Death in a Cold Climate

by Robert Barnard

  Tonight the crop of English speakers was not very promising. Coming with his beer and hamburger over to the dark, wood-walled corner, with cushioned benches round the wall and two or three tables, he found only four people, and these included two young Americans deep in the sort of conversation only young Americans can ever get into.

  ‘I have this problem relating to people,’ said the girl–shabbily dressed as if by conviction, with a thin, peaky, worried face and hair all anyhow–desperately earnest and (Bjørn suspected) hideously boring. She paused to throw a ‘Hi!’ in his direction, as if marking him down for future use, and then went back to her subject, speaking low and devoutly, as if at confession. ‘I do think the socialization aspect is vital, don’t you, Steve?’

  ‘Right,’ said Steve, without conviction. He was a boy in his early twenties, beanpole-thin, and gazing dejectedly down the expanse of dirty tee-shirt covering his upper half.

  ‘I just flunk out, somehow. I just never make the grade. I mean–well, how do I affect you? What sort of person do I strike you as, frankly, Steve?’

  ‘Sort of average.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you see. It’s always like that. I don’t reciprocate easily. I have such a restricted social set-up. I try to get in contact with people, and I just bomb . . . ’

  The possibilities for breast-beating on that topic seemed endless and infinitely dreary, and Bjørn, sinking down on to the bench by the girl, turned to his other neighbours.

  Helge Ottesen was a local businessman, with a men’s outfitters just off the main street. He was small, plump, balding, genial, hand-rubbing, and moderately trustworthy. His wife Gladys, acquired from Essex during the war, was matronly, jolly, and had a sort of English High-Street smartness about her, which showed she had kept contact with home. Bjørn knew the pair well. Helge had gone into local politics a few years ago, and now–in his fifties–was a leading light of the Tromsø Conservative Party, and constantly active to keep that light shining bright. Gladys revelled in the activity, and strove with all her jovial energy to play the part of Mary Ann to his Disraeli.

  ‘Nice to see you, Bjørn,’ said Helge, speaking in English, as was the custom of the place. ‘How are you keeping? What have you been doing with yourself?’ His bald head glistened reflections from the wall lamp, and his teeth flashed tradesman’s sincerity.

  ‘Well, actually, I’ve just been taking Christmas presents round to the family,’ said Bjørn Korvald. Helge Ottesen’s face collapsed in several directions. He was a man who liked situations where one could be jolly, optimistic and encouraging, and he shunned death, disease and financial collapse as things unsuited to his personal philosophy of life. Separation was one of those nastily ambiguous things that upset him most: did one commiserate, or did one dig roguishly in the ribs? Anyway, Sidsel Korvald’s father was a good customer of his. He tried to put his face into neutral.

  ‘It’s awful for the kiddies,’ said his wife comfortably. ‘But there, it might be worse if you stayed together, that’s what I always say. How’s the tourist trade?’

  Helge Ottesen brightened up immediately. His wife was a jewel like that, and always knew how to steer the conversation round from the emotional uncertainties that he hated to subjects where his own particular brand of bonhomie could operate.

  ‘Yes–how about it?’ he said. ‘I hear it’s likely to be a good year, eh?’

  ‘I expect so,’ said Bjørn. ‘Bookings are very good. Of course they always are. But the season seems to be lengthening. The boats are filling up from Easter on, and the bookings go on into late September. It makes up for the off-season.’

  ‘Yes, pity about the off-season,’ said Helge, consoling himself with a sip of whisky. ‘Nothing much came of the attempt to attract a Christmas trade, did it?’

  ‘You mean “Spend Christmas in the Land of the Midnight Sun”? No. It wasn’t really honest, and most people saw through it too easily.’

  ‘Pity, that. I’d have thought Americans might have gone for it.’

  ‘Once perhaps. That sort of trade’s no good.’

  Helge Ottesen looked uncertain again. ‘Anyway, as businessmen, we’ve got to admit that things aren’t all that bad. Lots more trade than there was ten years ago, and if the oil comes, things will get better and better.’

