Odd Numbers Read online

  Håkon sat down slowly in an empty chair, clutching the armrests, and shook his head weakly.

  “She didn’t even come to Hairy Mary’s funeral,” he said, sotto voce. “I saw the obituary by sheer chance and went along. Nefis was there. The little girl, too, it was lovely to see her. Hanne’s daughter, sort of, whom I’ve never met. Pretty girl. She cried and cried. I kept out of sight and sat at the back. But Hanne . . .”

  All of a sudden he looked up and took a deep breath.

  “. . . wasn’t even there. At the funeral of her own housekeeper, who loved Hanne more than any person can cherish another. And you’re going to use someone like that in the police?”

  Silje opened her mouth to answer but was interrupted by irate knocking at the door. Her secretary, whose appearance was still unaffected by having reached his twenty-second working hour without a break, came rushing in without waiting for an answer.

  “They’ve identified the man on the tape,” he said so loudly that his voice sounded a touch strident. “The guy from . . . uh . . . the Prophet’s True Ummah. The head of the Security Service has expedited the meeting. He’s coming in half an hour, and so is the National Police Commissioner. She is on . . .”

  The secretary pointed to the Police Chief’s telephone.

  “ . . . line 5. You should take the call at once.”

  He wanted to do it immediately.

  Billy T. had earlier considered taking a closer look at Linus’s room, but more than a couple of decades of rooting around in other people’s business as an investigator had given him a strong disinclination to snoop around in his personal time. Just as he had required his youngsters to respect his personal domain, so he had always respected theirs.

  However, it was now time.

  The decision had grown firmer as he ran back from Årvoll, retracing the footprints he had trod only minutes earlier. Once home, all the same, he was seized by doubt. He brewed a large pot of coffee and sat down in the living room, filled with a fervent hope that Linus would return. That his son would come in through the door with that broad, crooked, and affectionate smile it seemed as if he had lost for good. He would have sat down and asked for a cup. Told Billy T. about his nocturnal expedition, provided an explanation—an embarrassed account perhaps, which had to do with a girl he had met and an assignation with her. Or a man. For heaven’s sake, that wouldn’t have bothered Billy T. in the slightest. Linus might have laughed at his father’s concern about the apartment he had visited: the note with the name on the doorbell at Rødbergveien 2 could have been left behind by the previous owner. They should have sat like that, Billy T. and Linus, watching the silvery morning light come creeping into the poky, dilapidated apartment, the two of them together.

  But Linus did not make an appearance.

  Billy T. should do it now.

  Without delay.

  He got to his feet with a resoluteness he did not feel. Returned his coffee cup to the kitchen. Washed his hands thoroughly, without knowing why, before he virtually marched into Linus’s room. A bedside lamp was lit beside the narrow bed in the corner. Billy T. had offered to buy a double bed, but Linus felt that would make the room too cramped. The bed was made. The curtains drawn. On the desk, an old wooden school desk that Billy T. had once found at a yard sale and refinished, lay a pencil case and a school book. A history book, Billy T. assumed when he glanced at the cover. Or social studies—he had never had a real grasp of any of the subjects. The only thing that actually testified to anyone actually having a permanent home here, rather than it being just a rented space, was Linus’s collection of stones. Most of it lay inside a chest tucked into the alcove beside the closet, but six especially beautiful semiprecious stones were displayed on top of the lid.

  It struck him, above all, that the room was empty. Not just soulless in its conspicuous lack of actual personal belongings, but empty. The young man spent a lot of time in here, but not so much as a dirty plate or coffee cup was to be seen. No newspapers or magazines. It was clean and tidy throughout. Billy T. had never seen his son bring a vacuum cleaner or bucket into his room, so he must obviously do his housework while his father was at work. A closed laptop was sitting on the bedside table. Several books were stowed on the small shelf above the desk. All of them school books. Beside the desk was Billy T.’s old chest of drawers from the time when he was himself a boy. He hesitated for a second before he opened the top drawer. With some difficulty: it had been knocked together by his grandfather and had never been easy to grapple with.

