Odd Numbers

by Anne Holt

Skoa was really worth a shower and a few old clothes. He had been an explosives expert in the army, the investigator had heard it rumored, and had apparently been involved in a hellish episode in Kosovo.

  The guy’s actually a hero, he thought, as he followed Skoa along the corridor. The poor creature was well aware where the showers in police headquarters were situated. Grønlandsleiret 44 was probably the only place the former soldier ever had a chance to have a wash.

  Truly, life was unfair.

  The feeling of being unfairly treated still rankled. While people at police headquarters worked day and night on the terrorist incident at Frogner, he had been directed to do something that looked as if he was being used as a messenger boy.

  It did not appear to be a particularly busy job.

  Henrik Holme had left Hanne Wilhelmsen on her instructions this morning without so much as a hint about when he should return. When he had stooped to taking on the assignment of being the liaison between the Police Chief and this odd woman in the wheelchair, he had been given the impression that some kind of collaboration would be involved. That he would assist the former Chief Inspector with more than carrying cases to and fro between Grønland and Frogner.

  At least he had hoped so.

  It had not been later than nine o’clock when he had returned to police headquarters. For the remainder of the day, he had wandered lackadaisically around the corridors until it dawned on him that he had made copies of all the cases he had delivered. By then the day was so advanced that he could easily have gone home. On the spur of the moment, he took one of the cases with him, that of the seventeen-year-old girl who had disappeared in 1996.

  He had gone on foot, with the folder tucked inside the pilot jacket he had just bought online.

  It struck him, as he walked toward Grünerløkka, that Oslo seemed exactly the same. He had bought his own place now, a tiny two-room apartment he would never have been able to afford if it hadn’t been for an inheritance from his grandmother. She had died last year, and he had been so heartbroken that he certainly hadn’t had any thoughts about an inheritance until a lawyer had phoned to tell him he had been left 850,000 kroner and an old TV set. He had only just been able to borrow the rest of the purchase price from the local savings bank in the small town where he had grown up and where his parents still lived.

  Henrik Holme enjoyed living in Løkka.

  He knew no one else there. He was on nodding terms with some people—a shopkeeper in Nordre gate and an old woman who stayed in the apartment below him. A well-known football player in the building opposite, who had become an expert commentator on TV after a number of years on the national team, also always said hello when she saw him. She was from Bergen or somewhere around there, and was pleasant. On the whole, people from Bergen were pleasant people, in Henrik Holme’s experience. They seemed to say exactly what they meant. Including her, that made three people who were in the habit of greeting him. Not very many more. Henrik had few friends anyway, even though his colleagues in the department occasionally invited him to come along with them for a beer on a Friday. He did not understand them very well. It seemed as if they talked in code, and in their free time, they laughed so much at things he simply couldn’t see the humor in. He was quite sure they invited him out of sympathy, and it was almost always the female officers who popped into his office and asked. They were probably more considerate than the men. Normally they drank too much alcohol, that whole gang. After an hour or two he felt so left out that he preferred to go home.

  Now he was sitting alone at a white dining table for two, squeezed into the small kitchen. The folder of information about Karina Knoph’s unexplained disappearance was lying in front of him. He had browsed through all of it without becoming really engrossed in anything.

  Oslo was so amazingly unchanged.

  After July 22, Henrik had had his hands full with the case about the ill-treated eight-year-old in Grefsen. Nevertheless, he had caught the mood—the grief-stricken, subdued, and distressed atmosphere that characterized the city. He had surprised his mother by telling her about it on the phone. Paradoxically enough, she had sounded happy, as if it were strange that he had been at all able to notice something so vague as an atmosphere.

  If something was different this time, in fact, it must be that people seemed pricklier. That same afternoon, just after he had arrived home, he had read a feature in vg.no, the online news outlet, about two boys around the age of fifteen who had been beaten up last night. The boys were from Iran. Their attackers—real hooligans—were ethnic Norwegians. The feature writer was an Iraqi refugee, and she lifted more than a warning finger against what was happening: a change for the worse in attitudes toward Muslims in Norway. And that was in less than twenty-four hours.

  VG had been forced to close down the comments section.

  In Henrik Holme’s experience, it took a great deal of racist filth for VG to shut out the lowlifes.

  Strange, he thought, sipping his scalding hot tea. Muslims had been the targets of the terrorist attack. And then they had become even more disliked in the bargain.

  The terrorist attack was unfortunately not his case.

  His case was spread out in front of him.

  It was quite difficult to summon up any enthusiasm for a possible crime at a time when he himself had been a little boy. He leafed back to the picture of the girl who had vanished.

  She was pretty, he thought.

  On the whole he thought that girls were pretty.

  It would not be long until he turned thirty. He still hadn’t had a girlfriend. He would have taken anyone, he knew. Certainly that one there, if she would have had him.

  A bit odd with that blue hair, of course, but her nose was sweet. Slightly retroussé. He thought he could see some freckles over the bridge of her nose, and her eyes were very pale. Maybe she was really a redhead.

