Death in a Cold Climate

by Robert Barnard

  Something stirred, uncomfortably, in Fru Vibe. Of course, it couldn’t be, it was impossible, and yet . . . It was as well to be sure. Something close to fear seized her stomach. Her solution, in all matters of doubt or complaint, was to dump the topic in the lap of Lindestad, the housing officer of the university. After all, they were the landlords.

  ‘I should give up scrubbing,’ said Fru Vibe. ‘I’ll ring up Lindestad and tell him to have a look.’

  • • •

  As luck would have it, Fagermo was sitting in Lindestad’s office in the University Administration building when the call came through. Lindestad, a tough little man with a gnome face, was a rare specimen of omnicompetence, with an elephant’s memory and the ability to fix anything that went wrong in his domain–which was what he usually did do, rather than undergo the frustrations of trying to get outside men to do it. But it was his memory that Fagermo was interested in at the moment.

  ‘The girl next door said it would take time to get the information,’ he said. ‘She had to go through her files, I suppose. She said it would be quicker to talk to you.’

  Lindestad grinned with amiable modesty. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Well, basically this: who was in the university houses in Isbjørnvei in December of last year–that for a start. I gather there are flats in them as well, and I’d like to know who was in those as well.’

  Lindestad thought and drew towards him a piece of paper. He wrote down the numbers of the university houses, and after some thought put down by them a list of names. ‘These are the main tenants,’ he said, ‘of the houses that were occupied. The flats are a bit more difficult.’

  He pushed the list towards Fagermo, and it was at this moment that the phone rang. As Lindestad answered a patient and monotonous yes to the upbraiding voice on the other end of the line, Fagermo studied the list. But when Lindestad said ‘Blood?’ he looked up with a definite flicker of interest. As Lindestad put the phone down with a promise to come out and see, Fagermo said: ‘Blood? Where was that?’

  ‘Isbjørnvei. Are you interested?’

  ‘Too right I’m interested. What number?’

  ‘Let’s see. Must be eighteen. New people moving in today.’

  Fagermo looked down his list and with a pang of disappointment saw by the number eighteen the one word ‘vacant’.

  ‘Was there no one at all there in December?’ he asked.

  ‘No one in the main part of the house, anyway,’ said Lindestad, getting up. ‘These houses are kept for Professors and the like: really it’s a sort of ghetto for upper-rank academics. They’re often vacant for a fair while, being kept for someone or other. This one has been vacant from last summer right up to now.’

  ‘What about the flat?’

  ‘Let’s see . . . I think it’s someone in the library . . . Yes, that’s right. Don’t remember her name–rather a pathetic-looking creature.’

  Fagermo shook his head. That hardly sounded promising. ‘Let’s go and have a look, anyway.’

  When they got there they left the car below the road, down by the garages that served the houses, and as they climbed through the snow to Isbjørnvei Fagermo was aware of a face watching them from No. 12. Fru Nicolaisen, no doubt, perhaps hoping for a visit from her policeman lover. Shielding their eyes from the golden glare of sun on snow, Fagermo and Lindestad trudged up to No. 18. Fru Andersen and Fru Vibe were ensconced in the doorway, deep in the only topic Bergen people do talk about when they get together, a nostalgic ramble through their rainy home city. They gave it up for business, however, on the approach of the two men.

  ‘Look at that,’ said Fru Vibe to Lindestad, whose tolerant expression told of years of dealing with complaining tenants. ‘And you said it had been properly cleaned.’

  ‘It was cleaned after the last tenants left,’ said Lindestad, edging his way into the vindfang. ‘That was last summer. You must expect a bit of dust.’

  ‘That,’ said Fru Andersen triumphantly, ‘is not dust.’

  Nor was it. It was a smallish, obstinate brown stain, clinging to wall and wooden skirting-board, just above floor level, and the lighter colour of the wall around told of Fru Andersen’s Trojan endeavours to scrub it out.

  ‘Let me see,’ said Fagermo, and squatted down on his haunches in the tiny space. He needed little time to make up his mind. ‘This mustn’t be touched any further,’ he said, getting up.