  In surprise, he lifted the top pair of boxer shorts. They were freshly ironed. Neatly folded and lying on top of one of three tidy stacks of underwear. Billy T. had never before seen an ironed pair of underpants. Not even in the military. He let his fingers run tentatively over the various fabrics before shoving the obstinate drawer back into place and opening the next one. Just a book. Nothing else. It was green, with a gold frame enclosing the title.

  The Koran, no less.

  Billy T. noticed how his hands were shaking when he carefully lifted out the book. He opened it, and the first thing his eyes landed on was the Opening Prayer:

  Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds,

  The Beneficent, the Merciful,

  Owner of the Day of Judgment,

  You alone we worship, You alone we ask for help.

  Guide us to the straight path!

  The path of those whom You have blessed,

  Not the path of those who earned Your anger,

  Nor of those who went astray.

  Billy T. dropped the Koran on the floor and burst into tears.

  He hadn’t done that for eleven years, three months, and a number of days.

  The pigeon that Gunnar from Korsvoll called Winnie the Pooh was well over eleven years old. He was the deceased Colonel’s little brother. The man who was carrying Winnie the Pooh in a cage across the coastal rocks could not fathom the purpose of giving birds names. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t particularly fond of animals at all but he appreciated that dogs and maybe cats might be pleasant to have under your roof. Okay to call them something. It might also be reasonable to give horses names, even though they lived in their own stables, but naming this tiny, feathered creature Winnie was one of the stupidest things he had ever heard.

  But then his sister’s grown-up son was pretty stupid, in the true meaning of the word. Of course it was a shame for the boy, or the man that he really was, despite his extremely limited intellect. His life had been in danger that time when, as a teenager, he had been brutally struck down and robbed by some youths who had never been caught. Bloody foreigners, of course—his poor nephew had grasped that much.

  “One minute you’re completely with it,” he mumbled as he looked around on the slippery rocks, “and the next you’ve lost your mind.”

  He stopped.

  He was at the end of his journey. It had begun to grow light. The fjord lay quietly in front of him, and the weather was so gray that the sea and sky merged out there, behind Stauper’s cluster of rocks and skerries.

  The man hunkered down and opened the cage. Warily, he grabbed the bird. Partly afraid that the creature would bite, he checked that the ring with the tiny container was still in place around Winnie’s foot. After that he stood up, raised his hands aloft, and let the bird fly home.

  To the half-wit.

  “Idiot.” The young police officer snarled at himself through gritted teeth. “Idiot!”

  Henrik Holme slapped his right cheek three times with the flat of his hand, before thumping his forehead with his fist. He was standing indecisively outside a red-brick apartment building in Frogner.

  It had happened again.

  When Oslo had been hit by one of its greatest tragedies on July 22, 2011, when a far-right terrorist killed eight people by detonating a van bomb in the city center and then proceeded to shoot dead sixty-nine participants of a Workers’ Youth League summer camp on the island of Utøya, Henrik had been sent off—a spanking new, fre
shly appointed police officer—to investigate a little boy’s death in an apparent domestic accident. The case had been both interesting and heart-rending, but most of all it was the explosion in Oslo that he wanted to be involved in at that time. Now that the city seemed to have been struck by yet another terrorist attack, barely three years later, it appeared that Henrik Holme was once again being sidelined, to serve as some sort of liaison officer between the Police Chief and a woman about whom he had heard the most preposterous rumors. And who didn’t have the remotest connection with the dramatic events only a few blocks away.

  He could have protested. Ought to have turned it down flat, but it was the Police Chief who had chosen him.

  “Shit!” he whispered, staring in a northwesterly direction, where he thought he could still—almost twenty-four hours after the explosion—see a pillar of smoke. He took a suitably large gulp of the raw morning air and lifted his finger to the doorbell with the simple inscription: “Wilhelmsen.”

