Death in a Cold Climate

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Did he send you money?’

  ‘I told him not to,’ said the girl quickly. ‘So we could save. They told me I had to get maintenance for Tor from him–they went on and on. Money and the Lord, that’s all they think about. Finally I told them I couldn’t be sure he was the father . . . That made them worse, of course, but it kept them off that tack.’

  ‘It wasn’t true?’

  ‘Oh, of course it wasn’t. A great big lie. There’s never been anybody else, not since we met.’

  ‘Can you think of anything‘–Fagermo paused–‘anything unusual in his past? Perhaps something suspicious, even. Or anything that happened while he was here–perhaps a quarrel, or a fight with somebody, or something odd? Or could there have been anything connected with his family?’

  ‘I only met his family two or three times. We went to pubs on Saturday nights . . . Oh, it’s nice, looking back on it. Before I met him he’d been all over the place, as I said, and I don’t know much about that part of his life. I used to make him tell me about it–Greece, Italy, Libya–all the places he’d seen. We used to sit down near the boats at Mersea, talking about it. He’d never been in trouble in those years, I’m sure. He’d have told me. And he never made any enemies while he was here–except them, of course. And no one can stand them. I don’t think he even realized–I mean we’d be talking, or kissing, and they’d be looking at us with hell-fire and damnation in their eyes, and I just don’t think he understood. They don’t have religion much in England.’

  ‘So there’s nothing you remember about him that might suggest any sort of motive for murdering him?’

  ‘Nothing. He was just a nice, ordinary boy. Not ordinary to me, of course. But he wasn’t the type to get murdered, that I’m sure about.’

  ‘But he wanted money. You said that yourself. It’s dangerous to want to make money fast. Do you think he would have–gone along with anything shady to get it?’

  ‘He wasn’t a crook! He would have earned it! He had real talent. He always knew he’d do well, but he didn’t need to cheat or steal it.’ She paused. ‘You’re always hearing these days of people who just take off into nothing. Nothing’s heard of them for months, years, and then they come back. They’re not crooks–they just live simply.’ Fagermo didn’t tell her how expensive living simply was these days. ‘He was like that. He’d been all over, but he hadn’t done anything crooked. He was the type people liked, and he’d always come off well. He was wonderful: so cool and uninvolved. He was the most wonderful thing that will ever happen in my life.’

  Fagermo watched for a moment the traffic under the window, and avoided looking at the enthusiastic face beside him. He had his suspicions about Martin Forsyth and his two women. He thought he took the opportunity of the trip to Tromsø to cast himself off from both of them. But of that, nothing could be said. ‘What will you do now?’ he asked finally, turning back into the room.

  ‘Get out of here. I’ve been waiting–for him, you know. I always hoped he might ring. And I couldn’t trust them. I didn’t know what they would do if he came, or rang, while I wasn’t here. Now I can go, get a job, perhaps study. Something, away from here.’ She humped her little boy up higher on her arm and turned to see Fagermo to the door. He chucked the baby under the chin.

  ‘I hope he’ll grow up like his father,’ said Anne-Marie.

  CHAPTER 9

  NO PLACE

  The police at West Mersea regarded Fagermo–emanating, they had been told, from Norway–as a strange bird blown from its accustomed nesting places to land inexplicably on their unlovely marshes. When he told them, in addition, that he was from the far North of the country, from above the Arctic Circle, the information, as it sank in, led them to look at him with the slow country equivalent of curiosity. Even in this age of unaccountable and undesirable migrations, they seemed to feel, nothing like this had been seen there before.

  ‘Cold up there, is it?’ said the local police inspector at last, as they sat in the cheerless little station.

  ‘Cold–and hot sometimes, too,’ said Fagermo.

  ‘Oh yes? . . . Get a lot of snow, though, I suppose, don’t you?’

  ‘Quite a lot,’ said Fagermo, refraining from adding that it had buried one of the inspector’s fellow townsmen. He had given them no details of the case, and they had showed no curiosity about it.

  ‘We had a Norwegian girl living round here, couple of years ago,’ said the inspector, after the obligatory pause. ‘One of these au pairs’ (how he leered), ‘name of Anne-Marie.’

