Death in a Cold Climate

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Well anyway, now we have a woman in the case,’ said Fagermo. ‘Which would at least have the effect of brightening it up, except that it’s a totally unknown woman.’

  ‘What about that Professor’s wife you were talking about?’ asked Ekland. ‘The one you said was the nymphet type? Couldn’t it be her? You said she was blonde.’

  ‘Oh she was, along with fifty per cent of this town. I suppose she’s about twenty-five, though she looks a lot younger. There’s no reason to think it’s her rather than anybody else, though. She’d be a long way from home–she lives on the mainland.’

  ‘Some things are best done a long way from home,’ said Sergeant Ekland sagely. ‘I’d follow it up if I were you. As a matter of fact, I think I’ve heard of her before.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The boys did a raid at the students’ place a few months ago–drugs–and I have an idea she was one of the people there. Wife of one of the professors, but more of an age to be a student. Can’t be many of them.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I have the impression that’s a bit of an occupational hazard. Did you say drugs? That could be interesting. Was she brought in?’

  ‘Well, actually it wasn’t drugs. They went through the place with a toothcomb, but there wasn’t a trace. It must have been some kind of hoax–they had a tip-off by telephone, and that evening the students did something else: had a demonstration about something, or blew something up, I forget what. All they found was a nice sexy party with nothing worse than alcohol. They were all students there except her.’

  ‘So she sort of stood out, did she? Was it really a sexy party, or are you making that up?’

  ‘Would I?’ asked Ekland, injured. ‘There were ten or twelve there, mostly men, nobody had a stitch on, all the furniture had been moved out and there were mattresses all over the floor. By the time our boys had finished the investigation they were down to their underpants themselves. Just my luck I wasn’t on duty! But there were no drugs.’

  ‘Well, well, just an ordinary student party, eh? I wonder if she goes in for that sort of thing often. When I saw her she certainly seemed–well, never mind. Where she met the boy–if it was her–is only five or ten minutes from Prestvann Student Hostel. She could have been entertaining herself for the evening.’

  ‘She’s probably not important,’ said Ekland lazily, the flicker of interest, or lust, he had shown now being replaced by his habitual lethargy. ‘I mean, the guy probably just slept with her. We’ve no evidence she goes around killing the blokes she sleeps with–otherwise the student hostel would have been littered with corpses that night.’

  Fagermo spread out his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  ‘What can we do but follow up all the contacts he had while he was in Tromsø? We have precious little else, though of course I’m thinking what I can do about tracking him further in the past. Meanwhile, we’re bound to probe his connection with the people he met here, like this woman. Did he know her from before? Did they meet by arrangement? Did he tell her anything about what he was doing here? That sort of thing.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound particularly hopeful to me,’ said Ekland with a big sigh.

  ‘It’s not. But they’re possibilities, and they’re about all we’ve got at the moment . . . ’ He paused, and looked down again at the jungle of Ekland’s notes. ‘I suppose one of the things we could begin to do would be to draw up a timetable of his activities while he was in Tromsø.’

  He took up a clean sheet of paper.

  ‘Let’s see. He arrives some time during the morning of the nineteenth, probably tries various hotels, and then lands up at Tromsø’s Little Hilton–Botilsrud’s Pensjonat. We don’t know what he did for the rest of the day, but in the evening–almost the entire evening–he was in the Cardinal’s Hat. Slept at the Pensjonat. Next day is pretty blank, but we have a reliable sighting around ten o’clock at night, an encounter with a woman, and then a late arrival back at the Pensjonat–around three o’clock or so.’

  Fagermo paused: ‘Question: if he was sleeping with the woman, why go back to the Pensjonat at all? It can’t have been just to get his money’s worth.’

  ‘Husband?’ hazarded Ekland, with a lazy, experienced air.

