by Anne Holt
Her drink was beginning to cool down. She took a big gulp, then put the mug down again and started to read.
To begin with, the Muslim world had seemed delighted with the eccentric Khalifa’s discoveries. At first his work was taken seriously. Muslims the world over accepted the idea of mathematical evidence for the existence of Allah. Even the well-known sceptic Martin Gardner referred to Khalifa’s mathematical discoveries as interesting and sensational in one of his articles in Scientific American.
Then things went downhill for the Egyptian-American Rashad Khalifa.
He wrote himself into the Koran.
Not content with regarding himself as a prophet on the same level as the Prophet, he created his own religion. According to ‘The Submitters’, all other religions, including corrupt Islam, would simply die out when the prophet foretold in both the Koran and the Bible arrived, and Islam would rise again in a pure, unadulterated form.
She was going cross-eyed. Johanne put down the papers.
Perhaps she would be able to sleep on the sofa.
She wasn’t going to think about Rashad Khalifa any more.
Still, it was hardly surprising that he gained supporters, she thought, trying to get comfortable. Many modern Muslims welcomed his attack on the Muslim priesthood. On the other hand, numerology would always tempt those with a weakness for fanaticism – extremists of all kinds. Khalifa’s theories were still accepted, in spite of the fact that the man himself had been murdered in 1990.
By a fanatical Muslim, following a fatwa issued at the same meeting as the one against Salman Rushdie.
‘Oh my God,’ she mumbled, trying to close her eyes. ‘These religions!’
The number 19 was performing Riverdance on the inside of her eyelids.
It was ten past two.
Tomorrow would be terrible if she didn’t get to sleep soon. She got up abruptly, and with the blanket tucked under her arm she padded into the bathroom to take a sleeping tablet. The very thought that they were there was usually enough, but this time she took one and a half tablets, swilled down with running water from the tap.
Fifteen minutes later she was fast asleep in her own bed, untroubled by dreams.
*
Lukas Lysgaard had waited until everyone was asleep. He left a note for Astrid saying that he was worried about his father and was going to check that everything was OK, but would be back later that night. He had left the car parked on the street so that the garage door wouldn’t wake anyone.
The drive did him good. While his mother had always adored the light, Lukas was a man who felt comfortable at night. As a child he had always felt safe in the dark. The night was his friend, and had been ever since he was little and lived in the big house on Nubbebakken. From the age of six or seven he had often woken up and been fascinated by the shadows dancing on his bedroom wall. The big oak tree whose branches scraped against the window pane was illuminated from behind by a single yellow street lamp, making the most beautiful patterns on his bed. All of a sudden, when he could no longer sleep, he would tiptoe out of his room and up the steep stairs leading to the attic. In the semi-darkness, among trunks and old furniture, moth-eaten clothes and toys that were so old nobody knew who had owned them originally, he could sit for hours, lost in dreams.
Lukas Lysgaard drove from Os through the damp winter darkness into a Bergen that was heavy with sleep; he had finally made a decision.
When he thought back to his own childhood, he didn’t have much to complain about.
He was a much-loved child, and he knew it. His parents’ faith had been good for him when he was little. He accepted their God just as easily as all children accept their parents’ ideals until they are old enough to rebel. His rebellion had taken place in silence. From seeing the Lord as a comforting father figure – forgiving, watchful and omnipresent – he had begun to have his doubts at the age of twelve.
There was no room for doubt in the house on Nubbebakken.
His mother’s faith in God had been absolute. Her kindness towards others, regardless of their faith or conviction, her generosity and tolerance towards even the weakest among the fallen, all of this was firmly anchored in her certainty that the Redeemer was the Son of God. When Lukas became a teenager he discovered that his mother wasn’t a believer. She knew. Eva Karin Lysgaard was absolutely sure about her religion, and he never dared confront her with his own doubts. God stopped answering his prayers. Christianity became more and more of a closed book to him, and he started to seek the answers to the mysteries of life elsewhere.
After completing his military service he began to study physics, and abandoned his religion. Still without saying a word. He and Astrid had been married in church – what else would they do? Their children had been baptized. He was pleased about that now; his mother had been so happy each time she held up one of her grandchildren before the congregation, after administering the sacrament herself.
It had always been different at home with his parents, he thought, as he drew closer to his father’s house.
When he was a boy he had never noticed it. Since his mother’s death he had been trying to remember when it first arose, this vague feeling that she was hiding something. Perhaps it had happened gradually, alongside his own dwindling faith. Although she had always been there as a mother, always spiritually and often physically, as he grew older it had become increasingly clear to him that he was sharing her with someone else. It was like a shadow hanging over her. Something missing.
He had a sister. That must be the answer.
