No Echo

by Anne Holt

  “Maybe you came to apologize. I would think so.”

  There was a strong scent of Christmas. The sound of the brass seraphim’s never-ending dance at the window seemed louder now. Snow had begun to settle along the windowpanes. She began to cry. Cecilie’s parents drank coffee with milk. They drank two cups each, and still Hanne wept.

  “I don’t entirely know,” she finally said softly. “Perhaps.”

  Two hours later, each of the Vibes had a drop of liqueur in a glass. Hanne had switched to tea. She drank it out of a large mug adorned with a half-faded picture of the Eiffel Tower, aware that the tea leaves must be old. The brown liquid tasted of onion and pepper and oatmeal. She hugged the mug as she tucked her feet underneath herself.

  “Are you cold?” Inger asked, settling a blanket round Hanne’s shoulders.

  “No.”

  “It was good of you to come. Maybe you could have come sooner. That would’ve been better for us all.”

  Arne suddenly stretched out across the armrest and prized Hanne’s left hand from the mug. He held it in his own, and ran his thumb over her skin. As far as she could remember, it was the first time he had touched her, apart from shaking her hand.

  “Our problem,” he began slowly, “is that … We’ve found it so difficult to understand. We’ve never rejected Cecilie. We’ve never rejected you. On the contrary.”

  “My fault. Everything’s my fault. Everything, always.”

  Inger Vibe got up and stood in front of the enormous picture window. She rested her forehead on the glass and continued to stand like that, leaning against the window with her hands by her sides until she suddenly turned round and said: “That’s your biggest mistake, Hanne. That’s how you’ve failed.”

  “I know that.”

  “No. You don’t know that. That’s the problem. You always believe everything’s your fault. If only you can take on the guilt, you feel that exonerates you from everything. Sorry, you say, and then think that makes everything okay. Your feeling of guilt has been your shield against your surroundings. You’ve been …”

  She flung out her arms with a gesture that made Hanne hide her face behind the mug of tea and close her eyes.

  “You’ve protected yourself for too long. You’ve decked yourself out with guilt. You’ve slung it around you like a … dark cloak. To keep people away.”

  “Cecilie didn’t keep herself away.”

  Inger smiled and turned back to the window. The reflection in the dark glass magnified her.

  “But then Cecilie was quite special too.”

  Her laughter was high-pitched and prolonged, as if she had said something really amusing, as if Cecilie was expected at some point, any moment; Hanne had to force herself not to turn to the door where Cecilie might be.

  “It’s absolutely ridiculous of you to stay at a hotel.”

  Inger’s voice had taken on a determined note. She ran her hands over her skirt and lifted the necklace up to her eyes.

  “You’ve a really splendid apartment. Do you want me to come with you to tidy it?”

  “No!”

  The reply came too quickly. Maybe Inger wanted to come with her. It might mean something for her to sort out her daughter’s belongings.

  “Cecilie isn’t going to be cleared away,” Hanne explained hesitantly. “She should stay there. I just have to—”

  “Stuff and nonsense. Of course things have to be tidied away, now she’s gone. She has clothes and suchlike that have to go. What about the Salvation Army?”

  “Later. Perhaps. First of all I have to—”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  Arne was still stroking the back of her hand with his thumb.

  “I need to go.”

  She rose from the deep armchair. Her legs had gone to sleep under her, and she nearly fell over. Arne caught her.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay now.”

  “Just one more thing,” Inger said. Hanne had opened the front door and was shivering in the icy draft. “Seize whatever you can from life. We don’t live so very long, Hanne. We can’t afford to squander the important things.”

  With a shrug, Hanne closed the door behind her without hugging either of them; not even a handshake did she manage to offer. When she reached the car, she turned round. Lights still shone in every room, bar one, in the attic.

  It was now Tuesday night, December 14, 1999.