  ‘Not many jobs where you knock off around two or three in the morning.’ Fagermo pulled the paper towards him again. ‘Next day, it seems probable, he was killed. Where? Possibly over there on the mainland, though he could just as easily have been taken there by car. The doctors say he was moved after death. When was he killed? Any time after dark, if it was outside–in any case, it was dark practically all day . . . I see you’ve got a sighting for him around midday, day unspecified.’ He peered down at Ekland’s notes trying to find something more concrete, and Ekland leaned forward too with an apparently quite disinterested curiosity. ‘Seems to be someone called Solheim. Is that right? Who was he? Reliable?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Ekland, with false confidence. ‘Some fairly high-up bod in the Post Office. Said he saw him in the Viking Café a bit after midday.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  Ekland scratched his head. ‘Not that I remember.’

  Fagermo, getting that haloed feeling one does get when keeping one’s good humour in circumstances guaranteed to enrage the average Archangel, pulled the phone towards him and got on to the central switchboard at the Post Office.

  Solheim, he learned, was a fairly big wig with a ridiculously long title that could mean anything. When he came on the line he sounded competent and decided. He often went to the Viking Café, just by the Post Office, when he forgot to bring his lunch sandwiches. He remembered the boy because it was just before Christmas, and you didn’t see many tourists around that time. He couldn’t remember the exact date, but there were lots of people with Christmas packages. He had picked out the boy as English from his clothes. Had said a few words to him because he liked talking English now and then–having been there in the war.

  ‘What sort of thing did you say?’

  ‘Well, I think I asked him if he needed any help–he was poring over a map.’

  ‘Did he accept the offer?’ asked Fagermo, his hopes rising.

  ‘No, he didn’t. He seemed sort of–reserved. He wasn’t exactly rude, but he didn’t seem to want to talk, you know how it is. So I just went on to another table.’

  ‘You say he was poring over a map. Do you remember what sort it was? A motorist’s map?’

  ‘No, no: it was a map of the town–you know the one: it’s the only big one available, with all the streets on.’

  ‘Did you by any chance notice where he was looking? Somewhere on the island?’

  There was a pause. ‘Now you come to mention it, I think I do remember. He’d had to fold it–it was too big for the table. He was looking at the bottom section, the mainland–bottom lefthand corner, in fact. That’s where his finger was.’

  ‘Good, that’s very useful. Did you notice him again?’

  ‘I think he went out not long after that.’

  ‘And you can’t swear to the day–that’s a pity.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t swear to a date, because you just don’t remember things like that. But it was certainly just before Christmas . . . and it was probably a Friday.’

  ‘Probably Friday?’ said Fagermo, flicking through the last year’s desk calendar he still had in his drawer.

  ‘Yes: it’s mostly Friday I forget my sandwiches. That’s the day my wife goes to work early, and she’s not there to remind me to take them.’

  ‘I’m very, very grateful to you,’ said Fagermo, putting down the phone. He pulled towards him the sheet on which he had detailed the boy’s movements, and entered: ‘12.00 Viking Café? About to go over to the mainland?’ He sat back.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind betting,’ he said, ‘that he was killed not far from where he was found. Anton Jakobsensvei, Isbjørnvei–one of those around there. They’re on the bottom lefthand end of the map . . . ’ He looked again at his li
ttle timetable of the boy’s movements. ‘There’s still an awful lot of blank spaces. A lot of time unaccounted for.’

  ‘Isbjørnvei,’ said Sergeant Ekland, who throughout the telephone conversation had been picking his teeth with an intentness and concentration he rarely exhibited in his day-to-day work, and had now reached an excavation of particular delicacy and interest. ‘Isn’t that where the Prof lives–the one with the dishy wife?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fagermo with a sigh. Trust Ekland to notice the blindingly obvious. Still, when there were so few promising lines of investigation, the obvious could certainly not be ignored. Sergeant Ekland, having finished the hideous probings, was grinning like a manic model.

  ‘Oh, stop posing, man–drive me there,’ snapped Fagermo.

  • • •

  Outside the station, as they got into their car, Fagermo said: ‘Wait a sec. Drive me over to Brennbygget first–that’s where the Prof works. There’s no point in talking to the girl if the husband’s there. I’ve done that already.’

