Odd Numbers

by Anne Holt

  In amazement, she had noticed that she grew increasingly worried as the morning progressed, without entirely understanding what she was afraid of. Of course Billy T. had nothing to do with the terrorism. Obviously it must be a misunderstanding. Around one o’clock, it was announced that he had been released after the interview, on condition that he continued to report to police headquarters, so the Oslo Police probably thought the same. Nevertheless, it felt more upsetting to think of Billy T. as a detainee than it had been to meet him yesterday for the first time since Christmas 2002.

  It was Ida who had been agitated last night.

  Not Hanne.

  And now the whole morning had been spent following online newspapers and social media. Using a range of anonymous and fairly insignificant accounts, she had acquired a rich source of information in recent years. It was certainly nothing new for her to observe the world through the Internet from her internal, self-imposed exile. On the contrary. What was new was that she had been focused, with almost monomaniacal zeal, on what had first of all been described as an arrest and subsequently as an interview. “Of interest in the terrorist inquiry,” as Aftenposten stated at noon. Only when Ida arrived home from school did Hanne succeed in forcing her train of thought on to something in the here and now. Life as it had become. The way she had chosen. The way it had to be.

  It brought her a sense of calm.

  Which she was once again about to lose.

  Come, she typed in as her response.

  Afterward, to avoid regrets, she put down her phone and turned to face her daughter. Ida sat watching her in silence as she ate.

  The man who went by the name of Skoa, but who had once been a soldier called Lars Johan Austad, was famished. Until recently he had occasionally sneaked into one of the many hamburger joints around the city and stolen leftovers from the garbage bins. It was unbelievable what people threw away. If he were lucky, he might find more than half-full cardboard containers of french fries. Sometimes he had come across whole, unopened boxes of hamburgers, especially at Oslo Central Station. Maybe the buyers had suddenly realized they needed to make a dash for their trains. Maybe they had bought two and couldn’t face the second one. Anyway, the overflowing plastic bins were real treasure chests.

  Until someone must have complained.

  He was almost certainly not the only one who knew about this easy source of a better meal. Someone must have disliked consuming his food while poor people rummaged around in the garbage, because scarcely six months ago, without any warning, it became impossible for him to set foot inside a single family restaurant. Both the major chains had obviously arrived at a decision: if you showed any signs of living on the streets, you were not welcome on their premises.

  Skoa most definitely showed signs of being homeless.

  Now and again, he took a chance all the same.

  If there were long lines inside, he could sometimes manage to scurry in as fast as his aching legs would carry him and snatch whatever was lying on top of the trash containers. Altogether slapdash. There were several wasted trips in that fashion—sometimes he shuffled out again with nothing more than an empty wrapper smeared with mustard and ketchup.

  However, it was worth a try.

  He was so damn hungry.

  Burger King in Karl Johans gate, in the middle of the city center, was normally crowded at this time of day. Skoa was standing on the corner beside Café Cathedral, on the opposite side of the street, beneath the still-bare trees that would be surrounded by tables and chairs as soon as spring grew warmer and serving outdoors took hold. He had a good view straight across to the Burger King entrance, and his mouth was watering at the thought of what might be in store for him.

  He had not eaten for twenty-four hours.

  One try. He would allow himself that.

  If it did not succeed, he would drag himself off to the meeting place, where the Church City Mission sold reasonable food at an extremely cheap price. The problem was that he would then have to scrape together 15 kroner that he did not have. He could collect some bottles for their deposits, but that would take time.

  A deep voice sneaked up on him from behind.

  “Don’t turn around,” it said.

  Skoa felt a chill crawl over his skin. The immobilizing armor plating enclosed him, paralyzing all his muscles. It did not happen so often these days, because there was so little he was afraid of. At the time when his life had slowly grown so full of anxiety that he had been sent home from Kosovo, three months before his tour of duty in the NATO-led Kosovo Force was finished, he had still had something to lose. Now he had nothing. If he and death had not exactly become friends, they were at least close acquaintances who supported each other at irregular intervals.

  The anxiety that hit him was therefore so unexpected that he began to pass urine. He did not turn around and concentrated instead on getting his bladder under control.

  “Open your eyes.”

  Skoa was not even aware he had closed them.

  The stranger’s mouth was right beside his ear. Skoa tried to concentrate. He had once been a soldier. A member of the Special Forces.

  It was a man who was standing behind him. Approximately as tall as he was. Slightly taller, perhaps; at least he did not seem to have to stretch to reach Skoa’s ear with his mouth. Skoa had lost his sense of smell long ago, and there was no distinguishing feature to be detected in the short bursts of breath that almost imperceptibly stroked his cheek.

  “Look down.”

  Skoa did as he was asked.

  A hand. At the end of an arm. The hand was wearing a glove, and in the glove, only just visible, was a 1,000 kroner note. Yet another hand. This one was holding a small package, not much larger than a letter.

  “You’ll receive 1,000 kroner for delivering this package to TV2,” the voice said. “Straight along the street here. Do you know where it is?”

