No Echo

by Anne Holt

  The ill-tempered nurse came in again, this time without even knocking. She banged a ring binder down on the desk in front of Dr. Felice and stamped out of the room without closing the door behind her.

  “That was a bit much,” Billy T. commented. “Do you find it acceptable for her to behave like that, or what?”

  Dr. Felice did not reply. He pinched his eyes between thumb and index finger and forced out an abrupt smile.

  “She’s very efficient. She’s the one who has to take the flak out there.”

  Billy T. buttoned his jacket on his way out.

  “It’s entirely possible that we’ll call you in for formal interview,” he said. “We’ll see. In the meantime, if anything else that might be of interest springs to mind, then phone. Billy T.’s enough. That’s me.”

  “I had understood that,” Øystein Felice said. “From that point of view, we’ve got something in common.”

  “Eh?”

  Half-turning, Billy T. bumped into a box of disposable gloves that fell on the floor.

  “Strange name.”

  “Exactly.”

  He crouched down and gathered up the gloves, covering his fingers in talcum powder and brushing them vigorously on his trousers.

  “There could be one thing.”

  Dr. Felice looked exhausted. For the first time Billy T. noticed that his short dark hair had a sprinkling of gray at the temples, and copious beard growth was starting to show. Billy T. fished out his pocket watch and cursed when he saw that it was already half past four.

  “What is it, then?” he said brusquely.

  “I … In that folder I gave you, there’s nothing about …”

  Dr. Felice helped himself to another pastille. He didn’t put that one in his mouth either, but instead rolled it into a soft green pea.

  “Brede Ziegler was sterilized. Of course that would emerge from the postmortem anyway. Or … He must already have been autopsied. I wasn’t sure if it was of any possible relevance for the case, so I didn’t include it in the—”

  He waved uncertainly at the folder Billy T. held in his right hand.

  “Anyway. He wanted to be sterilized before he got married. Of course I spoke to him in detail about it before the procedure, but he was extremely set in his decision. His age would normally mean that I wouldn’t have any objections, but he was childless and about to get married to a young and presumably fertile woman, so I—”

  He broke off. Again he pressed his fingers against his eyes, as if struggling to focus.

  “It’s probably of no interest whatsoever.”

  “Yes, it is,” Billy T. said. “I need to go now, but if you don’t phone me in the next few days, then I’ll call you. Okay?”

  Dr. Felice did not answer. The phone rang; a modern, digital chime. He grasped the receiver as Billy T. closed the door behind him.

  “That woman who always asks for Dr. Happy is on the line,” he heard the receptionist say. “Shall I ask her to call back later?”

  Happy. Billy T. flashed a crooked smile at a black woman with a whimpering two-year-old as it suddenly dawned on him what “felice” actually meant.

  “Dr. Happy,” he murmured. “What a name for a doctor!”

  He completely forgot to pay for his vaccination.

  33

  In two hours’ time she had to be at theater rehearsals. She still had little idea how she would actually interpret her role. As usual she had learned the words quickly but naturally – that was not where the problem lay. The difficulty radiated toward her from the very cover of the manuscript, now dog-eared and soiled with coffee stains.

  “Narcissus at the Late-Night Party.”

  Nonsense! Thale had spent weeks analyzing the text, but the words remained inconsequential hypotheses on a piece of paper. Her role was a paradoxical parody, though that was not what the playwright had in mind; she was to play a lovesick Greek nymph in a luxury apartment in affluent Aker Brygge.

  The theater manager had agreed to stage the production from some sense of duty to contemporary Norwegian drama. Why not something by Jon Fosse? Admittedly she had already acted in two of his plays, but at least he gave her something to work on, a personality to delve into. They had advertised a competition to commemorate the National Theater’s centenary. A know-all crime novelist – who’d had great success with a host of murder mystery books – had won. The play was, and remained, dreadful. At the last rehearsal Thale had got it in spades from the director. He was fed up, he said, with her using their scant allocation of rehearsal time to complain about the text, instead of trying to make something of it. Commitment, he had yelled, as he kicked a floodlight. He had fractured his little toe. Now he was hobbling around on crutches, grumpier than ever.