  Henrik did not have anything against redheads.

  She was most likely dead.

  It was almost certain that she was dead, since no one had seen or heard anything of her for eighteen years. Of course, there were people who succeeded in disappearing completely in order to build a new life for themselves in a totally different place. But as the world grew smaller and the Internet larger, it was increasingly difficult to do that. Besides, he firmly believed that such a move would demand far greater resources than a seventeen-year-old high school student would have had at her disposal.

  No, she was dead.

  She might have fallen into the sea.

  Or be hidden in the forest.

  Her remains might lie anywhere at all.

  However, among the things that had become increasingly difficult in this world was hiding a body. A dead person was a big deal. For instance, you eventually had the smell to worry about, and 130 to 200 pounds of meat was not an easy matter to get rid of just like that. He had read about an old case in England in which the murderer had dissolved the victim in lye. Or had it been tannic acid? In any case, a couple of gallstones could not be dissolved, and the guy had been found guilty at the Old Bailey on the basis of the victim’s medical blessing in disguise. He could well understand that with increasingly dense population and a police force whose competence, equipment, and methods were improving exponentially, someone had tried to hide that body in a rock slide out in Nordmarka.

  There was coverage of the discovery of the Norwegian convert everywhere. Henrik had surfed the net when he got home. While he ate meatballs with potatoes and boiled cabbage, all courtesy of Fjordland prepared meals, with a hearty appetite, it had crossed his mind that they certainly had not spared any detail.

  It was perhaps not so strange that the body had been dismembered, he thought. It would be practically impossible to convey a whole human body all the way out to north of Øyungen without cutting it up. Driving was forbidden out there for anyone other than those in possession of permits and keys for all the barriers. What’s more, he had seen on a map in one of the online newspapers that they were talk
ing about quite a long distance to walk along a relatively small track.

  If it hadn’t been for the dog, the guy would probably never have been found.

  Henrik Holme did not like dogs. He was terrified of them, he had to admit. In the past couple of years, he had started both to walk and cycle in Marka. If it hadn’t been for all the dogs running about, it would have been perfect. Even on the leash they scurried about, with owners who grinned and waved and gave assurances that they weren’t dangerous.

  He really and truly had a profound, heartfelt dislike of dogs.

  But if there were lots of them in Marka, there were virtually no immigrants, he thought as he let his eyes rest on the picture of Karina Knoph. It was exactly as though immigrants did not understand the point of roaming around in the woods with no purpose other than the enjoyment of nature. Even a man at work, the same age as him and born here in Norway, shifted over to immigrant patois and jeered at the others the moment there was any discussion of a camping trip.

  When Henrik thought about it, he had hardly met a dark-skinned person at any time out there—at least nowhere other than in the areas close to the city.

  It must have been Norwegians who had carried the body to the place where it was found. There must have been at least two adults, probably male, because the dead man had been twenty-two years old. If he weighed 175 pounds, it would have been a heavy job for two.

  No, if Henrik Holme had been involved in the hunt for whoever had left the dismembered remains of the Norwegian convert from Lørenskog far out in Marka, then he would have been searching for three ethnic Norwegian men, well used to hiking and, in any case, fit and active.

  He burst out laughing.

  The thought of three dark-skinned foreigners, each carrying a weighty sack so far out in the forest, had taken him aback, to say the least.

  But neither the case of the corpse in the fallen rocks nor the terrorist attack on Frogner was any of his business.

  His tea had grown colder. It was Kusmi tea, made in a tea percolator he had received from his parents at Christmas. The aroma was so intense and good that he held the cup up to his face while he took out the list of witness interviews in the Karina Knoph investigation. There was something there, something he had discovered a couple of days earlier when he had been instructed to go to Frogner with four old case files on Wednesday morning.

  The list was not so very long.

  The father had been interrogated six times.

  The mother twice. The sister once, and two teachers had also been called in.

  And six friends.

  That was at least more than he had.

  But there was something odd here. He compared the list on the front of the document with each of the interviews. Leafed back and forth. Grabbed a yellow marker pen and highlighted a sentence in the interview with a girl named Elisabeth Thorsen, one of Karina’s classmates. He read the sentence over again, bundled the witness statements together, and took out the pile of special reports from the police officers involved in the case. He found the right one immediately and read it.

  It was really conspicuous.

  Not what was stated, but what was not.

  If Henrik was right, then an enormous error had been made. A colossal blunder. He felt hot and wriggled out of his sweater. He felt more alert than he had for hours.

  It could not be right. Henrik read the special report over again before returning to the interview with Elisabeth Thorsen.

  There must be something missing here.

  He began to compare the list of contents on the cover of the folder with every single document in the thick bundle of papers. First once, and then again.

  Everything matched. Nothing was missing.

  That could only mean one of two things. Either the obvious clue had never been followed up or some kind of mistake that he could not fathom had happened when the material was archived. Sometimes parts of a folder went missing, especially in old cases, from before the time when computer systems were up and running. In such cases, however, it was easy to ascertain that something was missing, since the list on the cover would not match up with the contents.

