Death in a Cold Climate

by Robert Barnard

  ‘But from your point of view it’s frustrating that it’s so difficult to get proof, I should think?’

  ‘Very frustrating. But I’ll go on with those little cobwebs of suggestions. When we look at you and your lifestyle, we can’t help but wonder, sir. It’s not many academics can afford these old wooden houses, particularly one as large and handsome as this. It’s one of the best specimens in Tromsø. Then, you’ve got a large Swedish car, and more recently you’ve acquired a boat. Somehow all this takes you just that bit out of the academic rut as far as life-style is concerned–it’s more the very prosperous doctors and lawyers, or the really successful businessmen who run to houses like this, to boats the size of yours.’

  ‘Of course, you know nothing about my personal background, about my family, and so on.’

  ‘I will, sir, I will. Did you inherit money? Did you make a lot when you were with oil, and did you save it? I’ll be looking at all that. I’ll be looking at your bank accounts–not your Norwegian ones: those are too easy, too open to inspection. But somehow or other I’ll have to get a look at your British ones, possibly an American one, a continental one? It won’t be easy. Perhaps it will be impossible. But I’ve set things in motion already, and I think in the long term I’ll get results.’

  There was a silence as Dougal Mackenzie contemplated, still with a slight, thin smile on his lips, the long term opening up before him. His dog, Jingle, was now resting his head on his lap, seeming pleased with the restfulness of the conversation.

  ‘You haven’t explained,’ said Dr Mackenzie at last, ‘why I should kill this boy. Does your little trip into fantasy not include motivation? I should have thought it was the last thing I’d want to do if I was using him to make money out of all and sundry.’

  ‘I think that’s quite easy, if you take in the human factor. I think you were two of a mind. Like you, Martin Forsyth could never get enough. You used him. I expect you despised him. You thought that because he had no academic background he was stupid, that he would be an easy tool. But Martin Forsyth was nobody’s tool. And he wasn’t stupid, though he was very, very unwise. You both slipped up on the human factor: if you had underestimated him, he certainly underestimated you. I think quite early on in the game he realized that he was being used; that provided he could make contacts higher up he could feed the information direct to the various potential customers, without having you as middleman, since it could be interpreted at base there. But above all he realized that now you’d entered into this arrangement with him, you’d put yourself in his power. It’s something middle-class people almost always forget.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘That if you use someone like Martin Forsyth, you’re using someone who has nothing to lose–no stable job, no “respectability”, no reputation. Whereas someone like you, sir, has all of those things, and doesn’t want to lose them. It puts you in his power.’

  ‘I should have thought an academic these days was one of the most generally despised members of the community,’ said Dougal Mackenzie, his smile broader than ever.

  ‘Ah–that’s just your little academic joke. In fact, an academic has an almost impregnable position. Perhaps that’s what attracted you, after serving with the oil companies. You’re virtually impossible to sack, however incompetent. You’re actually looked up to by a lot of people, at least here in Norway: it’s very much a “status” job, and in a country with no aristocracy, it’s the people in the status jobs who are the cream of the cream. It’s something you people in the university come to take for granted. I’ve heard a left-wing academic complain bitterly that when he went to jail for drunken driving he was put in with common criminals. He thought he could shelter behind some impregnable bourgeois fortress. No, the fact is that you had everything to lose, and Forsyth had nothing.’

  ‘You’re saying, if I understand you right, that he blackmailed me. No doubt you hope my bank account will bear this out too.’

  ‘Possibly it will. More probably not. Because I should think this was just the beginning. He can’t have been feeding you information for many months, and he’d need a really good hold over you. And, as for you, you’d realize as soon as the first hint of blackmail was made that this was something that could go on for ever. I think the sequence was this: Forsyth began with oblique approaches, you spotted his game from the beginning, and made an appointment in Isbjørnvei to talk things over.’

  ‘And there killed him?’

