Death in a Cold Climate

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Funny to think of him buried up there . . . all stiff,’ said Lise Nicolaisen, who seemed to feel no compulsion to hide her more appalling thoughts. ‘When I slept with him just a day or two before. Sort of–exciting, somehow!’

  ‘If you should think of anything else –’

  ‘I’ll come along to the police station,’ she said, unwinding herself from her chair and putting on a pretty pout of anticipation. ‘I’ve always wanted to.’

  Fagermo let Ekland go first down the stairs, but at the bottom he turned, received a very full view of what Fru Nicolaisen was not wearing under her brunch coat, and–swallowing his embarrassment, which she seemed to find charmingly old-fashioned–he said: ‘You are quite sure you didn’t meet him again in the evening?’

  ‘Absolutely sure,’ said Lise Nicolaisen. ‘Have I hidden anything from you?’ Fagermo spluttered. ‘I had another date, as far as I remember. It wasn’t with Amnesty International, so it may have been the Warm Clothes For the Elderly Committee, or Reclaiming the Alcoholics. I’m chock-a-block full of good works, Inspector!’

  Fagermo gained the front door and slipped and slithered down to the car. Ekland already had his hand on the driver’s door, but as Fagermo climbed in he said: ‘Oh, I’ve forgotten my gloves,’ and made his way nippily back to the front door.

  Christ, thought Fagermo, settling grumpily into the passenger seat. How bloody uninventive. Gloves.

  CHAPTER 12

  ONE DAY

  As March shaded into April, the elements played coy games with the North Norwegians. Some days they flattered them with hopes of an early spring: the roads were clear, and there was the pleasure of walking on nature’s own tarmac again; sometimes the temperatures rose above zero, and on some evenings, as the sun set in a clear sky, the surrounding hills seemed draped with pink snow, like enormous cheap cakes. These were the days of delusion. Next day the skies would be angry grey and lowering, the snow would fall, and by nightfall nature white in tooth and claw had reasserted its accustomed iron rule.

  It was on one of the flirtatious days, when the town and the surrounding fjords and mountains were bathed in blinding sunlight reflected from the snow, that the people who had briefly met Martin Forsyth back in December had cause to remember him again. It was nearly two weeks since the body had been found, and already the newspapers had gone on to other things–contenting themselves with brief remarks about the Inspector in charge being in touch with Interpol, and vague suggestions that the body being found in Tromsø was totally fortuitous.

  Fagermo was content to leave that suggestion in the air. The apparent dearth of interest in the case, however, did not reassure all the people who had crossed Forsyth’s path during that fatal visit. More than one wondered exactly what the wider implications of the murder were, and whether there would be any fall-out that might involve others. And one of those persons was still very worried indeed.

  So as they went about their daily business, many of them thought about Martin Forsyth.

  Professor Nicolaisen travelled to work by car on those days when his wife did not require it for her private purposes. He parked it behind the Post Office, getting tetchy if there was a lack of space. The morning was, for Professor Nicolaisen, a process of gathering tetchiness. He would have been disappointed if there had been nothing to thwart or aggravate him, but fortunately there always was. Today, as usual, the lift was out of order. He sighed theatrically at nobody in particular, and trudged up the bleak coal-grey stairs, telling himself how bad it was for his heart–though physically that organ was in perfect working order.

  He pushed open the main door on the fourth floor and went into the bright orange, blue and white corridors of the Department of Languages and Literature. It seemed to please him no better than the dreary stairs. His nose twitched. The air was redolent of aborted research and stale feminism. He went to the common-room to collect his mail, throwing grunts in the direction of the newspaper readers there. In his pigeonhole was a pay-slip for external examining: four-fifths to the government, one-fifth to himself. His lip curled, and he emitted a sound like an outraged cockerel.

  So far the morning was going well.