  Stretching out on the settee, Thale pulled up the blanket and closed her eyes. Commitment. She had to struggle to find some commitment to a play in which the Greek myth of Narcissus had been transposed to a nouveau-riche Norwegian setting in the year 2000. Apparently prosperous characters wandered around on stage, cultivating vacuity and avoiding the love of anyone other than themselves. Thale could almost hear the laughter from the audience when they were introduced to a stockbroker called Narcissus. The tragedy of it all was that the play was not meant to be a farce. That she herself, named Echo, would roam around in a Spice Girl costume would occasion nothing other than a smile of pity.

  She made an effort to concentrate and distance herself from her contempt for the play, to no avail. No matter how hard she tried, she could not see the connection between the moving Narcissus myth and drinking whisky for five hours at a stretch in a postmodern apartment. The original Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection and rejected Echo’s love. Since the reflection was a lover Narcissus could never possess, his self-love became his misfortune and downfall. The stockbroker, on the other hand, was basically quite happy to be in love with himself. The analogy was illogical. All the same, the liberties the writer had taken with Echo were the worst aspect of the play. In the myth, she wasted away in sorrow over her lost love, but her lament – the echo – lingered with humanity for all eternity. In the modern version Echo had become a feminist. Thale shuddered at the thought of how, in the final act, she had to rape Narcissus in his bathtub. Everyone had to get what they wanted, by force if necessary.

  It enraged her that a writer who obviously hadn’t understood his material should coerce her into expressing his warped ideas.

  She had to turn her mind to something else. She fell asleep.

  A dream woke her twenty minutes later. Sweaty and breathless, she recalled being at Daniel’s bedsit to help him hang pictures. A large damp patch was horribly outlined on one wall and she concealed it with a photograph. As soon as she had hung it, cracks appeared on the wall beside it. Another picture, another crack. She kept running, faster and faster, but the entire room had begun to fall apart, all the same.

  Thale sat up and checked the time. She would make herself a cup of coffee before walking to the theater.

  She was deeply anxious about her boy.

  Nothing had gone the way she had planned. Daniel had not received what he was due. She could see there was something wrong with the boy. He spent more time on meaningless part-time jobs than on his studies, and he seemed unhappy. She had a hunch that it had to do with something far more serious than his enforced move from Bogstadveien to that mold-infested bedsit with no bathroom. When he had tried to speak to her last Saturday, she had dismissed him. She hadn’t really wanted to, but his questions were too obvious, too painful to countenance. She had been reluctant to deal with them. It was not her fault that Daniel had been let down. Thale had no wish for her son to dwell on everything that had already transpired. She was keen to help him look forward. That was what she had always done.

  She sipped half a cup of coffee before going to the bathroom. The nightmare’s dank miasma still pervaded her clothes: she tore them off and stuffed them into the laundry basket. Scalding hot water cascading down her ba
ck made her feel better.

  It really all came down to money.

  Daniel had not received the inheritance he was entitled to, the inheritance that she and Idun had agreed would go to Daniel. Daniel would be his grandfather’s heir. Idun, whom Daniel ludicrously enough still called Taffa as he had done since a toddler, had no children of her own. Idun loved Daniel as if he were her own child. They had both come to an agreement. Thale had never let herself be ruled by money or the opportunity to possess it. Since the age of seventeen she had managed by herself. Never, not once, had she asked her father for money. Nevertheless, there had always been a certain security there. The villa at Heggeli was a family insurance policy, held in common, that would come to Daniel at the end of the day. It had never occurred to her that her father, a Supreme Court advocate, might have financial problems. When he died after a short illness at the age of eighty, the estate was insolvent. The villa was worth six million kroner, but the mortgage on it was almost six and a half. Thale had not been able to muster the energy to make an effort to find out what had happened. It was Idun who had uncovered it all. Their father had been a notorious gambler and the opportunity to speculate on the Internet had wiped him out completely.

