Death in a Cold Climate (20 page)

‘I understand you live in the flat downstairs in Isbjørnvei 18, is that right?'

The creature looked at him fearfully, her wet, bulbous eyes almost obsessively fixed on his face. She nodded.

‘Were you there on December the twenty-first?'

The girl thought, and then shook her head with a little high grunt that Fagermo took to be a negative.

‘Where were you?'

‘I went home. I had back holidays due to me. I had permission.' The words came out in a terrified squeak. Fagermo had the idea that she thought the university had put him on to her for taking unauthorized holidays.

‘I see. So the house had been unoccupied since–when? When did you leave?'

‘The fourteenth. I had permission. I had–'

‘Yes, yes. I understand. When did you come back?'

‘January the fourth.'

‘Was everything all right in the house? You didn't notice anything changed?'

The terrified, rabbity face shook in wonderment.

‘Nothing in your flat, anyway. I suppose you didn't go into the main part of the house?'

The girl swallowed and hesitated. ‘I did. Because . . . I'm alone, alone in the house, I have been for months. I get . . . frightened. I went through the house when I came back, to make sure . . . '

‘That you were still alone. Very sensible. Quite understandable. And there wasn't anything odd that you noticed?'

The head shook again.

‘There was a brown stain in the
vindfang
when I was there yesterday. Have you noticed it?' She nodded. ‘When was it, precisely, that you first saw it?'

‘I noticed it soon after I came back. In January.'

‘You didn't think anything of it?'

‘No. I thought Lindestad must have been showing somebody over the house. He does sometimes. Or I
thought I must have spilt something there, but I couldn't think what.'

Fagermo looked at the great dim eyes and got up to go. There was nothing to be got out of her. As he thanked her and began to slip unobtrusively through the door, her squeaky voice shrilled out: ‘What was it?'

‘Eh?'

‘What was it? The brown stain?'

‘Blood,' said Fagermo, and was thus directly responsible for a long, hag-ridden night of hideous dreams filled with vampires and rapists and fiendish torturers–dreams which led next morning to another phone call to the harassed Lindestad, with a hysterical demand for a change of flat.

• • •

But Lindestad's obligingness and omnicompetence were put to a further test before that. Fagermo rang him up when he got back to the office with the fruits of his meditations overnight.

‘Those houses in Isbjørnvei,' he said. ‘I suppose all the keys are different?'

‘Well, of course.'

‘But each of the houses will have had a fair number of tenants in its time?'

‘Depends. Some of the people stay a long time, others are only short-term–either because they're not permanent in Tromsø or because they want to buy themselves a house here. So some of the houses have the same tenants they've had since they were built four or five years ago, but others have had a long line of them.'

‘Including number eighteen, perhaps?'

‘Yes–there've been a fair few there.'

‘And what happens to their keys when they leave?'

‘They deliver them back to us, of course.'

‘Only sometimes they've lost one, perhaps?'

‘Oh yes, it happens. People are careless. It doesn't matter much to us: we can get more made.'

‘And so can they, of course: get further keys made while they are tenants, and keep one.'

‘They could,' said Lindestad, sounding bewildered. ‘It's not something we've ever thought of. There wouldn't be much point unless they intended to rob the people who came in afterwards. As far as I know, not many of our professors have burglary as a side-line, though I'd be willing to believe anything about some of them.'

‘Not burglary, no. Still, it's an interesting thought. Now–could you give me a list of all the people who've lived in number eighteen since it was built?'

‘I could try. We've got the records, of course, but I could probably do it in my head. Could you give me half an hour?'

‘All the time in the world. Think about it and get it right. I'm just collecting information.'

And collecting information was what Fagermo did most of over the next few days. Dribs from here, drabs from there. Phone calls here, tentative letters of enquiry there, resulting in little piles of paper on his desk, notes in a grubby notebook he had kept in his trouser pocket throughout the case and had made scrawls in, decipherable only by himself. And in the end they really did begin to make a pattern: Lindestad's lists: the reports from Interpol; the lists of people employed by British Petroleum and other major oil firms; the information from the Continental Shelf Research Institute. And then there was that very interesting conversation on the telephone with the man in State Oil, the Norwegian national oil company. He had been very cagey, of course: had displayed all the caution of the natural bureaucrat, one of the worst species of
homo sapiens
a policeman has to deal with. Nothing must go down on paper, that had to be made
clear. Everything he said was off the record–right? And so on, and so on. But in the end he had unbuttoned at least one little corner of his mouth, and Fagermo and he had had a very interesting conversation.

There were still many, many minor aspects of the case to be attended to. It was going to take time, lots of time. Fagermo was a Norwegian. He liked taking his time. Before the real grind of routine investigation set in, though, there was one more brick to be placed in position, one very important thing to be attended to.

Dr Dougal Mackenzie lived in a handsome, white wooden house towards the top of the island. Spacious, attractive, often old farms, some of them built by profiteers from the First World War, these houses were prized by some for their style, despised by others for their draughts, their inconveniences, the expense of their upkeep. Like most of the old wooden houses in Tromsø, they were in daily risk of burning down, either through faulty wiring or at the hands of the Town Council's official pyromaniac. But they were stylish, satisfying places to live in for people with the means to maintain them. Fagermo noted as he walked up the drive a man odd-jobbing around the well-shrubbed garden who was not Dougal Mackenzie. The snow lay now, in this first week of May, only in odd, obstinate patches in shady corners. Spring was beginning its long, flirtatious love-affair with the people of Tromsø.

Fagermo's ring on the door-bell was the signal for excited little whines and yelps on the other side, and–when the door was opened–for a doggy onrush, indiscriminate shows of friendliness, jumpings up and attempts to lick his face. After this, Jingle departed down the path to inspect the course of Fagermo's footprints and do a routine check around the murkier parts of the garden–for all the world as if he were a police constable.

