Death in a Cold Climate (9 page)

The artist's impression of the dead boy's face had appeared in the Trondheim newspaper that morning, and before ten o'clock a girl had rung up to say she knew who it was.

‘She says he's English, and he left Trondheim in the middle of December,' Fagermo's contact in Trondheim said with unjustifiable pride in his voice. ‘She hasn't heard from him since. So it looks as if it's the chap you've got there.'

Leaving Tromsø entailed leaving Ekland (who had been assigned to him on the case) in sole charge for a day or more. As a rule, Fagermo contrived to send him out slogging away at some side-issue. Ekland was very adept at sitting in on an interrogation and laboriously taking notes of all the inessentials, but beyond that, and a certain country humour Fagermo liked, he had few talents. It was a wrench to leave things to him, but as Fagermo saw it, the first priority was to fill in the boy's background, and whatever Ekland did while he was away, he could do over again when he came back.

He got to Trondheim in the late afternoon, and drove the endless drive from the airport to the city in gathering twilight. They had found him a spare office in the police station, and the girl was sitting there when he arrived. She was perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two–blonde, good-looking, self-assured, with a hint of sharpness in her features.
She looked like a girl who saw her first duty as taking care of herself. There was no great grief in her bearing–nor any ghoulish relish either. She was businesslike, contained, moderately concerned. The sort of girlfriend for a man who didn't want to get too involved. Her name, she told him, was Sølvi Martens, and she was twenty-one.

‘Well, let's get straight down to business. You think you know this man?'

‘I think so. It all seems to fit, doesn't it? I mean the dates and so on.'

‘Do you happen to have a picture of him?'

‘Yes, I do. I found one back at the flat and brought it along.' She dug in her handbag and came up with a coloured snapshot. It had been taken by flash at a party, no doubt by the kind of social menace who hands round the results with a chuckle weeks later. These two, however, did not look particularly resentful, or particularly drunk. They were smiling at the photographer, he with his arm round her shoulders, she looking as self-possessed as she looked now, sitting opposite Fagermo. The boy looked young, lively and carefree–dressed in a heavy fawn and black Norwegian sweater and jeans. Only when one looked at the eyes did one see an aspect that was not young and carefree: there was something withdrawn, ungiving, calculating about their expression that contradicted the wide, smiling mouth and the relaxed pose.

‘That's him,' said Fagermo.

‘I really am sorry,' said Sølvi. ‘I wouldn't want him dead.'

‘Well, somebody certainly did,' said Fagermo, ‘and went the right way about it, too. Would you have any idea who it could be?'

‘No, of course not,' said Sølvi. ‘It's so–melodramatic. Everyone that I knew liked him all right.'

‘What was his name?'

‘Martin Forsyth. Some people called him Marty, after Marty Feldman.'

‘Do you know anything more about him?'

‘He came from somewhere called Mersea. I remember he sent a card once to his parents.'

‘Did you know him well?'

‘We lived together for several months. But I wouldn't say I knew him well.'

Fagermo looked at her hard, but she didn't seem to be joking. In fact, he wouldn't have set a high price on her sense of humour. ‘Were you waiting for someone to introduce you?' he asked. She gave him a hard stare.

‘I mean, he didn't give away much. For example, when I'd known him for a long time he'd come out with something that would be a complete surprise–somewhere he'd been, you know, or some job he'd done–and I'd never heard of them. It wasn't exactly that he was secretive: he'd discuss these things with you quite openly. But he didn't give much away casually.'

‘What sort of things did you learn?'

‘Well, he'd knocked around the world a bit. As I say, some place-name would be mentioned, or come up on television news, and he'd say: “I've been there.” Italy, Turkey, North Africa, even Asia. I think he worked at home for a bit after he left school, and then he more or less took off. Since then he'd been wandering, with spells back home with the family. You know how it is.'

‘Yes, I know how it is,' said Fagermo. ‘It worries an old family man who pays his taxes and watches the price of fish-pudding. I wonder how people like that manage to eat.'