  ‘Not touched?’ howled Fru Andersen, outraged. ‘But you can’t expect –’

  ‘Police,’ said Fagermo, showing his card. ‘This must not be touched. I’ll have a man out to look at it in an hour or so. He’ll have to take some sort of sample. Luckily there’s still enough there to make tests on.’

  ‘Tests?’ said Fru Vibe, agog with interest. ‘Then it is blood?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I wondered,’ she said. ‘That’s why I rang. Do you think it’s that boy?’ She nodded her head in the direction of the mountains.

  Fagermo looked at her with interest: a handsome, intelligent-looking woman. ‘Perhaps. It’s what I’m working on. Had you any reasons for thinking it might be?’

  ‘Oh no. It’s just that since he was found, so close to here, we’ve all had rather a creepy feeling. And then when there was this blood . . . ’

  ‘But this house was empty, wasn’t it, in December?’ Fru Vibe nodded. ‘Did you hear anything from next door?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ said Fru Vibe. ‘It was winter, Christmas. You sort of shut yourself away at that time of year.’ And as the reality of the thing struck her, she shivered. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ said Fagermo. And as he turned to go towards the car, leaving Lindestad to cope with the protests of Fru Andersen at being moved into a blood-stained house which seemed likely to be infested by policemen, he stood in the street, looking down the road at the other blocks and muttered: ‘I think I’m going to have to do some research into these houses.’

  CHAPTER 16

  ILLUMINATION

  The University Library, two floors down from Department of Languages and Literature, where Professor Nicolaisen had his office, presented next morning a fairly somnolent appearance. There were no students around: perhaps they were at lectures, or perhaps they never came. A few hen-like women scuttled around from shelves to catalogue clutching cards, books and periodicals, and having a frail, burdened look, as if the world were too much for them. An enquiry to the two pregnant ladies on the desk resulted in Fagermo being shown into the back room where Elisabeth Leithe worked. One glance at her was enough to dispel any idea of her as a conceivable murderess. She was barely five foot four, thin and pathetic, wearing a dreary nondescript cardigan over a nondescript dress, and having a dreary, washed-out face over a nondescript body. Fagermo tried to imagine a murder in which she took an active role: imagined Martin Forsyth obligingly kneeling on the floor of the vindfang while she swung a blunt instrument and bashed the back of his skull. The idea was absurd. Even as he turned into the doorway she was sitting at her desk, seeming merely to peer over it, and contemplating several great piles of books waiting to have something done to them. Her eyes were great wet globes, as if somehow too much was being expected of her by someone or other. Fagermo introduced himself, sat down, and weighed straight in.

  ‘I understand you live in the flat downstairs in Isbjørnvei 18, is that right?’

  The creature looked at him fearfully, her wet, bulbous eyes almost obsessively fixed on his face. She nodded.

  ‘Were you there on December the twenty-first?’

  The girl thought, and then shook her head with a little high grunt that Fagermo took to be a negative.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I went home. I had back holidays due to me. I had permission.’ The words came out in a terrified squeak. Fagermo had the idea that she thought the university had put him on to her for taking unauthorized holidays.

  ‘I see. So the house had been unoccupied since–when? W
hen did you leave?’

  ‘The fourteenth. I had permission. I had–’

  ‘Yes, yes. I understand. When did you come back?’

  ‘January the fourth.’

  ‘Was everything all right in the house? You didn’t notice anything changed?’

  The terrified, rabbity face shook in wonderment.

  ‘Nothing in your flat, anyway. I suppose you didn’t go into the main part of the house?’

  The girl swallowed and hesitated. ‘I did. Because . . . I’m alone, alone in the house, I have been for months. I get . . . frightened. I went through the house when I came back, to make sure . . . ’

  ‘That you were still alone. Very sensible. Quite understandable. And there wasn’t anything odd that you noticed?’

  The head shook again.

