Death in a Cold Climate (3 page)

For the men on duty at the Tromsø police station it was a day like any other. The only ones who glimpsed the returning sun were those out in twos patrolling the streets–and that was very few, for the police in Norway prefer that crime should come to them, rather than that they should go out looking for it. Most of the men in the large square building down from the Cathedral laboured over paperwork in quadruplicate, lounged over coffee with their mates, or typed with their two index fingers lengthy and impressionistically-spelt reports. In the office near the main door where the general public was received Sergeant Ekland, square and dark, and Sergeant Hyland, square and dark, stood fingering their square, dark, droopy moustaches, modelled on a television policeman, and thinking what a fine pair of fellows they were.

It was shortly after twelve-fifteen, as the sun disappeared in a final liquid flicker and Tromsø re-entered its familiar twilight state, that the office door opened and a little old man entered with an odd walk, half cocky and half defensive–the walk of a man who is trying to say he
has nothing to fear from the police, and is saying it none too convincingly. He was not particularly clean and not at all well shaven–the whitish stubble bristling defiantly round his sunken mouth and his nicotine-stained teeth. He was half carrying and half dragging a large knapsack attached to a metal frame–a type of burden much used by Norwegian hikers and campers, who like to carry their life history round with them.

‘I can't stop, I'm busy,' he said, dragging his burden over to the centre of the office.

‘Nobody asked you to stop, grandad,' said Sergeant Ekland, magnificently bored.

‘I've got
middag
to prepare,' went on the old man, as if he hadn't heard.

‘Crowded out with guests, are you, Mr Botilsrud?' asked Sergeant Hyland, sardonically as he thought. Old Botilsrud was proprietor of the
pensjonat
up near the swimming pool, a rather dirty, musty affair that did well enough in summer when all the other hotels and boarding-houses were packed out. Botilsrud was suspected (and more) of selling bottles of spirits to his guests at laughably high prices without the licence that made that sort of robbery legal, and though the suspicion had never actually led to charges being brought against him, the two sergeants felt they could dispense with their usual thin veneer of respect.

‘I've got guests,' said the old man defiantly. ‘Casual workers,' he went on, his face falling. ‘Scum. Anyway, what I've come about's this knapsack.'

‘So we see,' said Sergeant Ekland. ‘What's it all about? What's in it? Empty bottles?'

‘There's not much in it,' said Botilsrud, once more cultivating deafness to insinuation. ‘I looked, just to check, but there was nothing worth–nothing much in it. It was left by this lad who stayed up there at my place. Just left it
behind, he did.'

‘When was this, grandad?'

‘Matter of a month or so ago. Just before Christmas, it was. I'm not sure of the exact dates, because my books got in a bit of a muddle about then.'

‘I'll bet,' said Sergeant Hyland. ‘Festive season and all.'

‘Anyway,' said Botilsrud, preparing to leave, ‘I thought I should bring it in, because he disappeared.'

‘Here, hold on, grandad–your guests will have to wait for their princely meal. You can't just dump this here and go off. We have to get something down on paper. Now–what exactly do you mean, disappeared?'

‘Well,' said Botilsrud impatiently, ‘as far as I recollect, he said he was staying three nights. Then after the second I saw nothing more of him, not sight nor sound. He took the room key, too, and I never had it back.'

‘Had he paid?'

‘Oh yes,' said the old man, with a look of feeble cunning. ‘I made sure he paid in advance. I always do–have to, with some of the types you get coming to this town.'

‘OK, then, what was he like?' said Sergeant Ekland, taking a pencil and paper, and only pausing to smooth lovingly his splendid black moustache with the back of his hand, as a prelude to composition.

‘Well, sort of ordinary, really. About your height or a bit taller, but not so bulky. Very slender, really, I'd describe him as. Then his hair: well, it was fair–yellow fair, you know what I mean? Not white fair. What was he wearing, now? Oh yes–jeans and a check shirt, same as they all do–they've no imagination, young people today. That's about all, really. Oh yes, and of course he was foreign.'