  ‘I was talking to her yesterday,’ said Fagermo.

  ‘Oh yes?’ said the inspector, without surprise, as if Norway to his imagining were about the size of Mersea, and folk could be expected to run into each other almost daily. ‘A bit of all right, she was.’

  ‘She wasn’t looking too happy yesterday,’ said Fagermo. ‘How did you meet her?’

  ‘Can’t recall now . . . That’s right, she used to go with your lad, with that young Forsyth. Met ’em in a pub, with his family. He likes his pint, does Jack Forsyth.’ The inspector drew his own hand across his lip, as if in anticipation.

  ‘Is that the father?’

  ‘Aye. He likes his pint, does Jack.’ The inspector thought for a bit, as if trying to find something else to say about Jack Forsyth, but he was unsuccessful. ‘If you’re ready, I’ll drive you there,’ he said, getting up and feeling for his keys.

  They drove the few hundred yards from the station to the Forsyths’ house along the boat-strewn quay, then off it towards a collection of depressingly similar houses–a junk-yard of residences put up by a speculative builder, which looked all too likely to have cleared him a packet. Very soon they would have all of the symptoms of age, with none of the dignity.

  ‘It’s that one,’ said the inspector, pointing. ‘Number seventeen. Nice little places, aren’t they? Mostly they’re retired Londoners live there–we get quite a good type, on the whole. But the Forsyths are local.’

  ‘I see,’ said Fagermo, mentally shutting out the hideous estate. ‘Did you ever have any trouble with the Forsyth boy?’

  ‘No–there wasn’t any trouble from him, that I remember. Wish I could say the same for all the young ’uns round here. All these university students . . . bloody young thugs, most of them. But the Forsyth boy never settled down here, as I remember. He’d be away for a period, then back again for a bit, then suddenly he’d take off. Other than that, we never had any trouble with him.’

  ‘Do the parents know?’

  ‘Oh yes, they know.’

  ‘Did they seem surprised?’

  The inspector looked at him in his slow, country way, and scratched his head. ‘Can’t rightly say,’ he drawled meditatively. ‘You better talk to them yourself.’

  As Fagermo went up the path, through a weedy failure of a garden, he was aware by some sixth sense of inspection from behind the lace curtains of the living-room. Mersea was not so different, after all, from any small Norwegian town, he thought. The curtains fell back into position, and a decorous interval passed between his ring and the opening of the door.

  Standing in the opening was a fleshy woman of fifty or so, with tinted auburn hair, carefully made-up face, and hard, gimlet-sharp eyes. She wore a navy Crimplene costume, which seemed odd wear for half past five in the evening. Fagermo wondered if she was going out, if this was in anticipation of his visit, or if it was put on as an attempt at half mourning. It must have been some vague mental image of the last, he decided, because the woman was clearly very unsure how to behave: most notably, she was not sure what she ought to do with her face, though finally she decided she might smile.

  ‘Oh hello-o-o,’ she said, in a voice with a sharp country edge like a jagged scythe. ‘They told me you’d be coming. Would you like to come in?’

  She stood aside, and Fagermo stepped into the hall. She looked up and down the street, and then closed the door and led the way towards the living-room. ‘You’re from Norway, aren�
��t you?’ she said. ‘That’s nice. I’ve heard it’s very nice there.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fagermo. ‘It’s very nice.’

  ‘I’ve heard the countryside is lovely. Mrs Nethercoat down the road went there before it got so dear going abroad, and she said Bergen was lovely.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fagermo. ‘It’s very lovely.’

  They had got themselves to the living-room, and Mrs Forsyth’s uncertainty seemed to increase. Some show of emotion seemed to be called for, but she seemed to have no idea of what was appropriate. Her notion of tragedy seemed to date back to Joan Crawford in a ’forties melodrama, and she gave a convulsive gulp, her hand on her bosom. Then, even she finding this unconvincing, she gave up and contented herself with a careful dab at her eyes.

