No Echo Read online

  26

  Five people swarmed in the kitchen, their movements brisk and efficient. All the same, it was surprisingly quiet in the room, with only the occasional clunk of metal against metal disturbing the faint susurration of the colossal extractor hood above the gas cooker. Billy T. had been in the Navy. He had served in the Coastguards aboard a fisheries protection vessel in the Norwegian Sea. Entré’s kitchen reminded him of a ship’s galley. Slightly larger of course, but nevertheless cramped, with a preponderance of stainless steel.

  “Today’s lunch,” one of the chefs said cheerfully, flipping a steaming dish out of the oven. “Arctic char. We’ll lay them on a bed of scrambled eggs cooked in a bain-marie with finely chopped truffles.”

  He pointed at an apprentice who stood lost in concentration, whisking something in a massive stainless-steel bowl. Billy T. leaned slightly over its rim and sniffed.

  “Smells good already,” he said. “Aren’t truffles absurdly expensive?”

  “Here,” said the chef, using a knife to point at a little clump on a chopping board. “That lot there cost one hundred and sixty kroner. But it goes a long way, in return.”

  Billy T. had decided to regrow the moustache that Tone-Marit had implored him to get rid of six months earlier. Scratching the stubble, he wondered whether he should perhaps change his mind.

  “Looks like hash. The same price too. But where’s Claudio?”

  The chef shrugged indifferently.

  “Is he here or isn’t he?”

  No one answered. No one seemed abashed at not saying anything. Each and every one of the five kitchen workers knew what they had to do, and they continued chopping, stirring, rinsing, and frying without so much as a glance in Billy T.’s direction. He grabbed the Arctic char-man by the arm, unnecessarily hard.

  “Do you mean for me to stand here all day and watch you cooking lunch, or do you think your boss might have the courtesy to show up? Would you be kind enough to inform this Gagli-guy, wherever he might be, that it would please the police for him to show up now!”

  He regretted his display of temper before it was over. The chef had been friendly enough, and of course he was not responsible for Claudio Gagliostro having already failed to turn up for two interview appointments. Billy T. needed to look sharp. There had been complaints. The Chief of Police had called in to his office the previous evening and made a polite request for the Chief Inspector to behave like a reasonable human being. Not in any way a warning. Just some friendly advice.

  Maybe his outburst had worked, all the same. A man who could not have been more than five foot four suddenly appeared in the doorway, wearing dogtooth-check trousers under a voluminous white apron. His face seemed heavy and puffy, in stark contrast to his slight, narrow-shouldered body. His eyes looked almost as if they lacked lashes, and greasy wisps of his black hair were plastered to his forehead. It dawned on Billy T. that he had seen the guy before, the Monday after Brede Ziegler was killed, when he had bumped into Suzanne on the way out of Entré. It must have been the shock of meeting her that had caused him not to pay much attention to the peculiar figure.

  “It’s me you’re looking for,” the man said. “Come with me.”

  Billy T. forgot all his good intentions.

  “Shouldn’t you have come to see me at—”

  “Shh,” the man responded. “Not here. Come to my office.”

  Despite Claudio Gagliostro reaching no higher than Billy T.’s chest, the police officer allowed himself to be led by the arm like a child. He stared in fascination at Gagliostro’s head. Something must have been wrong. Hydrocephalus, perhaps. In any case, the proportions were totally insane.

  His office turned out to be a spacious square work table in the wine cellar, pushed against the wall with a high-backed chair behind it. An architect’s desk lamp shed light on four thick bundles of papers, a telephone, and a glorious jumble of yellow notes and envelopes.

  “Fucking cold here,” Billy T. said tetchily.

  “Eleven degrees Celsius. Eleven and a half, in fact.”

  At last Gagliostro looked more at ease. The lank wisps of hair began to release their grip on his forehead. Wiping his brow with a snow-white pocket handkerchief, he sat down on the office chair and gave a strained smile.