  31

  The truck ahead of her blocked most of her view. With no load, it clattered along from Tollbugata to Prinsens gate, with Hanne Wilhelmsen bringing up the rear. From old habit, she longed to note the registration number. She peered at the dashboard, but the hire car was not equipped with an easily accessible notepad. Anyway, the truck driver was not doing anything illegal, even though this was his third time cruising around the block in Kvadraturen. He should have parked down at the Havnelager building on the harborside long ago, to catch his regulation hours of sleep according to the rest-time regulations. Instead he was clogging up the whole street and taking his time studying the sparse selection on the sidewalk.

  Every time the truck braked, Hanne also stole a glance at the silhouettes outlined in the yellow glare of the street lamps. The girls she had seen until now were too young. Most of them might be considered juveniles. She turned into the curb and stopped the car. The rattle of the truck had given her a headache. She wound down the window and lit a cigarette.

  She should have visited Cecilie’s parents ages ago. She had forgotten to ask about the funeral. She still did not know where Cecilie’s gravestone was located.

  She looked at her watch. Quarter past one.

  “Girls’ night?”

  She jumped, suddenly gazing into a face smaller than the gruff voice would suggest. The person who had thrust almost an entire head into the car was having wig problems. It had slipped down as far as the eyes.

  “Looking for company?”

  The accent grated. The smile revealed a row of teeth bought a short time before, or more likely stolen. The denture was badly fitting. The words had a slurping time-lag.

  “Do you speak Norwegian?” Hanne asked, leaning away; the smell of bad breath mixed with a profusion of cheap perfume forced its way into the car.

  “I speak all languages.”

  Hanne noticed a faint trace of stubble under the brown cream. She shook her head and produced a 100-kroner bill from her jacket pocket.

  “Here. I’m not interested. Not in you.”

  She started the engine. The transvestite snatched the banknote, with a wiggle of the backside to demonstrate pique. In the rear-view mirror, Hanne could see the long legs toddle away on ten-centimeter-high heels.

  Like everyone else in the police, Hanne had begun her career on street patrol. From that time she was well aware that it was useless to ask. Whores could kill one another to secure a regular spot on a street corner, but information did not come free of charge to anyone who smelled like a cop.

  Hanne smelled like a cop, and she knew it. She drove on in the tracks churned by the enormous truck. Fortunately the guy had got a nibble. Only a Volvo estate car with a child’s seat visible was lurching around now in the red-light area; it was approaching some sort of closing time. The vehicle stopped quietly in Myntgata and a tiny figure in fake fur sneaked in on the passenger side after a brief discussion about price and product. The young girl would probably fit into the child’s seat.

  A solitary shadow limped off toward Bankplassen. The lights on the façade of Gamle Logen reflected faintly on a short silver-lamé jacket. Hanne dropped her speed, rolled down the window once again, and said: “Hey. Hey, you!”

  The woman turned and took a few seconds to focus properly.

  “No time,” she said abruptly.

  Hanne stopped the car and made to step out.

  “Don’t talk to cops.”

  The woman continued her pig-headed monologue, walking oddly, as if half-turning with every second step she took.

>   “No time, don’t want to.”

  “Hairy Mary!”

  Although the woman gave no sign of responding to the name, Hanne knew she had found the object of her search. That same morning she had run a background check on Hairy Mary. The hooker would turn fifty-five in January. This person looked almost eighty. All the same there was a remarkable strength in her movements, a kind of against-all-the-odds defiance that had kept her upright long past her time. Hanne tried to place her hand on the woman’s shoulder.

  “Let go!”

  Hairy Mary growled as her pace quickened. Her limp became more pronounced; the socket of her right hip might be damaged.

  “Would you like some food? Are you hungry?”

  Hairy Mary stopped at last, squinting at Hanne with an expression that might indicate bafflement.

  “Food?”

  She seemed to savor the word, smacking her lips lightly and scratching her thigh. Hanne had to avert her eyes when she saw the inflamed scabs, gouged open by her dirty long nails, through the fishnet stockings.

  “Food. Okay then.”