  She struggled with the mixer taps. Probably something wrong with a gasket: the pipes rumbled and the tap dripped constantly, no matter how hard she turned it. She punched the wall and almost toppled over.

  Daniel had lost his inheritance and it was a real problem for her to accept that.

  His inheritance.

  She hesitated as she stepped out of the bathtub. That it had not crossed her mind earlier must be because she had tried to push it all away. She always wanted to look forward – only forward.

  The thought was entirely unfamiliar, and she slowly ran her hands over her wet hair.

  34

  The technique of freezing her out was carefully planned, thoroughly implemented, and obviously universally accepted. In any case, no one batted an eyelid when she turned up after the meeting had started and sat at the end of the massive conference table with three empty chairs separating her from her neighbor. Hanne Wilhelmsen tried to restrain a discouraged sigh. For the first time it struck her that she did not deserve this treatment, regardless of what she might have done.

  It was tedious to arrive late at this major run-through of the Ziegler case, but waking with Hairy Mary in her apartment had been like suddenly having a baby in the house. The woman had eaten more than her fill of lamb stew at half past seven that morning. There was nothing apart from canned food in the house, and Hanne had woken to the sound of Hairy Mary spewing her guts, her head down the toilet pan.

  “My God, that was good,” Hairy Mary said, wiping her slaver with the sleeve of a pair of pajamas that had belonged to Cecilie.

  Hanne had to spend an extra half-hour going over the ground rules: no drugs, no stealing. No rummaging through closets and drawers, except in the kitchen. Eat whatever you want that you can find, but have a care for your stomach. When Hanne stepped out of the shower, Hairy Mary had a broad, triumphant grin on her face.

  “Lovely sweater, isn’t it?”

  The garment reached to her knees, making her head stick up like the neck of a chicken from an enormous egg; it had been a gift from Cecilie for Hanne’s thirtieth birthday.

  “The character of the laceration in the chest indicates that the stab wound was inflicted from slightly below.”

  Hanne struggled to concentrate on Severin Heger’s report. She would have to scoot home at lunch break and check on how things were going.

  “Which means one of two things,” Severin went on: he was standing beside a flip chart, waving a marker pen in the air. “The perpetrator may have been shorter than Brede Ziegler, who was five foot ten, or else …”

  He drew a staircase, and placed a stick-man on the second step.

  “… Ziegler may have been standing on the stairs, and the perpetrator here, down below.”

  Yet another stick-man was marked on the paper, equipped with a knife, its size and shape more like a sword.

  “As far as footprints are concerned, those were substantially degraded as a result of the mild weather that set in on the night of the murder. Admittedly, this staircase is pretty pointless—”

  “What is it actually used for?” Silje Sørensen interrupted. “Honestly, I must admit that I never even knew about it. It seems odd that we have some sort of back stairway into the building that’s never been used.”

  “… but it’s obviously regularly frequented,” Severin completed his sentence, without answering her.

  Silje used her mouth to hide her diamond ring as she looked down at the floor.

  “There’s a brick wall just here,” he continued, drawing a bird’s-eye view of the flight of steps. “Of course, that functions as some kind of shelter if the wind is blowing from this direction …”

  He outlined an arrow coming from Åkebergveien.

  “… which happens only seldom. But the place was covered in footprints of all shapes and sizes. The two trainees who ran round to check the tip-off about a dead man on the stairs, for instance, left their own clear marks on the site. To put it that way.”

  He fell silent and stared vacantly ahead, as if considering how useful it would be to repeat the tongue-lashing he had given the two trainee officers. He took a deep breath and shook his head.

