No Echo

by Anne Holt

  Contents

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  Praise for Anne Holt

  Half Title

  Also by Anne Holt

  Copyright

  1

  Hairy Mary could hardly remember her real name. She came into the world in the back of a truck in January 1945. Her mother was an orphan aged sixteen. Nine months earlier, she had sold herself to a German soldier for two packs of cigarettes and a bar of chocolate. Now she was on her way to Tromsø. Finnmark was ablaze. Having pushed out in freezing temperatures of minus twenty-two degrees Celsius, the baby was swaddled in a moth-eaten blanket and then turned over to a married couple from Kirkenes. They were walking along the road holding a child of five by the hand, and barely had a chance to gather their wits before the truck with the sixteen-year-old was gone. The baby girl, two hours old, got no more from her biological mother than her name. Mary.

  Incredibly enough, the family from Kirkenes managed to keep the infant alive. They held on to her for eighteen months. Before Mary reached the age of ten, she had put four new foster families behind her. Mary was quick-witted, remarkably lacking in the beauty stakes, and what’s more had sustained an injury to one leg during her birth. She walked with a limp. Her body twisted halfway around every time she set down her right foot, as if scared that someone might be following her. If she had problems moving about, she was all the faster at shooting her mouth off. After two combative years at a children’s home in Fredrikstad, Mary headed for Oslo to take care of herself. She was then twelve years of age.

  Hairy Mary certainly did take care of herself.

  Now she was the oldest street hooker in Oslo.

  She was an exceptional woman in more ways than one. Maybe it was an obstinate gene that had helped her survive almost half a century in the trade. It might just as easily have been downright defiance. For the first fifteen years, alcohol had kept her going. In 1972 she became addicted to heroin. Since Hairy Mary was so old, she was one of the very first people in Norway to be offered methadone.

  “It’s too late,” Hairy Mary said, and hirpled off.

  At the start of the seventies she had her first and last dealings with the social-welfare office. She needed money for food after starving for sixteen days. Only a few kroner; she was fainting all the time. It wasn’t good for business. A humiliating ordeal of being sent from one social worker to another, which only ended up with an offer of three days’ detox, ensured that she never set foot in a social-welfare office again. Even when she was granted disability benefit in 1992, everything was organized through the doctor. The physician was a decent guy, the same age as her, and had never let a single unkind word fall from his lips when she came to him with swollen knees and chilblains. There had also been the odd sexually transmitted disease down through the years, without his smile growing any less sincere each time she limped into his warm surgery on Schous plass. The disability benefit managed to cover house rent, electricity, and cable television. The money from street work went on drugs. Hairy Mary had never had a budget for food. When things became chaotic, she forgot about the bills. The debt collectors came to the door. She was never at home, and never protested. The door was sealed, her belongings removed. Finding a new place to live could be difficult. Then it was a hostel for one or two winters.

  She was worn out now, completely worn out. The night was bitterly inclement. Hairy Mary was wearing a thigh-length pink skirt, laddered fishnet stockings, and a long silver-lamé jacket. She tried to wrap her clothes more snugly around herself, but that wasn’t much help. She had to get inside somewhere. The City Mission’s night shelter would be the best option after all. Admittedly, admission was refused to anyone under the influence, but Hairy Mary had been high on drugs for so many years that no one could tell whether she was clean or not.

  She took a right turn beside police headquarters.

  The park surrounding the curved building at Grønlandsleiret 44 was Hairy Mary’s place of refuge. Conventional citizens gave it a wide berth. An occasional dark-skinned immigrant with wife and countless children sometimes sat there in the afternoons while the kids kicked a ball about and sniggered in terror at Hairy Mary’s approach. The winos were the trustworthy sort. The cops didn’t bother her, either; it was ages since they had stopped harassing an honest whore.

  On this particular night, the park was deserted. Hairy Mary shuffled out from the beam of light shed by the lamp above the entrance gate to Oslo Prison. That night’s honestly earned fix was in her pocket. She just had to find somewhere to shoot up. Her steps were on the north side of the police headquarters building. They were not illuminated and never used.

  “Fuck! Bloody hell.”

  Someone had taken the steps.

  That was where she planned to shoot up her fix. That was where she was going to sit and wait until the heroin had reached a proper balance in her body. The steps around the back of police headquarters, a short stone’s throw from the prison wall, those were her steps. Someone had taken them.

  “Hey! You!”

  The man made no sign that he had heard her. She tottered closer. Her high heels ground into rotten leaves and dog shit. The man slept like a log.

  The guy might be good-looking. It was difficult to say, even when she leaned over him. It was too dark. A huge knife was sticking out of his chest.

  Hairy Mary was a practical creature. She stepped over the man, sat down on the top step, and fished out her syringe. The pleasant, warming feeling she craved hit her before she had got as far as withdrawing the needle.