  They drove past the Amundsen statue and the little customs shed, and came to the office block which temporarily housed the library and various other parts of the university. Fagermo pottered up the stairs, looking into the library and the canteen, outside which the various left-wing student groups fought out their ideological battles in shrill red wall posters dotted with exclamation marks. On the fourth floor he found the Department of Languages and Literature, and here he met a snag: he was just about to enquire at the office whether Professor Nicolaisen was teaching today when he saw him stalking along the corridor towards the dark, smelly little seminar room, set windowless in the middle of the building. Nicolaisen saw him, stopped, and regarded him with a commendably frank dislike. Since he made no opening to start even the most casual of conversations, Fagermo was forced to accept that the onus was on him.

  ‘Oh, Professor Nicolaisen–I wondered if you were teaching at this hour.’

  ‘I am. My students are waiting,’ said Nicolaisen, nodding towards the seminar room where one or two students were sprawled in attitudes not notably expressive of anticipation.

  ‘Oh, then I won’t keep you,’ said Fagermo. ‘I just wanted–’ he nearly dried up for a moment, but invention seldom failed him entirely and he seized gratefully on the first thought that happened to come into his head: ‘I just wanted to know if you remembered whether Martin Forsyth was wearing a ring of any sort when you met him in the Cardinal’s Hat.’

  Nicolaisen’s face, creviced like a relief map of his native country, expressed as clearly as words: what a foolish question! He said: ‘Good heavens, how could I be expected to remember that! It’s not the sort of thing one notices.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Fagermo, glad to make his getaway so easily, ‘that’s all I wanted to ask. Perhaps somebody else will have noticed.’

  ‘Not many Englishmen do wear wedding-rings,’ said Nicolaisen, to his departing form. He loved imparting useless information, and now went on to do more of it to his seminar group, in the sort of mood that guaranteed that withering and crushing would be the order of the day.

  On the drive out to Isbjørnvei and the Nicolaisens’ residence Fagermo remembered why the question of the ring had flashed into his mind. The boy had been wearing one, presumably, when he died: the rounded indentation was there on the fourth finger of his right hand. Nicolaisen’s reaction had been interesting . . . A possibility of further questioning suggested itself.

  When they got to Isbjørnvei Fagermo tossed up in his mind the advantages of leaving Ekland outside and taking him in with him. Finally he decided on the latter: he had a certain dreadful appeal which might go straight to the heart, or something, of Fru Nicolaisen. Together they clambered over unswept snow, watched by an unashamedly interested face from the kitchen window. The response to the ring on the door-bell was immediate-even, one might have fancied, enthusiastic. Fru Nicolaisen came tripping downstairs and pulled open the door invitingly.

  ‘I knew you’d come back,’ she said. ‘Oh–you’ve brought a friend with you.’

  It was one way of putting it. Ekland brightened up visibly and took a vital interest in his official duties for the first time since the case began. Fru Nicolaisen was wearing something between a brunch coat and a brunch jacket–a short, frizzy, nylon-gauzy creation that led one to wonder if she was wearing anything underneath and kept one within an ace of finding out. Fagermo generously allowed Ekland to follow her upstairs. She sat them down on the sofa and then, without asking, went into the kitchen, opened a bottle of beer, and poured three glasses.

  ‘Isn’t this cosy?’ she said, looking from one to the other with experienced naivety.

  ‘We actually came to ask you some more questions, Fru Nicolaisen,’ said Fagermo.

  ‘Lise, call me Lise,’ said Fru Nicolaisen; and then, with a pretty pout: ‘But why shouldn’t we be comfortable? So much nicer to relax. Especially as I suppose these are the questions you didn’t like to ask while my husband was around . . . ’

  ‘Well, that’s pretty much the truth,’ admitted Fagermo. Then, chancing his arm, he added: ‘Or anyway, ones we thought you might not have been quite honest in answering.’

  She put on an enigmatic smile, then let it fade slowly, fascinatingly from her face.

  ‘Did you notice whether Martin Forsyth was wearing a ring when you met him at the Cardinal’s Hat?’ Fagermo asked experimentally.