  Hairy Mary did not waste anything, not even her consonants. Hanne knew her success was more through good luck than good management. It was idiotic to use nourishment to entice the woman. Hairy Mary could just as easily have felt insulted and made herself scarce. Now Hanne’s greatest problem was to find something for a worn-out hooker to eat in the middle of the night. Of course she could drive to a gas station, but those gargantuan floodlit kiosks were hardly the place for a conversation with Hairy Mary.

  Hairy Mary nodded in the direction of Dronningens gate and began to walk off. Relieved, Hanne assumed she knew where she wanted to go. A few minutes later they were sitting on red plastic chairs in a cafeteria bereft of other customers. Hanne smoked, Hairy Mary ate. Pink sauce dripped from the corners of her mouth. Her eyes roamed constantly to the cook behind the counter, as if to make sure there was more where that kebab had come from. She swallowed cola in a single greedy gulp.

  “More. Thanks.”

  Hanne lit another cigarette and waited patiently until yet another kebab was served, with accompaniments. Hairy Mary belched behind a closed fist, and stared for the first time at her benefactor. Her eyes were brown with yellow flecks on the iris. Less becoming was the distinct yellow hue of the whites of her eyes, barely visible behind the heavy locks of hair.

  “You were the one who phoned,” Hanne said.

  It was more an assertion than a question, and she regretted it immediately.

  “Haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “I know that.”

  Restless, Hairy Mary looked keen to leave, as if the meal had drained her of any ability to concentrate that she might still possess.

  “Need to work. Bye.”

  “Wait a minute. If you had done anything wrong, I’d have hauled you in long ago. You know that perfectly well. I just want to know what you saw.”

  The food had almost done for Hairy Mary. Her eyes slid shut and her whole figure crumpled into something resembling sleep. The scraping sounds of a spatula on the grill plate woke her and she nabbed a cigarette from the pack on the table.

  “That was good.”

  She talked down at the leftover food, and took a really deep drag before her eyes slid closed again.

  “I need to know what you saw. Whether there was anyone else there. Whether you … Did you find anything? Something you took with you?”

  “Dead man and piles of garbage. Need to sleep soon.”

  Hairy Mary snuffled from her jacket lapel and gave a hacking cough. Hanne weighed up the possibility of getting this exhausted woman towed off to the car she had left in Myntgata.

  “Where do you live, Hairy Mary?”

  The question was so absurd that it momentarily shook Hairy Mary awake. Her eyes blinked against the flickering of the fluorescent lights on the ceiling.

  “Live? Right now, I live here.”

  Then she fell asleep. Soft snoring sounds jerked in her throat; her lips smacked against each other in short snorts that brought a smile to Hanne’s face. The half-dead shape sat awkwardly, resting against the windowpane, with her hands folded neatly on her lap, the cigarette balanced between two fingers. Hanne teased it out carefully and extinguished the glowing embers in the ashtray.

  “She can’t sleep here,” the cook said in an amalgam of Turkish and Swedish. “You’ll have to take her with you.”

  “I’ll just go and get my car – is that okay?”

  Hairy Mary had plenty of experience of clambering in and out of cars. Like a sleepwalker, she settled into the passenger seat and continued snoring until they passed police headquarters.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Home,” Hanne said. “I’m going home, and you’re coming with me.”

  When she parked the car outside the low-rise apartment block in Tøyen, it was past two o’clock on Tuesday night. Fortunately all the windows were in darkness.

  32

  “Felice. With an Italian c. Like in cello. Not Felise.”

  “Apologies, Dr. Felice.”

  Billy T. rubbed his arm and rolled down his shirt sleeve.

  “Strange name. Øystein Felice. A bit … of a mixture, so to speak.”

  The doctor dropped the syringe into a cardboard container, before washing his hands thoroughly under the tap.

  “So your trip wasn’t entirely wasted, then. Now you should at least avoid coming down with this winter’s influenza. My mother’s Norwegian. My father’s Italian. I should really be called Umberto after my father’s father, but I got my mother’s father’s name instead. He was from Valdres.”

