Special Dynamic

by Special Dynamic (retail) (epub)

  And what could he, Ollie Lyle, do to protect any of them, if the worst came to the worst? Throw snowballs?

  Small-talk was still in progress. Ollie waiting, barely hearing it, wanting to talk about things that mattered: and there were a few … The pause came, finally, and he moved in with ‘Sophie, I suppose your department had the report about the Finn soldiers they’ve found murdered?’

  ‘Oh.’ Her expression changed. ‘Yes. We did … I see, you’ve told them?’

  Sutherland said, frowning, ‘We could discuss it later, maybe.’

  ‘We must.’ She nodded. ‘I was not expecting you to have heard of it so soon.‘ Glancing round, seeing who else might be in earshot. ‘We certainly do have to discuss it. There are some details that reached us only this morning — rather clinical detail, if that‘s the word?’

  Her English was already less stilted, he noticed, just from the last ten minutes’ use of it … Sutherland said, ‘If it is the word, all the more reason to leave it until we’ve finished our meal. OK?’

  ‘Sure.’ Ollie nodded. ‘The issue that’s bothering me, though — well, correct me if you disagree, Sophie, but I’d imagine those Finns would have been asking the sort of questions that Carl will be asking. Gus pointed out, a short while ago, that the professor’s book has established him as an ally of the Lapp people, so that he wouldn‘t be in any similar danger, but—’

  ‘Excuse me.‘ She cut in. ‘That’s assuming the killers were Sami people.‘

  ‘Right.’

  It was the flaw he’d seen too, in Stenberg’s theory, and he’d also noticed the double-think in Sutherland’s acceptance of it, Sutherland refusing to see the Lapps as instigators of violence but still accepting that being their champion might guarantee his safety. He told her, ‘Carl has doubts of that, I mean on the likelihood of Sami involvement. Would you agree with him?’

  ‘It comes into what I have to tell you later.’

  ‘Ah … So meanwhile I’ll air my own problem. I’m supposed to be responsible for this expedition’s safety. At least, that’s what they hired me for.’ Sutherland moved to interrupt him, but he went on, ‘And I’m told those three Finns were armed. It couldn’t have helped them much, but you’d have thought it should have, and the point is I am not armed. It bothers me, frankly.’

  ‘Yes. I understand your concern.’ She’d nodded, taking the point seriously. He was surprised — having expected her, like Jarvis, to take the view that he was being unnecessarily alarmist. Sutherland also showed surprise, and Sophie added, ‘Before we received the Helsinki report I probably would not have agreed, but with the circumstances as they appear to be …’ She shrugged, left the sentence unfinished, sipping her glass of wine.

  ‘Is there any chance you could help — to get me a firearm licence, hunting permit, whatever?’

  ‘I can make enquiries. Tomorrow we might go to the Lensmannen.’

  ‘Well, that’d be marvellous …’

  ‘Ollie.’ Sutherland turned to him. ‘Let me relieve your anxieties a little. What I was looking for was back-up of a rather more general nature. Escort, sure, in a sense, but I certainly never asked for an armed guard, for Pete’s sake. For instance, we don’t want to get lost out there — and you’d be good with a map, right? Also I’d hoped you’d handle the driving, or most of it. Especially when my first idea was to get hold of some kind of tracked over-snow vehicle, which I was told you’d be familiar with — although I’ve learnt since then that we’re OK on wheels until such times as we may want to leave the main highways. But I’d be relying on your advice in facing up to adverse climatic conditions, problems of terrain when we’re off the beaten tracks, all that stuff. I may as well explain, while I’m at this rostrum so to speak, that it’s not my intention to spend much time in the wilds, mainly to handle outlying places by short excursions from the two main centres. Most of the Sami population of Finnmark is around Kautokeino and Karasjok, after all. We’ll take Kautokeino first, since that’s the nearest, hole up there in some degree of comfort—’

  ‘At the turisthotell?’

  ‘Right, Sophie. No need to starve or freeze when we don’t have to.’

  ‘But some fieldwork we’ll be doing on skis?’

