Odd Numbers

by Anne Holt

  “Without finding anything, if I interpret you correctly?” Silje said.

  “The situation is worse than that. We’re beginning to think these boys are being used by other people. That there are far smarter powers behind them. Real jihadists, not young men. This is going to be another long night. But I can already tell you this: we’re starting to doubt whether they exist at all.”

  “These young men?” Caroline Bae blurted in surprise.

  “No. The Prophet’s True Ummah. After thirty-six hours of intense coordination of all the intelligence we have, an increasingly clear picture is forming that they quite simply . . . don’t exist.”

  It was precisely what they had not found that was the problem.

  Henrik Holme was elated as he sat at his tiny kitchen table, reading through the documents in the Karina Knoph investigation for the fourth time. The papers were meticulously sorted according to a new system. Sentences were highlighted in marker pen, lines straight as a die drawn with a ruler. He used red folders for witness interviews and yellow for special reports. All the papers sat exactly edge to edge. He had attached the photograph of Karina to the windowpane neatly and carefully, to avoid tearing the paper when the picture was taken down again.

  It was already 3:00 a.m., but he was still wide awake.

  When Hanne Wilhelmsen had woken him, he had been halfway through a generous glass of whiskey. After their conversation, he had poured the rest down the sink and switched on the percolator for a fresh pot of tea.

  It was unbelievable that she had phoned.

  Henrik Holme was not used to being taken so seriously. For a period after he had solved the case of the dead boy in Grefsen, people had met him with a kind of curiosity, if not exactly respect. That had quickly passed. Now they regarded him as strange.

  He was strange.

  He always had been.

  Occasionally, once in a blue moon, he encountered people who saw something else, more than that damned Adam’s apple and all the tics he struggled to control. As a rule, these were people who recognized the symptoms and were used to them from someone close. They were usually extra friendly. Sympathetic. Kind, pure, and simple, almost as if he were a child.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen had been totally different. When he had been at her place yesterday morning, she had been quite direct and actually a bit abrupt. It seemed as if she were annoyed at him being there, but not because he was peculiar. It had struck him as soon as she had finally opened the door and the first thing she had done was chide him for his epaulets. She was probably like that with everybody.

  When she had phoned, she had not even apologized for calling after midnight. Henrik liked that. She got right to the point, as if they were old colleagues. Equals, in a sense.

  The Police Chief had said she was a bit unusual.

  Henrik thought she was completely perfect.

  At least after that phone conversation.

  They had spotted exactly the same thing. She had said it had taken her less than fifteen minutes to see what had been done incorrectly from the very beginning. It had taken him longer, but he did not tell her that. When he had understood, only one minute into their conversation, that she had seen what was missing in the case, he had pushed aside his whiskey glass and raised his voice. His lecture was so precise and came to the point so quickly that she had actually called out, “Bravo!”

  “Bravo,” he whispered, smiling broadly as he used his forefinger to touch the side of his nose three times in succession. “She said bravo. To me.”

  Hanne too had reacted to the treatment that the police had meted out to Karina Knoph’s father. When the original investigation had finally gotten under way, he was the one they had pressed relentlessly. He had spent an entire twenty-four hours at police headquarters, and it emerged very clearly from the papers that the investigator in charge had wanted to have him taken into custody. The police lawyer responsible for the case had put a foot down, but nonetheless that had not prevented the investigators from continuing to be convinced of the father’s involvement in his daughter’s disappearing act.

  Karina’s dad had committed the oldest mistake in the book.

  He had lied in the initial interviews.

  Reading through them one more time, Henrik Holme shook his head at the contents.

  Frode Knoph, at that time assistant coach with Vålerenga, a first-division Oslo football team, had claimed that he had spent a much-needed free Friday on the fjord. He had been fishing. Admittedly he hadn’t caught anything, but it had been a glorious day until he had arrived home that afternoon and his wife had been in hysterics that Karina had not turned up for dinner, as arranged.