Dougal Mackenzie seemed used to taking second place to his dog at the moment of opening his door. He appeared to take Fagermo's visit equably, but his eyebrows were raised quizzically when he spoke.

‘Well, Inspector, what can I do for you?' He held the door as if uncertain whether to invite him in or not.

‘Could we have a chat for a little, do you think?'

‘By all means.' Mackenzie–smiling and friendly, and quite unlike Sidsel Korvald in his reception of a police visit–opened the door wide and ushered him into the house, pausing only to call Jingle in from a distant lilac bush, and then make futile attempts to persuade him on to his chair.

The sitting-room was pleasantly furnished in a modern style of comfort which did not clash too obtrusively with the traditional air of the house. English newspapers littered the side tables, and dotted around other spaces in the room were files, open books, and what looked like drafts of examination papers. It was the house of a busy, untidy academic.

‘Sorry about this,' said Dougal Mackenzie. ‘Bit of a mess, I'm afraid. My wife is sick.'

‘Oh dear–anything serious?'

‘Not really. Finds it difficult to adapt, you know. Had to have a spell in hospital in February. I've packed her off to Scotland for a month or two. Should set her up.'

Fagermo had been in Scotland, and had his own opinions of what a couple of months in that country in springtime would do to a person, but he held his peace. He knew that some foreigners, and many Norwegians too, did find it difficult to adapt to the darkness of a Northern winter, particularly in their second or third year.

‘That's sad,' he said. ‘I hope she perks up.'

‘Oh, these things–' said Mackenzie, flapping his hand vaguely towards an armchair unencumbered with papers
or files. ‘Luckily I'm used to looking after myself.'

‘Oh yes–when you've been living abroad, I suppose.'

‘That's right,' said Mackenzie. He said it with an American intonation: That's
right
. ‘What was it you wanted to see me about? It's a long time now since I found the body. I don't suppose there's anything new I can add.'

‘No, no–probably not. No, I'm really consulting you in your official capacity.'

‘What do you mean? As an academic?'

‘Exactly. You see, I'm a pretty unscientific person. A bit of a disadvantage these days for a policeman: mostly when we solve a crime it's the boffins who do the lion's share of the detection. So I trail along with the good old human factor. And when you said you were a marine geologist I didn't immediately connect you with oil.'

‘Really?' said Mackenzie, an open smile spreading over his plump, pink face. ‘Lots of other things as well, of course, but to be sure oil is among them–especially up here. I'm sorry. I didn't realize the name didn't mean anything to you, otherwise I'd have said something when we talked about oil in the Cardinal's Hat the other week. You know how it is: I just didn't want –'

‘To teach your grandmother to suck eggs, isn't that the English expression? No, I quite see. My own fault entirely. But it might mean that you can help me a lot: fill me in on the background. I've had a lot of help from the Continental Shelf people down in Trondheim, as a matter of fact.'

‘Oh, yes–some first-rate people down there. And of course he'd worked there–hadn't he?'

‘Yes, he had, actually. But there are some other things I thought you were probably the best person to come to for. For example, he'd worked, as you say, on boats with the Continental Shelf research people. Collecting data, and so on–most of it done electronically, with pretty sophisticated
equipment. How much do you think all that data they collected would have meant to a chap like that–a chap with a respectable but fairly ordinary education?'

‘Little or nothing, as a general rule.'

‘Even if he'd worked in oil before?'

‘Oh yes, even then. You need a real grounding in the subject–from a university or polytechnic in fact–before the sort of info they're getting would mean a thing. It's the sort of education we're aiming to provide here. And of course, even then the data by itself is nothing: you'd need time to work on it, even if you were an expert. You'd have to sit on all the stuff for a while before you could really assess its significance.'

‘So normally all the data they collected would go straight to, say, State Oil, and even then they'd often call in expert advice, from the universities or wherever.'

‘That's about it. It's a long job.'

‘The end result being a better idea of the most profitable areas for drilling?'

‘Yes–put very simply, that is one of the things they're interested in.'

‘And not just State Oil.'

‘Well, no. You know the way of the world, Inspector. There's a pretty cut-throat competition among the oil companies, and the gentlemanly rules sometimes get passed by. Don't they always? And particularly now, with the Middle-East supply getting more and more uncertain, everyone's interested in the North Sea fields. Particularly the Northern ones.'

‘Why particularly the Northern ones?'

‘Because they're so rich. That's one of the things we're pretty sure about. Enormously rich–much more so than the fields further south, the ones between Norway and Britain. And then, they represent the future–they will probably be the next big ones to be opened up. But there are so
many imponderables: the cost of getting at it is one big one; then the technical difficulties due to the rugged weather; the political opposition to it from people up here; the opposition of the ecology people. It's all very exciting, just because it is so uncertain. So naturally all the various companies are interested in just about every aspect of what's going on, and what's being found out.'

‘I see. That's roughly what I thought. But now, where do the universities come in?'

‘Well, not as directly as the Continental Shelf people. But the fact is, this discovery of North Sea oil found Norway pretty unprepared in a lot of ways. It was like a big pools win, you know. It wasn't something anyone could predict, or that you could do anything about in advance. So suddenly there was this big need for experts–in all the related fields. What's happened has been enormous expansion in the relevant university departments, with lots of money from the government to push it along. In the early years Norway has had to rely on a lot of foreign advice–Americans, Britons, Dutch, and so on. But Norway's in the grip of the same sort of petty nationalism as everyone else is these days: foreign help isn't good for national pride: she wants to breed her own experts and run her own show.'

‘But meanwhile?'

‘Meanwhile she still often has to call in experts from abroad to train the Norwegian experts of the future.'