  ‘Some, sure …’

  ‘It’s what I love most.’ Her eyes shone with enthusiasm. ‘To cross the open vidda on skis, you know?’ Glancing from Ollie’s smile to Stenberg’s interest … ‘In winter down there, Gus, not so many people ever see it, but my God, it is fantastic … One winter before I have been there, camping and stopping some places with Sami people.’

  ‘D’you talk Lappish?’

  ‘Oh, yes, that is how I got the job I have … But the scenery, the great distances and the silence — it’s another world …’

  *

  She began — when the meal was finished, coffee on the table: ‘We should talk about this horrible event in Finland now, do you think?’ Ollie lit her cigarette for her, then his own. Sutherland was cutting a cigar, and Gus didn’t smoke. Ollie had given it up years earlier but since the malfunction of that parachute he’d decided he might as well start again. Sophie asked them, ‘I suppose you know the soldiers were stabbed in the way Sami mountain people have been used to killing reindeer?’

  ‘Except the leader had also been shot, or speared, possibly before he was stabbed.’

  ‘Yes.’ She frowned. ‘Professor — in your research work, did you ever read that the reindeer Samis in southern Lappland used a double stab?’

  ‘My God, yes!’ Sutherland snapped his fingers. ‘I’d forgotten that! You’re damn right, though — a paralysing blow first!’

  ‘And why then would a Sami from that part, if he wished to make a public display of these murders, make a wrong display?’

  ‘He wouldn’t, would he.’

  ‘So the murderer was ignorant of this. All right, it does not prove it was not Samis who did it, because there are so many who have forgotten the old ways. As of course you know well, professor. But another detail now. In the traditional manner of slaughtering, north or south it makes no difference, the custom was to leave the knife in the heart — to stop the outflow of blood, save it for, well, various purposes. But there would always be some bleeding, of course. In the place where these bodies were found there was none at all, not in the bodies and not in the snow. Blood is easy to see in snow, you know?’

  Ollie pointed out that according to his own informant there’d been heavy snowfalls in that area recently, so surely blood traces would have been covered.

  ‘There had been snowfalls, as always at this time of year, but the bodies themselves were not buried by it so deep they could not be found. Huh? And in any case, you scrape away the top layers and if you continue, removing layer by layer, you come to it. Maybe stained ice by that time because of the compression of more weight on top, but whether snow or ice the bright colour remains until there is a thaw. And my information is there was not one spot of staining in that area. So it is beyond doubt that the bodies were carried there, and what this tells us is simply that the murders could have been committed anywhere.’

  ‘Even well up to the north. Norwegian side of the border even.’

  Stenberg had said it. Sophie shrugged: ‘Or east, or west.’

  ‘So what positive conclusions are you drawing from all this?’

  ‘Really only one, Ollie — that it was not done on that spot. And if it had been done nearby, by Samis from that area, maybe it would have been the double stab. So we might guess the killing was done some distance away, and perhaps it was not Sami people who have done it. Why would they so advertise it? Only if it was to seem like a Sami crime would the killers do this. Do you agree, Carl?’

  ‘Yeah. I do.’ Sutherland was back in his own convictions. ‘In any event, it’s not in character, not in the Sami character in this day and age.’

  Ollie asked her, ‘Did you discuss these conclusions in Oslo?’

  ‘Yes. There was a meeting, before I left th
ere.’

  ‘So your people are aware of the danger but they still let you come?’

  ‘We do not think there would be any immediate danger to us here in Norway, Ollie. There could be, of course, we could be quite wrong, but we think if there is danger it must be in the future. What I am trying to say — well, the bomb, that was dreadful, but only one piece of a pattern maybe. They had the rioting in Norrbotten, and afterwards rumours of trouble all over Lappland. Such rumours gain strength and multiply since the Tromsø bomb, of course. Now, these Finns are murdered. And so on. What must follow, if such things continue, is backlash, Norwegian people looking at Samis as at enemies. So then maybe Samis are insulted, attacked even, there might be discrimination in employment or in trading, and so on. Then the Sami are under pressure and it could seem to be a fact, to the world outside, that they are being — persecuted… So, they would have support — for nothing, a situation that is completely artificial — but it’s a vicious circle, huh, where would it end?’