  The mere use of the word hysterics in such a context was slightly conspicuous, Henrik Holme thought, as he squeezed a lavish portion of honey into his teacup.

  Frode Knoph had stuck to his story for three weeks and two days. Then he had been confronted with information that the police had made inquiries at the marina where his twenty-two-foot yacht, Windy Sport, was moored. It had been a simple matter to ascertain that the boat had not been to sea on the day in question. The marina was being put up for sale, in fact. A photographer had been there for three hours that day, taking photographs for the sales brochure, and the football coach’s berth had not been empty between the hours of eleven and two.

  Only then did the truth come out.

  Frode Knoph had been with a mistress.

  “My God,” Henrik murmured. “Can anyone possibly be so stupid?”

  He was referring both to the mistress and to the fact that people never learned what he had most definitely realized at barely ten years old: if you’re suspected of having done something wrong that you didn’t do, then don’t try to lie about some other transgression that you actually did commit.

  After all, having a mistress was not a crime.

  And the damage was already done.

  Not for Frode Knoph, in a sense, because the new story about a mistress checked out. His alibi fell into place. However, the investigation into Karina’s disappearance had cooled, just like the investigators’ enthusiasm for the case. After more than three weeks of zealous pursuit of the football coach had led to nothing, hardly a finger was lifted to uncover the truth about Karina Knoph’s disappearance. Media interest in the case had also dwindled, and there were no close friends to be found to bear tearful witness to what a fantastic, vivacious girl the missing Karina had been. Quite simply, she had moved too many times to acquire that kind of ally.

  Besides, she had blue hair and played in a band, two members of which had criminal records.

  Henrik poured out more tea. Then he took hold of the bundle of witness statements and picked out references from the interview of Elisabeth Thorsen. It was printed on three pages, and he leafed through to the last one:

  The interviewee says she has heard rumors that Karina’s boyfriend was Gunnar Ranvik in 2A. The interviewee had never asked Karina directly. The interviewee thinks there may be something in the rumors, because the two of them were seen together a lot. Karina also often hangs out with Abid Kahn in 3B, and some people have said that there might be more than mere friendship to that. Karina has gained the reputation of being a “faghag, but with darkies instead of gays” (verbatim quote, note by report writer).

  Henrik ran his skinny index finger along the lines as he read. Thereafter he replaced the bundle on the table, precisely edge to edge with the other papers, before opening the bundle of special reports. It was the shortest one that he was after:

  The undersigned has attempted to make contact with Gunnar Ranvik, mentioned in document 2-6, and claimed to be a friend, perhaps the boyfriend of the missing girl. At present he is in hospital following a violent incident, see attached copy of the cover folder from the separate case file for the connection. According to Dr. Augusta Aronsen at Ullevål Hospital, he will be in no fit condition to be interviewed for some considerable time, possibly never. I will follow this up after a short interval. As far as Abid Kah
n is concerned, the school confirms that he traveled to Rawalpindi with his family at the beginning of August, and he is not expected back at school before the end of September.

  This was all the police officer had done in connection with the case. Thank goodness, he had at least done that. For the present, there was nothing to suggest that he had made any effort to follow this up with a later interview of Gunnar.

  Henrik looked at the copy of the cover from the other case file. The one that dealt with Gunnar Ranvik, born in 1979 and found in the undergrowth around the top part of the Akerselva River, just below the dam near the lake at Maridalsvannet. In autumn, beaten up and crippled for life.

  He intended to look through the complete folder in the archives as soon as morning came, as Hanne Wilhelmsen had requested, or, in actual fact, instructed. Find that case ASAP, she had said.

  Henrik liked Hanne. He wanted to stop using her surname when he thought of her. They were colleagues now, and she had said, “Bravo!” about what he had done and had issued him fresh orders to boot.

