass. Probably Linus would take the stairs, since the elevator was noisy and it was past 2:00 a.m. He forced himself to wait in his bedroom.

  A minute and a half.

  Quick as a flash, Billy T. pulled on his sneakers in the hallway and grabbed his denim jacket from a nail beside the cupboard. He felt for his keys, to check they were still in his pocket, and dashed for the door.

  The bracing night chill accosted him as he headed outside. The meteorologists had promised spring would arrive that weekend, but the weather gods had clearly decided to be stubborn beforehand.

  It must be below freezing. Linus’s attire might suggest that he didn’t intend to venture far. The sleet that had fallen the previous evening had become dry and coarse-grained. It also told Billy T. in which direction Linus had set off. To judge by the long distance between his footsteps, his son had been running. Billy T. trudged after the distinct footprints, alternating his gaze between the ground below and the night before him.

  At the end of the bend that rounded off the loop around the high apartment buildings, he saw that Linus had slowed to a walk. Billy T. slackened his own pace, and as he approached Refstadveien, he stopped entirely. To the south, he saw Linus sprinting up the steps toward the hill outside the library and a small Chinese restaurant. Billy T. loitered until Linus was completely out of sight before he followed after him. His son was then making his way across the parking lot in front of the Rema 1000 supermarket. He could hear the occasional vehicle passing along Trondheimsveien, but not the constant roar of heavy traffic as in daytime.

  Linus obviously had it in mind to cross the bridge over the main road. Billy T. could see that he was shivering: his son kept his hands buried in his tight pants pockets and hunched his shoulders up to his ears. This hindered him so much that Billy T. had to stop several times to avoid coming too close.

  The boy never looked back.

  On the other side of Trondheimsveien, he continued on up toward Årvoll. Billy T. kept between 100 and 150 yards behind him and was no longer so afraid of being spotted.

  It had never been entirely clear to him whether Linus had quite simply been thrown out of his home when he had suddenly turned up at the door a few months earlier, asking if he could move into his father’s shabby three-room apartment. Since his son was an adult, at least according to the calendar, Billy T. had not taken the trouble to contact Grete. He had considered himself finished and done with talking to her the day Linus had turned eighteen. If she had been worried about her son, she could easily have phoned.

  The boy himself had merely mumbled an explanation that he didn’t care for his mother’s new boyfriend. That might well be true. Or not. Until recently, Billy T. had not bothered particularly, and initially he had felt a strange pleasure that Linus wanted to live with him. The first few weeks he had given his best shot at making things pleasant as far as both housework and meals were concerned. He had bought a new TV and a PlayStation and hoped this would generate something resembling the old camaraderie between them.

  But Linus mostly stayed in his room. If he was at home at all. Most often he blamed his college work. Discussion groups, he said tersely when Billy T. occasionally asked where he was going. That at least seemed to tie in with working on his high school diploma. The rare occasions when he wanted to eat dinner with his father, he sat with his school books beside his plate and barely looked up when he accepted the offer of second helpings.

  The change had probably begun before he moved in. Admittedly, at that time, Linus was still going about in sagging pants and a military jacket with holes in the sleeves, but he had cut his hair short. As the weeks and months passed, these hopelessly teenage clothes were displaced. A longish dark-blue coat was the only thing he had wanted for Christmas, and Billy T. had gone to the Ferner Jacobsen fashion store and spent far too much money in order to please Linus. It worked: his son thanked him for the Boss coat with a lackadaisical hug and something reminiscent of a smile.

  That was the only time he smiled: when he wanted something or got something or other. A shirt. A tie, even. He often asked for money to go to the movies and for a bus pass. The pass was something that had taken Billy T. aback, since Linus had used public transportation throughout his teenage years without ever paying so much as a single fare.

  Tonight he was walking on foot in a pair of blue dress pants and matching sweater with a cable pattern on the front. It looked as if he was shivering more and more; he was jogging now, still with his hands thrust into his pockets. Every now and then he looked on the verge of losing his balance.

  Still he did not look back.

  Billy T. let the
distance between them diminish.