  Here, everything did match up.

  Slowly Henrik stood up and stretched his back with his hands on his hips. This quite simply could not be right. They could not have made such a mistake, not with so many police officers involved. Someone would have noticed it. Must have noticed it. Done something about it.

  He wondered whether he should allow himself a glass of the fine whiskey he had bought duty free on the Danish ferry on his way home from a seminar with the Violent Crime Section. In fact he did not like alcohol, but the others had been so eager to use up their quotas that he had felt foolish not buying any.

  The bottle had sat untouched for more than six months.

  He crossed over to the antique corner cupboard that was actually far too large for the small apartment, but his mother had insisted he should have it in his first home. Inside the top cupboard with its rose-painted decorations were three lovely glasses and the bottle. He twisted off the cork and poured out an inch or so in the glass, before bringing it back to the kitchen table.

  The police had become fixated on the father being the villain of the piece, he thought, and poked his tongue down into the amber liquid.

  It was good, he noted in surprise. Sipping it, he felt the heat spread down his gullet. He replaced the glass and picked up the stack of interviews with Karina Knoph’s father.

  “They’ve made a major blunder,” he said softly, taking another drink, a bigger mouthful this time.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Making an ass of yourself like this should incur the death penalty.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen had spent only fifteen minutes on the first of the unsolved cases Henrik Holme had brought that same morning, when a howler of a mistake had screamed out at her.

  It was past midnight. Usually she would have been in bed long ago at this time of night. At half past eleven, she had tried to go to bed, but it had proved impossible to fall asleep. Every time she closed her eyes, she had seen Billy T.’s face from this afternoon. The way he had looked at her when he had driven her home. He had helped her into her wheelchair but had not been allowed to accompany her inside.

  His gaze.

  The same as the one he had used that morning half a lifetime ago. They had spent the night together, something they should not have done. They had woken up beside each other, the way they never should have done. For her, it had all been a matter of seeking comfort somewhere she really knew there was none to be found; Cecilie was dying, and Hanne was on the brink of expiring from sorrow. For Billy T., it had been a case of bursting a dam in which so much hope was stored that it was almost the end of him when she asked him to go. To forget the whole thing. Erase the last twenty-four hours from the calendar of life and leave her in peace.

  The relationship between them was never quite the same again. Their familiarity, their brotherly love, was destroyed. The finely tuned balance between them—the intuitive understanding and almost telepathic communication—no longer existed.

  Billy T. had looked like a whipped dog for weeks on end.

  Exactly the same as when he had dropped her off earlier that evening.

  It bothered her more than she liked.

  Since it was impossible to sleep, she had gotten up, poured a glass of red wine, and sat down with the piles of papers the peculiar young police officer had brought. When she speedily discovered the obvious mistake that had been made eighteen years ago, she knew it would be futile to attempt to sleep.

  She glanced fleetingly at the clock.

  Ten past midnight.

  A bit late to phone, of course, but the guy had been assigned as her assistant, after all. If he were asleep, a man of his age would not have much problem dozing off again. This morning, he had said that he had looked through the case files before he had come. He did not seem stupid, either. A curious character, with an Adam’s apple bigger than any sh
e had ever seen before. His whole head seemed a touch too large for his ungainly figure. It was odd that he had managed to fulfill the physical entrance requirements for the police faculty at university.

  She hesitated for a moment. Drank some of the wine.

  It was worth a try, she decided. He had scribbled down his number on the cover of the case folder. She picked up her phone and keyed it in.

  Henrik Holme was the least threatening person she had met in years, it struck her as she heard the phone ring at the other end.

  But he might well be smart, all the same.

  It was questionable whether it was a good idea to meet after midnight, when neither of them had slept much in more than forty hours. But it was essential, according to the Chief of Police. It was a little untraditional to invite the heads of the Security Service and the National Police Directorate to a meeting with only the three of them present—quite an exception to protocol also. The Security Service still reported directly to the Ministry of Justice, and the Norwegian Police Force had been subject to the National Police Directorate since 2001. Silje Sørensen, however, had an uneasy feeling that the others regarded her inexperience as an ever-increasing drawback in the enormous task of coordination that faced them. While the other two had studied together, were old friends, and, moreover, had been in their respective jobs for many years, Silje was only recently appointed. She was also considerably younger than they were.

  She had run home around eleven o’clock for a shower and some clean clothes. She had left her uniform at home. Now she was sitting in her office in a loose lambswool sweater, jeans, and a pair of sneakers. The National Police Commissioner, Caroline Bae, had fortunately taken even greater liberties and turned up with wet hair and something that looked most like a snug tracksuit. The head of the Security Service, Harald Jensen, stared slightly disbelievingly at them both before taking a seat at the massive conference table and loosening his tie a fraction.

  “Help yourselves,” Silje Sørensen said, pointing at the food before sitting down. “Hope you like sushi.”