  Those who knew Professor Nicolaisen well–and really, in a small university, there was not much option–contended that it was best to get hold of him early on. Something got into him as the day wore on–‘home thoughts’, said some wit who knew how his wife spent her time. Or perhaps it was just the cumulative effect of contact with his kind. Certainly the coffee-break at twelve seemed to do nothing for his humour, perhaps because most of the others in the coffee rooms were so much younger than himself, perhaps because of the radical orthodoxies they spouted. Whatever the cause, he was best left alone after the sun had started its long, lingering decline.

  Which was bad luck for the student who sat in his room at two-fifteen presenting to his professor the plan for his forthcoming thesis on Crime as Social Protest in the Works of Arthur Morrison. It could not be the chosen author that was niggling Nicolaisen, because he had never heard of him. It could not be the proposed organization of the thesis, because he was not listening. He sat in his poky room, surrounded by cheap reproductions of Gainsborough and Stubbs, and looked witheringly at the boy as he sat reading painstakingly from his disquisition.

  Jeans. Check shirt covering grubby sweat-shirt. Fair hair, and the lightest of stubbles on his chin and cheeks. Halvard Nicolaisen’s eyes were odd, neither attentive nor abstracted, clearly not listening, and yet noticing. Thoughts of some kind were clearly going through his brain, for he sometimes swallowed in a meaningful way that ended up in a little whinny. The student would half look up, then return hastily to his notes.

  Jeans. Long thin body. Fair hair. Nicolaisen snuffled. It was that that reminded him . . . reminded him of . . . He pulled himself together. Silly to give way. Nothing to do with this boy. Incredibly silly to give way . . .

  ‘Then I thought to give a whole chapter to The Hole in the Wall, concentrating on the East End background and taking up the whole subject of the derivation from Our Mutual Friend–’

  He reminds me . . . There’s a look there . . . Fair hair. Check shirt. Professor Nicolaisen emitted a choking sound that threatened explosion:

  ‘Oh Christ in hell, get out of my office, you incompetent driveller,’ he said, to one of his more promising honours students.

  • • •

  Nan Bryson sat in a dusty corner of the little US Information Office, copy-typing busily and thinking–for she was competent enough to do both, though any demand for original endeavour found her faintly lacking. She always worked enthusiastically, because her job with the Office was important to her: it was her lifeline, her means of staying put in Tromsø. Here she had put down some feeble roots, got herself into some kind of circle. Nowhere in the States did she have either. If she nursed feelings of having been rejected at an early age she did so for the excellent reason that she had been rejected at an early age.

  What Nan was typing was not of any great interest, to her or very probably to anyone else. She was producing paperwork for the bureaucratic machine that in its turn could be expected to beget more such. If the Information Office was indeed part of the ludicrously ineffective CIA network, it kept its secrets from her. She was always telling people that, and never being believed. Perhaps she didn’t entirely want to be believed. Perhaps something did go on here that was vital to the security of the Free World. Perhaps her boss, dark and bulky, hunched over something behind his desk, was reading some sort of secret report. But it looked more like a paperback.

  She wondered why spying was on her mind. Was she afraid she was being investigated herself? Fat lot they’d find. No–that’s right: they’d been talking about it in the SAS pub the other night, all the local drunks and near-drunks. They’d got hold of a rumour that the dead boy was a spy. Charlie Brown she thought of him as, Martin Forsyth she now knew his name was. The gossip was that he was a spy. She’d sat for a couple of hours over her b
eer just to listen to the talk. As usual in that kind of place it got progressively wilder and wilder. From being frankly and openly gossip, it became by the minute more and more bogusly ‘inside’.

  And yet–what if he had been? What if he’d scraped acquaintance with her because he had found out she worked at the Information Office? She did not stop to examine whether he had scraped acquaintance with her, or she with him. Nor even whether the thought was flattering. It was a story, a dream, a web of possibility in which she sat at the centre. Bunched over her typewriter, tapping out a long and heavily reasoned memorandum about the proposed closing down of the Information Office’s unused library, she set up an image of herself being courted by glamorous male spies in the pay of foreign leftist governments, and her pale, uninteresting little face lit up.

  She preened herself.