  They followed Årvollveien for a few hundred yards. A couple of taxis passed them both. Linus gave a body swerve to a slightly tipsy man with a dog and took a detour off the sidewalk at Årvoll Gård. Apart from that, he kept to the right-hand side of the road with a single-mindedness that eventually made Billy T. speculate whether they had embarked on a lengthy journey. Before he had actually managed to think this through, the boy took a right turn. Now he removed his hands from his pockets and began once again to run along Rødbergveien. Ten or so rundown low-rise apartment buildings were arranged around slushy grassland, half covered in snow. At the second building on the left-hand side, Linus cut across the road so quickly that Billy T. came to a sudden halt for fear of being seen. He was only fifty yards behind his son now and swiftly crouched down behind a badly parked Mazda, halfway up on the sidewalk.

  As soon as Linus disappeared behind the building, Billy T. ran on. In the course of less than a minute, he had managed to cross the road unseen a little farther along. From where he was standing, sheltered behind a green garbage container, he had an unrestricted view of the first of the three entrances into Rødbergveien 2.

  Linus appeared indecisive. In any case, he stood still for a while on a small concrete staircase. His hands were again deep inside his pockets, as if he wanted to prevent himself from ringing one of the doorbells beside the door. Nervously, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other before taking a couple of paces back. He stopped with his rear end against a rusty steel railing but still kept his eyes trained on the entrance.

  Without warning, Linus took a big step forward to the door and raised his hand to the doorbells. Squinting to see, Billy T. instinctively leaned slightly forward from his hiding place behind the container.

  Second from the bottom, he saw.

  On the left side.

  “Second one up, on the left side,” he let his mouth form the words three times in a row.

  The buzzing of the electric door-release mechanism was only just audible from where he was standing. Linus opened the door and stepped inside. Billy T. counted to twenty and walked back to the road. He approached the building in a semicircle, before moving as close to the house wall as possible and inching forward to the door that had closed behind his son.

  “Second one on the left-hand side,” he whispered as he leaned over to the doorbells.

  A spurt of adrenaline surged through his body when he saw the name on the little scrap of paper someone had attached with tape. The note was handwritten but easy to read. Billy T. swallowed and moistened his lips. He felt queasy and had to swallow again. Struggled to breathe calmly. In through his nose, out through his mouth. It made him dizzy, and he forced himself into a better rhythm.

  There could be good reasons for Linus to visit someone in the middle of the night, between two workdays. Certainly hundreds of good reasons.

  The problem was that Billy T. could only think of one when he saw who lived here.

  This was exactly what he had feared, without ever having admitted it to himself. In the course of the past few weeks, a vague disquiet had grown into anxiety. Thereafter, when he had found Linus’s precious Darth Vader on a dead Muslim in Frogner only minutes after the explosion, he had become extremely worried.

  Now he felt ice-cold and struggled in vain to draw his tight jacket more snugly around himself before he broke into a run.

  “What does ‘cold case’ actually mean, Hammo?”

  Ida Wilhelmsen, aged ten and a half, was stretched out on her back, wide awake, in her parents’ double bed.

  “It’s just an expression,” Hanne murmured as she turned over for the third time in the course of one minute. “Now you really must go to sleep.”

  “I can’t get to sleep. Can’t we just get up?”

  “It’s half past two, Ida. You’ll be going to school in a few hours. If you don’t drop off now, you’ll have to go back to your own bed. I’m dead tired.”

  “But what does it mean? And why will you never tell me anything about when you worked in the police? It sounds fascinating. Have you caught any thieves?”

  Hanne could not conceal a smile when her daughter held her face only a few inches away from hers. The dim blue light from the broadband router by the window made Ida’s eyes twinkle.

  “No, in fact I can’t ever remember doing that,” Hanne said. “I worked on worse cases.”

  “What, then? Terrorists? Like the ones who blew up that bomb today? Murderers and that sort of thing?”

  The young girl sat bolt upright.

  “Have you caught murderers, Hammo?”

  Hanne grabbed a pillow and put it over her head. “We must sleep,” she said, half smothered by the down.

  “What?”

  “Ida!” Hanne tore the pillow away, groaning theatrically, and used her arms to pull herself up into a sitting position.

  Ida leaned toward the bedside table and switched on a lamp.

  “Now I definitely won’t be able to get to sleep,” she complained. “Have you really captured murderers, Hammo? And what are these cold cases you’re going to work on? Are they about murderers too?”