‘Foreign?' Sergeant Ekland perked up. Foreigners were always of some interest in Tromsø, due to its closeness to
the Russian border, and the politically sensitive area of Svalbard. And Christmas was not a time one would expect many foreign visitors in North Norway. ‘What kind of foreign?' he asked.

‘How would I know? English, perhaps, or German.'

‘You should have details of his passport.'

‘I told you, my records got jumbled,' said the old man. Sergeant Ekland sighed a great big theatrical sigh. To placate him, Botilsrud said: ‘Anyway, he wasn't American.'

‘That's very helpful,' chipped in Sergeant Hyland. ‘How do you know that?'

‘Anyone can tell an American,' said the old man contemptuously. ‘You can hear.'

‘But he spoke Norwegian?'

‘He had a bit. Enough to hire a room. Otherwise,' said the old man grandly, ‘I'd have known what nationality he was.'

‘Hmm,' said Sergeant Hyland. Coming round to the front of the counter, he humped the knapsack up, and vaguely began to turn over its contents. They were not very interesting. ‘Just clothes,' he said. ‘Change of shirt, vest and underpants, a pair of boots. Not much.' He peered closely at the shirt. ‘No identification marks or name tags. You're not giving us much to go on, grandad. I suppose you nicked all the diamond rings and the stolen Rembrandts, eh?'

‘He-he,' said Botilsrud unenthusiastically. ‘Look, I've got to get back.'

‘OK, OK, get back to your beef stroganoff,' said Sergeant Ekland. ‘I expect the boy just did a bunk, or got a girl or something. But we can put a bit in the paper, and see if anything turns up.'

And as old Botilsrud edged out, crabwise, to the street, Sergeant Hyland heaved the knapsack into the corner and went back to contemplating his image in the plate glass
door, while Sergeant Ekland tucked his tongue between his lips and began composing for the newspapers a three-line paragraph about a missing person.

It had made a break in the monotony of the morning.

• • •

Sidsel Korvald had got up heavily, given the children breakfast, got the elder off to school, put several layers of clothing on the younger and sent it out to play in the snow, and then began brewing her second cup of coffee of the morning. She trudged through the dusting of new snow to the letter-box and fetched the morning paper, then she poured the thick black liquid into a large breakfast cup, took three lumps of sugar from the packet in the cupboard, and settled down on the sofa to read the paper.

Or rather, she did not settle down, and did not read. She had not settled down–ever, she felt–since her husband moved out; since the humiliating, inexplicable day when he left her. She had gone about the house doing the usual things, behaving as if nothing had happened. But she knew that everything had happened, nothing was the same. Her body felt stiff, as if poised to receive another blow. It was so unfair, so
wrong
. It was the sort of thing that happened to women who had been bad wives. It had happened to people she knew, and she had often sympathized with the husband. But she had been a good wife, none better. She looked around her house now, and suddenly it wore a completely new air. Suddenly it was a desert of labour-saving appliances–and for what? She did not want to be saved labour. She had all the time in the world. Her very shopping had suffered: she had bought in bulk before the price went
down;
she had fallen for several crazy non-bargains. She told herself that things would get back to normal before long. But she could not imagine what was ‘normal' for a single woman with children. She felt reality slipping through her fingers, day by day.

She tried to concentrate on
Nordlys
. Sport she skipped over, the foreign page she did not so much as glance at. She tried to read the leader on North Sea oil, but lost the thread; then she tried to take in all the little items of local interest which were the staple of the newspaper, and which had always roused what interest she could take in things outside herself, her family and her home. The grievances of fishermen, the lack of doctors in North Norway, the doings of the radical students–she read them, and did not read them, her mind elsewhere, anywhere. She registered a heading, ‘Missing person', and was about to move on to something else, when her eye caught the description:

Foreign, possibly German or British. Was in the Tromsø area 19th-21st December. Height–about 1m 80. Slender build, fair hair . . . '

She paused. The dates had caught her attention, and the nationalities. She uncrossed her legs suddenly, and jolted the coffee table. Coffee spilt from the cup on to the polished wood surface, but she did not, as normally she would, rush for a cloth to mop it up. She got up, tenser than ever, and went towards the window. Outside her youngest was fighting with the boy next door, but she did nothing, merely looked unseeing. But over her face there had spread a vivid, crimson blush.