  ‘Well,’ she said, looking at the black-stained handkerchief, ‘doesn’t do to give way, does it? Will you sit down, Mr –?’

  ‘Fagermo.’

  ‘Oh . . . ’

  They sat down on two soft, unsteady-looking easy chairs. Tentatively the two of them looked at each other appraisingly. Mrs Forsyth seemed to like what she saw. Fagermo, covertly, did not.

  ‘This must have been a great shock to you,’ he said, giving her a cue to display what feelings she had.

  ‘Oh, it has,’ she said, stretching down towards her heart for an emotion she did not feel. ‘Awful. When they came and told me this morning, I just didn’t know what to say!’

  Fagermo could believe it. He said: ‘It was a complete surprise to you?’

  ‘Well, it was. Of course it was.’ She blinked a dry eye. ‘I mean we heard from him only–well, let’s see, I suppose it would be about last autumn, or not later than summer, anyway. We had a card from him, ever so pretty, one of your towns over there. So of course we didn’t think for a moment there was anything wrong . . . ’

  ‘He hadn’t written to you more recently than that, I suppose–at Christmas, for example?’

  ‘Well, no. But of course Christmas is so busy we didn’t think anything of it, you know. We’ve got the other little girl, you see, and it’s all go then. He wasn’t a great writer–we none of us are in this family. Awful when you think of the amount of money they spend on education, isn’t it?’

  ‘So usually when he was away, you just got the odd card, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Sometimes–you know, when he was away before, and went all over the place–we’d get cards and I wouldn’t know where they were from. I kept meaning to look them up, but we haven’t got an up-to-date atlas.’

  She spoke as if towns made a habit of moving restlessly about the world, and she looked at Fagermo as if to establish a sort of intimacy of self-satisfied ignorance. He found her still, as he had from the beginning, oddly repellent.

  ‘You don’t have any of the cards, do you?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t. I expect I threw them away, or gave them to some kiddy or other. They’re always doing these projects in school these days, aren’t they? My little girl or one of her friends is always on at me for this, that, or the other.’

  ‘Do you remember any of the places they came from?’

  ‘Well –’ it was clearly a major effort–‘I think one of them was from Italy. Tripoli or some such town . . . Then there was a town with a funny name–like Aberfan or something, but that’s where the kiddies died, isn’t it, wasn’t it awful? and this one was foreign, I knew from the stamp . . . Anyway, there weren’t many cards, no more than two or three to the best of my recollection. And then suddenly he’d turn up on the doorstep, large as life.’

  ‘So you’d say he was a restless boy?’

  ‘Well, they are, aren’t they? Young people. I mean, it wasn’t like that when we were young, was it? ’Course, there was the war, so people had to stay put, but I don’t think we wanted to go traipsing off to these places the way they do now. I know I didn’t.’

  ‘But he did?’

  ‘Well, he must have, mustn’t he?’

  Fagermo was beginning to find this a very strange conversation indeed. As soon as he asked a question about her son, Mrs Forsyth seemed to want to generalize out, to say what ‘they’ did these days, or to talk about herself–anything, in fact, except talk about her son and his habits. Could it be, Fagermo wondered, that she knew practically nothing about her own son, and had a faint sense of embarrassment at her own blankness?

  ‘You never tried to stop him, though, going off to these “foreign parts”?’ he asked.

  ‘Fat lot of use it would have been if I had,’ she said shortly. Then, thinking she might have offended him, she added: ‘Not that I’ve anything against foreign countries, of course, and anyway Norway’s not really foreign, is it?’

  ‘Not for me,’ said Fagermo, and put on a charming smile he usually reserved for worthier recipients. He decided to take the conversation back to an earlier period, when it might be thought she would have been more aware of her son and his doings. He said: ‘Had your son been unsettled earlier–when he was at school, for example?’

  ‘Well . . . I wouldn’t say that, no. We gave him a very good education . . . ’

  ‘You mean he went to private school?’

  ‘Oh no, no. He went to the Grammar School at Colchester. We’ve still got one, you know.’ Her bosom swelled with inexplicable pride.

  ‘Does that mean he won a scholarship?’