  “Among other things. Mostly that, I think. Missing persons’ cases as well. And one or two different things. By the way, in the police we call it homicide, not murder.”

  “But are you . . . are you going to talk to murderers? Meet them—that sort of thing?”

  She looked absolutely terrified. In a single movement, she slid out of the quilt and up onto her knees, with her face thrust right at her mother.

  “You’re not allowed to do that. Does Mommy know about this?”

  “Of course,” Hanne said, disheartened. “And you won’t notice any particular difference; I’ve already told you that. I’ll be working here at home mostly, while you’re at school. Cold cases are old cases that the police have given up on solving. It’ll mainly be paperwork and then a lot of work on the computer, you see. No murderers are going to be allowed to come here.” She laid her hand on Ida’s narrow thighs. “I can promise you that.”

  “That man who was here tonight, he really looked like a murderer.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “A bit mucky, you know, and very creepy eyes.”

  “Well . . .” Hanne picked up a pillow, punched it lightly and placed it by her side. “He certainly isn’t a murderer. I don’t know him anymore, but he used to be very nice. Lie down. Now.”

  Her voice had taken on a tone that made the ten-year-old lie right down and pull the quilt up to her chin.

  “Can we keep the light on?” she whispered.

  “If you dim it all the way down. Good night.”

  The lamp was turned down. A pale, almost pink glow settled over the spacious bedroom. Turning her back to her daughter, Hanne closed her eyes. All she could see behind her eyelids was Billy T.’s blue-brown gaze. She opened them again.

  “I miss Mary,” Ida whispered into the gloom.

  “We all do. But she was old and worn out, and now she’s dead. Sleep.”

  “I miss Mommy.”

  “Ida!”

  “But I do.”

  “She’s coming home on Friday, you ninny. Now go to sleep, or else I’ll be cross. I don’t in the least want to do that. Do you want me to get cross?”

  “Night-night.”

  Hanne tried to think about something else. About nothing at all. She struggled to relax the legs that had no feeling, to let her thoughts find their own paths—forward in time, not back. Dreams instead of nightmares. As she felt sleep catching at her, Ida whispered in a voice that was far too loud: “Since it’s the actual police chief who wants you back, you must have been really smart.”

  “I was the very best,” Hanne Wilhelmsen said, and fell asleep.

  “But, my dear man, don’t you remember how good she was?”

  The Police Chief opened out her arms. Håkon Sand clutched his head and rolled his eyes.

  “Good—yes, she was!
She was damned outstanding! The best there was. And off her head, at the end. Sulky and difficult and the most stubborn person I’ve ever met.”

  It was now 5:00 a.m., and Håkon Sand was so freshly showered that there were still damp patches outlined on his uniform shirt. At the Police Chief’s command, he had not gone home for the night after all, but instead had snatched an hour and a half’s sleep on a couch, before getting ready and donning a uniform that had also been stipulated. Even now, at the age of fifty-two, he possessed an enviable mop of hair that was combed back, smooth, and soaking wet.

  “And who have you actually cleared this with? Why haven’t I heard a word about it? After all, we’re talking about—”

  He broke off and stood panting with open mouth and slumped shoulders.

  “Hanne Wilhelmsen,” Silje finished off for him. “Once one of your best friends. If my recollection isn’t wrong, she wasn’t too crazy for you and your family to celebrate Christmas Eve at her house, only a few days before she was shot.”

  “That was the last time I saw her. Do you know how many times I tried to visit her in the hospital? At the Sunnaas Hospital during her rehabilitation? At her home? Do you have any idea . . . ?”

  “Give it a rest, Håkon. We don’t have time for this. The terrorist attack demands our full attention, okay?”

  “But—”

  “Give it a rest, I said. We’ve had indications that the new justice minister is considering establishing a national cold case group. A good idea, in my opinion. Since I have a couple of authorized posts to juggle with, I want to try to preempt the cabinet minister by setting up a little two-person team here at headquarters. Provisionally, it’s only a trial arrangement. One year. Worth a try. Hanne was the first person I thought of. She showed that her police instincts are still first class in that affair up in Finse. Surprisingly enough, she accepted my offer.”