Odd Numbers

by Anne Holt

  Alfred Skoggesen, Member of Parliament for the Labor Party, says in a comment that this is the most contemptible instance of fanning the flames of the crisis.

  “It is at precisely such times that we must show how we stand together as a nation: Christians and Muslims, atheists, and all other Norwegians. There is no reason to believe that this year’s celebrations will be any more dangerous than previous ones have been. After all, life is not free from risk either.”

  Hanne sat staring at the image of Fredrik Grønning-Hansen. She thought he bore a resemblance to a Gestapo officer, but that might simply be because she disliked him. His hair, though, was combed smoothly into a side part, and he always looked as if he had just paid a visit to a military barber. His eyes were narrow, almost glowering. Hanne had never seen a picture of him where he actually appeared to be enjoying himself. Looking happy. She had never heard him say anything pleasant. Not about anybody.

  May 17, she mused for a moment, before switching off the computer and moving toward the door. The children’s parade and chaos in the heart of Oslo. Ice cream and lost youngsters. Balloons, flags, marching bands, and the royal family on the palace balcony. VIPs walking at the front of the procession.

  It had to be admitted: for once, Grønning-Hansen had a point.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Easter had come and gone, and Henrik Holme had not seen any point in staying in Oslo. Since Hanne Wilhelmsen still had not been in touch when Maundy Thursday arrived, he had brought joy to his mother by turning up at home despite previously sending his excuses.

  It had been wonderful being just the two of them. His father had spent four days hunting wild boar on the Swedish border and did not return home until a couple of hours before Henrik was due to leave. Two hours in his father’s company was exactly sufficient, in his opinion, for then it wasn’t so easy to run out of things to talk about.

  Norway was almost unrecognizable.

  At Easter the daily newspapers usually resembled weekly magazines. Most of the content had been written days in advance, prior to publication: book recommendations, celebrity interviews, and five new ways to prepare Easter’s obligatory roast lamb.

  That sort of thing.

  This year the journalists had kept going throughout the entire holiday period. On Easter Saturday, Dagbladet’s editorial had announced its agreement with VG’s already reiterated statement: both Silje Sørensen and head of Security Harald Jensen must follow Roger Michaelsen out of office. Words such as scandal, catastrophe, and incompetence were hammered down on keyboards in every editorial suite. Even the national broadcaster, NRK, seemed unusually aggressive. On Good Friday they had called in the new Minister of Justice for an eleven-minute-long rapid-fire interview.

  The Prime Minister had gone for the safe option when she was compelled to replace Roger Michaelsen with only a few hours’ notice. She had even restricted herself to her own party in the nomination, something that led to the subtle balance in the blue–blue coalition government being tilted in favor of the Conservative Party.

  Probably a deliberate move, Henrik had thought.

  The Progress Party was in what a principal Socialist Left politician had called, during a live broadcast debate, “deep, fucking shit.” The extreme right wing of the party was in the process of “going bananas,” as the same Socialist Left representative had expressed it. There was a great deal to suggest that the central leadership of the party was losing control of its numerous strays to more fascist groupings.

  Tove Salomonsson, however, was a woman known for never losing her grip. She was fifty-one years old and had once been leader of the Young Conservatives. In the years that had passed since then, she had contented herself with one term in Parliament. Then she could no longer be bothered, as she admitted in a later in-depth interview. Her rather disrespectful description of work in the Norwegian Parliament had not hindered two subsequent prime ministers from calling on her services. She had been both Minister of Defense and Cabinet Secretary in the Health and Social Security Department. In between the periods of Conservative government, she had gained considerable cross-party respect for her work on human rights. She had been chair of the Helsingfors Committee and Norwegian PEN, and had worked for four years at Red Cross headquarters in Geneva. Until Monday afternoon at 2:30, she was General Secretary at Amnesty International’s head office. She came home from London that same evening and had been so accessible to the press that journalists began to run out of questions.

  Her calm and experienced handling of the media had probably poured oil on troubled waters. But not to the requisite degree. She had only been responsible for the Justice sector for five short days. In no way could she be blamed that neither the Oslo Police nor the Security Service appeared even a bit closer to solving the terrorist incidents. Nonetheless, on Good Friday, she was furiously quizzed about how long she could expect to maintain the ministerial office if something did not happen soon.

  Henrik and his mother had agreed this was unfair, as they munched on tacos and drank Pepsi.

  He had found out who Karina’s friend Fawad was long before he had gone home to his mother’s.

  It had been simple.

  Fawad’s surname was Sharif, and he had been a thug from the day he was born—at least from the time when he was quite small. On STRASAK, the police force’s central criminal records, he appeared to use up several gigabytes on his own. He had managed to be institutionalized even before he had reached the age of criminal responsibility, including being held in custody for three days—something that seldom happened to youngsters, no matter what the circumstances. Since then he had acquired a couple of community service orders, before taking hold of the revolving door in the Norwegian prison system.

  Now he was thirty-five and serving a four-year sentence for drug offenses at Ullersmo Prison.

  Henrik longed to speak to Hanne.

  In fact, he just wanted to go to the prison to talk to Fawad Sharif.