  He smiled distractedly, as if so used to explaining his unusual name that he spoke on autopilot. He dried his hands diligently with a paper towel and put the edited folder into a plastic wallet.

  “Here,” he said, handing it to Billy T. “This is what I can tell you. Since the patient is dead, he can’t release me from my duty of confidentiality. It’s then up to me and my discretion. From what you told me on the phone, there’s nothing in Brede Ziegler’s medical history of any interest. To the police, I mean.”

  “You know,” Billy T. said grumpily, snatching the folder with its sparse contents, “you would think there was a duty of confidentiality attached to knowing this guy Ziegler at all.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t give a shit. But …”

  He skimmed through the papers.

  “The man was plagued by headaches and had a gammy knee,” he summarized. “Nothing else.”

  “I’ve most certainly not said that. Neither have I said the opposite. All I’m saying is …”

  Billy T. groaned loudly and leaned forward in the cramped chair, holding his head in his hands as he rocked back and forth, moaning softly.

  “Unfortunately I’m not a psychiatrist,” Dr. Felice said drily. “But I can recommend a really capable man if you—”

  Billy T. sat up straight and took a deep breath.

  “So the headache wasn’t migraine,” he said despondently. “And he didn’t take any medication.”

  “No. He was perhaps the nearest I’ve come to a fanatical resister of pills. His knee bothered him even more than the headache, which could be absent for months at a stretch. However the meniscus tear should really have been operated on. He refused. He wouldn’t take painkillers, either.”

  A woman popped her head round the door.

  “We’re now half an hour behind with appointments,” she said tartly, glaring at Billy T. before she slammed the door shut without waiting for a response.

  “When did you see him last?”

  Billy T. struggled to find a more comfortable position on the chair, in order to make a show of telling the doctor that he intended to take as much time as he required. Since Dr. Felice had so arrogantly refused to visit police headquarters until he had received a formal request, his patients would have to tolerate an extra hour in the waiting room. Dr. Felice opened a packe
t of pastilles and offered him one.

  “It’s quite odd that you should ask. He hasn’t been here for eight months. At that time he had a laceration. He had cut himself when opening an oyster and, stupidly enough, had not gone to Accident & Emergency right away. Instead he came here the next day. He was given a tetanus injection and a course of antibiotics. Not of any interest to you, of course, but …”

  He picked a pastille out of the box and sat twiddling it between thumb and forefinger.

  “What is interesting, I expect, is that he phoned me the Sunday he was killed.”

  Billy T. swallowed his pastille whole.

  “He phoned you,” he repeated tritely. “On Sunday the fifth. Well, well. What did he want?”

  “I don’t know, in fact. He called me at home. My personal number. He’s never done that before. I wasn’t at home, but he left a message on the answering machine. He asked me to phone him on …”

  Dr. Felice gazed across the massive office desk that displayed signs of a remarkable sense of order. Three stacks of paper sat neatly side by side below paperweights in the shape of monkeys that could not see, hear, or speak.

  “Two-two, nine-eight, five-three, nine-nine,” he read from a note. “Later I discovered that’s his home phone number.”

  “When did he phone?”

  “I don’t know. I have an ordinary answering machine, and it doesn’t record the time. He didn’t say himself. He didn’t say what it was about. Just that I must call him before eight o’clock. ‘Before eight tonight.’ That was what he said. Since I was out from two o’clock on Sunday afternoon and wasn’t back until the next afternoon, I can’t be more specific about the time of his call.”

  Billy T. produced a notepad from his voluminous jacket and made apathetic notes.

  “He said ‘before eight’? Not ‘when you come home’?”

  “No. ‘Before eight.’”

  “Can we have the tape?”

  “Sorry, no. It’s been wiped. By complete accident. Naturally I would have kept it, since I read about Brede Ziegler’s death on Monday morning and was quite shocked when I heard the message from him that same afternoon. I must have touched a button in my confusion. But I remember the message clearly.”