  ‘There was a brown stain in the vindfang when I was there yesterday. Have you noticed it?’ She nodded. ‘When was it, precisely, that you first saw it?’

  ‘I noticed it soon after I came back. In January.’

  ‘You didn’t think anything of it?’

  ‘No. I thought Lindestad must have been showing somebody over the house. He does sometimes. Or I thought I must have spilt something there, but I couldn’t think what.’

  Fagermo looked at the great dim eyes and got up to go. There was nothing to be got out of her. As he thanked her and began to slip unobtrusively through the door, her squeaky voice shrilled out: ‘What was it?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What was it? The brown stain?’

  ‘Blood,’ said Fagermo, and was thus directly responsible for a long, hag-ridden night of hideous dreams filled with vampires and rapists and fiendish torturers–dreams which led next morning to another phone call to the harassed Lindestad, with a hysterical demand for a change of flat.

  • • •

  But Lindestad’s obligingness and omnicompetence were put to a further test before that. Fagermo rang him up when he got back to the office with the fruits of his meditations overnight.

  ‘Those houses in Isbjørnvei,’ he said. ‘I suppose all the keys are different?’

  ‘Well, of course.’

  ‘But each of the houses will have had a fair number of tenants in its time?’

  ‘Depends. Some of the people stay a long time, others are only short-term–either because they’re not permanent in Tromsø or because they want to buy themselves a house here. So some of the houses have the same tenants they’ve had since they were built four or five years ago, but others have had a long line of them.’

  ‘Including number eighteen, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes–there’ve been a fair few there.’

  ‘And what happens to their keys when they leave?’

  ‘They deliver them back to us, of course.’

  ‘Only sometimes they’ve lost one, perhaps?’

  ‘Oh yes, it happens. People are careless. It doesn’t matter much to us: we can get more made.’

  ‘And so can they, of course: get further keys made while they are tenants, and keep one.’

  ‘They could,’ said Lindestad, sounding bewildered. ‘It’s not something we’ve ever thought of. There wouldn’t be much point unless they intended to rob the people who came in afterwards. As far as I know, not many of our professors have burglary as a side-line, though I’d be willing to believe anything about some of them.’

  ‘Not burglary, no. Still, it’s an interesting thought. Now–could you give me a list of all the people who’ve lived in number eighteen since it was built?’

  ‘I could try. We’ve got the records, of course, but I could probably do it in my head. Could you give me half an hour?’

  ‘All the time in the world. Think about it and get it right. I’m just collecting information.’

  And collecting information was what Fagermo did most of over the next few days. Dribs from here, drabs from there. Phone calls here, tentative letters of enquiry there, resulting in little piles of paper on his desk, notes in a grubby notebook he had kept in his trouser pocket throughout the case and had made scrawls in, decipherable only by himself. And in the end they really did begin to make a pattern: Lindestad’s lists: the reports from Interpol; the lists of people employed by British Petroleum and other major oil firms; the information from the Continental Shelf Research Institute. And then there was that very interesting conversation on the telephone with the man in State Oil, the Norwegian national oil company. He had been very cagey, of course: had displayed all the caution of the natural bureaucrat, one of the worst species of homo sapiens a policeman has to deal with. Nothing must go down on paper, that had to be made clear. Everything he said was off the record–right? And so on, and so on. But in the end he had unbuttoned at least one little corner of his mouth, and Fagermo and he had had a very interesting conversation.

  There were still many, many minor aspects of the case to be attended to. It was going to take time, lots of time. Fagermo was a Norwegian. He liked taking his time. Before the real grind of routine investigation set in, though, there was one more brick to be placed in position, one very important thing to be attended to.

  Dr Dougal Mackenzie lived in a handsome, white wooden house towards the top of the island. Spacious, attractive, often old farms, some of them built by profiteers from the First World War, these houses were prized by some for their style, despised by others for their draughts, their inconveniences, the expense of their upkeep. Like most of the old wooden houses in Tromsø, they were in daily risk of burning down, either through faulty wiring or at the hands of the Town Council’s official pyromaniac. But they were stylish, satisfying places to live in for people with the means to maintain them. Fagermo noted as he walked up the drive a man odd-jobbing around the well-shrubbed garden who was not Dougal Mackenzie. The snow lay now, in this first week of May, only in odd, obstinate patches in shady corners. Spring was beginning its long, flirtatious love-affair with the people of Tromsø.

