No Echo

by Anne Holt

  He stood up to his full height.

  His first thought, that everything was now a waste of time, disappeared just as fast as it had struck him. This was the proof he needed. At least for himself. Claudio always put the keys right here. The fact that they were now gone could only mean that Sebastian was right. Claudio had panicked. He had looked terror-stricken the day that big guy from the police had paid a visit, and had not recovered his composure until much later that night.

  Sebastian wanted to go home. He would try in the morning. He would pay more attention to what happened to the keys. It might be difficult, since he was in the kitchen all evening, but he would dawdle after closing time and be the last to leave. Together with Claudio, perhaps.

  He switched the alarm on again, and closed the back door behind him.

  The headlights that suddenly pierced the darkness, dazzling him, made him press himself back, quick as a flash, into the little recess in the entrance where the door was inset. The entranceway was narrow, and fortunately the vehicle had to reverse out again into the street to get space. The driver could not have seen him.

  Sebastian stood silent, with his mouth against the dirty timber. He did not even dare to breathe before the engine stopped, the car door slammed, and the light footsteps disappeared. Slowly, expelling the breath from his lungs, he relaxed.

  When he peeked out from the recess, he recognized Claudio’s car in the back yard. A Volvo estate. The rear doors were open. Sebastian jogged over to the garbage bins: five enormous, stinking plastic containers. He did not need to wait long.

  The short figure with the large head emerged through the open cellar trapdoor, carrying a case and moving slowly. When he let the case slide carefully into place in the trunk of the car, Sebastian could barely hear a sound. Only a faint clink, like full bottles hitting against one another.

  Five cases were carried out of Entré’s wine cellar. Sebastian was too far away to see if there was anything written on the wood.

  Claudio put the trapdoor back into place and locked it with a hefty padlock. He slammed shut the vehicle’s rear doors and drove out slowly through the entrance. Not until Claudio had stepped from the car and closed the actual gate did Sebastian dare to quit his hiding place. His clothes stank. He had just seen Claudio steal five cases of wine from himself. He understood none of it.

  37

  Silje Sørensen was nursing a secret. Although she should share it with Tom, she hesitated. When she came home yesterday evening, she had not felt like eating the food he had prepared. He had waited so long with dinner that a skin had formed on the casserole. It made her feel sick, and she pushed the plate away with an apology and a protracted yawn. Tom was worried. He had been worried for some time. As a stockbroker in an asset-management company, he had long work days too, and was aware that Silje had been given a fantastic opportunity by participating in a homicide investigation so early in her career. But she had lost weight. The dark circles under her eyes had become more obvious in the past few weeks. What’s more, she was always feeling sick: he had heard her throwing up in the mornings, behind a locked bathroom door. He could not understand why it was necessary to work for twelve hours every day, especially when her remuneration consisted of peanuts and churlish media reports. As if money had ever been a problem, she had said – and left the table.

  They had not quarreled. It had merely been a serious discussion. She should have told him about it then, although she knew he would put his foot down. They had tried for a baby for eighteen months. Silje knew that was not really a long time. Tom was more impatient. If she told him she was about eight weeks gone, he would wrap her in so much cloying solicitude that she would hardly be allowed to continue her job. It would have to wait.

  Anyway, she had slept well last night. The atmosphere between them had not been improved by yesterday evening’s unfortunate meal, but he had at least put on a smile when she told him she was having a long lie-in. It was Friday December 17 and she did not have to report for work until noon. The overtime budget had been breached as early as July, and as the turn of the year approached, they were all instructed to take as much time off in lieu as possible.

  “Good morning!”

  Silje glanced at the alarm clock. Ten past ten. She struggled up out of the quilts and placed a pillow at her back.

  “How lovely,” she sighed over the tray he laid in front of her.

  Tea, juice, milk. Two halves of ciabatta with Gorgonzola cheese and Italian salami. A cod-liver oil pill and two multivitamins rolled around on the tray. Tom had bought today’s newspapers and a red rose, with the leaves neatly picked off, inserted into a tall vase that threatened to capsize as he crept up on to the bed and kissed her on the forehead.