  ‘That scenario, Sophie—’ Sutherland shifted uncomfortably on his chair ‘— is realistic enough to scare me.’

  ‘But you see, if it is the scenario, it must be what someone wants to bring about. It would have been set in motion deliberately, there would have to be some — how do you say, some impulse-’

  ‘Some dynamic behind it.’ Stenberg nodded. ‘So who’d stand to gain?’

  She looked at him. ‘There is a question, Gus.’

  ‘I’d say there’s a rather obvious answer to it, too.’ Ollie shrugged. ‘But one bomb was in Murmansk, wasn’t it?’

  Stenberg said, ‘So we were told.’

  There was a silence, then, some thinking going on. Ollie broke it finally, suggesting to Sophie, ‘If it would make getting a permit any easier, I’d settle for a shotgun.’

  3

  Thirty-six hours later they were on the road south to Kautokeino. The sky was clear, there’d been a brilliant, orange-glowing sunrise and it promised to be a lovely day: with, of course, a bitingly low ground temperature to match. Ollie was at the wheel with Gus Stenberg beside him and the other two behind.

  Southward out of Alta the road ran downhill into the whitened valley, past signs advertising summer camping grounds and through open snowfields with hay-racks visible here and there, and was then joined by the river, the Altaelva. Where the river exited to the fjord was the site of the airport, at Elvebakken, where yesterday after breakfast Sophie had steered him to the Lensmannen, sheriff’s office, to see about applying for a hunting licence. A lot of talking and a long telephone call to Oslo had seemed to achieve the desired result, but Ollie thought it might have been Sophie’s charm that had counted most. She might have pulled some rank, too; he had a suspicion that she might be quite high-powered in whatever department it was, in the capital. Anyway, he’d been issued with a licence. Armed with it, they’d taken the local bus back from Elvebakken to Bossekop, to the sports shop where he’d already decided on an AYA 12-bore ejector that was less ridiculously expensive than some of the other guns. One of the advantages of a shotgun — in preference to a sporting rifle, which would have been the alternative — was that it came apart so easily, for stowage purposes, and could be put together again in two seconds. He’d bought fifty cartridges, Remington number 4 shot.

  The road was entering a gorge, with the ice-bound river on the left and a ridge behind it dark with fir trees. There was a steep rise on the other side as well, as high as a thousand feet above road and riverbed. Dipping into the gorge, they lost the sun, plunging into half-light with the glow above them, down here only hazily reflected in the sheen of ice. Scrubby trees lacking either enough soil or enough light, or both… In Karasjok, Sutherland was telling Sophie, there was one man in particular, a Sami, whom he had to see and from whom he was counting on a lot of help. He was known as Isak — just that one name; he was a writer on Sami culture and history and also famous as a yoik artist.

  ‘Maybe you’d know of him?’

  ‘I read the two silly books he wrote.’

  ‘Oh!’ Sutherland chuckled, rather artificially. ‘Well, I grant you some of his contentions may be a little — naive… And OK, he tends to over-simplify. But he has a good brain, you know. And he gave me a lot of help, last time I was here. And there was nothing in it for him, either, I can tell you; he was simply generous enough to help.’

  ‘I think you quoted from his writings?’

  ‘Sure, I did, but—’

  ‘If he’s going to be of use to you again — well, fine…’

  There was a silence. Ollie could just about hear Sophie suppressing her real feelings about this Lapp. She added diplomatically, after a while, ‘As a yoik performer Isak is considered to be exceptional. Have you heard him?’

  ‘No, as it happens, I have not. I’ve heard others, of course. With — this may surprise you — fascination. Oh, I grant you, none of it’s ever going to make the charts, but from an anthropological viewpoint—’

  Gus Stenberg asked Ollie, ‘Ever hear a yoik?’

  He hadn’t. Bridge ahead, and a sharp turn. Gus telling him, ‘The guy squats, fills his lungs up and sort of squeezes the sound out of his throat. Very little melody you’d notice, and not a lot of words either, mostly the same ones over and over.’