  ‘In one way, perhaps,’ said Bjørn dubiously.

  Helge Ottesen did not like doubt to be cast on the great god oil, and became almost polemical. ‘You mark my words,’ he said. ‘In spite of what people say, it’ll transform the whole of North Norway!’

  ‘That is precisely what people do say,’ said Bjørn. ‘That’s what they’re afraid of.’

  ‘That’s just the carpers, the professional troublemakers. They said the same about the university, but it’s done wonders for this town. The people there have money to spend.’ He looked at the scraggy American boy with the dirty sweat-shirt and the jeans genuinely rather than artificially aged. ‘Not that they always do spend it,’ he added sadly.

  The exploration of personality problems at the next table was still in full swing, and involuntarily they paused to listen.

  ‘Some people like they just walk into a room and pow! everyone smiles, they feel better, they really do. When I go in, they just kinda wilt. Know what I mean, Steve?’

  ‘Errgh.’

  ‘Somehow I’m just not self-actualized. I mean, what do people say about me? What kind of social reciprocation do you think I set up?’

  ‘You piss people off,’ said Steve. He looked up momentarily from his gloomy contemplation of his beer, as if he half hoped the girl would burst into tears and dash out into the night. But in fact there was an expression on her face of the deepest masochistic satisfaction.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Now I need to analyse those reactions, you see, and . . . ’

  Helge Ottesen had listened to this conversation as if he could not believe his ears. He shook his head, and looked uncertainly from Bjørn to his wife and back again. ‘I don’t think I understand young people any more,’ he whispered plaintively.

  ‘They’re not all like that,’ said his wife comfortably, sucking the lemon from her drink. ‘You meet lots of nice young people around.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said her husband, brightening. ‘You meet lots at the Club, and we’ve had some of them home, haven’t we, Gladys? That’s where the Club is so useful.’ Helge Ottesen was a vice-president of the Foreigners’ Club, and was used to defending it to his fellow townsmen who didn’t particularly like the influx from abroad or want them to feel at home in Tromsø. ‘We bring them together, and make sure they’re welcome. Then there’s this place, too.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said his wife. ‘There was that English boy came in here the other night–two or three nights ago. Quite by accident, and heard us talking English. He seemed a nice type.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said her husband, subsiding into contentment. ‘He was a pleasant chap, fitted in very nicely. I think he enjoyed himself. He didn’t say what he was doing here, but at least Tromsø gave him a great welcome.’

  He smiled happily into his glass at the thought of Tromsø’s great welcome.

  CHAPTER 3

  FIRST LIGHT

  On January 20 the sky over Tromsø was clear at midday, and the sun showed gloriously but briefly on the horizon and splashed orange gold over the fjord. All over town little ladies had coffee with each other in celebration, and men in shops and offices who had missed it because they forgot to look up from their desks nevertheless said that they had seen it, and how nice it was to have it back. Life, everybody felt, was returning.

  For the men on duty at the Tromsø police station it was a day like any other. The only ones who glimpsed the returning sun were those out in twos patrolling the streets–and that was very few, for the police in Norway prefer that crime should come to them, rather than that they should go out looking for it. Most of the men in the large square building down from the Cathedral laboured over paperwork in quadrupl
icate, lounged over coffee with their mates, or typed with their two index fingers lengthy and impressionistically-spelt reports. In the office near the main door where the general public was received Sergeant Ekland, square and dark, and Sergeant Hyland, square and dark, stood fingering their square, dark, droopy moustaches, modelled on a television policeman, and thinking what a fine pair of fellows they were.

  It was shortly after twelve-fifteen, as the sun disappeared in a final liquid flicker and Tromsø re-entered its familiar twilight state, that the office door opened and a little old man entered with an odd walk, half cocky and half defensive–the walk of a man who is trying to say he has nothing to fear from the police, and is saying it none too convincingly. He was not particularly clean and not at all well shaven–the whitish stubble bristling defiantly round his sunken mouth and his nicotine-stained teeth. He was half carrying and half dragging a large knapsack attached to a metal frame–a type of burden much used by Norwegian hikers and campers, who like to carry their life history round with them.