  But it was far from certain that Hanne would give him permission. For all he knew, she might want to go herself. She did not seem especially mobile, but who could know? Despite everything, she had agreed to take on this job with the unsolved cases, and until now he had mostly functioned as an errand boy.

  If only she would phone.

  If she still had not made contact by ten o’clock, he would get a car from the transport office and drive out to Ullensaker, where the bleak prison was located.

  Henrik did not like prisons.

  He felt slightly claustrophobic from the moment he was allowed through the security checks. Pounding heart and ringing ears. High blood pressure in the bargain, he was quite sure of that.

  He would tolerate all of these things if he could persuade Fawad Sharif to talk. If only Hanne Wilhelmsen would call, he prayed, chewing on a pencil until he began to spit splinters and lead.

  The phone rang.

  It was half past eight, and he nearly dropped his phone on the floor as he picked it up and put it to his ear.

  “What’s become of you?” he heard Hanne say. “Weren’t you supposed to phone me? If we’re going to work together, you must be more reliable than this, goddamn it.”

  Henrik caught himself smiling from ear to ear.

  “Sorry,” he rushed to say.

  He could swear he heard her smile back.

  There was something about that sheepish grin, Billy T. thought.

  Only when, for the third time in less than an hour, he tried to look trustworthy as he strolled past the rickety gate to the property at the edge of the forest in Korsvoll did he appreciate that there was something wrong with the man.

  He had checked the address in advance on the Internet.

  Two people were registered there. Gunnar and Kirsten Ranvik. Billy T. had taken it for granted that they were a married couple, but that did not add up. In the first place, the man seemed too young for her, despite his clumsy, almost waddling gait. Second, there was the matter of the smile. Billy T. had noticed it
several times in the course of the hour or so he had been loitering in the area. The man occasionally pulled a strange grimace as he walked between the house and a hay barn farther down the garden.

  Maybe he continually had something amusing on his mind.

  Billy T. had initially been extremely discouraged when it looked as if the guy did not have any job to go to. If he now turned out to have learning difficulties, that would be a relief.

  Billy T. had already studied the property from all sides. He had approached from the forest, where only a dilapidated wooden fence marked the border between the garden and the conservation area of Nordmarka. He had also been in both neighboring properties. Under cover of hedges and apple trees, he had observed that Kirsten Ranvik’s house was undergoing a slow process of renovation. The front door was new, but the work had not been finished. The same applied to the massive picture windows facing southeast.

  At the rear of the house, overlooking the forest, two of the three basement windows were new. The third one looked as if it had been removed but the new one not yet installed. The opening was covered with a black garbage bag fastened to the foundation wall with white advertising tape from the Maxbo DIY store. When the man Billy T. presumed to be Gunnar Ranvik embarked on his fourth trip out through the red door and across the slate flagstones down to the outbuilding, Billy T. jumped over the fence to avoid the gravel in the driveway. In a matter of only seconds, he was beyond Gunnar Ranvik’s field of vision, and a mere minute later he had wriggled through what turned out to be an open hole behind the garbage bag. To be on the safe side, he managed to replace the plastic reasonably efficiently from the inside.

  The daylight through the new windows enabled him to look around the basement. All the same, he took out a small flashlight from his jacket pocket and switched it on.

  Kirsten Ranvik was a tidy person, he realized. In all his years in the police, Billy T. had searched any number of basements. Storerooms, cupboards, and outbuildings. Warehouses and containers. Never before had he seen so many individual objects stored as systematically as this. Not even in the police lost-property store. The room was perhaps three hundred or so square feet in area, obviously the most spacious room in the basement. Roughly rectangular, it had a staircase leading up on the gable wall. There were three doors on the other wall. The room itself was divided up, like an archive room, with six double, parallel bookcases, each at an identical distance from the next. They would have divided the room into seven separate spaces, except that none of them reached as far as the walls.

  There were objects lying on the shelves of all shapes and sizes, some enclosed in plastic containers and old cartons, others sitting on their own or hanging from hooks. There were old handbags and four pairs of rubber boots. Six plastic buckets in different colors were stacked up, all with their handles missing. Billy T. increased the size of the flashlight beam and peered up at one or two boxes. Lightbulbs. Batteries. Toys and Lego bricks. Women’s shoes that had gone out of fashion in the eighties and a whole crate full of rails for a train set that must have been extremely large. A recorder in a case sat on top of four folded rain jackets, three blue and one dark green. A big bass drum kept company with an apparently unused windsurfing board on the bottom broad shelf nearest to the stairs. An old toddler’s car was the only item that had not been placed on the bookcases: it was parked beside the stairs, looking somewhat forlorn.

  Its left front wheel was missing.

  Billy T. tiptoed over to the first of the three doors and put his hand on the doorknob. The door was unlocked and the hinges oiled. The room inside was empty. Absolutely empty, as he could see when he played the light over the one hundred square feet or so. Clean too and, to judge from the odor, it must have been painted fairly recently. He closed the door and made a stab at the next one.