  “There were a few clumps of snow here and there, and they have given us some help, at least. To sum it all up …”

  Once again he began to sketch, this time the soles of shoes. Three of them were placed side by side on the sheet of paper. He wrote the number forty-four on the first, thirty-eight on the next, and forty-two on the last, before using the marker pen to point to the largest one.

  “This imprint is Ziegler’s own. These two …”

  He slammed the palm of his hand on the flip chart and turned to face the others in the room.

  “… are probably the freshest footprints in the area. A lady’s shoe size thirty-eight and a boot in size forty-two that was presumably worn by a man.”

  “A small man,” Billy T. muttered.

  “Or a teenager. Not a full-grown man.”

  “Or a woman with big feet.”

  Silje made another attempt, and her eyes leapt audaciously from Billy T. to Severin Heger.

  “Or a girl in borrowed footwear,” Klaus Veierød said grouchily. “Who are the people who hang about in that park of ours? Hookers and other riff-raff. They don’t exactly pay much attention to what’s going on.”

  “The depth of the footprints suggests a body weight of around seventy kilos for the woman’s shoes, considerably less in the bigger boots. Luckily, we had Brede Ziegler’s prints for comparison purposes.”

  “A well-rounded, plump lady,” Billy T. concluded. “And a light, bantam-weight man. What a pair.”

  “Two perpetrators? Are we now talking about two murderers all of a sudden?”

  Silje Sørensen tucked her hair behind her ear.

  “Don’t you hear what I’m saying?”

  Severin took a seat and drummed his fingers on the table.

  “The crime scene was a fucking mess. Loads of footprints. Loads of shit. If these prints are relevant at all, we don’t really have any idea. But out of all the muddle I’ve got from the technicians, this seems the closest we can come to footprints that were left on the night of Sunday December the fifth. It could be right. It could just as easily be wrong.”

  “Have the witnesses been asked their shoe size?”

  Hanne Wilhelmsen’s question was self-assured, though not addressed to anyone in particular. No one answered. No one looked in her direction. In the end Karianne Holbeck shook her head slowly, blushing to the roots of her hair. Billy T. raised his hand as a sign that Severin Heger should continue.

  “The really astounding information in this case is something we learned fairly early in the proceedings,” he said. “Two attempts were made on Brede Ziegler’s life. The one
– the stabbing – killed him. The other – the poisoning – he would probably have died of anyway.”

  He got to his feet again, this time to take an empty Paracet packet from his back pocket. He unfolded it and held it up to the others.

  “This item here is left lying in most Norwegian homes. But have you ever tried to buy two packs at the pharmacist’s? It’s not possible. You’ll get only one. It is in fact a poison, folks. As you see …”

  His index finger smacked against the black lettering on the orange background.

  “Five hundred milligrams. That’s the dose of paracetamol in every pill. As for myself, I usually take two at a time. That’s one gram, isn’t it?”

  Everyone around the table nodded in attentive silence; this was a sum they could follow.

  “Very few of us read these warnings on the medicines we use. Permit me to entertain you: ‘The recommended dose must not be exceeded without consulting a doctor. High doses or prolonged use can cause serious liver damage.’ You can certainly say that again! If you consume this whole packet – that is to say, twenty tablets – you can die! That would amount to ten grams of paracetamol. If you’ve gone to another pharmacy and got hold of another pack, you can definitely say goodbye to your family. If you mix all of it with large quantities of alcohol or other stimulants, you need less. Then this one packet would be more than enough.”

  From time to time Hanne had used one packet of Paracet in a week. Unconsciously she touched her liver.

  “If you don’t receive treatment fairly quickly after ingesting large doses of this poison, it’ll be too late. Then you’ll die, no matter what. Brede Ziegler was stuffed full of paracetamol, and what’s more his blood alcohol count was 0.3 when he died. That could mean he’d consumed one glass of wine earlier that evening.”

  “What does the postmortem indicate?” Hanne Wilhelmsen asked.

  Severin did not answer but glanced across at Billy T.