  ‘Well, sort of: he got through his eleven-plus. He was never one of the really bright ones: they put him in Science. But he always did quite well, really. We let him stay on till he was sixteen, and he got his GCE.’

  Fagermo had heard the expression ‘Big Deal’, and thought it might be an appropriate reaction to that ‘let him stay on’. He asked: ‘Was he ever in trouble–girls, for example?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Of course they know so much these days, don’t they? Makes you wonder sometimes–the things they come out with. It must be the telly, or some of these set books they read in school. My father would have walloped me, I know that, if he thought I knew half what these youngsters know today. But I don’t think Martin was ever in what you’d call trouble.’

  ‘Did he get on with his father?’

  ‘Well . . . I don’t know what to say, really. They never didn’t get on, if you know what I mean . . . ’

  ‘No rows?’

  ‘Oh, rows . . . Well, Jack would shout at him now and then, as is only natural, and he’d swear back, but there was nothing . . . nothing nasty about it. There wasn’t much between them at all, really, if you know what I mean. They both went their own ways.’

  Fagermo had a sudden vision of this home as an bare prison, full of self-contained cells–or as a frozen waste of non feeling. Somehow it seemed pointless to continue the conversation, so little did the woman seem to know of what her son was, or thought, or did. He stirred in his chair, preparatory to leaving.

  ‘Did you know your son’s Norwegian girl-friend, Anne-Marie Lausund?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yes. Ever so nice. So quiet-spoken and that. I do think Norwegians are nice.’ She looked at him invitingly, and was disappointed in his clear blue gaze in return. She chattered on, apparently quite happy to get off the subject of her son. ‘Oh yes, we knew her quite well. She came out with us a couple of times, perhaps three. We used to drive over to the Bull at Thaxted, I remember, ever such a nice pub, lots of university people use it, and professional people, and there’s ever such a nice atmosphere on Saturday nights. Yes, we had some lovely evenings there. She was such a nice little thing, and spoke lovely English–ever so attractive.’

  ‘She has a baby now.’ She looked at him blankly, and Fagermo added: ‘Your son’s.’

  At the thought of grandmotherhood an unconcealable spasm of distaste crossed her face.

  ‘I hope she’s not expecting us to do anything about it. We’re not well off, and we’ve got more than enough on our plate as it is. And I mean, you can’t prove that sort of thing, can you?’

  ‘She’s not expecting anything
from anybody. I just thought you might be interested.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, it’s not something anyone’d be proud of, is it? . . . I don’t know as I’d want it known.’

  ‘There’s no reason why it should be.’ They reached the front door, and Fagermo asked: ‘Will your husband be in later in the evening?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. He’s on the boats, you know. He’ll probably be down at the Yachtsman at seven or half past.’

  And at half past seven he was, indeed, in the Yachtsman. He was sitting at a table with a group of his pals, engaged in an intense discussion over a newspaper, folded over to the racing results. The landlord pointed him out, and Fagermo took a pint of (he thought) typically weak English beer over to the table, and made himself known. The table fell silent at his name, and he realized that Jack Forsyth had certainly heard the news, and so had his pals.

  Forsyth cleared his throat with embarrassment, and then got up and shuffled off with Fagermo to another table, where he sat down and contemplated his beer. His eyes were wetter than his wife’s, but not with grief. He searched his mind for something to say, and then finally came out with: ‘Rotten thing, this.’

  And for the rest of the ten minutes Fagermo stayed, he got out of him nothing more meaningful than that. As he left, he saw him scuttling back to his mates, eager to resume the business of living.

  CHAPTER 10

  WORK AND PLAY

  On the way back from England Fagermo stopped off again in Trondheim, and took a taxi to the Continental Shelf Research Institute, where Forsyth had worked. It was a tubular building on the outskirts of the town, like a hideous white worm, curiously involuted. Nobody much seemed to be around, or to know where anybody else was, but finally he found himself talking to Gunnar Meisal, a large man with a genial, chinny face that seemed to have been carved out of sandstone by an inexpert hand. He at least had known Forsyth–remembered him from several North Sea expeditions.