  ‘I can’t stop, I’m busy,’ he said, dragging his burden over to the centre of the office.

  ‘Nobody asked you to stop, grandad,’ said Sergeant Ekland, magnificently bored.

  ‘I’ve got middag to prepare,’ went on the old man, as if he hadn’t heard.

  ‘Crowded out with guests, are you, Mr Botilsrud?’ asked Sergeant Hyland, sardonically as he thought. Old Botilsrud was proprietor of the pensjonat up near the swimming pool, a rather dirty, musty affair that did well enough in summer when all the other hotels and boarding-houses were packed out. Botilsrud was suspected (and more) of selling bottles of spirits to his guests at laughably high prices without the licence that made that sort of robbery legal, and though the suspicion had never actually led to charges being brought against him, the two sergeants felt they could dispense with their usual thin veneer of respect.

  ‘I’ve got guests,’ said the old man defiantly. ‘Casual workers,’ he went on, his face falling. ‘Scum. Anyway, what I’ve come about’s this knapsack.’

  ‘So we see,’ said Sergeant Ekland. ‘What’s it all about? What’s in it? Empty bottles?’

  ‘There’s not much in it,’ said Botilsrud, once more cultivating deafness to insinuation. ‘I looked, just to check, but there was nothing worth–nothing much in it. It was left by this lad who stayed up there at my place. Just left it behind, he did.’

  ‘When was this, grandad?’

  ‘Matter of a month or so ago. Just before Christmas, it was. I’m not sure of the exact dates, because my books got in a bit of a muddle about then.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ said Sergeant Hyland. ‘Festive season and all.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Botilsrud, preparing to leave, ‘I thought I should bring it in, because he disappeared.’

  ‘Here, hold on, grandad–your guests will have to wait for their princely meal. You can’t just dump this here and go off. We have to get something down on paper. Now–what exactly do you mean, disappeared?’

  ‘Well,’ said Botilsrud impatiently, ‘as far as I recollect, he said he was staying three nights. Then after the second I saw nothing more of him, not sight nor sound. He took the room key, too, and I never had it back.’

  ‘Had he paid?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the old man, with a look of feeble cunning. ‘I made sure he paid in advance. I always do–have to, with some of the types you get coming to this town.’

  ‘OK, then, what was he like?’ said Sergeant Ekland, taking a pencil and paper, and only pausing to smooth lovingly his splendid black moustache with the back of his hand, as a prelude to composition.

  ‘Well, sort of ordinary, really. About your height or a bit taller, but not so bulky. Very slender, really, I’d describe him as. Then his hair: well, it was fair–yellow fair, you know what I mean? Not white fair. What was he wearing, now? Oh yes–jeans and a check shirt, same as they all do–they’ve no imagination, young people today. That’s about all, really. Oh yes, and of course he was foreign.’

  ‘Foreign?’ Sergeant Ekland perked up. Foreigners were always of some interest in Tromsø, due to its closeness to the Russian border, and the politically sensitive area of Svalbard. And Christmas was not a time one would expect many foreign visitors in North Norway. ‘What kind of foreign?’ he asked.

  ‘How would I know? English, perhaps, or German.’

  ‘You should have details of his passport.’

  ‘I told you, my records got jumbled,’ said the old man. Sergeant Ekland sighed a great big theatrical sigh. To placate him, Botilsrud said: ‘Anyway, he wasn’t American.’

  ‘That’s very helpful,’ chipped in Sergeant Hyland. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Anyone can tell an American,’ said the old man contemptuously. ‘You can hear.’

  ‘But he spoke Norwegian?’

