Death in a Cold Climate (8 page)

He looked down at the list of names of the people the boy had met at the Cardinal's Hat. The Ottesens would have to be approached cautiously: the kid-glove, would-you-be-so-gracious-as-to-spare-us-a-minute-of-your-valuable-time approach, as befitted a local Conservative councillor and a possible future Mayor. The Professor could be approached a little more freely, a man of title without power. He took from his bookshelf the University Catalogue and looked under Nicolaisen. There were three, under the various possible spellings, but two of them were women. The other was Professor of English Literature, and his address was in Isbjørnvei. Not more than two or three hundred yards from where the body was found. Interesting. Fagermo looked at his watch. Five-fifteen. Not the ideal time for a visit in Norway, but it
looked as if today the gentleman was going to have his after-dinner nap interrupted.

As he was driven over the bridge in the direction of Hungeren where Professor Nicolaisen lived (and where the boy had found his long home) Fagermo noted walking down towards the bridge the two local Mormons, instantly recognizable figures. Always in twos, like Norwegian policemen, they wore dark grey suits in all weathers, with white shirts and neckties, and generally were impeccably turned out, as if their religion were an off-shoot of Wall Street, or at the lowest Savile Row. Fagermo looked curiously at the current representatives: both were healthy, prepossessing specimens as they all tended to be (what did they do with the unhealthy ones? Expose them on the Salt Lake?). These were clearly walking advertisements for their non-alcoholic and decaffeinated life-style. One was thick, chunky and serious, rather like a mortuary attendant in his dark suit and overcoat; the other was slim and fair, more carefree-looking, and with a tiny note of the careless in his dress: his tie was less than impeccably straight. He was looking around him with genial interest, while the other was looking directly ahead, his eyes on salvation, or the main chance, or something.

They can keep, thought Fagermo to himself. The Mormons are always with us. They can only have seen the chap for five minutes or so. Anyway it sounds as though he was talking to (or suffering conversation from) Nan Bryson at the time they came in.

Isbjørnvei was a new area of Tromsø, part of the opening-out that had taken place over the last ten years or so, and changed Tromsø from a large frontier outpost to a medium-sized country town. Little blocks of terraced houses had been built by various local interests around a small ring road, which thus divided itself into thirds: one
third for navy personnel, one third for the university and one third for employees of the local council. These three groups existed apart, occasionally holding out the hand of sceptical friendship–rather like the Western and Eastern power blocs, and the Third World.

When Fagermo rang the door-bell at number twelve there was a longish pause. However, he was conscious of the pattering of socked feet upstairs, and sensed a face at the kitchen window looking down at the police car parked by the side of the road. Eventually the front door was opened by a long, gaunt, unattractive man with brown teeth and a manner which uneasily combined arrogance and uncertainty. The uncertainty was in this case probably aggravated by the nature of the visit: the man's expression, Fagermo felt, would have been positively hostile, if only he dared.

‘Well?' he asked.

‘Professor Nicolaisen?'

‘Yes–' opening the door an inch further.

‘I wonder if I might talk to you?'

‘What about?'

Fagermo smiled in the friendliest possible manner, and said in a stentorian, neighbour-reaching voice: ‘About the murder of the boy whose body was found up the back here yesterday.'

It was an infallible way of dealing with that sort of witness. The door was pulled hurriedly open, and he was ushered into the hall by a very flushed and flustered academic.

‘What an extraordinary thing to do,' said Professor Nicolaisen.

Fagermo looked at him blandly, as if his words might refer to the murder, or anything else under the sun but his own actions. Professor Nicolaisen, further fussed by this lack of reaction or apology, led the way up the stairs which
ended in his sitting-room. All the main rooms of the house were on this floor, and there hung around the room a faint smell of cooking–unpleasant, as if the food had not been very good, or well-cooked, or the meal not very sociable.

‘You'd better sit down,' said Nicolaisen. He stood for a moment towering over him like a crumbling crag, seeming uncertain whether or not to offer him coffee. Then, deciding against it, he collapsed into a chair, like a block of flats in an earthquake, looking at him all the while gloomily, and glowering with some obscure resentment.