‘Well, they pinch things, of course,' said Sølvi unconcernedly. ‘And if they're on drugs they don't need much.'

‘Was he on drugs?'

‘Not while he was with me. But I think he was once, like most of them, fairly mildly. You know how it is.'

Fagermo sighed his knowing-how-it-is sigh. Then an idea struck him: ‘He wasn't pushing drugs here, was he?'

‘Oh no, definitely not. I wouldn't have stopped with him if he'd been mixed up with anything like that . . . But he knew a lot about how to get hold of them.'

‘He talked about it?'

‘If he was asked. People–young people in our group–knew he'd knocked about a bit, and they'd angle for information now and then, casually, you know.'

‘But what did he actually do–for a living–while he was in Trondheim?'

‘Worked on boats. That's what he mostly did, if he could, as far as I could gather. I think he'd been with some boat-building firm after he left school, so he knew a lot about them. He'd been on some Greek millionaire's yacht too–not one of the well-known ones, one of the second-rank lot. But it was a pretty big yacht, he said. He worked for the Continental Shelf Research Institute here.'

‘Are they attached to the university?'

‘I don't think so. I think they're more or less government, or something. They chart the shelf, and do a lot of the scientific side of oil exploration. Anyway, they have several research ships. Sometimes Marty would be off for several weeks, sometimes he'd be in port for a long stretch and only put out on short trips. It meant I didn't see all that much of him, even though we lived together for a fair while.'

‘How exactly did you meet?'

‘It was more or less his first night in Trondheim. We met at a disco–he'd just dropped in there, and still had his haversack in the left luggage place at the station. Anyway, he came home to my flat, and then–he more or less settled in with me.'

Fagermo sighed. He felt he knew the type. ‘He paid his way?' he asked.

‘Of course. I wasn't a complete fool, even then.'

‘But you don't seem to feel particularly warmly for him, even though he's apparently been murdered?'

Sølví Martens sat thinking for a little. ‘Well, no,' she said; ‘I suppose I don't.'

‘Why? A row?'

‘No, no, nothing like that. It's just that he wasn't a warm sort of person, I suppose. He never did anything without thinking things out carefully. Well, that suited me all right too. We were two of a type. I don't like anything messy. It was really a sort of convenient arrangement, our living together. Nothing much more than that.'

‘And when it stopped being convenient –?'

‘We split up, and that was that. No hard feelings, but no particular regrets either.'

‘Why exactly did you split up?'

‘He just said he'd be away for a bit and wouldn't be coming back to the flat. He may have left his job–I don't know. He'd always been a bit unsure what he was doing for Christmas, then around the middle of December he said he'd be moving out, and I said: “Please yourself.” '

‘No indication where he was going?'

‘He just said north. He didn't give much away as a rule, as I told you. So I just said it seemed a funny time to go north, and left it at that.'

‘And since then, nothing?'

‘No. I wasn't expecting anything really, though he could have run to a postcard. But then he was dead, wasn't he? But there was something came to the flat for him–at Christmas.'

‘Cards?'

‘Just one. I kept it for a bit. It was one of those cards with a snapshot of the sender. It was from Ålesund, and
there was an address on the back–KirkegÃ¥rdsveien, I think the street was called. He'd had letters from there before, but he'd never said anything about them. This was a girl, with a baby. A kid of a few months, I'd imagine. It just said: “Hope to see you soon. All our love, Anne-Marie and Tor.” I didn't keep it.'

‘What did you make of it?'

‘Well–I thought the kid was probably his.'

• • •

Thinking over the interview on the plane to Ålesund, Fagermo found himself most struck by the coolness of the girl. It frightened him, perhaps as all signs of our own ageing frighten us. Even in a small, provincial city like Trondheim the young people had that null sophistication, that terrible chill that reduces all passions and tragedies to a shrug of the shoulders, a muttered remark about ‘Just one of those things'. She had lived with the boy and now he was dead, and the experience was hardly more than a flicker of the eyelashes to her. By now she was no doubt living with another man, and soon he would pass out of her life without causing any great flutter of emotion; one day she would contract a marriage as sterile as a hospital operating theatre, and she and her husband would build their own house as soon as possible, aim for a Volvo before they were forty, and bring up two children by the currently accredited text-books.