  “How lovely,” she repeated, and threw up.

  38

  Even though Dr. Felice had only just made a start on his work day, he felt exhausted. The influenza epidemic was raging and he had fallen behind with his paperwork. His shirt had sweat stains in the armpits. Two clean, freshly ironed garments were hanging in the closet. The first one he grabbed had lost a button, and he crossly pulled on the other one, breathing through his nose, feeling as if he could smell his own patients right through the door.

  He ought to phone that Billy T. The more he thought about it, the surer he felt that phoning would be the appropriate thing to do. When he had first gone through the records, after the police had rung, he had thought the information insignificant. He had not included it in the edited version of the papers he had handed over to the burly policeman. At the time the application had not led to anything, and it could hardly be thought to have any relevance to the murder inquiry. Besides, it had been years ago. Strictly speaking, he did not even know what it had all been about. All the same, he had a suspicion that it might be important.

  A father came in, holding a bewildered child by the hand. The five-year-old stopped just inside the threshold and started howling. Snot mixed with tears and candy slavers that ran from the corners of his mouth. The father swore. He coaxed and scolded, but nothing worked. The boy stood rooted to the spot, his legs straddled, screaming at the top of his lungs, and Øystein Felice was unable even to approach him.

  “We’re falling behind with the appointments,” Mrs. Hagtvedt said crankily, shaking her head as she passed the stubborn youngster. “Fathers …”

  Øystein Felice took a toy fire engine from the closet, gave the child a strained smile, and prepared himself for yet another ten-hour work day.

  39

  He fed her with a spoon. The oatmeal porridge tasted of suffocating childhood, and she twisted away after only three spoonfuls.

  “You must eat something,” Tom said firmly. “A bit more.”

  She refused and stood up abruptly.

  “This was exactly what I feared,” she said, sounding discouraged. “You’re going to wrap me in cotton wool for the next seven months. I’m an adult, Tom. I’m pregnant, not ill. You really must give over!”

  He was half-sitting, half-lying on the bed, with a bowl of oatmeal porridge in one hand and a spoon in the other. He had taken off his tie and rolled up his shirt sleeves. His face shone, his cheeks were flushed, and the grin that spread across his face might imply that the baby had already been born just a couple of minutes earlier. It was astonishing enough in itself that he had postponed going to work until she was awake. That he had just phoned the office and taken the whole day off was revolutionary. Tom was never unwell; never absent from work, apart from three weeks every summer and a couple of days at Christmas.

  “Do you know whether it’s a boy or a girl?” he asked, laughing. “It’s all the same to me, but do you know?”

  “Nitwit,” Silje said, peeved. “I’m only seven or eight weeks gone.”

  When she returned from the shower, with dripping hair, wearing a silk dressing gown, he had changed the bedclothes and aired the room thoroughly. The single rose was lying neatly on her pillow. She crossed to the French doors and tied her belt. On
e door was still gaping, and she opened it wide. Goosebumps appeared on her skin and, without knowing why, she began to cry. In the distance, down the slope, behind the massive oak tree that leaned to the east and brushed the garage roof with its branches, she could hear Oslo. She had never regarded the house in Dr. Holms vei as part of the city. When she had been given the property by her father as a present for her twentieth birthday, she had felt shame more than anything. She’d had a long time to grow accustomed to the idea; that was the way it had always been. She was an only child, and would take over her grandparents’ gigantic villa. Her father had renovated the house before she moved in. He himself lived in a detached house farther down; the family owned a couple of magnificent hectares in that location and had never contemplated selling.

  When she had attended police college, she had never brought anyone home. She muttered about her address and complained that it was so far away. She did not want anyone to discover that her bedroom was approximately double the size of the bedsits belonging to her student friends. And that she had five of them.