It was difficult to work out how and why, but it had to be connected in some way to his mother’s salvation as a sixteen-year-old. Perhaps she had been pregnant. Perhaps Jesus had spoken to her when she was thinking of having an abortion. That would explain the one area in which she was immovable and sometimes almost fanatical: it was not given to man to end a life created by God.
He quickly worked out that his mother had been sixteen in 1962.
It wasn’t easy to be pregnant and unmarried in 1962, and most definitely not for a young girl.
The woman in the photo was so like him; he remembered that, despite the fact that on the few occasions when he had paid any real attention to the picture he had felt an antipathy, almost a sense of loathing towards this nameless woman with the attractive, slightly crooked teeth.
Lukas was going to find that photograph. Then he was going to find his sister.
On Nubbebakken he parked a short distance from his father’s house. When he reached the front door, he tried not to rattle the bunch of keys.
Once inside, he stopped and listened.
It was never really silent in his parents’ house. The wood creaked, the hinges squealed. Branches scraped against the window panes when it was breezy. The ticking of the grandfather clock was usually so loud that you could hear it more or less anywhere on the ground floor. The pipes sighed at irregular intervals; his childhood home had always been a living house. The floors were old, and he still remembered where to put his feet so that he wouldn’t wake anyone.
Now everything was dead.
There wasn’t a breath of wind outside, and even when he stood on a floorboard that usually protested beneath his weight, he could hear nothing but his own pulse beating against his eardrums.
He walked towards the narrow staircase, holding his breath until he reached the top. The door of his father’s bedroom was ajar. The slow, regular breathing indicated that he was asleep. Lukas moved cautiously over to the door leading up to the attic. As usual the old wrought-iron key was in the lock, and he lifted the handle up and towards him while turning the key at the same time, which he knew was the trick. The click as the door unlocked made him hold his breath once more.
His father was still asleep.
With infinite slowness he opened the door.
Eventually he was able to slip through.
He placed his feet as close to the wall as possible on each step, as he had learned to do when he was onl
y six years old. Silently he made his way up to the big, dusty room. He slipped the torch out of his waistband and began to search.
It was a reunion with his own childhood.
In the boxes piled up by the little round window in one gable he found clothes and shoes that had belonged to him when he was a little boy. Next to them were several boxes containing more clothes; his mother had thrown nothing away. He tried to remember when he had last been up here, and worked out that it must have been before they moved away for the first time, when he was twelve, and he had cried himself to sleep for two months at the thought of leaving Bergen.
And yet everything seemed so strangely familiar.
The smell was still the same. Dust, mothballs and rusty metal mixed with shoe polish and indefinable, comforting scents.
Suddenly he turned away from the boxes by the window and moved silently back to the staircase. He swept the beam of the torch over the floor at the top of the stairs. In the thick dust he could clearly see his own footprints. He could also see another impression, with no pattern on the sole, like the marks left by slippers. There were several when he looked more closely, and they went in both directions. Someone had been here recently.
Lukas couldn’t help smiling. His father had always thought the attic was a safe place. Every Christmas Eve when he was a little boy, Lukas had pretended to be surprised at his presents. His father had hidden them up here until Christmas Eve, but he had no idea that Lukas had become an expert at opening presents and sealing them up again without anyone being able to tell.
He stretched and looked around.
The attic was large, covering the same area as the ground floor of the house. A hundred square metres, if he remembered rightly. His courage almost failed at the thought of how long it would take to search through all this rubbish – all these memories – for something as small as a photograph.
Once again the beam of the torch danced across the footprints by the stairs.
The impressions left by the slippers– almost invisible – were pointing in the opposite direction from where Lukas had been. They led over to the western end of the attic, where the little window was nailed shut. He traced them carefully.
A sound from downstairs made him stiffen.
The sound of footsteps. The footsteps stopped.
Lukas held his breath.
His father was awake. He could almost hear him breathing, even though there must be more than fifteen metres between them. It sounded as if he was standing by the attic door.
Shit. Lukas’s lips silently formed the word. He hadn’t closed the door, simply because he was afraid of making a noise later, when he came down from the attic. Presumably his father was going to the toilet, and, of course, he had noticed that the attic door was open.
Sometimes, if they had forgotten to lock the door, it would open by itself. Lukas closed his eyes and prayed to God for the first time in living memory.
Let Dad believe the door opened by itself.
This time his prayer was answered.
He heard his father muttering to himself, then the door closed.
And the key was turned.
God hadn’t answered his prayer after all. Now he was locked in, and how the hell was he supposed to explain that? A stream of quiet curses poured out of his mouth before it occurred to him that he could use the roof light. He was only six years old when he climbed out of the little window in the roof for the first time; it was right next to the chimney, and he clambered down the sweep’s ladder, scrambled along the guttering and across to the big oak tree just outside his old bedroom.
From there getting down to the ground was a simple matter.
But first he must find the photo of his sister.
He waited for ten minutes to make sure his father had gone back to sleep. Then he crept quietly across the floor.