  Even though he did not yet have access to the whole case, the folder cover was enough to ensure that both he and Hanne had spotted it: Gunnar Ranvik had been assaulted and severely injured on September 3, 1996.

  The same day that Karina Knoph had vanished.

  Two people, possibly romantically involved, had been subject to extraordinary occurrences on the same day. One disappears; the other is almost killed. However, any possible link between the cases had been effectively shut down by a special report written by a police officer who had obviously made up his mind that the girl’s father was a thug and hadn’t bothered to follow up an obvious lead.

  It was nothing short of a scandal, and Henrik stretched his arms above his head, smiling from ear to ear.

  Sixteen-year-old Frikk Borg-Sand laughed when he saw Aftenposten’s front page. He was the only one of Håkon Sand’s children who still lived at home and the only one of them in many years to have shown the slightest interest in printed newspapers. Having joined the Labor Party’s youth wing three days after the terror attack on Utøya, he had since then been fairly active in the local branch and followed news coverage more avidly than either of his parents.

  “There’s not much to laugh at,” Karen Borg reproached him. “As for me, I’m more inclined to weep. Can you pass the milk?”

  “I’m not laughing at the actual opinion poll, though. I’m laughing at people being so incredibly stupid. After all, it’s the Muslims who’ve been attacked, for heaven’s sake!”

  “That’s right,” Håkon Sand muttered, snatching the milk carton from his wife’s hands. “But there wouldn’t have been a bomb blast if the Muslims weren’t here in the first place.”

  “Dad!” The boy looked taken aback.

  “Honestly,” Karen said, retrieving the carton to pour milk over her porridge. “Now you really must give it up. That opinion poll there is deeply disturbing. Get a grip!”

  Håkon raised his hands above his head.

  “I’m just saying what folk are thinking. And no matter how you look at it, isn’t there a certain logic in that? If we shut people out of a party, then at least they won’t be able to gate-crash it. If Muslims weren’t here in this country, then they wouldn’t be attacking one another. Here, at the very least. It’s obvious that people are going to worry.”

  “It’s embarrassing,” Frikk said. “Really embarrassing, Dad. So there are 76 percent of the population who now agree with the statement . . .” He lifted the newspaper and quoted: “ ‘We should not let more immigrants into Norway.’ Seventy-six percent! In 2010 the total was 53 percent, Dad, and one year after July 22, it had gone down to 45 percent. We were experiencing a favorable development. But now there are 76 percent of the population who believe that . . .”

  The boy did not complete the sentence. He wolfed down a spoonful of porridge before continuing with his mouth full of food: “And to make matters worse, more than 30 percent believe that we ought to deprive criminals of citizenship! But not Norwegian criminals, no. Look at this here, Dad.”

  He leaned across the kitchen table and turned the newspaper around so that his father could read it. His forefinger tapped the text rhythmically.

  “If you have received Norwegian citizenship without having an ethnic Norwegian background, then you shouldn’t retain your human rights if you break the law? Seriously, Dad? Don’t you understand how awful this is?”

  “Yes, of course. It is awful. But in the first place . . .”

  Håkon grabbed the newspaper.

  “. . . this is just a small, limited opinion poll, undertaken in the course of a few hours yesterday afternoon. In other words, a limited number of people were interviewed. Look here. It says so in the fact box. The results can’t be very accurate, then. Second, it’s not abnormal to experience a reaction to a bunch of crazy jihadists bombing half of Frogner sky-high.”

  “You’d think that people’s natural reaction would be to sympathize with the victims,” Karen interjected. “Who in this case are absolutely ordinary citizens of this city. Well-integrated, law-abiding people whose relatives deserve something quite different from this . . . crap.”

  She picked up a jar of chopped nuts and sprinkled them over her half-eaten porridge.

  “Shh,” Håkon Sand said, snatching up the remote control that was lying in the middle of the table.

  “We’re not saying anything,” Frikk muttered.

  “. . . which is fundamentally a new battle for our country,” said a woman on the TV set beside the fridge.