  Fortunately her name, Sørensen, was quite common. It was not so obvious that her father owned the Soerensen Cruise Line. It would have been much worse to be called Kloster or Reksten. Or Wilhelmsen, for that matter. Silje dried her tears, thought of Hanne, and decided to get dressed and go to work.

  When she and Tom had married, she had kept the name Sørensen. Tom’s full identity was Thomas Fredrik Preben Løvenskiold. Although his father had originally come from Denmark and had nothing to do with the landowning family in Oslo, the name was linked to an image that Silje wanted nothing to do with.

  “What about Catharina Løvenskiold?” Tom asked. He had come in with freshly brewed tea and had two newspapers tucked under his arm; only the copy of Aftenposten had landed in the trash, after having cushioned the worst of the vomit. “Sit up in bed, sweetheart. My father’s mother was called Catharina. Or Flemming, what do you think of that? If it’s a boy, I mean. Flemming Løvenskiold. There’s a certain panache about that, don’t you think, darling? Or what? Sit down now.”

  “I was thinking more in the direction of Ola Sørensen,” Silje said grumpily.

  He stiffened momentarily, before his face broke into a huge smile that made his eyes disappear above his unusually high cheekbones.

  “We’ll talk about that later, my dear. Here! Newspapers and tea. The papers might smell a bit of puke, but the tea’s fresh and delicious.”

  Silje reluctantly stretched out on the bed and picked up the VG newspaper. Tom just managed to save the rose from being crushed. He closed the French doors and went over to a panel on the wall beside the bathroom. A gas fire in the soapstone-and-brass fireplace blazed and he dimmed the ceiling light before switching on her bedside lamp.

  “Real Christmas atmosphere,” he said cheerfully, lying down beside her and opening the copy of Dagbladet.

  The nausea had gone. In fact, it was not really troublesome. Only in the mornings, and in the evening if she had slept badly the night before. Maybe she was mistaken. Tom was exasperatingly solicitous but, all the same, it would be a relief not to have to dissemble. Besides, he was unbelievably sweet. His enthusiasm about the expected baby was even greater than the exhilaration he had exhibited when he had proposed to her two years ago, with a diamond ring and a bouquet of fifty roses and two plane tickets to Rome in his inside pocket.

  “Listen to this,” she giggled. “I just love these readers’ letters.”

  “Love? You’ve got a real hang-up! What about Johannes?” He nibbled his index finger as he shut his eyes. “Or Christopher? I was really fond of Winnie-the-Pooh when I was little.”

  “Listen to this, won’t you!”

  She sat up straight and read aloud from the “Say it with VG” column.

  “The heading is ‘Mother Monsen’s Cake and the Mormons’. Fantastic! Listen”:

  Our country is inundated with foreign customs. In a generation or two there will be nobody who knows what it means to be Norwegian. We must fight back and preserve what our forefathers spent thousands of years building up.

  “No,” Tom groaned. “Not one of those. Please!” He tried to put his arm around her stomach but she brushed him off and continued:

  During the war we wore paperclips as a mark of resistance. Let us now pin a white feather to our lapels, a white feather that symbolizes what is pure, what is Norwegian, what is uninfected.

  “That is sheer racism, Silje. It’s not the least bit funny.”

  “The funny part comes next, just wait.”

  Take food, for example. Food is an important aspect of every culture and way of life. Now kebabs and hamburgers lie in wait on every street corner. The enemy has besieged us! During this precious Christmas season, the aroma of pickled cabbage and Christmas baking should emanate from homes and kitchens. I myself live in Majorstuen, and here one morning, when I was baking my traditional Mother Monsen’s Cake, the doorbell rang. Two Mormons wanted to “save” me. They couldn’t even speak Norwegian! Like any polite person, I offered my uninvited guests some freshly baked cake. When they asked whether there was alcohol in the cake, I realized that the culture battle must be conducted on every front. Are we to have polygamy and temperance fanatics in Norwegian housing cooperatives? The recipe for Mother Monsen’s Cake specifies two tablespoons of cognac, as well as sixteen good, NORWEGIAN eggs!