  Skoa nodded, staring at the 1,000 kroner note.

  Food and heroin for a couple of days. Money left over.

  “Take it,” the man said.

  He almost embraced him, with both arms underneath Skoa’s.

  “Don’t turn around. Walk calmly up Karl Johans gate. I’ll be able to see what you’re doing. Okay? I’ll be watching.”

  “Okay,” Skoa mumbled, keeping a firm hold of both the money and the small package.

  “Now,” the voice said, and took a step back.

  Skoa pulled his grubby hood down over his cap and did as he was told.

  A thousand kroner, he thought. A thousand fucking kroner for walking a hundred yards.

  This must be his lucky day.

  Up until now, this day had been horrendous.

  It was four o’clock in the afternoon and the only positive news she had received was that the Security Service had identified the person in last night’s video. That was beginning to be a long time ago. It hadn’t been any feat of investigation either: the boy’s name was Abdullah Hassan, and he had been Mohammad Awad’s closest friend. Abdullah had also been granted the honor of a slim folder in the Security Service’s capacious data banks. Since the people up there in Nydalen had initially harbored suspicions about Mohammad, after viewing the footage from the American Church and the nearby Seven-Eleven store, it had not taken them more than three hours the previous night to expose who had concealed himself behind the scarf while rattling off a hate-filled litany about heresy in general and Norway in particular. The young man had been easy to recognize by a V-shaped scar on his forehead that he hadn’t had the wisdom to camouflage.

  As Silje Sørensen saw it, there were two immediate problems linked to Abdullah Hassan. The first was that he seemed to have vanished into thin air. He had been missing for several days—a long time before the terrorist bombing in Frogner.

  The other was that his real name was Jørgen Fjellstad.

  The young man was the result of a Norwegian exchange student at the end of the eighties returning home with more than a high school diploma in he
r luggage. Six months later, she gave birth to a son. To his grandparents’ great surprise and slight shock, the baby’s complexion was soon as dark as that of the wide receiver on Monroe High School’s football team.

  Jørgen himself became a promising athlete in his youth, until a nasty bone fracture put a stop to his career, taking his school attendance down the drain with it. He had managed to rack up a few instances of petty crime on his record, prior to converting to Islam two years ago.

  Of the increasingly zealous type.

  Silje Sørensen regarded the huge stack of papers in her in-tray on the desk in front of her with dismay. She had already fallen behind yesterday morning, before the blast, and knew it would take days, maybe weeks, for her to get familiar with the daily challenges of being Chief of Police.

  She stood up and crossed to the window.

  If nothing else, the new job had afforded her a better view.

  Last night she had asked herself if she had any regrets.

  About agreeing to apply for the job after being given an implied promise that she would get it.

  The answer had been a long time coming.

  When the bomb had exploded in the government complex on July 22, 2011, Silje Sørensen had been on vacation in the Bahamas. Early that morning, after a lovely breakfast in the beach bar, she had received a phone call from Norway. It was Johanne Vik, the criminal psychologist who had assisted the police with so many cases until she died so tragically in an accident just two weeks after the catastrophe on Utøya Island. Johanne had been in desperate straits because she had been unable to reach the police in connection with the death of a little boy, the victim of what appeared to be a domestic accident. Eventually Silje Sørensen had been able to put her in touch with a police prosecutor who was spending his vacation at home. Thereafter she had returned to the hotel and followed the news from Norway on the Internet.

  It had been a dreadful twenty-four hours.

  But she had been off work.

  This time she was responsible for the city.

  This was a job she had really wanted.

  She glanced down at her own hands. They were trembling slightly and so clammy that she began to shake them to make the perspiration evaporate.

  There was a knock at the door. She took a deep breath and tried to straighten up. Her uniform shirt was uncomfortably tight—she would have to remember to change before her next meeting with the head of the Security Service.

  “Come in,” she said, and turned to face the door.

  Her secretary, as immaculately dressed as ever, had hectic roses on his cheeks.

  “Another video has arrived,” he said in an apologetic tone, as if he were to blame. “From the Prophet’s True Ummah. They’re threatening yet another explosion.”

  The terrain looked as though it had been blown to smithereens at some point in the distant past.

  The man had set off from Åneby that same morning. He would turn seventy in a couple of months, but few would have believed that. He had already put more than eight miles behind him, and there was still a distance to go before he would set up camp for the night. He had followed the detour north of Ørfiske and had taken time for only a short break at Tømte. Some snow was still lying on the northern slopes and on the very smallest paths, but it was easy enough to walk in most places. He had all the time in the world. Now he had turned off on to a narrower track over Brenna, en route to Øyungen, where he would try his luck at fishing at dusk.

  There were hardly any people out and about. On weekends he kept well away from the southern parts of Nordmarka, where large numbers of people went walking. A miserable day in the middle of the week such as this, however, offered mile upon mile of twosomeness: he and his dog. Pelle was getting on in years as well, but like his owner, he was in remarkably good shape. He was roaming about, just as he always did, whether on the leash or not. The man had to relieve himself. To take a shit, no less. Even though he had not spotted anyone for more than half an hour, he cut off from the path to find some shelter behind trees. The ground had just opened out into a rockfall that he was forced to cross. A pretty impassable rockfall, he noted as he made an attempt at the narrowest point.