  Fagermo’s ring on the door-bell was the signal for excited little whines and yelps on the other side, and–when the door was opened–for a doggy onrush, indiscriminate shows of friendliness, jumpings up and attempts to lick his face. After this, Jingle departed down the path to inspect the course of Fagermo’s footprints and do a routine check around the murkier parts of the garden–for all the world as if he were a police constable.

  Dougal Mackenzie seemed used to taking second place to his dog at the moment of opening his door. He appeared to take Fagermo’s visit equably, but his eyebrows were raised quizzically when he spoke.

  ‘Well, Inspector, what can I do for you?’ He held the door as if uncertain whether to invite him in or not.

  ‘Could we have a chat for a little, do you think?’

  ‘By all means.’ Mackenzie–smiling and friendly, and quite unlike Sidsel Korvald in his reception of a police visit–opened the door wide and ushered him into the house, pausing only to call Jingle in from a distant lilac bush, and then make futile attempts to persuade him on to his chair.

  The sitting-room was pleasantly furnished in a modern style of comfort which did not clash too obtrusively with the traditional air of the house. English newspapers littered the side tables, and dotted around other spaces in the room were files, open books, and what looked like drafts of examination papers. It was the house of a busy, untidy academic.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ said Dougal Mackenzie. ‘Bit of a mess, I’m afraid. My wife is sick.’

  ‘Oh dear–anything serious?’

  ‘Not really. Finds it difficult to adapt, you know. Had to have a spell in hospital in February. I’ve packed her off to Scotland for a month or two. Should set her up.’

  Fagermo had been in Scotland, and had his own opinions of what a couple of months in that country in springtime would do to a person, but he held his peace. He knew that some foreigners, and many Norwegians too, did find it difficult to adapt to the darkness of a Northern winter, particularly in their second or third year.

  ‘That’s sad,’ h
e said. ‘I hope she perks up.’

  ‘Oh, these things–’ said Mackenzie, flapping his hand vaguely towards an armchair unencumbered with papers or files. ‘Luckily I’m used to looking after myself.’

  ‘Oh yes–when you’ve been living abroad, I suppose.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mackenzie. He said it with an American intonation: That’s right. ‘What was it you wanted to see me about? It’s a long time now since I found the body. I don’t suppose there’s anything new I can add.’

  ‘No, no–probably not. No, I’m really consulting you in your official capacity.’

  ‘What do you mean? As an academic?’

  ‘Exactly. You see, I’m a pretty unscientific person. A bit of a disadvantage these days for a policeman: mostly when we solve a crime it’s the boffins who do the lion’s share of the detection. So I trail along with the good old human factor. And when you said you were a marine geologist I didn’t immediately connect you with oil.’

  ‘Really?’ said Mackenzie, an open smile spreading over his plump, pink face. ‘Lots of other things as well, of course, but to be sure oil is among them–especially up here. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize the name didn’t mean anything to you, otherwise I’d have said something when we talked about oil in the Cardinal’s Hat the other week. You know how it is: I just didn’t want –’

  ‘To teach your grandmother to suck eggs, isn’t that the English expression? No, I quite see. My own fault entirely. But it might mean that you can help me a lot: fill me in on the background. I’ve had a lot of help from the Continental Shelf people down in Trondheim, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Oh, yes–some first-rate people down there. And of course he’d worked there–hadn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he had, actually. But there are some other things I thought you were probably the best person to come to for. For example, he’d worked, as you say, on boats with the Continental Shelf research people. Collecting data, and so on–most of it done electronically, with pretty sophisticated equipment. How much do you think all that data they collected would have meant to a chap like that–a chap with a respectable but fairly ordinary education?’