  • • •

  In his room in the Faculty of Science, Dougal Mackenzie stood looking out over the fjord. The water sparkled, small fishing boats chugged up and down, there was much activity. He could see over to where his own little boat, new and almost unused, was moored. Turning his head he could see towards Hungeren, the rows of houses, the mountains . . .

  He had his dog with him today. Scenting restlessness, and scenting some possible advantage to himself, Jingle had got up from the rug by the door and tentatively come over, looking up pleadingly, wagging his tail, and panting slightly. Looking down at him, Dougal Mackenzie remembered him barking in the snow, tugging at the ear, remembered the gradual uncovering of that young human face.

  Quite suddenly, he retched.

  • • •

  Business was slack in Ottesen’s men’s outfitters when Fru Ottesen dropped in on her husband in the course of the morning’s shopping. Two assistants were draped over a rail of sports jackets discussing the English FA Cup match on Saturday’s television. Helge Ottesen was sitting in his little office at the back, working on sums that never seemed to come right.

  ‘Not much doing today,’ said Gladys Ottesen cheerily.

  Her husband grunted. ‘Not much doing any day these days. It’s these damned package tours to Britain. They ought to be banned. Three hours in Oxford Street and they buy up clothes to last them for years. It’s ruining the Norwegian clothing industry.’

  ‘Well, it won’t last,’ said his wife, with her usual optimism. ‘Prices are going up in Britain too. There’s not the saving there was, everybody’s saying it. And you don’t get the quality.’

  ‘If only people did realize it,’ said Helge Ottesen dubiously.

  ‘Oh, they will, they will,’ said his wife. ‘I’ve got a lovely bit of cod for your middag . . . ’

  But after his wife had gone Helge Ottesen went back to his figures and sank further and further into despondency. If Gladys did but know, things were pretty grim. Or would be if it weren’t for that little extra, that delicious untaxed little undercover income that kept things precariously afloat. It had been the saving of him–and if all went well it would go on, and on. If all went well . . .

  His mind unaccountably turned to the boy who had died in the snow of Hungeren, the boy he had met so briefly. There were rumours going round, talk–but then there was always talk, and half of it contradicted the other half, or was the purest nonsense. There was no reason to believe any one thing people were saying rather than another. No reason to fear the end of his little bonus. And he had always found the police very amenable.

  • • •

  Idling along Storgate in a day full of frustrations and unproductive leads, Inspector Fagermo happened to see, by the open space in front of the Cathedral, two of the people on the fringes of the case whom he had not yet spoken to. On the pavement were planted the two local Mormons, with a hortatory placard, a hail-fellow manner and a promise of salvation available through the combination of Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith. They seemed to have plenty of well-wishers and casual acquaintances, but not many takers. On one of them the Arctic spring seemed to have laid an icy finger: the fair-haired, open-faced one had his tie riotously askew, his jacket and overcoat open, and he was getting as near to chatting up the girls as a street-corner evangelist could reasonably be expected to go. Fagermo stopped by them.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to look you up,’ he said. ‘I suppose you can guess what I want to talk about.’

  ‘We told the police we’d be here,’ said the heavy one, aggrieved. ‘It’s our usual time and place.’ His Norwegian was very grammatical and highly accented. As old Botilsrud had said, one never had much doubt with an American.

  ‘Not that,’ said Fagermo. ‘It’s about this murder.’ The two faces at once looked mystified and concerned.

  ‘We haven’t heard about any murder,’ said the fair one. ‘Why should we have expected that you’d want to talk to us about a murder?’

  ‘We don’t read the papers much,’ said the other one. ‘We can, but we can’t really afford to.’

  ‘I thought it was the main topic of conversation among the foreign community, that’s all,’ said Fagermo.

  ‘We’re more religious,’ said the heavy, obstinate one, obscurely.

  ‘Anyway, it’s about a boy you met, way back before Christmas, in the Cardinal’s Hat. I don’t know if you remember?’

  ‘The Cardinal’s Hat? Were we there?’