  Pelle did not want to come with him. He was already standing on stiff legs in the middle of the heap of stones, peering eagerly down between two boulders.

  “Not there, Pelle. Come on.”

  The man shouted in a stern voice. At the age of four, the dog had broken his left foreleg on scree like this.

  For once, Pelle refused to listen to his master. The man was starting to struggle a bit with his hearing, but he could have sworn that he heard a low growl from Pelle’s throat.

  “Come on, then!” he ordered once again: he was really desperate to relieve himself and approached a massive pine trunk that would provide shelter from the path.

  No reaction.

  It was surely too early for adders? The freezing temperatures had still lingered, even in daylight hours and especially here in the forest. On the other hand, it was precisely on such rocky slopes that they would lie in hibernation. It could be a vipers’ nest that Pelle was growling at. If the dog were bitten, it would probably be the end of him. He was eleven years old, and even though the man was fit, he would not have been able to carry a fully grown elkhound very far.

  As fast as he could, he moved over the big boulders.

  “Come here now, you rascal.”

  Angry and scared, he narrowly avoided falling several times. Finally he was level with the dog, still growling loudly.

  “Pelle, come on.”

  The man fastened the leash, mollified at gaining control of the dog without anything having happened to him. Pelle had scraped away some debris from between the stones—sprigs of spruce and old leaves. He pushed them aside with his foot to prevent himself from slipping and taking a tumble.

  That was when he spotted the body.

  He could not fathom what it was that he saw.

  Slowly he sat down on the rock beside the one under his feet. His pulse rate soared so suddenly that his head was spinning. He pulled the dog closer and grabbed its collar, for safety’s sake.

  “Well then, Pelle,” he whispered, using his free hand to fish out his phone.

  No signal.

  “Pelle, there, there. Quiet, Pelle. Good boy.”

  The ringing in his ears and his flickering vision were not due first and foremost to his discovery of a dead person down there between the stones. He was used to dead people, after all: he had worked for a funeral director all his working life. The worst thing was not the smell, either. The man had smelled the odor of dead animals before. This one did not stink any worse than the elk cadaver that Pelle had nibbled at last autumn, which had made him impossible to allow in the house until after three baths. The corpse could have lain there for no more than a week, the man guessed, and the chilly weather would not exactly have hastened decomposition.

  When the elderly hiker realized he was shaking and no longer desperate at all, it was not primarily because he had found a dead man. What was so shocking was that the body was in pieces.

  On top, faceup, was the head. A dark head. A real Negro, it struck the old man as he struggled to pull himself together, in order to retreat to a spot with cell phone coverage.

  There was a black man down there between the huge rocks, and his body was well and truly dismembered.

  The collection of stones was the only thing that gave the room a touch of personal character. Some beautiful examples, including a topaz that she recognized, lay on top of a chest.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen had not set eyes on many genuinely boyish rooms in her life. Her important elder brother, whom she had not seen or spoken to since a few days before she was shot, never allowed her into his when she was a child. During her teenage years, she had been a loner until she had met her Cecilie at high school and loved her, until Cecilie died of cancer many years later. If she had let any others into her personal space to any extent, it had been a matt
er of children and ancient whores. And Nefis, the woman who had brought her back from the depths of a sorrow so great that she had sought refuge in an Italian convent in order to die.

  Men were theoretical rather than actual for Hanne Wilhelmsen. Especially young men and boys, with whom she had minimal dealings, apart from through her work. In any case, though, she had seen a great deal more in the movies.

  This did not look like a boy’s room.

  Not in the slightest, unless the boy in question suffered from OCD and a phobia of bacteria.

  On the one hand, a twenty-two-year-old could scarcely be called a boy any longer. On the other, the boy in question was a high school student living with his father. It should have looked different in here.

  She had no desire to trundle in any farther. Now she sat just inside the door and failed to understand how she had actually gone along with Billy T.’s absurd suggestion about viewing Linus’s room, to convince her that something was off-kilter.

  It had been four weeks since the last time she had ventured out of the apartment in Kruses gate. Ida was to take part in her very first gymkhana. Nefis had been merciless and in the end had threatened to take the youngster and leave if Hanne did not come to watch. Empty threats, they both well knew, but it helped Hanne understand the seriousness of the demand that she go to Stovner to see a ten-year-old canter around on a scruffy Shetland pony for four minutes, before it was all over.

  Precious little to leave the apartment for.

  So was this.

  It was only when Hanne had learned who had actually owned the wristwatch the police had found that she had let herself be persuaded. Billy T. had given the watch to Linus in a fit of solidarity, he had explained to her in desperation, one late night when they had in fact been playing video games and had a conversation of sorts. The intention had been to have Linus’s name engraved as well, but he had never gotten around to that.