Authors: Anne Holt
He drew quotation marks in the air.
‘… where Eva Karin used to go when she couldn’t sleep, according to the family. There were four photographs in there the first time I saw the room, and three when I went back two days later. The only thing I remember is that it was a portrait.’
‘But Erik Lysgaard doesn’t want to—’
‘We’ll just have to forget Erik. He’s a lost cause. I’ve spent far too long thinking the key to finding out more about this mysterious walk lies with him. But we’ve reached stalemate there. Lukas, however—’
‘Doesn’t seem all that keen to cooperate either, if you ask me.’
‘No, you could be right there. Which means we have to ask ourselves why a son who is obviously grieving – and who really wants
to find out who murdered his mother – is so reluctant to help the police. There’s usually only one explanation for that kind of thing.’
He looked at Sigmund with raised eyebrows, challenging him to follow his reasoning through to its conclusion.
‘Family secrets,’ said Sigmund in a dramatic tone of voice.
‘Bingo. They often have nothing to do with the matter in hand, actually, but in this case we can’t afford to make any assumptions. My impression of Lukas is that he’s not really …’
There was a long pause. Sigmund waited patiently; his glass wasn’t empty yet.
‘… he’s not really sure of his father,’ Adam said eventually.
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’re obviously very fond of each other. There’s a striking resemblance between them, both physically and in terms of personality, and I have no reason to believe there’s any problem with the relationship between father and son. And yet there’s something unresolved between them. Something new. You notice it as soon as you’re in the same room with both of them. It’s a long way from hostility, it’s more a kind of …’
Once again he had to search for the right words.
‘… broken trust.’
‘Do they suspect each other?’
‘I don’t think so. But there’s something unspoken between them, some kind of deep scepticism that …’
Once again, mostly as a reflex action, he looked at his watch.
‘I mean it, Sigmund. I have to get to sleep. Clear off.’
‘You always have to spoil the party,’ mumbled his colleague, putting his feet on the floor. His room was two doors away, and he couldn’t be bothered with his shoes. He picked them up with two fingers of his right hand, and carried the whisky bottle in the other.
‘What time are you having breakfast?’
‘Seven. Then I’m going out to Os. I want to catch Lukas before he goes to work. That’s what we have to hope for – that Lukas will agree to help us.’
He yawned and weakly raised two fingers to his forehead in a farewell salute. In the doorway Sigmund turned back.
‘I think I’ll get up a bit later,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll go straight down to the police station about nine. I’ll let them know you’ve gone to talk to
Lukas again. They seem to think it’s OK for you to go off on your own here in Bergen. You’d never get away with it back home!’
‘Fine. Good night.’
Sigmund mumbled something inaudible as the door closed behind him with a muted bang.
As Adam undressed and got ready for bed, he realized he’d forgotten to ring Johanne. He swore and looked at his watch, even though it was only two minutes since he’d established that it was eleven thirty-six.
It was too late to call, so he went to bed.
And couldn’t get to sleep.
*
It was the number 19 that was keeping Johanne awake. She had spent the entire evening reading about Rashad Khalifa and his theories about the divine origins of the Koran. Whatever she tried to think about in order to tempt sleep, that damned number 19 popped up again, and she was wide awake once more.
After an hour she gave up. She would find something mindless to watch on TV. A detective programme or a sitcom; something to make her sleepy. It was already after one o’clock, but TV3 was usually showing some kind of crap at this time of night.
The sofa was a complete mess. Papers everywhere, every single one a printout from the Internet.
Johanne threatened her own students with death and destruction if they ever used Wikipedia as a source in a piece of academic work. She used it all the time. The difference between Johanne and her students was that she had the sense to be critical, in her opinion. This evening it had been difficult. The story of Rashad Khalifa made riveting reading, and every link had led her deeper into this remarkable story.
It was so fascinating.
She padded silently into the kitchen and decided to follow her mother’s advice. Milk in a pan, two large dessert spoonfuls of honey. Just before it boiled she added a dash of brandy. As a child she hadn’t had a clue about the final ingredient. As an adult she had confronted her mother, telling her it was totally irresponsible to give a child alcohol to get her to sleep. Her mother had waved away her objections,
pointing out that the alcohol evaporated, and that in any case alcohol could be regarded as medicine. At least in these circumstances. Besides which they were very rarely given her special milk mixture, she had added, when Johanne still didn’t seem convinced.
She smiled and shook her head at the thought. Poured the milk into a big mug. It was almost too hot to hold.
She put it down on the coffee table and made some space on the sofa. Switched on the TV and flicked on to TV3. It was difficult to work out what the film was actually about. The pictures were dark, showing trees being blown down in a violent storm. When a vampire suddenly appeared among the tree trunks, she switched off.
Without really making a conscious decision, she reached for a pile of papers next to her mug of milk. Despite the fact that it was a stupid thing to do in view of the late hour, she settled down to read more about Rashad Khalifa and his peculiar theory about the number 19.
The Egyptian had emigrated to the United States as a young adult, and trained there as a biochemist. Since he found the English translation of the Koran unsatisfactory, he re-translated the whole thing himself. During the course of his work, towards the end of the Sixties, he got the idea that the book ought to be analyzed. From a purely mathematical point of view. The aim would be to prove that the Koran was a divine text. After several years and a great deal of work, he put forward his theory about the number 19 as a kind of pervading, divine key to the word of Allah.
Johanne didn’t have the requisite knowledge to follow the strange Muslim’s great leaps of thought. The whole thing seemed to be based on comparatively advanced mathematics, while in some parts it seemed utterly banal. For example, he noted that in the Koran, ‘Basmalah’ is mentioned 114 times, which is a number divisible by 19. In certain places he based his comments more directly on the text, such as when he referred to the fact that sura 74:30 said, ‘Over it is nineteen.’
Tentatively, she took a sip of the hot milky drink. Her mother’s theory didn’t stand up; the alcohol burned on her tongue and prickled in her nose.
Rashad Khalifa carried out an inconceivable number of calculations, she noted once more. The most ridiculous was to add up all the
numbers mentioned throughout the whole of the Koran, and to show that this total was also divisible by 19. At first she really couldn’t understand what was special about that, but then she realized that 19 was a prime number, and therefore divisible only by itself, and that made things slightly easier to understand.
‘But then there are a hell of a lot of prime numbers,’ she muttered to herself.
The room was cold.
They had installed a thermostat with a timer on every radiator in an attempt to protect both their bank account and the environment. While Adam kept on turning up the radiators to maintain the heat overnight, she kept turning them down to allow the system to work as it was meant to. She regretted it now. For a moment she considered lighting a fire, but instead she went into the bedroom and fetched a blanket.
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.