  Still he hesitated. It was as if his finger felt reluctant to press the bell. Maybe it was Silje Sørensen’s smile that stopped him: he remembered it all too well. Four days ago, he had sat in the chair on the opposite side of her desk in her office when she rounded off a short lecture by saying: “She’s a bit . . . demanding, Hanne Wilhelmsen. But she’s incredibly smart. Not like all the others, that woman. But then you’re not either, are you, Henrik Holme? I’m sure you’ll strike a chord.”

  Then she had smiled. A bit oddly. Maybe it was involuntary, as if she found it downright amusing to select him to send to this preposterous female character, without being at all willing to admit it.

  That smile had bothered him since.

  He let his index finger push the button and held it down.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen pressed her thumb on the remote control and zapped it to NRK. They had obviously had a change of shift of both journalists and interviewees after a long night with nonstop broadcasts from Marienlyst. The new presenter, in a dark suit, stood talking to three other men in similarly somber attire.

  The doorbell rang.

  She did not bat an eyelid. She was not expecting anyone. When she was not expecting anyone—something she did extremely seldom—she did not open the door.

  “Out of consideration for possible new viewers now, in the early hours of the morning,” the presenter said, “could you give a brief summary of what distinguishes the Prophet’s True Ummah from other Muslim groups in Norway? Until now, the group has never been mentioned anywhere. Does anyone know anything at all about this organization?”

  The doorbell rang again.

  Hanne picked up her coffee cup and drained its last dregs. It was already lukewarm. In annoyance, she put the cup back on the table and grabbed her iPhone. She clicked on the doorbell app and sneaked a look.

  She had never seen him before.

  The man was relatively young, with fair and slightly too short, cropped hair. He was staring intently at the camera, and the wide-angle lens made his nose look enormous.

  Police uniform, Hanne noticed, and it suddenly occurred to her that she was expecting someone after all. The familiar aversion washed over her: a slight queasiness and sudden ache in her joints. There was a stinging sensation behind her eye sockets, and she took off her glasses.

  Following yesterday’s explosion and the unexpected visit from Billy T., she had forgotten the appointment entirely. The awful night with an unusually restless Ida had not improved matters, and she felt panic snapping at her heels. Meeting her old friend Silje Sørensen again two weeks earlier had taken her three days to prepare for. This was someone she had never seen before.

  It wasn’t acceptable.

  Hanne sat stiffly and held her breath to make the dizziness subside.

  “Go away,” she whispered, when she could no longer hold her breath.

  She glanced at the app. He was still standing there.

  Yet again came the insistent sound from the hallway.

  “Damn it!” she said out loud, surprising herself by pressing the button to open the door downstairs.

  “We have just received a report from the Security Service,” she heard from the TV. “The representative of the Prophet’s True Ummah, who yesterday assumed responsibility for the terror attack in Frogner, has been identified. It has been announced that the threat level has been increased following a meeting this morning of Oslo Police, the Security Service, and the National Police Directorate. We are transferring to . . .”

  The policeman outside must have leaped up the stairs, because the doorbell was already ringing again.

  It was so long since he had run. Really run, wearing sneakers and a tracksuit, and with no other aim in mind than to become properly tired. That didn’t take long. Billy T. had hardly reached the bus barrier at Lofthus before he was unable to go on. At a stretch, he could claim to have run a half mile. His lungs were on fire, and his thighs had been full of lactose even before the slight incline up along the green expanse. He had hoped to clear his head. Instead he felt a pain shooting up from his neck, and he came to a complete standstill.

  Linus had not come home last night.

  After examining his son’s room in minute detail, Billy T. had remained seated in a chair in the living room. In the semidarkness. Waiting. He had drunk another four cups of coffee. Without reading. Without watching the TV. He had just let time pass.