  Ollie eased the van into the turn, not quite sure of the snow-covered road and the snow-tyres’ grip yet, on bends. They were in the very gut of the gorge, with rock walls on the right of mostly solid ice, dull greenish gleaming, and huge stalactites in clusters shimmery in the half-light. The gorge’s sides were steep and high enough to be shutting out a lot of the new day’s light. He heard Sophie ask Sutherland, ‘Have you been in contact with your friend Isak?’

  ‘Sure. He knows I’m coming, after Kautokeino… He has a snow-scooter business, did you now?’

  ‘Yes. There was an article about him, in some paper.’

  ‘He does good business. Since the reindeer Samis mostly use scooters now, in the winters. It also keeps him in touch with them, so if anything’s going on in his area you can bet he’ll know about it.’

  Stenberg asked, glancing back over his shoulder, ‘Does this guy have only one name.

  ‘It’s an affectation.’ Sophie made a face, a disparagement of Isak which Sutherland didn’t see. ‘The great artist, all that.’

  The road was winding as it climbed now. From Alta to Kautokeino was supposed to take about three hours: 129 kilometres, the map said.

  Most of yesterday he’d had Sophie to himself, and it had been a very enjoyable experience. Gus had been with Sutherland, taping interviews with Lapps. Ollie and Sophie had seen just about all all there was to see of Alta; mostly on foot, which had involved a lot of exercise because the place was strung out around the wide head of the fjord.

  ‘Did you see that, Ollie?’

  He had: a sign saying ‘Kautokeino 100 Km’. The road was climbing in a series of sharp bends. Ahead, rounded hillsides were covered in a greyish fuzz of birch trees, but the summits were bare, gleaming smoothly white. Sophie said with her mouth close to his ear, ‘Soon we will be up on the vidda, you will see how my description was right or wrong.’

  ‘I’ll let you know.’

  Last night they’d danced, in the bar which for some reason the hotel called ‘Aunt Augustine’s’. She’d also danced with Gus, but only a couple of times, and he hadn’t stayed with them long.

  He called back, ‘Anyone seen any reindeer yet?’

  ‘Not yet. But don’t worry, you’ll see thousands!’

  They’d eaten reindeer pizzas in the ‘dancing bar’. And at one point she’d asked him about his past in the Royal Marines. ‘You were something special, were you not?’

  ‘Just a Bootneck.’ He added, ‘That’s slang for a Marine.’

  ‘But the information from London said Special Boat Squadron, I think.’

  It shouldn’t have. Blabbermouth Jarvis had been at work there, he guessed. But in fact it was a matter of principle more than
anything else now, in his present circumstances, being right out of it as he was. He told her, ‘That’s no big deal. It’s a specialist qualification, one of several. The one that would be really worth having on this trip would be a thing called MAW, the Mountain and Arctic Warfare Cadre, or ML for Mountain Leader — those are the real pros. They only offered me this job because I happened to be available.’

  ‘But surely SBS is very special.’

  ‘We’re swimmer-canoeists, that’s all. But we’re dancers too, so how about it?’

  ‘Commandos, parachutists?’

  ‘All Bootnecks are commandos. And quite a few are parachutists. Others fly helicopters or drive landing-craft, and so on. The really top guys get to dance with wildly sexy Norwegian girls in pizza bars.’

  ‘Yah?’ They were on the floor and her body had begun to weave. Dark head back, eyes laughing under the sweep of lashes. ‘What are they called, special whats?’

  ‘You’re special, Sophie.’

  ‘You talk balls, you know?’

  ‘You have an impressive command of English too. And look, there’s no doubt how special you are, look at those guys’ faces — in that corner. And the girls wishing they could look like you do.‘

  ‘Better we sit down, then.’

  On the tip of his tongue was Better we go to bed. He’d held it back, thank God. Cautious old civvie, he thought, in retrospect, half-contemptuous but also suspecting that he’d been wise, that caution might succeed where the mad stallion routine — with this one, anyway — could surely have blown it.