At Ålesund police station he was given the number of the house in Kirkegårdsveien which seemed to be the one he wanted. He told them he would walk, though they looked at him strangely. Ålesund always affected him badly, and he wanted to get the atmosphere. After Trondheim it was like taking a couple of steps back towards the nineteenth century. A hard-faced city, which only ten years ago had enjoyed the benefits of near-total prohibition, and whose joyless, life-sapping religion seemed to
have moulded not just the faces of the older inhabitants, but the stance, the tone of voice, the choice of clothes and colours as well.

At No. 24 the door was opened by a true native daughter: hardly more than fifty, her hair was dragged back from a pear-shaped, unmade-up face, her mouth pursed into a perpetual line of disapproval and distaste. She was like a heavy autumn mist over the fjord.

‘They told me about you,' she said, pulling around her thin body a hideous, coke-grey cardigan. ‘You'd better come in.'

She ushered him quickly through the door, held open no more than a fraction, and then shut it quickly. ‘It's coming to something,' she said bitterly. ‘Police twice in one day.'

Fagermo stood awkwardly in the hallway, enduring her hard stare. ‘Did the local man tell you what the business was?' he asked, hoping for a nominal softening.

‘Something about a death,' said the woman, tossing her head. ‘We've no cause to regret him, if it's true, I can tell you. As you can see for yourself.'

She led the way along the hall to the sitting-room–an airless, lightless room, furnished with hard, high-backed, styleless chairs and a heavy, stained table with dropsical legs, covered with a thick olive-brown cloth.

On one of the chairs, playing disconsolately with a little boy of about a year, was as sad a girl as Fagermo had seen. She was small, but with a fine face–quite unmade up, but regular of feature and with superb, honest eyes. Her hair was cut close, but was of a beautiful shade of auburn which defeated the unflattering attentions it had received, perhaps from her mother. She had clearly been crying, but Fagermo felt that this was only a climax to months of hopelessness–to a weight of misery which was part of her family inheritance.

As she stopped playing with it to greet him, the baby let out a howl of outrage.

‘
That's
what
he
left behind,' said the woman.

‘Mother!' The girl showed signs of bursting into tears again. The woman sat down at the table, contemplating her daughter with a gloomy relish, as if she were personally allocating the wages of sin. It was clear that nothing could be done as long as she was in the room.

‘I would like to see your daughter alone,' said Fagermo.

‘No, better I'm here too,' said the woman with finality.

‘That would be quite impossible,' said Fagermo, with all the firmness he was capable of. He added, untruthfully but convincingly: ‘It would be totally against the regulations. We have very strict procedures, you know.'

Like most Norwegians, the woman was cowed by talk of regulations. She got up heavily and moved towards the door.

‘You want to watch what she says,' was her parting shot. ‘She's a deceitful little hussy.'

She shut the door firmly, but as he was sitting down Fagermo noticed the girl throw an apprehensive glance in its direction.

‘Can you carry your little boy?' he asked. ‘We could go over by the window and talk.'

A sad half-smile crossed the girl's face. Humping her baby on her arm she went over with Fagermo to the window. He opened it; the air blew chill from the fjord, but the noise from the traffic would defeat any twitching ears on the other side of the door. The baby gazed rapt on the procession of little boats.

‘You're Anne-Marie Lausund–is that right?' Fagermo began.

‘Yes.'

‘You know that Martin Forsyth is dead?'

‘Yes.' The girl's tone was dead, but deliberately
damped to stop tears. ‘It makes it better in a way. I mean for me. I thought he'd deserted us. Tor and me. Gone on to someone else and just forgotten. I couldn't bear that. Now at least I know that wasn't true–that he would have come back.'

‘You wrote to him at Christmas, didn't you?'

‘Yes–I sent a card. We didn't write all that often. He rang me up a fair bit–about once a fortnight. And he came down a couple of times from Trondheim.'