  “I’m sorry that …”

  Billy T. looked around for another seat. There was none. Instead he tipped a crate of apple juice sideways and sat down on it, staring down between his legs.

  “Do you sell this kind of thing?”

  “What is it you want?”

  Billy T. let his eyes make a detailed examination of the cellar walls. There must be several thousand bottles down here. Half the room was divided into shelf units running lengthwise like an old-fashioned archive, and the other half had racks from floor to ceiling. It was gloomy. He was freezing.

  “I’ve called you in for interview twice already,” he said, taking a deep breath. “And still you’re wondering what I want from you. Okay then. Do you open your mail?”

  He smashed his fist down on a pile of unopened envelopes.

  “Anyway, I don’t give a shit what you do with your letters. But when Oslo Police District is stamped on one of them, then you open it! You should have reported to me three hours ago!”

  Gagliostro’s white apron had acquired a green stain without Billy T. having any idea where it had come from. The man spat on his finger and rubbed the fabric. The stain grew larger and paler.

  “I quite simply don’t have the time,” he muttered. “Don’t you understand that? I’m doing the work of two people!”

  “And I’m working for the police.”

  Billy T. stood up slowly. He took two steps over to the wine racks and let his index finger dance across the bottle necks.

  “What you’re really saying,” he said dully, “is that it’s more important to serve fish with truffles to those snobbish customers of yours than it is to clear up the homicide of your partner. Sweet Jesus, the Lord preserve us all.”

  He rubbed his face with both hands and sniffed loudly. Then he suddenly shook his head and squeezed out a smile.

  “It looks as if you all don’t give a shit who killed Brede Ziegler. But I have to give a shit. Do you understand that? Eh?”

  He grabbed a bottle from the wall rack at random and pointed at Gagliostro with the spout.

  “Most of all I’m inclined to call a Black Maria and have you driven off to police headquarters at Grønlandsleiret 44 without delay. But since you aren’t obliged by law to give a statement, I’ll skip that. I’m asking you nicely, one more time. Will you answer my questions, or do you want me to go to court and have you dragged in for formal interview? Then you’d be able to try and get the judge to appreciate that you don’t have time! Then you can do the Canossa Walk over to the courthouse, surrounded by press photographers and hungry journalists. Your choice.”

  Gagliostro stared frantically at the wine bottle.

  “Put it back,” he whispered. “Please. Put it back.”

  “Well then?”

  Billy T. raised the bottle to eye-level and squinted at the label in the gloom.

  “A wee favorite, this one? Ooops …”

  He let go of the bottle with his right hand and caught it again with his left.

  “That was nearly a little accident, you know.”

  “Is this an interview?”

  Gagliostro was obviously starting to perspire again. The beads of sweat covered his forehead and Billy T. began to wonder if he was seriously ill.

  “Listen here,” he said in a conciliatory tone. “Let’s just do a short interview here and now …”

  He produced a Dictaphone from his pocket and held it out to Gagliostro.

  “Then you can give me a specific time in the course of the next twenty-four hours when you do actually have the opportunity to come down to police headquarters. Six o’clock tomorrow would suit me. Okay?”

  Gagliostro fiddled with the stain on his apron, now the same si
ze as an old banknote. It was only just possible to construe his head movement as a nod. Billy T. switched on the Dictaphone and got the learned-by-heart, rattled-off formalities out of the way. He said nothing about the interview being conducted in a wine cellar in Grünerløkka.

  An hour and a half later Billy T.’s teeth were chattering. The temperature of the room was the only thing that prevented him from exploding yet again. The man on the opposite side of the vast table toyed with everything within his reach: the stain on his apron, a pen that leaked and colored his fingers blue, a glass elephant he had taken out of a drawer, and a silver penknife with red stones on the handle. The answers he gave were mostly brief, never comprehensive. Billy T. felt completely worn out when he made an effort to summarize.

  “So you met Brede eleven years ago in Milan. Then you moved to Norway. By the way, your Norwegian’s good. Yes, absolutely fluent.”

  “What?”