• • •

Helge Ottesen was late into the shop that morning. He had to go to a Town Council meeting in the evening, and was expecting a hard day. He prided himself on being able to delegate authority, though he took all the important decisions himself. The shop would run itself, while he enjoyed a late breakfast. He and his wife divided the paper in two, and retreated into companionable silence, he at
the same time spreading a piece of bread with marmalade, and stirring the thick coffee which was the first of his daily necessities.

‘Helge,' said Gladys Ottesen from the other side of the table. ‘Listen to this.' And in her slightly cockney Norwegian she read out the heading ‘Missing person', and the description of the boy.

‘Could be anybody,' said her husband, hardly looking up from the sports page.

‘But don't you remember that boy who came into the Cardinal's Hat, just before Christmas? He joined us in the foreigners' corner, and we had a bit of a yarn–you can't have forgotten.'

‘Why should it be him?'

‘Well, the description: English–then the height, I'm good at heights–' (Gladys worked now and then in her husband's menswear shop)– ‘and the fair hair. The date's about right too, because I remember that when we met him I'd just been Christmas shopping, getting in the last-minute things. So it all fits, really. Do you think we should go along to the police?'

Her husband looked at her with those wonderfully frank businessman's eyes of his.

‘Why should we get mixed up in it, Gladys? It doesn't do any good, politically or any other way. And after all, we only met him for a couple of hours, if that. What information could we give the police that would be any use?'

His wife sipped her coffee and nodded her head. ‘Yes, I suppose you're right. Even if it
was
him, there's nothing much we could tell them, is there?'

Helge Ottesen returned to his newspaper with a grunt of assent. He'd said it before, and he said it now: his wife was an invaluable woman, absolutely invaluable.

• • •

Steve Cooling was eating dinner out for a change. The
Pepper Pot was the best restaurant in town, and eating there was something of an extravagance, but Steve had had a largish cheque from home that day, and the cheque had coincided with his finishing the penultimate chapter of his thesis. It seemed worth a minor celebration, so he sat eating reindeer, drinking a half-bottle of red wine, and vaguely peering now and then at the local paper.

Steve was from the State of Iowa, and was working for a year in the History Department at Tromsø, completing a Ph.D. on emigration from North Norway to the States. He liked the University of Tromsø. It was small, like the one he had come from, and one could put up with a lot, weather-wise, to be in a place where everyone knew everyone else. Looking around the Pepper Pot he found he knew nearly half the people there: there were students who had just received their loans and were blowing a hundred kroner as a good start to the term; there were people from the University Administration, ordering North Norwegian specialities for a sceptical-looking distinguished guest; and there were members of the academic staff, some single, some presumably escaping for a night from Norwegian Home Cooking (a curse called down upon good food to rob it of all taste and texture), and all of them scanning the menu earnestly, as though it were
Middlemarch
. Among the academics, in fact, was the Professor of English Literature, sitting at the table next to Steve, talking and eating an enormous meal, and not properly separating the two activities. He was watched with a degree of ascetic disgust by a youngish lecturer in French.

Professor Halvard Nicolaisen was thin, gaunt, unattractive: his face was like a face in a spoon, sunken, cratered, an area of dark corners and uninviting crannies. His manner, when he was most natural, was gloomy and intense, which he tried to cover with dreadful jokes, jokes which lasted minutes because he embellished them with
Victorian convolutions of plot and syntax. His laugh was high and unamused. When he ate, he showed two brown Dracula fangs on either side of his mouth, for he did not close it properly and breathed fragments of food over his companion. He was now–as he usually was–deep in the minutiae of university politics.

‘This matter of starting Finnish,' he was saying, in a lowered voice thick with food and conspiracy. ‘I wanted to get your opinion, since you're on University Council.'