Death in a Cold Climate (14 page)

‘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 –'

‘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.

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 beer 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 . . .