‘Well?' he said again. The word was obviously one of
his
words, an off-putting ploy to put students at a disadvantage, socially and intellectually. His face was cratered with the scars of many battles–of easy victories over cocksure students, of sterile trench-warfare with colleagues over matters of principle. There was in his manner a nervous intensity which contained the odd mixture of aggression and defensiveness which rodents have, and those who engage in university politics.

Fagermo remained genially sociable. ‘I don't know if you've seen the paper today?' he said.

‘I've read
Aftenposten
.'

‘Less exalted than that. The local papers both had a report of the body which was found up the back here yesterday.'

‘Yes?'

‘Perhaps you've heard of it?'

Professor Nicolaisen made a grudging admission. ‘I did hear some talk of it yesterday. People saw the police cars around, I believe. But I was busy with a guest lecture I've been invited to give in Gøteborg. And in any case I would not have gone up to gawp.'

‘That's a pity, now. You might have recognized the corpse.'

‘Really? Hmm. A student, I suppose. Strange how the
universities attract all the unstable types.'

‘No, not a student. Or not one from here, at any rate. No, this is the boy that's been missing for some time. I believe the American student Steve Cooling came and spoke to you about him in the Pepper Pot some weeks ago.'

‘Oh yes?  . . . I think I do have some vague recollection. But it was nothing to do with me.'

‘But you had in fact met him?'

There was a pause, and then the same grudging assent, as if anything but contradiction came awkwardly to the man: ‘I think we may have sat at the same table.'

‘Exactly.' Fagermo smiled ingratiatingly. ‘But you didn't come forward in answer to our advertisement.'

Professor Nicolaisen bristled. ‘My God, I've had my office burgled three times in the last six months. On the last occasion they scattered my lecture notes out through the open window and defecated on the floor–and your men couldn't even be bothered to cross the road and give it a look. Why do you expect me to come running to do your work for you in those circumstances?'

Fagermo was unpleasantly conscious that–nasty though his manner was–the man had made a palpable hit. He decided he'd better not try to browbeat him, and became still more ingratiating.

‘Well, well, I do take your point. Yes, indeed. Well, perhaps I could tell
you
when you met the boy. In fact, you were both of you in the Cardinal's Hat on the evening of December the nineteenth, and as you say, you both sat at the same table. You were with another member of the university, I think –?'

‘Botner. Lecturer in French literature.'

‘Ah, good. Now, I think you in particular should be able to help me. I've talked only to Americans so far–and you are something of an expert on English speech, so I've heard.'

Fagermo went thus far with the soft soap rather dubiously, since he thought the man might be too intelligent to respond, but he was gratified to see a faint relaxation of the cheek muscles–a near-smile of gratified vanity.

‘Oh. You heard that . . . ?'

‘Now, you must have some memory of how this boy spoke. Would you say he was English?'

Professor Nicolaisen sat back in a pose of contemplation, as if sitting for a bust of Milton. ‘Ye-e-es,' he said finally, with lawyer-like deliberation. ‘Ye-es, almost definitely, I'd say. I couldn't detect any trace of the colonial there–it almost always shows through.' It was as if he were talking of a stain on the tablecloth.

‘English
, you would say–rather than Scottish or Welsh?'

‘Ye-e-es, yes, I'd say so.'

‘Anything more precise? A Northerner, for example?'

The intellectual pose was intensified:
Paradise Lost
was in gestation. ‘A Southerner, I'd say. And perhaps there was a trace of West Country there.'

Fagermo took this with a pinch of salt, as so much flimflam, but he was glad his witness was mellowing into a better humour. He rubbed his hands with delight. ‘Ah, now we're getting somewhere. Now–what sort of impression did the boy make on you?'

The response was very ready this time, and the good humour vanished. Professor Nicolaisen never spoke other than dismissively of the young: ‘No particular impression at all,' he said. ‘He was just a young man–someone who happened to drop in and join us. No great
force
of personality–' he smiled satirically–‘that I can remember.'