  “You speak g-o-o-d N-o-r-w-e-g-i-a-n.”

  “Oh. One of my grandmothers was Norwegian. I used to come here for summer holidays when I was little.”

  “Brede worked at the restaurant …”

  He waved his right hand to get the recalcitrant witness to help him.

  “Santini.”

  “Santini, yes. In Milan. Then you became friends and you moved to Norway shortly afterwards. After having sold a place in Verona, is that right?”

  “Mhmn.”

  The elephant’s trunk snapped. Gagliostro looked perplexed as he sat holding the broken surfaces together, as if he expected the glass fragments to regrow, if only he was patient enough.

  “Then you took your money and came to Norway to earn more. Together with Brede.”

  “Yes.”

  “But it took quite a long time, didn’t it? Until you opened this place here, I mean. And in the meantime it looked as if you might have changed your mind. Because you and Brede entered into a project in Italy seven or eight years ago, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t you just put down that animal!”

  Nonplussed, Gagliostro put the elephant on the table with the trunk between its legs. Billy T. used one hand to rub the small of his back as he switched off the Dictaphone with the other.

  “We’ll swap places,” he said, getting to his feet.

  “What?”

  “Swap places, I said. My back will break soon. Come on, then. You sit on the packing case. Give me the chair.”

  Gagliostro made no protest worth mentioning about relinquishing his comfortable seat. Instead of sitting on the crate of apple juice, he plonked himself down on a folding chair built into the wall, impossible to spot if you didn’t know it was there. Billy T. closed his eyes. He leaned back in the chair for some time. The only sound to be heard was a distant clatter of saucepans and sudden shrill female laughter on the floor above.

  “Sindre Sand,” Billy T. said, without switching on the Dictaphone again. “Do you know him?”

  “Yes.”

  “How well?”

  “Slightly.”

  “Slightly well or you know him slightly?”

  Gagliostro did not reply. He tugged at his earlobe and opened his mouth briefly, before shutting it again with a little snap. He stared at the floor.

  Billy T. had hardly slept for the past four nights. Hanne Wilhelmsen’s return had shaken him more than he thought possible. He had been lost in his own thoughts, still with no idea what sudden impulse had made him look up at the gallery on the sixth floor. When he saw her leaning over the banister and recognized her gaze, too far distant for him to know what it held, but fierce enough to feel the old intimacy he had spent the past six months trying to forget, he was on the point of collapse. He felt sick; really, genuinely sick. The nausea did not let up until he had vomited into the wastepaper basket in his office, behind a locked door. Since then he had made an effort to resist the thought of her. Of her smell, her fragrance, her bad habit of rubbing her right temple when she was pondering something, with one eye half-closed; he did not want to remember her hands, her thumbs that massaged between his shoulder-blades when she stood behind him in the canteen and kissed him on the head as she teased him because he groaned; he refused to hear the click-clack of her boots, always boots, on the indestructible linoleum floor in Grønlandsleiret 44; he heard the tapping of Hanne’s heels on the floor, and he hated her.

  He loved her, and had honestly never realized that before now.

  “Do you know Sindre Sand well, fairly well, not well, or not at all? A, B, C, or D. Tick the box.”

  He did not have the energy to open his eyes, and knew he was losing his grip. He was sitting in a cold cellar struggling to drag the truth out of a reluctant witness who might well be the killer. He was taking no notes. He could not even bring himself to lift his arm to switch on the Dictaphone. This was not where he wanted to be. He wanted to go home.

  “Sleep,” he said slowly.

  “Sort of fairly well,” Gagliostro answered. “It was Brede who really knew him. He’s smart. Steadily growing reputation. He’s at Stiansen’s now and is doing well there.”

  “The money, then. Do you know anything about that?”

  Billy T.’s voice was almost inaudible.

  “You mean the money that was to be invested in Italy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was also party to that deal. I didn’t have so very much to contribute, just a couple of million kroner. It’s still unclear to me how much Brede put in, but Sindre … Of course he was just a young lad at that time. He threw four or five million into the pot. Something like that.”

