Death in a Cold Climate

by Robert Barnard

  Really, it wasn’t the end that was unclear, but the beginning. When, where, had it all begun? Not at school, surely. He remembered himself as a thin, sickly schoolboy, inclined to priggishness and goody-goody friends. Surely that boy was not father to this man? He never remembered any fast bits of schoolboy commerce, any sharp cutting of corners. He wouldn’t have dared.

  University had liberated him from the priggishness, but he didn’t remember dreaming of luxury, of the quick buck dubiously acquired. Perhaps it was the grinding three years afterwards, at Hull, as a research student. Prolonged penny-pinching maketh the heart sick.

  But whenever it was, by the time he had come to work at Abadan it was there–gnawing, writhing inside him. A little worm of envy, of twisted ambition. Because as soon as he had met Martin Forsyth he had recognized him as a fellow, spotted the same disease in him. They had stood there one day, in the overwhelming morning heat in the dusty centre of the oil processing works–the thin, tough boy with the hard eyes and the workman’s hands, and the pot-bellied executive, haltingly acquiring the manners of his middle-rank–and like had spoken to like, greed to greed. Dougal Mackenzie had not liked Martin Forsyth. He had recognized him.

  After that they had never spoken often. They weren’t, in the company structure, in the same class by a long chalk, and habit and convention set all sorts of barriers and gulfs between the minutely distinguishable grades. Nevertheless, he had once invited him home for a drink. He remembered him sitting there, making small-talk with off-hand confidence to him and his wife, yet all the time his eyes darting round the various objects in the room that bespoke Mackenzie’s status, almost costing the furniture. His wife had said when he left that she thought him unlikeable, and he had agreed. It was true. He had not liked him. He had recognized him.

  He paused half-way up the mountain. The bush and undergrowth around the path had given way momentarily to more open country, sloping green down to open fields, and presenting a vista of great glory. Below him, island, town, mainland and fjord came together to form a jigsaw more intricate and beautiful than human mind could devise, chamber music in green and white and gold. A valedictory spread.

  In the very far distance he could see his own car, and the car that had been parked nearby. Now there was nobody standing beside it. Was he now inside? or had he begun to climb? Dougal Mackenzie smiled faintly, and patted his jacket pocket.

  Funny, that was the last thing he remembered Forsyth doing. He was just about to take his anorak off, and patted his pocket as he did so. The papers were there–the last lot of data from the survey boat, the bone that was to be dangled before his eyes, the sweetener of the coming blackmail. He had got the papers easily enough, after he had hit him. After he had dragged him back into the hall. And before he had begun the grisly job of stripping the body–the job that had ended with his pulling, dragging like a maniac at his ring. Even now the sweat on his forehead was not from the heat of the sun.

  That had been the last day of his peace. Before that the worm born in the black liquid wealth of Abadan had given him many good days. He had enjoyed his first months in Tromsø, settling into a stable, safe job, and the moderate luxury of a beautiful house, money to buy good Scandinavian furniture, a quiet, powerful car, the knowledge that his means could encompass most of what he could want, with ease. He had thought it a kindly worm. His wife, he thought, had been happy too those months.

  But ‘things’ had turned against him. The safeness, the stability had been threatened before the first year was out. The worm had seemed less kindly, and had gone on gnawing. When the major threat came out into the open he had acted fast to preserve his safety, but he had preserved nothing. Even in those first weeks after the murder, nothing had been quite the same. His wife had suspected–suspected something. She had looked at him in a new way. She had known what Martin Forsyth was. Now she knew what he, her husband, had become.

  One last half-hour’s climb through steep terrain overgrown with bushes and growths which covered the path and he emerged at last on the uplands. He sat down for a minute on a ledge and got his breath back, but-restless-he got up almost at once and began walking again. The plateau stretched in rolling greens and browns, with the night sun streaming upon it and dancing in the occasional patch of water. He was in the open. He was free.

  It was freedom, in fact, that he had lost. It was not only his conscience that the worm had eaten away, it was his freedom. Ringing him round over these last years with new fears, new unspeakable secrets, new hindrances to action. That was why, unconsciously, he had known it had to be up here–on the top of a glorious world, free of shackles and guilts. Just to have the illusion again for a few hours.

  Because Fagermo had been wrong. It would not have been better to give up then, throw down the cards, admit it all. It would have been infinitely worse. Of course these last few weeks had been terrible, feeling the net tighten, every facet of his life under scrutiny. Yesterday had been the last straw, when he knew the inspector had been talking for hours about him with his own colleagues.

  But there was a way of cutting the net. He knew that once his safe, respectable existence had been shattered there was no putting it together again. He had sometimes contemplated the careers of exposed civil servants, local councillors, Members of Parliament, whose financial malpractices had been revealed and prosecuted. What could they be when they emerged from jail but shifty, pathetic shells of people? Fagermo’s way was no way. It led only to that. And there was something better open to him.

  And as he wandered over the winding paths, around mounds and crags with occasional views, tantalizing, of distant islands looming over the fjord, he experienced again that subtle sense of freedom, that illusion of infinite possibilities.

  Until suddenly, in the glare of midnight, he realized he was not alone. There in the distance, now visible, now hidden by the terrain, was a dark, bulky figure, watching him, following. His hours of freedom were over.

  There was no regret. Mackenzie reached in his pocket, fondled the gun for a brief moment, then–hidden for a moment from his observer–carefully took it out. Experimentally he opened his mouth. The shot, when it came, was not loud–sounded indeed irrelevant in this natural vastness, a petty thing measured against the blaring trumpets of the sun.

  by the same author

  DEATH OF A MYSTERY WRITER

  DEATH OF A LITERARY WIDOW

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  Copyright © 1980 Robert Barnard

  First U.S. edition, 1981

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Barnard, Robert.

  Death in a cold climate.

  I. Title.

  PR6052.A665D4 1981 823′.914 80-20979

  ISBN 0-684-16795-6

  Copyright under the Berne Convention.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Charles Scribner.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4767-1627-5 (eBook)