  The man was dead. Probably murdered. Hairy Mary had seen murder victims before, even if they had never been as expensively dressed as this one. Attacked, probably. Or maybe the guy was a faggot who had taken too great a liberty with one of those young boys who sold themselves for five times the price of a blow-job from Hairy Mary.

  She stood up stiffly, swaying slightly. For a moment she studied the corpse. The man had a glove in his hand. Its partner lay to one side. Without any appreciable hesitation, Hairy Mary crouched down and appropriated the gloves for herself. They were too big, but were real leather with a wool lining. The guy had no more use for them. She pulled them on and began walking to catch the last bus to the night shelter. A scarf lay on the ground a few meters from the body. Hairy Mary had hit the jackpot tonight. She wound the scarf around her neck. Whether it was the new clothing or the heroin that helped, she had no idea. In any case, she did not feel quite so cold. Maybe she should even splash out on a taxi. And maybe she should call t
he police to let them know they had a dead body in their back garden.

  All the same, the most important thing was to find herself a bed for the night. She didn’t know what day it was, and she needed to sleep.

  2

  Santa Maria, Mother of Jesus.

  The picture on the wall above the bed reminded her of one of her forgotten scraps from childhood. A pious face gazing down above hands folded in prayer. The halo around her head had long ago faded to a vague cloud of dust.

  As Hanne Wilhelmsen opened her eyes, she realized that the soft features, narrow nose, and dark hair with severe middle parting had led her astray. She saw that now, though she did not understand why it had taken such a long time. It was Jesus himself who had watched over her every single night for nearly six months.

  A ribbon of morning light fell across the shoulder of Santa Maria’s son. Hanne sat up and her eyes squinted against the sunlight forcing its way through the gap in the curtains. Stroking the small of her back, she wondered why she was lying crosswise in the bed. She could not remember the last time an entire night had been lost in deep, undisturbed sleep.

  The cold stone tiles on her feet made her gasp for breath. In the bathroom doorway she turned to study the picture again. Her gaze swept over the floor and came to a sudden halt.

  The bathroom floor was blue. She had never noticed that. She put the knuckle of her index finger against one eye and stared down with the other.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen had lived in this spartan room in Villa Monasteria since midsummer. It was now almost Christmas. The days had been drab, just as all other colors were absent in and around this huge stone building. Even in summer, the Valpolicella landscape outside the enormous window on the first floor had been monotonously free from true colors. The vines clung to golden-brown trunks and the grass beside the stone walls was scorched.

  A chilly intimation of December struck her half an hour later when she opened the double doors leading out to Villa Monasteria’s gravel courtyard. She ambled aimlessly across to the bamboo woods on the other side, maybe twenty meters away. Two nuns stood in animated conversation on the path that divided the grove in two. They dropped their voices as Hanne approached. When she passed the two older, gray-clad women, they bowed their heads in silence.

  The bamboo on one side of the path was black. On the other side the stalks were green. The nuns were gone when Hanne turned around, perplexed about what had caused the inexplicable difference in color between the slender plants about the thickness of her thumb on either side of the path. Hanne had not heard the familiar shuffling across the gravel yard. She wondered fleetingly what had become of the nuns. Then she let her fingers brush over the bamboo stalks as she scurried up to the carp pond.

  There was something going on. Something was about to happen.

  In the beginning the nuns had been friendly. Not particularly talkative, of course: the Villa Monasteria was a place of contemplation and silence. Sometimes a brief smile, perhaps at mealtimes, a quizzical look above hands that gladly poured more wine into her glass, and an odd softly spoken word that Hanne could not understand. In August she had almost made up her mind to spend the time learning Italian. Then she had dismissed the idea. She wasn’t here to learn anything.

  Eventually the nuns had realized that Hanne preferred complete stillness. Even the astute manager. He accepted her money every three weeks, with no more than a simple grazie. The fun-loving students from Verona, who sometimes played records so loudly that the nuns came running within a few minutes, had spotted a kindred spirit in Hanne. But only in the beginning.

  Hanne Wilhelmsen had spent six months being entirely alone.

  She had in the main been left in peace to her daily battle not to bother about anything. Recently, nevertheless, she had been unable to divert her curiosity from the obvious fact that something was about to happen at Villa Monasteria. Il direttore, a slim, omnipresent man in his forties, raised his voice increasingly often to the nervously whispering nuns. His footsteps pounded harder than before on the stone floors. He dashed from one incomprehensible task to another, immaculately dressed and trailing a whiff of sweat and aftershave. The nuns were no longer smiling, and fewer of them assembled at mealtimes. However, they sat increasingly often in silent prayer on the wooden benches in the small chapel dating from the thirteenth century, even when there was no Mass. Hanne could see them from the window as they padded, two by two, in and out through the heavy timber doors.

  It was difficult to tell the depth of the carp pond. The water was unnaturally clear. The fishes’ plump movements along the bottom seemed repellent, and Hanne felt a trace of nausea at the thought of them swimming around in the convent’s drinking water.