  ‘Yes. I think he came up here a day or two early, to spy out the land and think things over. I don’t know what he’d decided on when he went to the appointment, but I guess he was hardly in the door before you killed him, quickly and quietly.’

  ‘I see–the blood in the vindfang. You’re building an awful lot on very little, Inspector.’ ‘I know, I know,’ said Fagermo. ‘I’m telling you my thoughts, not making out a case. I’m just at the beginning. There’s going to be months of rummaging around after proofs. Now–as I say, I take it you hit him hard as he was turning to take his coat off in the hall, and that he fell backwards into the vindfang–hence the bloody mark. Then I think you pulled him into the hall or one of the downstairs rooms and stripped his clothes off.’

  ‘To hinder identification, I suppose?’

  ‘Of course. That was very important. There’s one interesting thing there. You stripped off not just his clothes, but also his ring. That must have been difficult to get off: it was tight, and left a deep ridge. A nasty, sick-making process, I think, for someone who wasn’t a natural murderer. I’ve been mentioning rings to a lot of people, on the assumption that a once-off murderer would remember that most of all. I sensed a reaction when I mentioned it in the Cardinal’s Hat, and I fancy it was you who reacted. You hadn’t banked on the ring.’

  ‘Hadn’t banked on it?’

  ‘I mean that not many ordinary young men in Britain wear rings. You hadn’t expected it. But he was engaged–sort of–to a Norwegian girl, and she did what any Norwegian girl would do: she bought him a ring. And so you had to tug and tug to get it off. And you remembered that in the Cardinal’s Hat. I think you are remembering it now.’

  A flicker of emotion had passed over Dougal Mackenzie’s face. He said quickly, ‘And so I went and buried him in the snow, only to decide to discover him there three months later.’

  ‘Well, oddly enough, and as it turned out–yes.’

  ‘I’ve heard of murderers revisiting the scene of the crime, but other than Burke and Hare I’ve not heard of them burying the body and then enthusiastically digging it up again. It sounds more like my dog than me.’

  Jingle looked up at the mention of his kind, and tentatively wagged his tail.

  ‘Told like that it sounds absurd,’ said Fagermo confidently. ‘But what you’re describing is what happened, not what you wanted to happen. Things didn’t pan out as you expected on that occasion. As I say, I think the murder was a hurriedly planned affair. A quick response to a dangerous threat. You stripped the body of all identifying marks, and then–at night, probably–you took it a little way up in the mountains away from the houses and there buried it. It was snowing in any case. It must have been an easy job. But later I imagine you regretted it. Especially when that paragraph appeared in the papers about the boy missing from the Alfheim Pensjonat.’

  ‘I don’t actually read Norwegian, Inspector.’

  ‘It was a topic of common gossip, especially among the British community. And when that came up, you realized there was a real danger if the body was discovered of its being identified; and if that happened, all sorts of connections might be made. Whereas if the body had been well weighted and thrown in the fjord, the chances are it would never have been found–or if it had been, it would have been totally unidentifiable. Difficult to do without detection from dry land; difficult to do from either of the bridges, because people keep a look-out for suicides, and anything suspicious might have been noticed. But I think that about this time the question began to nag you: was it to
o late? And in fact it was about this time, the end of February, that you bought the boat, wasn’t it?’

  ‘How well informed you are–already, Inspector.’

  ‘I’ve checked what I can check here, sir. That was one of the things. Anyway, you bought the boat, and then one day early in March, shortly after the first thaw, you went to look at the state of the snow. I don’t think you realized how much difference even a brief thaw makes to the snow levels. You went to satisfy yourself that you could get the body up with comparative ease–it was a reconnaissance trip. But in fact he was already practically exposed.’

  ‘I could very easily have covered him over again, though.’

  ‘But in fact you had the most awful luck, didn’t you? I’ve read over the accounts again, and it’s clear how it happened. Your dog started tugging at the ear in the snow, and just at that moment Captain Horten skied down the mountain and came to the spot. And the aggravating fellow stopped to look. From then on, your plan was sunk. Horten realized there was a body there, and all you could do was participate in the discovery. A good, innocent-seeming role for a murderer, but much, much less safe than the one you had planned. We have an awful lot to thank your dog for.’