‘What did you talk about?'

‘Good heavens, Inspector, this is months ago. I couldn't possibly remember. And I fancy I spoke to him very little. I was in conversation with Ottesen, I remember–sound man, not unintelligent. If I remember
rightly, this boy was talking to some American girl: the young stick to the young, you know.'

It was unfortunate that at this moment the door from the hallway opened and a young woman walked in, clearly straight from the bedroom. She could hardly have been more than twenty-three, was blonde, sleepy and well-fleshed, with a jumper pulled over bra-less breasts, and tight jeans. Fagermo might have fallen into the unlucky assumption that this was Nicolaisen's daughter, had he not caught a glimpse of the man watching her with a greedy, untrustful look.

‘A visitor, darling?' said the young woman in a bored voice, but looking at Fagermo appraisingly.

‘Inspector–Fagermo?–yes–my wife Lise.'

She sat on the sofa opposite them, picked an apple from a bowl on the coffee table beside her, and bit into it, all the time watching Fagermo intently from under a Lauren Bacall lock of fair hair. He felt he was being added up like a column of figures. If she desired to make an effect, she certainly succeeded with Fagermo, for when Nicolaisen said rather testily: ‘Where were we?' he couldn't for the life of him think, and for a moment there was an awkward pause.

‘I suppose you were talking about the boy,' drawled Lise.

Fagermo turned to her quickly, and she added: ‘The one they found up there,' jerking her head back towards the big window behind her as if she were talking of a lost cat or an elk strayed from the herd.

‘You know about him?'

‘Ye-es.' Her word was drawled with no sort of emotion, but no hesitation either. ‘He's the one we met in the Cardinal's Hat.'

‘I didn't know that you'd met him too. We've been enquiring about him for some time. I wish you'd come forward.'

‘Didn't think about it,' she said, bored. In the silence her husband filled in nervously.

‘My wife came to fetch me at the Cardinal's Hat. She'd been to a meeting, hadn't you, dear?'

‘That's right,' said Lise Nicolaisen, and her gaze fixed itself on Fagermo with great intensity. ‘Amnesty International.'

The gaze was unblinking, yet if anyone could be said to wink without moving an eyelid Fagermo would have said she had done it. How wonderful, he thought, to marry a young wife and be made a fool of by somebody half your age. Nicolaisen was plainly confused and uneasy.

‘She just came in, and we–went, didn't we, dear?'

The girl chewed steadily on her apple.

‘And you left him there, did you, still talking to–who?–the Ottesens by then, I suppose?'

‘That's right. The girl had gone a bit earlier. He was talking to the Ottesens.'

‘Actually,' said Fru Nicolaisen, in that distant, languorous voice, ‘actually, he wasn't talking.' Fagermo turned towards her, to find her still gazing at him, apple at her mouth. ‘I had to go back, didn't I, Halvard? I left my–'

‘Your gloves, you said, dear –'

‘That's right, my gloves . . . and he was still there, and the Ottesens were talking with this lecturer in French–what's his name?–and the boy was just sitting there on the other side of the table, looking into his beer.'

‘I see,' said Fagermo. ‘Did you talk to him at all?'

She looked him straight in the eyes with her deep blue, untrustworthy gaze. ‘I said: “Do you happen to have seen a pair of gloves?” ' she said.

• • •

That evening Bjørn Korvald, after he had watched the news on his little portable television (the new bankruptcies in Norwegian industry, the terrible plight of Norwegian ship-owners, the allocation of new blocks in the
exploitation of North Sea oil) and after he had looked at the list of the evening's programmes (old-age pensioners singing age-old songs, and a two-hour programme on the role of women in the emerging Bulgarian trade-union movement of the nineteen-twenties) Bjørn Korvald decided to act on Fagermo's request and drop into the Cardinal's Hat. It seemed the sort of evening when there was nothing much to keep people at home.

It wasn't often that the table where the foreigners usually gathered was empty of an evening. But tonight it was. Quite empty.

In the event, the next day the Trondheim police, through no exertions of their own, came up trumps.