  She sat down on the wall surrounding the pond. Heavy oak trees, almost bare of leaves, were outlined against the wintry sky. A flock of sheep grazed on the northern hillside. A dog was barking in the far distance, and the sheep huddled more closely together.

  Hanne yearned for home.

  She had no reason to yearn for home. All the same, something had happened. She didn’t know what; nor did she know why. It was as if her senses, blunted through a conscious process over several months, were no longer lurking in enforced hibernation. She had started to notice things.

  Six months had passed since Cecilie Vibe died. Hanne had not even attended the funeral of her partner of almost twenty years. Instead she had shut herself into their apartment, numbly registering that everyone had left her in peace. No one rang the doorbell. No one had attempted to come in. The phone was silent. Only junk mail and bills in the mailbox. And eventually a settlement from an insurance company. Hanne had had no idea about the policy Cecilie had taken out years before. She had phoned the company, got the money paid into a high-interest account, written a letter to the Chief of Police, and applied for leave of absence for the rest of the year. Alternatively, the letter could be considered her resignation.

  She had not waited for an answer and instead simply packed a bag and boarded the train, heading for Copenhagen. Strictly speaking, she did not know whether she still had a job. It was of no concern to her, at least not then. She had no inkling where she was going or how long she would be away. After a fortnight of traveling haphazardly through Europe she had stumbled across the Villa Monasteria, a run-down convent hotel in the hills north of Verona. The nuns could offer her tranquility and home-made wine. She signed in late one evening in July, intending to move on the following day.

  There were prawns in the pond. Small ones, admittedly, but prawns all the same: transparent and darting by fits and starts in flight from the indolent carp. Hanne Wilhelmsen had never heard of freshwater prawns. Sniffing, she wiped her nose with the sleeve of her jacket and let her eyes follow il direttore’s car along the avenue. Four women dressed in gray stood under a poplar tree gazing up at her. Despite the distance, she could feel their eyes on her face, sharp as knives in the drizzly air. When the manager’s car disappeared out on to the highway, the nuns wheeled around abruptly and bustled toward the Villa Monasteria without a backward glance. Hanne got up from the wall. She felt cold and rested. A huge raven, flying in oval circuits below the low-lying clouds, made her shiver.

  It was time to go home.

  3

  Housing one of Norway’s three major publishing companies, the anonymous building was nonetheless modestly tucked away in a back street in the city’s most unprepossessing district. The offices were small and uniform. No history of the publishing house decorated the walls, and no dark furniture or plush carpets graced the interior. Along the glass walls dividing the office cells from the endless corridors hung newspaper clippings and posters, evidence of a memory that only extended a few years back in time.

  The conference room in the Literature Section, reminiscent of a lunch room in a social-welfare office, was situated on the second floor. The table was pale veneer and ordinary office standard, and the orange upholstery on the chairs belonged more to the seventies. The publishing company was
Norway’s oldest, founded in 1829. This publishing company had history. Serious literary history. The books on the cheap IKEA shelves lining one wall, however, looked more like mass-market paperback novels. A random selection of that autumn’s publications was displayed with front covers facing out; they looked as if they might topple at any minute and clatter to the primrose-yellow linoleum floor.

  Idun Franck stared absent-mindedly at Ambjørnsen’s most recent bestseller in the Elling series. Someone had turned it upside-down and the dust-jacket was torn.

  “Idun?”

  The Senior Publishing Manager raised his voice. The five others in attendance sat with expressionless faces turned to Idun Franck.

  “Sorry—”

  She leafed distractedly through her papers and picked up a ballpoint pen.

  “The question is not really how much this project has cost us to date, but whether the book can actually be published at all. There has to be an ethical consideration of … Can we publish a cookery book when the chef who wrote it has been stabbed to death with a butcher’s knife?”

  The others seemed unsure whether Idun Franck was joking. One of them gave a slight smirk, before swiftly smothering it and staring at the table top as a red flush spread over his face.

  “Well, we don’t know whether it was a butcher’s knife,” Idun Franck added. “But he certainly was stabbed. According to the newspapers. In any case, it would be considered rather tasteless to follow up a gory murder by publishing an account of the victim and his kitchen.”

  “And we don’t want to be tasteless. We are, after all, talking about a cookery book,” Frederik Krøger said, baring his teeth.

  “Honestly,” muttered Samir Zeta, a dark-skinned young man who had started in the Information Department three weeks earlier.

  Krøger, the stocky Senior Publishing Manager, who tried to hide his bald pate under an awe-inspiring comb-over, made an apologetic gesture with his right hand.

  “If we can go back and examine the actual concept for a moment,” Idun Franck continued on her own initiative. “We were definitely on the track of something. A further development of the trend in cookery books, so to speak. A sort of culinary biography. A mixture of cookery book and personal portrait. Since Brede Ziegler has for several years been the best—”