  Dougal Mackenzie’s fondling of that dog’s head was by now becoming somewhat obsessive, but he slept on, head in lap, oblivious of all except the sounds of interest to dogs–birds, barks, nature outside the window. He looked, in fact, rather pleased with himself. But then, the expression on Dougal Mackenzie’s face was hardly less complacent.

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Fagermo, ‘that basically is my case.’

  ‘Your case, Inspector?’

  ‘You’re quite right. As I said before, it’s not a case at all. Just a fantasy based on a few significant connections–Abadan, geological research for oil, number eighteen Isbjøravei, the blood in the vindfang . . . just a series of slight, suggestive indications.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been better to wait until you’d got something more substantial? At the moment what you have is hardly, I would have thought, worth mentioning.’

  ‘Right again, sir. Normally I would have got a great deal further before I even broached the subject. But then, normally any investigating I had to do would be within Norway–plodding work, painstaking details, but easy, open, accessible stuff. Now the investigation of this case is going to be very different. Heaven knows when–if ever–it’s going to be possible to do any serious work in Iran. If it proves not to be, I’m going to make contacts with other people who were working for the same company–people on your own level, the sort of people who are getting out fast now. And perhaps I shall be able to find some who were friends of Forsyth, if he had any: he kept his cards close to his chest, that boy. Then of course there are the oil firms themselves, their central offices. And of course the consultancy work you did for State Oil here, and the reasons for their thinking you had been guilty of leaking information. Then, as I said, there are your own personal records–bank accounts, and so on.’

  ‘What a long, tedious prospect seems to stretch in front of you, Inspector.’

  ‘Very long. Not tedious, I hope. I expect at the end I shall be a lot better informed about the ways of the big world.’

  ‘Very foolish of you to put me wise to what you are going to be doing before you even start, isn’t it? There’s no knowing what I mightn’t be able to have destroyed.’

  ‘Very unorthodox, certainly. But I had a reason. You see, I don’t at this moment know the extent of your activities. I will, but I don’t yet. This may be an isolated–lapse, shall we call it? Or you may have a much bigger thing going than I know about. More Martin Forsyths doing dirty work for you–picking up pocket money while you go off with the big sums. As long as you thought you were entirely in the clear in this case, that kind of thing could still be going on. And that meant this thing could happen over again.’

  ‘You think I’m some kind of mass murderer or something?’

  ‘Anyone who has killed can kill again. And in fact, they might be in danger, you might be in danger. Things might work out very differently a second time. I don’t give a hang about the grubby little spyings of the oil companies, or the Russians, or any other nation on earth. But I care about murder. Martin Forsyth may have been a contemptible little tick, but he had a right to go on breathing beyond his twenty-third year.’

  Fagermo got up, smiled at his antagonist, and began to move towards the door.

  ‘So what I’ve been saying has been in the nature of a warning. You’re being watched. All the time I’m engaged in this long, detailed investigation, you’ll be watched. You can’t take one step outside the strict path of the law without it being known. As long as you realize this, everyone will be a lot safer. I know there’s no sort of court case to be made out of a few slips of the tongue on your part: Marty for Martin; knowing he’d worked for the Continental Shelf people in Trondheim when you shouldn’t. Easy as pie to make up a story to cover that sort of lapse. But I’ll be going round the world, looking at records, talking to people who knew you during your days in big business. I’ll be talking to your colleagues here, your bank managers. I’ll be uncovering every little thing about you, down to the last detail. I’m afraid I’ll have to talk to your wife too. She was in fact in Aasgård, wasn’t she, sir, the mental hospital? Did she have her suspicions of you, perhaps? I’ll be gentle with her, but I’m afraid I’ll have to talk to her. Because there is a case to be made. And I assure you, I’m going to make it.’