  His decision to confront Linus at last had faded as daylight crept into the small apartment in Refstadsvingen. During the past few weeks, he had avoided asking the boy too much about what he was doing, out of respect for his private life—and in ever-increasing fear of what the answer would actually be. Tonight, when he had realized that Linus could be involved in something far worse than anything Billy T. had ever been able to imagine, he appreciated that something had to be done.

  But his son never came home.

  It was just past 8:00 a.m. when Billy T. made an effort to bend and stretch after a jog of not much more than a half mile, with his foot on a ramshackle bench. As he made up his mind to walk home again and feeling increasingly ridiculous in his far-too-tight elasticated trousers below a neon green Nike top, he made eye contact with a jogger heading in the opposite direction. There was something familiar about the guy. Middle-aged, Billy T. noticed as he approached—a heavily built and fairly athletic individual.

  The man slowed down and stood momentarily, slightly disoriented, staring at him, before his face broke into a smile.

  “Billy T.! Well, my goodness! Long time no see.”

  Billy T. took the proffered hand.

  “Adam?” he ventured to say. “Heavens, you’re certainly fit these days, I see.”

  “Had to do it.”

  “Yes, well . . .”

  Billy T. let go his hand.

  “Condolences,” he muttered, when it dawned on him that the man had become a widower for the second time.

  He squinted up at Grefsenkollen, where the clouds were hanging so low that he was unable to see the summit.

  “Thanks,” answered his old colleague from the beginning of the nineties. “It was a while ago now.”

  “How are—” Billy T. did not get any further.

  “Yes,” the man said. “I’m fine, thanks. I’ve my little girl to think about, you know. Now I really do have to keep myself alive, at least. I’ve begun to exercise and that sort of thing. Run to work, you see, even though it’s quite a distance.”

  “Mm,” Billy T. said, nodding.

  He wanted to leave, but if he turned and headed for home again, which he had been about to do when Adam Stubo appeared, he would have to accompany his obviously far fitter ex-colleague.

  “Are you still working for Kripos?” he asked instead.

  The man shook his head and used his arm to wipe the sweat from his forehead.

  “I’d had enough of the National Criminal Investigation Service,” he said firmly. “Of all the depravity, pure and simple. July 22 and my wife’s death and—I’d had eno
ugh. You’ve packed it in, too, haven’t you? Security firm, I’d heard someone say?”

  “Yes. Good job. Well paid. Very little depravity. What about you?”

  “I’m at Stovner Police Station,” Adam said, waving his hand in a northerly direction. “Coordinating a preventive initiative among young immigrants.”

  “Goodness,” Billy T. said, again attempting to catch sight of the top of Grefsenkollen.

  He swallowed so loudly he could hear himself.

  “It’s actually fascinating,” the other man went on. “Preventing traditional crimes is one thing, but now we have this radicalization of young Muslims to contend with as well. Far from old hat, if yesterday’s events are anything to go by. Even seemingly well-adjusted Norwegian young men can suddenly be converted, and in the course of a few months—”

  “I get it. Exactly. Good luck to you. Lovely to bump into you.”

  Billy T. took a few tentative jogging steps on the spot while dipping his head from side to side, as if preparing for a sprint.

  “But you . . .”

  Adam put his hand on Billy T.’s shoulder.

  “How would you like to drop in sometime? You’re exactly the sort of guy they look up to. Do you remember—?”

  He broke off. Two police patrol cars were on their way up Årrundveien. Without sirens and moving fairly slowly. When they reached the barrier that closed off the area to all traffic apart from the bus, the first vehicle swept quietly into Mons Søviks plass and drew to a halt. The other car parked just behind it.

  Both cars switched on their blue lights.

  Adam pulled a grimace of disapproval, before grabbing a water bottle attached to his back with a belt.

  The doors of the nearest car were opened. A uniformed officer stepped out of each side, one of them considerably older than the other. Adam began to walk toward them. Billy T. remained rooted to the spot. The sight of a water bottle had made him unbearably thirsty.