It was all so simple that he couldn’t really believe it. Underneath a banana box full of old newspapers – on top of a footstool he thought he remembered from when they lived in Stavanger – lay the photograph. The frame shone when the beam of the torch caught it. Only now did it occur to him that it was made of silver. The metal had oxidized over the years, but the weight and the quality of the chased frame convinced him.
A pang shot through him as he let the beam rest on her smiling face.
The woman was possibly in her twenties, although it was hard to tell. The only part of her clothing that was visible was a blouse with a small collar and something that might be flowers embroidered on the point at each side, white on white. On top of the blouse she was wearing a darker jacket – it looked like a thin, knitted jacket. One single colour.
Not particularly modern, he thought.
Quickly, he took the photograph out of the frame. He wanted to look for the name of the photographer or some other clue that might take him further in the hunt for the sister in whose existence he had believed for so long; now he had no intention of giving up until he found her.
Nothing.
The photograph was completely anonymous. He put down the frame and went over to an old armchair standing by the long wall on the southern side of the house. He sat down and balanced the torch on his shoulder so that the light was shining directly on the photograph.
If his mother had been pregnant in 1962, then this woman must be forty-six now, perhaps forty-seven; he had never known what time of year his mother had had her alleged revelation.
So the photograph must have been taken at least twenty-five years ago: 1984.
He had been five years old then. He didn’t know much about the fashion in those days, apart from the fact that his best friend’s older brother had worn pastel-coloured mohair jumpers which he tucked into his trousers, and his hair had been permed into fantastic curls.
His ran his fingertips over the woman’s face.
She didn’t have a perm, and although it was difficult to guess colours from a black-and-white photograph, he thought the jacket might be red.
Lukas had never missed having siblings. He grew up with a sense of being unique, the only child with whom his parents had been blessed. He found it easy to make friends, and they had always been welcome at home. His friends envied him: Lukas had his parents’ undivided attention, and he often had the latest thing before other parents had even had time to consider whether they could afford it.
He felt as if the woman in the photograph was talking to him. There was something between them, a mutual love.
Quickly, he tucked the photograph inside his shirt and secured it in the waistband of his trousers. He put the frame back where he had found it, then moved over to the roof light, hoping it would still open after all these years.
It did.
Cold, damp air poured in, and he closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again he began to wonder if it would still be possible for him to squeeze out through the narrow opening. He looked around for something to stand on, and caught sight of a small stepladder, which he remembered from the kitchen in Stavanger. He carefully unhooked it from the wall, opened it out and placed it directly under the roof light. He just about managed to squeeze his shoulders through the gap. Once his upper body was through, the rest wouldn’t be a problem.
However, there were other challenges.
He immediately realized that it would be madness to attempt to get over the roof and down the big oak tree in the dark. There was only a faint glow from the solitary street lamp, which didn’t provide enough light to see what he was doing. Since he needed both hands to make his way over the roof and into the tree, the torch wouldn’t be much use. Of course, he could fix it in his belt, but it wouldn’t be enough.
Lukas Lysgaard was a 29-year-old father of three, and no longer a boy with no fear and no sense. Carefully, he wriggled back down and managed to get back inside without making too much noise.
He sat down in the armchair again, fished out his mobile and keyed in a message to Astrid.
Spending the night at Dad’s. Will ring in t
he morning. Lukas.
Then he switched the phone to silent.
He would wait for daylight, even if the dawn came late at this time of year. Once again he took out the photograph of the person he now knew was his sister and studied it for a long time in the blue-white glow of the Maglite.
Perhaps he had nieces and nephews.
At least he had a sister.
The very thought made him dizzy, and suddenly tiredness crept up on him. His limbs were as heavy as lead, and he was no longer capable of holding the photograph steady. He tucked it back inside his shirt, switched off the torch and leaned back in the lovely, comfortable armchair.
In the small hours of the morning, he fell asleep.
Child Missing
Adam Stubo had been so tired when he woke up that he had wondered for a while whether he ought to be driving. He wasn’t under the influence of alcohol, having restricted himself to just one decent drink. And yet he felt a heaviness in his body, a stubborn sleepiness that made it difficult to get out of bed. Perhaps he was coming down with something.
But after three cups of coffee, two portions of scrambled eggs and bacon and a freshly baked croissant, everything felt much easier.
He had almost reached Os.
He had decided against warning the family in advance. It was a risk, of course, since there was no guarantee Lukas Lysgaard would be at home, but Adam wanted to maintain the psychological upper hand by making an unannounced visit. He had never been to Lukas’s house, and when the mechanical voice of the satnav kept on telling him to turn right when he was passing a field with not so much as a logging track visible, he decided it would be better to ask the way. A woman in her sixties hurrying along a cycle track looked as if she knew where she was going.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, pressing the button to open the side window. ‘Do you know this area?’