  They arrived at the front door, and Dougal Mackenzie held it open with theatrical politeness and stood framed in it while Fagermo made his way down the front steps, Jingle at his feet still looking friendly and wagging his tail in ignorant good will.

  ‘I suppose the only thing to do is to wish you a pleasant time in your researches, Inspector,’ Mackenzie said, raising his voice above the traffic noises from the street below. ‘A pleasant time, not a successful one.’ He paused and went on: ‘Of course, if this were a book, what I’d say at this point would be “All right, Fagermo, you win”, or something fatuous like that. They always give in so easily in books, don’t they?’

  ‘Often in life too, Dr Mackenzie,’ said Fagermo. ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to oblige with any such cliché. So I’ll just wish you a thoroughly gruelling and frustrating next few weeks, Inspector.’

  Fagermo grinned amiably at him, and ambled off towards the front gate. But when he got there, he turned.

  ‘Of course, you’re quite right,’ he said. ‘It is a cliché from books, nothing more. But you know, it really would be better if you did just what you say. Much better–for you, your wife, for everyone. It sounds silly, but you’d be much happier in the long run.’

  He paused a moment, but his eyes met with no change in Dougal Mackenzie’s arrogant smile. With a sigh he turned on his heel and made for his car.

  CHAPTER 17

  MIDNIGHT SUN

  Early one evening, when term was over and June well advanced, Dougal Mackenzie–having pecked uninterestedly at his evening meal, and cast an eye over the newspaper headlines–put Jingle on a lead, gathered his various bowls and sources of entertainment into a plastic bag, and took him round to his neighbour’s.

  ‘It is all right, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said his neighbour, a comfortable, fat Norwegian lady in the prime of widowhood. ‘For as long as you like. Take a really good break. You’ve been looking tired lately, I said so to my daughter. It’s a long term, isn’t it, spring term? Take a good holiday. He’s always welcome here.’

  And Jingle, having extracted the maximum of dramatic pathos out of saying farewell at the gate, went wagtailing it around the garden, determined to establish for himself from the beginning a regime of the utmost permissiveness.

  Dougal Mackenzie went back home, got one or two necessaries, then got into his gleaming Volvo station-wagon and drove towards town. It sped along, with no more noise or f
riction than if it had been an arrow speeding towards some half-seen target. Dougal Mackenzie almost relaxed. A good car always made him feel good, and if it was his own good car he felt doubly good. It wasn’t often recently that he had felt so nearly free.

  He sped over the bridge, past the Arctic Cathedral, and finally left his car at the end of Anton Jakobsensvei.

  Superstitious, he said to himself.

  There were plenty of points from which to begin a climb up the mountains, but somehow it had to be here. He had never thought of anywhere else but here.

  As he took off from the road, up the path edged with stunted bushes and sturdy little trees, he neared the spot where the body of Martin Forsyth had been buried. He turned his head away. He had never offered so much as a mock-reproach to his dog about that finding of the body–a dog was a dog was a dog–but it was natural that as he went by the place his mind should play on what might have been, on what chance had done to him, on what might have happened.

  But perhaps, he thought, it would all have come out the same in the end.

  When he had managed the first stiff ascent he stopped and looked down. Parked not too far from his own car was another–anonymous, unobtrusive, but well-known to him. One man was still in the driver’s seat. Another was standing by the passenger’s door, smoking a cigarette and idly looking up. Dougal Mackenzie could just make out his thick, black, drooping moustache. He smiled, and turned his face upwards again.

  It was odd how serene he felt, in the evening air, with the sun, bright and warm, streaming down on him. Odd how untroubled, unresentful, unregretful. His mind had somehow cleaned itself out. There were no ‘if only’s now; no curses against the greed of the boy; no sad backward glances at things he himself had botched. What was done was done. By now he no longer even felt he had any control over himself. He merely walked blindly ahead to an obscure destination–unclear, but safe. He patted his pocket.