  “Ten,” Billy T. thought to himself, but said instead: “What happened?”

  “Bad trip. It all went wrong, to put it bluntly. The money disappeared down the drain. Mine too. Brede came out of it pretty unscathed, I think. At least he wasn’t dead-broke afterwards, like the rest of us. I had to start all over again. That’s why it took a long time to get as far as Entré.”

  Billy T. opened his eyes. Claudio Gagliostro put his thumb in the air and smiled for the first time. His teeth were remarkably white and even in his hideous face.

  “Why are you so talkative all of a sudden?” Billy T. said, struggling to raise his hand.

  It was impossible. A violent attack of anxiety engulfed him. From far away he could hear Gagliostro respond: “You’re not terrifying me so much any more. You can appear dangerous. Are you aware of that?”

  “Do you think I could have a glass of water?” Billy T. managed to force out. “A glass of water, please.”

  He was not thirsty. He wanted to be alone. He thought he was going to die.

  He concentrated on breathing. Relaxing.

  “Breathe,” he said, taking a big mouthful of air. “Breathe!”

  Out with the air.

  In again.

  The blood rushed to his head. He was not going to die. He managed to open his eyes wide and raise his hand. When Gagliostro returned with a glass of water – Billy T. heard the clinking of ice cubes all the way from the top of the cellar steps – he was able to take it and drink it down without spilling a drop.

  “Are you feeling unwell?”

  “Just a bit tired. We must finish. Why did you bring Sindre Sand here, then? As some kind of compensation for all the money he lost?”

  “I suggested it to Brede. He didn’t want to. He was probably a bit uncomfortable about that business with Vilde. It didn’t really seem like that, but maybe … Not quite sure.”

  The anxiety lessened slightly more. Billy T. wanted to stand up, but did not dare to.

  “Will you keep Ziegler’s shares now, or will you bring in another owner?”

  “Keep … Well, that’s exactly what’s the problem! It turns out that it’s Vilde who’ll probably inherit the shares. Didn’t you know that?”

  Billy T. wrinkled his nose and drank some more water.

  “Know what?”

  “Brede and I had an agreement that was crystal-clear. Not because we
thought either of us was going to die, but I mean … Plane crashes and car accidents, and that sort of thing … It happens, you know. We wanted to safeguard ourselves. Brede and I have always worked well together and the division of tasks here at Entré has always gone smoothly, but now this young girl comes along who hasn’t a clue about anything at all, least of all running a restaurant, and will …”

  Now it was Gagliostro who was in difficulties. He clutched his chest.

  “When did you find this out?”

  “Yesterday. No, last week, in actual fact. A lawyer phoned and created a huge commotion and I don’t bloody know—”

  “But when Brede was murdered, you were convinced you would inherit everything.”

  “Not everything! The restaurant. Brede owns a whole load more, and Vilde would of course have all the rest, but—”

  A young man came thundering down the stairs; his chef’s hat fell off as he reached the cellar floor.

  “You have to come now, Claudio! The menu’s wrong, and Karoline says it was you who said—”

  “He’ll come shortly,” Billy T. said, waving the boy away. “Give us five more minutes.”

  “Okay by me,” the boy mumbled, brushing dust off his cap as he headed back up the stairs. “I’m not the one who’s responsible.”

  “I must just get one thing clear before we go,” Billy T. said softly, leaning across the table. “On the evening of Sunday December the fifth, when Brede was murdered … At that time you thought you would take over the restaurant, if Brede were to die.”

  “But—”

  “Yes or no.”

  “Yes. But—”

  “And where were you? On the evening of Sunday December the fifth?”

  “Sunday evening. I was … Let me think.”

  “Garbage!” Billy T. said calmly, trying to breathe more deeply. “Don’t tell me that you have to think about where you were on the night your best friend and business partner was murdered. I still remember where I was when Olof Palme was shot. That’s almost fifteen fucking years ago, and I didn’t even know the guy!”