  Join me! Wear the white feather!

  Silje laughed and slapped the newspaper on her thigh.

  “Someone should write a book!”

  “That’s already been done.”

  Tom attempted to pull the quilt over her. She shoved him away yet again and squinted at the reader’s comment.

  “‘Iron Fist.’ She … This was obviously written by a woman, and yet she calls herself iron fist. What did you mean when you said it’s already been done?”

  “There is a book like that with horrendous reader contributions. It came out not so many years ago.”

  “Then it ought to be done again,” Silje said decidedly. “What does iron fist really mean?”

  Discouraged, Tom turned over on his back and puffed out his cheeks.

  “Can’t we talk about the baby?” he complained. “It’s three-quarters of an hour since you told me I’m going to be a dad, and then you want to amuse yourself with readers’ letters from God-awful racists.”

  Silje sprang up, leaving Tom buried in quilts.

  “Iron Fist! I knew I’d seen that expression recently!”

  Five minutes later she was dressed. She felt wide-awake, fresh, and in good shape. Tom was still lying in bed, sulky and sullen.

  “I won’t be late today. Promise. But right now I absolutely must go to work.”

  She kissed him on the nose, and a couple of minutes later he heard the car start. Why she insisted on driving a Skoda Octavia was something he had never understood. As for himself, he had two cars: an Audi A8 and a neat two-seater BMW.

  “I’m going to be a daddy,” he said slowly. “I need an estate car.”

  Then he laughed: happy, prolonged, joyous laughter.

  40

  Thanks to his mother, Billy T. had managed to get up in time to drop Truls off at school. Afterwards, he had bought Christmas presents. There were still eight days left before Christmas, and the thought of all the stress of gifts being out of the way made him a touch more light-hearted. All the boys got the same thing. Toolboxes in different colors, filled with hammers and fretsaws, folding rulers, screws, nails, and screwdrivers. They would be occupied until late on Boxing Day. Tone-Marit would have to be content with a bottle of perfume, and for Jenny he had quite simply bought a new baby-seat for the car. He had 3,300 kroner left in his bank account. That would have to last until the new millennium. It would never stretch.

  He turned off the road and into the driveway leading to the apartment block where Hanne Wilhelmsen lived. The last time he had been here, no one had opened the door. The apartment had been empty, and the neighbors had
not seen Hanne for a fortnight. Since she had not even come to Cecilie’s funeral, the others had advised him to leave her be. Give up, Tone-Marit said; you can’t get hold of her. Give up. He could not do it. Not until he had been there one last time and had confirmation of her disappearing act. The HR office had received a letter; he discovered that two days later. He had considered posting her missing, but the letter had finally persuaded him to follow Tone-Marit’s advice. They had postponed their wedding until August, both out of respect for Cecilie and because Billy T. had never heard from Hanne. She was to have been his best woman.

  It had started to snow again, gigantic wet flakes that melted as they reached the ground. In the past few days the weather had alternated between cold and mild. Now the temperature was around zero Celsius and the heating was not working. It couldn’t be turned off, either. Unpleasant chill air blasted from the ventilation system. He stopped the car and sat peering up at the window on the third floor.

  He would never manage to let her go. Not as long as she was in Norway, in Oslo. In the police force. The time she had been gone had been a relief, in a way. In the beginning, the first couple of months after she had vanished, she had been omnipresent. Everything he said and did, every discussion and every decision, had been filtered through his idea of what Hanne would have done and said. They talked together, long conversations, usually in an undertone when he believed himself alone. Eventually he had reached a stage where he did not think about her so much. At least not continually, and he no longer talked to himself. He still carried a nameless loss, but she stopped haunting his dreams. All the same, she was still there.

  Like someone dead, he had thought. It was possible to live with the thought that Hanne was dead. In fact it was best like that, and he no longer dreamed of her. Then she simply turned up again. The pain of knowing that Hanne was back was greater and more unwieldy than the anguish that had paralyzed him when she disappeared.