  Lise Nicolaisen raised her pretty blonde-grey eyebrows and stared at him: ‘What an odd question. I was hoping for something more . . . personal. Yes, he wore a ring-do you mean specifically when he was in the Cardinal’s Hat that night, or just generally?’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘Though actually I did notice when I met him the first time, because it’s one of the things one does notice, or I do, anyway. Not that it makes much difference to the way they behave, sometimes.’

  ‘So you met Martin Forsyth more than once?’

  ‘I always meet attractive men more than once,’ said Lise Nicolaisen, with a baby-doll wriggle of her shoulder, and that wicked pout. ‘That’s why I knew you’d come back!’ She curled her legs up under her on the chair opposite them and looked even more like something out of a ‘fifties film. Sergeant Ekland’s note-taking ceased entirely as he took in the augmented expanses of thigh.

  ‘So you met him again–at around ten o’clock the next night?’ hazarded Fagermo. She opened her adorable eyes still wider.

  ‘At ten o’clock the next morning, actually,’ she said with a little giggle. ‘Still, it was a good try.’

  ‘Ten o’clock next morning?’ said Fagermo, disconcerted. ‘Then you didn’t meet him on the evening of the twentieth up Biskopsvei?’

  ‘No. Why? Did someone? He does seem to have got around, doesn’t he? I’m sure I got the best out of him.’

  Fagermo tried to readjust his ideas. Was she telling the truth? Why should she admit to the morning but deny the evening? He said: ‘So you met him in the morning. Here?’

  ‘No, actually not here. I don’t often–unless it’s one of my husband’s students. It–excites them, you know, sometimes. It doesn’t bother me particularly. There are some who like to keep things within the Department, but I’m not one of them. It seems silly to me. I like to range around!’

  ‘Where did you meet?’

  ‘Up in the student hostel in Prestvannet. It’s a friend’s room. He got me a duplicate key, and I use it in daytime now and then, when he’s at lectures. Do you know, none of the hotels in this town will let rooms by the hour!’

  ‘How did you manage to arrange all this? You didn’t have much time.’

  She giggled cosily and sipped her beer. ‘Who needs time? I don’t. I have talking eyes.’ She looked at Sergeant Ekland and blinked invitingly. ‘Did you notice I had talking eyes? . . . So had he. We agreed to it when I was collecting my husband, actually, though we didn’t say a word. Then, when I went back for my gloves I just whispered the place and time, and he
nodded. It’s awfully simple to do, Inspector, if you’ve got my experience.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Fagermo. ‘And when you met you –?’

  ‘That’s right. Do you want details, Inspector, or have you read the little manuals?’

  ‘Hgghh-hmmm. Er, did you talk as well?’

  She considered. ‘I can’t remember. I expect I made coffee. We may have talked a bit while we drank it. Yes–that’s right. He said he’d been on some sort of boat in Trondheim, mentioned some of the expeditions they’d been on. Sounded deadly boring, all male and all that, but I think it was scientific or something.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  She threw back her head. ‘Let’s see. What’s the usual? I expect I asked how long he would be in Tromsø–that’s right, I did–and he said he didn’t know for sure, but he hoped to finish his business the next day, and if he did he’d probably take the plane the day after.’

  ‘Back to Trondheim?’

  ‘I suppose so. I don’t remember.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I don’t think so. There wasn’t much time . . . I don’t go in for too much talking. That’s the trouble with half the university people: it’s all jabber and no –’

  ‘And you parted–when?’

  ‘Parted! Sounds like a novelette! I suppose we left the flat about half past eleven. When we walked down to town it was light. We “parted” in the main street.’

  ‘Did he say where he was going, or anything?’

  ‘No. I think he just said “Thanks”.’ She looked at him wonderingly. ‘He was a man of few words.’

  ‘I see,’ said Fagermo. ‘Well–at least that fills in one of my blank spots in the timetable I’m making of his movements. I suppose there’s nothing else you’d like to tell me about him?’

  She giggled sexily and said in a Joan Greenwood voice: ‘No . . . ’

  Fagermo sighed, drained his beer and got up. ‘Well, I’m very grateful to you –’