  “I turned down the volume precisely because of her,” Karen said in annoyance. “If there’s something I can’t face right now, it’s listening to racists who dress themselves up as humanitarians to go fishing in troubled waters.”

  “Shh,” Håkon repeated, louder this time.

  “Just as our fathers and mothers fought against the German occupation for five difficult years, we too must now resist. We’re no longer talking about enrichment of our society and culture—if we ever have been. If we look ahead just a few years, the Muslims will comprise more than half of Oslo’s population and—”

  The woman’s voice was abruptly cut off when Karen seized the remote control and switched off the TV.

  “I really can’t stand it,” she said firmly. “On this day of all days, I just can’t bear to hear that Kari Thue—she never lets it rest. Not her, and not any of those lunatics on the murky far right of the Progress Party. Not even . . .”

  She pushed her bowl of porridge across the table and put her spoon down in it.

  “I just can’t abide it,” she concluded. “Okay?”

  “Of course,” Håkon murmured. “I don’t like that woman either. The point is that she’s gaining increasingly—”

  “Can’t abide it,” Karen repeated, a bit angrier this time.

  Håkon’s phone rang. He stuffed his mouth full of porridge as he put the phone to his ear.

  “Hello,” he said indistinctly.

  After that he said very little. A couple of minutes later, he thrust the phone into his jacket pocket.

  “I have to run,” he said. “They’ve found another bomb.”

  He uttered a vehement oath as he dashed for the door.

  Henrik Holme had been forced to push his way to the entrance door through a growing and increasingly impatient crowd of journalists. It was barely 6:00 a.m. He thought he could hear both Russian and Japanese in the babel and confusion. Once safely inside the doors, he had headed straight for the archives and located the folder dealing with the assault on Gunnar Ranvik. He made two sets of copies, returned the original, and stowed both folders in a backpack before making his way out of police headquarters once more.

  Now they had been poring over the documents for almost an hour.

  Henrik glanced up from the papers now and then. Hanne did not. She sat as if ensconced in a glass bubble of concentration, and it struck him how attractive she was. Much more attractive now
than when they had first met. His mother sometimes used to describe other women as “delicate.” He had never understood what that actually meant—not until now, seated at Hanne Wilhelmsen’s huge dining table, stealing glances at the far older woman. Her sweater was ice blue, with a V-neck. Her fingers were long and slim and her nails varnished, he thought. They were at least very shiny, but in a natural shade. She was freshly showered, it seemed—her hair had looked a bit damp when he arrived.

  Henrik wondered how she took a shower.

  Her daughter, who had left for school just as he arrived, was probably too young to help out. Anyway, it must be embarrassing for a ten- or twelve-year-old to help her mom wash. Maybe Hanne had a seat in the shower and managed by herself.

  In any case, she smelled absolutely wonderful.

  He could have stayed there for all eternity. There was such a pleasant sense of peace and quiet in the spacious room, and so many lovely things. Henrik was fond of lovely things, but even fonder of peace and quiet. No music. The TV was off. Hanne had also put away her phone and computer, even though last time he had been there, she had seemed totally dependent on both. A faint, regular beat, like a large clock, could be heard from another room.

  Henrik had not slept at all, but he could not remember the last time he had felt so contented.

  He had read through the case notes twice already. Quickly: he was so fast at reading that every new teacher he had encountered during his school career had thought he was faking it. However, he did not say so. He just sat there, enjoying the opportunity to look across at Hanne from time to time.

  He could no longer care less about the terrorist bomb.

  This was far better, and he started from the beginning of the papers again, for the third time now.

  Gunnar Ranvik had never been himself again after being found by a morning jogger in the undergrowth below the waterworks near Maridalsvannet. That was on September 4, 1996, but the police had speedily discovered that he must have been struck down the previous evening. He was extremely chilled, with a broken hip and serious head injuries, and his life had been in danger.