Death in a Cold Climate (23 page)

‘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.

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 friction 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.

Really, it wasn't the end that was unclear, but the beginning. When, where, had it all begun? Not at school, surely. He remembered himself as a thin, sickly
schoolboy, inclined to priggishness and goody-goody friends. Surely that boy was not father to this man? He never remembered any fast bits of schoolboy commerce, any sharp cutting of corners. He wouldn't have dared.

University had liberated him from the priggishness, but he didn't remember dreaming of luxury, of the quick buck dubiously acquired. Perhaps it was the grinding three years afterwards, at Hull, as a research student. Prolonged penny-pinching maketh the heart sick.

But whenever it was, by the time he had come to work at Abadan it was there–gnawing, writhing inside him. A little worm of envy, of twisted ambition. Because as soon as he had met Martin Forsyth he had recognized him as a fellow, spotted the same disease in him. They had stood there one day, in the overwhelming morning heat in the dusty centre of the oil processing works–the thin, tough boy with the hard eyes and the workman's hands, and the pot-bellied executive, haltingly acquiring the manners of his middle-rank–and like had spoken to like, greed to greed. Dougal Mackenzie had not liked Martin Forsyth. He had recognized him.

After that they had never spoken often. They weren't, in the company structure, in the same class by a long chalk, and habit and convention set all sorts of barriers and gulfs between the minutely distinguishable grades. Nevertheless, he had once invited him home for a drink. He remembered him sitting there, making small-talk with off-hand confidence to him and his wife, yet all the time his eyes darting round the various objects in the room that bespoke Mackenzie's status, almost costing the furniture. His wife had said when he left that she thought him unlikeable, and he had agreed. It was true. He had not liked him. He had recognized him.

He paused half-way up the mountain. The bush and undergrowth around the path had given way momentarily
to more open country, sloping green down to open fields, and presenting a vista of great glory. Below him, island, town, mainland and fjord came together to form a jigsaw more intricate and beautiful than human mind could devise, chamber music in green and white and gold. A valedictory spread.

In the very far distance he could see his own car, and the car that had been parked nearby. Now there was nobody standing beside it. Was he now inside? or had he begun to climb? Dougal Mackenzie smiled faintly, and patted his jacket pocket.

Funny, that was the last thing he remembered Forsyth doing. He was just about to take his anorak off, and patted his pocket as he did so. The papers were there–the last lot of data from the survey boat, the bone that was to be dangled before his eyes, the sweetener of the coming blackmail. He had got the papers easily enough, after he had hit him. After he had dragged him back into the hall. And before he had begun the grisly job of stripping the body–the job that had ended with his pulling, dragging like a maniac at his ring. Even now the sweat on his forehead was not from the heat of the sun.

That had been the last day of his peace. Before that the worm born in the black liquid wealth of Abadan had given him many good days. He had enjoyed his first months in Tromsø, settling into a stable, safe job, and the moderate luxury of a beautiful house, money to buy good Scandinavian furniture, a quiet, powerful car, the knowledge that his means could encompass most of what he could want, with ease. He had thought it a kindly worm. His wife, he thought, had been happy too those months.

But ‘things' had turned against him. The safeness, the stability had been threatened before the first year was out. The worm had seemed less kindly, and had gone on gnawing. When the major threat came out into the open
he had acted fast to preserve his safety, but he had preserved nothing. Even in those first weeks after the murder, nothing had been quite the same. His wife had suspected–suspected
something
. She had looked at him in a new way. She had known what Martin Forsyth was. Now she knew what he, her husband, had become.

One last half-hour's climb through steep terrain overgrown with bushes and growths which covered the path and he emerged at last on the uplands. He sat down for a minute on a ledge and got his breath back, but-restless-he got up almost at once and began walking again. The plateau stretched in rolling greens and browns, with the night sun streaming upon it and dancing in the occasional patch of water. He was in the open. He was free.

It was freedom, in fact, that he had lost. It was not only his conscience that the worm had eaten away, it was his freedom. Ringing him round over these last years with new fears, new unspeakable secrets, new hindrances to action. That was why, unconsciously, he had known it had to be up here–on the top of a glorious world, free of shackles and guilts. Just to have the illusion again for a few hours.

Because Fagermo had been wrong. It would not have been better to give up then, throw down the cards, admit it all. It would have been infinitely worse. Of course these last few weeks had been terrible, feeling the net tighten, every facet of his life under scrutiny. Yesterday had been the last straw, when he knew the inspector had been talking for hours about him with his own colleagues.

But there was a way of cutting the net. He knew that once his safe, respectable existence had been shattered there was no putting it together again. He had sometimes contemplated the careers of exposed civil servants, local councillors, Members of Parliament, whose financial malpractices had been revealed and prosecuted. What
could they be when they emerged from jail but shifty, pathetic shells of people? Fagermo's way was no way. It led only to that. And there was something better open to him.

And as he wandered over the winding paths, around mounds and crags with occasional views, tantalizing, of distant islands looming over the fjord, he experienced again that subtle sense of freedom, that illusion of infinite possibilities.

Until suddenly, in the glare of midnight, he realized he was not alone. There in the distance, now visible, now hidden by the terrain, was a dark, bulky figure, watching him, following. His hours of freedom were over.

There was no regret. Mackenzie reached in his pocket, fondled the gun for a brief moment, then–hidden for a moment from his observer–carefully took it out. Experimentally he opened his mouth. The shot, when it came, was not loud–sounded indeed irrelevant in this natural vastness, a petty thing measured against the blaring trumpets of the sun.

by the same author

DEATH OF A MYSTERY WRITER

DEATH OF A LITERARY WIDOW

Copyright © 1980 Robert Barnard

First U.S. edition, 1981
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Barnard, Robert
.

Death in a cold climate
.

I. Title
.

PR6052.A665D4    1981     823′.914     80-20979

ISBN 0-684-16795-6

Copyright under the Berne Convention
.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Charles Scribner
.