  ‘So all the available testimony agrees. I’m sorry if you’re not supposed to be.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that so much. But we can’t afford eating out or anything, and there’s not much we can drink, so I can’t quite see why we were there.’ The fair boy thought for a bit. ‘Wait a minute! I remember now: we did go in one time, just before Christmas.’ He turned to his fellow. ‘After Steinar, you remember.’ He explained to Fagermo: ‘It’s a boy we’ve been talking to a lot. He was really getting the message, but he sort of relapses now and then. We’ve been trying to be good influences, and if we hear of him like going off the rails, we try and get hold of him and talk him out of it, see what I mean?’

  Fagermo nodded. It figured: drink and religion were the great weaknesses of a certain type of Norwegian, and some veered enthusiastically from one to the other. He said: ‘You went and talked to the foreigners’ table there, if you remember.’

  ‘That’s right, we did. I suppose we must have known somebody sitting there.’

  ‘Can you recall who?’

  The two Mormons thought for a bit. ‘There was that man who’s an outfitter–has a shop along here somewhere,’ said the heavy one. ‘He was interested in our suits, said we always looked so smart.’

  ‘We had to tell him they were issued from headquarters,’ said the fair one. ‘No sale. Then there was an American boy–often see him around–fairly quiet type. Student. And the girl from the USIO: we keep in well with them. They’re a lot of help sometimes.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘There were others. I can’t recall exactly –’

  Fagermo prompted him. ‘There was a fair-haired boy, a stranger. You wouldn’t have seen him before.’

  The two of them thought. ‘That’s right. Didn’t say much. Looked–you know–sort of contemptuous. There’s some like that: they look at us like we were some kinda freaks. Yeah, I remember him.’ It was the fair-haired one speaking, and Fagermo felt fairly confident he really did remember.

  ‘You didn’t talk to him?’

  ‘No, sir. We don’t push in where we’re not wanted, whatever some people may say. And we were just in looking for Steinar. But I remember seeing that boy again –’

  ‘The boy in the Cardinal’s Hat? Where?’

  The fair Mormon thought. ‘I know I did . . . Not long afterwards, too.’

  ‘It would have been the next day, or the one after.’

  ‘Was it him who got his number?’

  ‘Yes–we found him in the snow above Hungeren.’

  The Mormon thought. ‘I can’t get it. Give me a bit of time, though, and it should come. I’ll get on to you as soon as it does. I usually do remember –
’

  ‘If you do,’ said Fagermo, ‘you’ll be one of the few to admit remembering anything definite.’

  ‘Part of the training,’ said the fair boy, grinning wide and tugging at his crazily askew tie. ‘Healthy mind in a healthy body, you know.’ He sounded infinitely cynical.

  Back in his office Fagermo sat at his desk and looked over the fjord, glimmering blue and gold like a vulgar evening gown. Things were beginning, just beginning, to make some sort of pattern in his mind. Always he had believed that one of the keys to the case lay in the character of the boy himself. What sort of person was Martin Forsyth? There was still a lot of work to be done there, but he thought the blank outline, symbolized by that anonymous frozen corpse, was beginning to be filled in. But then there was that other vital question: what had Martin Forsyth been, what had he done? Here there were some pieces in place–pieces from Ålesund, from Trondheim, even from Mersea–but also great gaping blank spaces.

  He turned back to his desk and began formulating his second set of questions for Interpol. Precious little he’d got from the first lot: no trace of a criminal record anywhere, not even of any minor involvement in questionable activities, or immigration troubles. But something of the boy’s past must be recoverable, must be relevant. In fact, he felt sure that something would be crucial, that this was not a murder that could be explained by some sudden burst of passion that sprang up during his three days in Tromsø. He sighed. It was just his luck that Iran was currently in a state of turmoil–a jungle of conflicting forces so complex that none of the great powers seemed to know who to kowtow to. And yet, it was very possible that there some part of the solution might be lying. Aberfan, Mrs Forsyth had said, vaguely. Aberfan, Abadan . . .

  He would have to trust to time and returning normality. Meanwhile the only thing to do was to formulate a series of clear, concise, to-the-point questions. He drew his pad towards him and wrote and thought for half an hour, concentratedly.

  When he had finished he picked up his phone and got through to Bjørn Korvald.