  ‘He had a bit. Enough to hire a room. Otherwise,’ said the old man grandly, ‘I’d have known what nationality he was.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Sergeant Hyland. Coming round to the front of the counter, he humped the knapsack up, and vaguely began to turn over its contents. They were not very interesting. ‘Just clothes,’ he said. ‘Change of shirt, vest and underpants, a pair of boots. Not much.’ He peered closely at the shirt. ‘No identification marks or name tags. You’re not giving us much to go on, grandad. I suppose you nicked all the diamond rings and the stolen Rembrandts, eh?’

  ‘He-he,’ said Botilsrud unenthusiastically. ‘Look, I’ve got to get back.’

  ‘OK, OK, get back to your beef stroganoff,’ said Sergeant Ekland. ‘I expect the boy just did a bunk, or got a girl or something. But we can put a bit in the paper, and see if anything turns up.’

  And as old Botilsrud edged out, crabwise, to the street, Sergeant Hyland heaved the knapsack into the corner and went back to contemplating his image in the plate glass door, while Sergeant Ekland tucked his tongue between his lips and began composing for the newspapers a three-line paragraph about a missing person.

  It had made a break in the monotony of the morning.

  • • •

  Sidsel Korvald had got up heavily, given the children breakfast, got the elder off to school, put several layers of clothing on the younger and sent it out to play in the snow, and then began brewing her second cup of coffee of the morning. She trudged through the dusting of new snow to the letter-box and fetched the morning paper, then she poured the thick black liquid into a large breakfast cup, took three lumps of sugar from the packet in the cupboard, and settled down on the sofa to read the paper.

  Or rather, she did not settle down, and did not read. She had not settled down–ever, she felt–since her husband moved out; since the humiliating, inexplicable day when he left her. She had gone about the house doing the usual things, behaving as if nothing had happened. But she knew that everything had happened, nothing was the same. Her body felt stiff, as if poised to receive another blow. It was so unfair, so wrong. It was the sort of thing that happened to women who had been bad wives. It had happened to people she knew, and she had often sympathized with the husband. But she had been a good wife, none better. She looked around her house now, and suddenly it wore a completely new air. Suddenly it was a desert of labour-saving appliances–and for what? She did not want to be saved labour. She had all the time in the world. Her very shopping had suffered: she had bought in bulk before the price went down; she had fallen for several crazy non-bargains. She told herself that things would get back to normal before long. But she could not imagine what was ‘normal’ for a single woman with children. She felt reality slipping through her fingers, day by day.

  She tried to concentrate on Nordlys. Sport she skipped over, the foreign page she did not so much as glance at. She tried to read the leader on North Sea oil, but lost the thread; then she tried to take in all the little items of local interest which were the staple of the newspaper, and which had always roused what interest she could take in things outside herself, her family and her home. The gr
ievances of fishermen, the lack of doctors in North Norway, the doings of the radical students–she read them, and did not read them, her mind elsewhere, anywhere. She registered a heading, ‘Missing person’, and was about to move on to something else, when her eye caught the description:

  Foreign, possibly German or British. Was in the Tromsø area 19th-21st December. Height–about 1m 80. Slender build, fair hair . . . ’

  She paused. The dates had caught her attention, and the nationalities. She uncrossed her legs suddenly, and jolted the coffee table. Coffee spilt from the cup on to the polished wood surface, but she did not, as normally she would, rush for a cloth to mop it up. She got up, tenser than ever, and went towards the window. Outside her youngest was fighting with the boy next door, but she did nothing, merely looked unseeing. But over her face there had spread a vivid, crimson blush.

  • • •

  Helge Ottesen was late into the shop that morning. He had to go to a Town Council meeting in the evening, and was expecting a hard day. He prided himself on being able to delegate authority, though he took all the important decisions himself. The shop would run itself, while he enjoyed a late breakfast. He and his wife divided the paper in two, and retreated into companionable silence, he at the same time spreading a piece of bread with marmalade, and stirring the thick coffee which was the first of his daily necessities.