  The room was locked. Billy T. produced his picklock from his back pocket. Fifteen seconds later, he was opened the door warily. The room was windowless and pitch black. He found a light switch immediately inside the door and risked flicking it.

  “My goodness,” he whispered.

  It was fully furnished in here.

  A huge desk was placed at the far end of the room, from wall to wall and with tiers of shelves above. It all looked like a do-it-yourself job, something that became more obvious the closer he approached. Well executed, he noted: this was a built-in unit, made-to-measure, and constructed a long time ago, to judge from the patina on the wood.

  The shelves, and to some extent the desk as well, were filled with items that at first glance he had no idea what they were. Electronics, in fact, but they also appeared antiquated. Much of it was fastened to dark, polished wood, attractive and painstakingly constructed. Many of the cables were covered in fabric, just like his grandmother’s telephone wires had been.

  All at once it came to him that this was radio equipment he was looking at. Amateur radio equipment—the kind he vaguely remembered from a long-ago episode of Fleksnes, the TV comedy series.

  A space heater of more recent vintage was attached to the wall. It was noticeably warmer in here than in the rest of the basement. When he took a deep breath through his nose, he noticed that the air was also drier. It did not smell of basement in here. The lightbulb in the ceiling was also fairly new, an energy-saving bulb from IKEA.

  He could not fathom what would be the point of being a radio ham in the digital era, but the room definitely looked in use. High on the exterior wall, a hole had been drilled where a cable that stretched along the wall from the desk disappeared outside: the antenna, Billy T. assumed, as he crouched down to examine the electricity connection. Sure enough, two double sockets were mounted underneath the desk.

  Two plugs were inserted.

  Slowly he crossed the floor.

  The equipment looked well maintained, despite its age. He ran his hand over a headphone set. Dust free. An odd little gizmo caught his attention. He picked it up and studied it.

  A Morse code key.

  “My God,” he mumbled. “What am I doing here, exactly?”

  The Morse key weighed heavy in his hand. The actual key was made of brass, Billy T. surmised. It was fixed to a beautiful strip of varnished wood, with a series of letters and numbers burned into one side of it.

  He carefully replaced it in the exact spot where it had lain.

  So Kirsten Ranvik was an amateur radio buff.

  If not the disabled guy.

  He must be her son.

  Billy T. shot a final look around the room.

  It told him nothing. He really could not comprehend why he was there. He had no idea what he had hoped to find. A secret mosque, maybe. An extremist right-wing hiding place, with Hitler on the walls and brown shirts in a closet. Antijihadist propaganda. Knights Templar posters. He honestly did not know and felt like an idiot.

  He ought to have learned from that insane visit to Andreas Kielland Olsen’s place. It had seemed so important. So unbelievably urgent, until he had come home with his phone full of pictures from the apartment, at a loss as to what to do with them. The only information he had gleaned from his break-in at Rødbergveien was that the resident was just as pedantically inclined as Linus—and as Kirsten Ranvik, for that matter. Billy T. stepped silently out of the radio room and was again struck by the awe-inspiring orderliness in everything that really was nothing but trash that, to be honest, should have been driven to a dump long ago.

  He shook his head. Mostly at his wits’ end with himself. This need to take action of some kind, in an effort to come closer to Linus’s secrets, had not only caused him to commit crimes. The crimes were also absolutely purposeless. As if to make up for that, he snapped ten or so photographs of the tidy shelves before stuffing his phone into his inside pocket.

  It took him a minute and a half to exit the basement the same way he had entered. On the lawn, close by the house, he stood for a moment to listen. He was alone. No one could see him. He stretched the plastic bag over the gaping window, taped it as firmly a
s he could, and made his way, unseen, back to the road where his Opel was parked a quarter-mile farther west.

  An amateur radio enthusiast, he mused, shaking his head. In a world where all other people were a keystroke away, and there were so many satellites circling the globe that it had become problematic having all that scrap metal up there.

  It was baffling that anyone could derive enjoyment from that sort of thing.

  “The brutality of it is almost incomprehensible,” Håkon Sand said with a deep sigh. “They used a power saw. Chain oil has been found on the surface of the wounds.”

  He flicked through the provisional report from Jørgen Fjellstad’s postmortem.

  “But by then he was already dead,” Silje Sørensen commented. “And as far as I understand, he was killed more . . . humanely?”

  “Well, cyanide is actually used as a method of execution in some American states. All the same, I’d be reluctant to call it particularly humane. But it’s obviously been quick, according to the conclusions here. Considering the concentration of hydrocyanic acid in the body.”

  “Hydrocyanic acid,” Silje said, tilting back in her chair and looking up at the ceiling. “Where on earth do you get hold of such a thing? If you’re not in an Agatha Christie novel, I mean? Or a bunker in Berlin?”

  “It can be made, for example,” he answered tersely, “in a modestly equipped laboratory, in fact. You distill a mixture of potassium hexacyanoferrate and dilute sulfuric acid. The problem is that it has an exceedingly low boiling point. It evaporates easily, in other words, and since the vapor is also extremely poisonous, you have to be careful.”

  He gave a discouraged sigh and put the postmortem report down on Silje’s desk.