Death in a Cold Climate (4 page)

‘I haven't really –'

‘It's a mistake. It'll never catch on. It's the sort of thing the radical students cry up, but none of them will think of taking it.' He waved a meaty fork at his companion and leaned forward, fixing his despondent eyes on him. ‘It's not in your interest, either. Too many small languages competing for not enough students.'

‘Of course that is one thing I –'

‘Right. Now, if we can come to some agreement, work together, make some plan of campaign . . . '

The two of them sank without trace into the mire of university intrigue, and Steve savoured the last scraps of his meal. With one half of his mind he read his paper, while with the other half he planned the broad outlines of his last chapter, with its magisterial summing-up of economic factors and regional trends. It was when he was thinking his way into his final paragraph–misty and grand–that his eye caught the tiny item about the missing person. He read it through, then read it again. It pulled him up with such a start that, without thinking or considering whether it was the right thing to do, he drained his glass, pushed back his chair, and made his way over to the next table.

‘Excuse me–' he said.

The two academics surfaced, blinking. The French lecturer looked as grateful as Wimsey being hauled out of a
bog. Professor Nicolaisen, on the other hand, fixed Steve with a cold eye, pursed his thin lips with irritation, and simply said: ‘Well?'

Professor Nicolaisen spoke in English, but it was his only concession. Steve could see he had made a mistake. At the Cardinal's Hat Professor Nicolaisen affected good fellowship, attempted a meagre heartiness. It was, clearly, a role which was for there alone, and not part of the serious business of his life.

‘I don't want to butt in, Professor,' said Steve, hesitating, ‘but I just saw this in the paper.' He was committed now. Professor Nicolaisen, twitching his long thin nose with irritation, accepted the paper, took with great show his glasses from his pocket, polished them, and put them magisterially on. Then he read wearily through the item. When he had finished, showing no vestige of emotion, he folded the paper and handed it back.

‘Well?' he said again. The word was not an invitation to explain, but a rebuke. Steve plunged further in.

‘You remember that boy who came into the Cardinal's Hat just before Christmas. An English boy–he said he was just in Tromsø for a couple of days.'

‘I can't say I do.' The voice was high and precise.

‘You were there, I remember. And your wife came in.' Professor Nicolaisen blinked his eyes in extreme irritation, as if Steve had somehow committed a
faux pas
. ‘He was a fair-haired boy, in his early twenties, and about that height.'

‘Fair-haired young men are not uncommon in this country,' said Professor Nicolaisen with a weary sigh.

‘He was foreign,' said Steve, his face flushing slightly. ‘How many foreign fair-haired boys of that height do you think were in Tromsø on exactly that date?'

‘I wouldn't like to guess. Perhaps you could try the Mathematics Department.' Professor Nicolaisen looked
at his guest and attempted one of his counter-tenor laughs. Then he turned his glacial eyes back on Steve. ‘Really, I can't see why you should interrupt me with this. I understand young people are very –' intake of breath, indicative of distaste–‘mobile these days. It is part, is it not, of their–' another quick intake–‘
life-style
. No doubt the young man just–moved on.'

Steve repressed a desire to say: ‘In the middle of December?' Instead he just murmured: ‘Possibly. If so, he left his luggage behind.'

‘Oh, no doubt there was some–
girl
or other,' said Professor Nicolaisen.

‘So you don't think I should go to the police?'

‘You must do as you think best, of course. I shouldn't think it would be anything to get involved in, not as a
guest
in this country. But you must use your own judgement about that, naturally. As I was saying –'

Professor Nicolaisen turned back to his companion, with a gesture of dismissal.

Steve Cooling went back to his table, dissatisfied, and settled his bill. He had hardly been helped by the conversation. But he got the same sort of answer half an hour later, when he went along to the Cardinal's Hat for his coffee. He was hoping (for once) to meet Nan Bryson, the American girl with the problem of relating, and there she was alone, stewing over a long-drawn-out litre of beer, and scanning the horizon for acquaintances as if they were ships passing her desert island.

‘Steve!' she cried in a pitiable wail, as if she had just killed the thing she loved. ‘You've been avoiding me, and I know why. I deserve it, I know it. I can't
tell
you how sorry I am I bored the
pants
off you last time you were here. Going on and on about
myself
. Just
stop
me, Steve, when I do that, because I
tell
myself not to, and then I go and do it every
time
. So just
stop
me –'

‘Oh, that's all right,' mumbled Steve.

‘I'm not going to say one word tonight, Steve, not a word. Now–what about you? How do you tick over? Tell me about yourself, just for a change.'

Steve Cooling tried to begin to tell her that he would find that conversation almost as boring as he had found the last, but he gave up. Nan Bryson was too irredeemably personal to understand what he meant. Instead he pushed the paper in her direction, tapping the paragraph with his finger.

‘Hey,' she said when she had read it. ‘Isn't that the guy that was in here?'

‘Right,' said Steve, relieved at her promptness.

‘Just before Christmas, I remember it well. Dates are right, and everything.'

‘You and he had something going, didn't you?'

‘We
did.'
Her face lit up for a moment, then slipped back to its usual doubtful misery. ‘Or I
thought
we did. Actually, to tell it to you straight, we made a date. Right here, we made a date. He was coming round to my flat.'

‘And –?'

‘Well–' Nan Bryson turned down the corners of her mouth in an expression of despair, half real, half playacting. ‘He broke it, tell you the truth. It cut me up, because I liked him, I really did.'

‘He seems to have disappeared about the twenty-first,' said Steve, looking down at the paragraph in
Nordlys
. ‘Was that about when you had the date?'

The girl's grubby, thin little face puckered in thought, then she swooped down into a great big untidy shoulder bag by her feet, fished in it for some minutes (dumping some rather embarrassing personal items on the table in the process) and finally surfaced with a pocket diary.

‘Still got last year's,' she explained. ‘This year hasn't done much for me yet.' She flicked through the pages.
‘Hey, yeah. It was the twenty-first he was supposed to come. That evening. Reckon that's why he didn't show up?'

‘Could be. Maybe we should go to the police.'

The girl's face fell again.

‘Oh hell, Steve, I wouldn't want to do that.'

‘Why not? They're asking for information.'

‘Well–I'm kinda ashamed.' She pulled herself up. The young will never admit to shame. ‘Not ashamed, sort of embarrassed. I made a bit of a set at him–like you saw. I guess you knew what was going on. Then he didn't show up, and I felt kinda cheap.'

‘What if he didn't show up because he disappeared?'

‘Well, even so, I don't feel that much better about it. I wouldn't want to talk about it. Then there's my job, you see.' She looked meaningfully at Steve. Light dawned. Nan Bryson had a part-time job with the United States Information Office in the town, generally considered a far-flung outpost of the CIA. ‘We're supposed to keep a very low profile. There's enough talk about us at the moment–you know how it is.'

‘But hell–if you just went along with information –'

‘That's getting involved. And if I'm put out on my ear, what then? No job, no work, no work permit. It's back to the States for me. No, Steve, I'd like to help, honestly I would, but just keep my name out of it, can't you?'

And so in the end Steve Cooling, like the rest, did nothing. The paragraph in
Nordlys
caused a little trickle of comment and speculation, especially in the foreign community, but it seeped gradually down into the fjord, and was buffeted by the currents till it finally sank. Quite soon it was replaced by other topics of interest. The year wore on, the weather grew milder, and the sun gained confidence enough to stay in the sky for several hours a day.

In the late afternoon sun, a man and his dog walked up past the Arctic Cathedral towards Anton Jakobsensvei. It was the second week of March. There had been an unexpected early thaw the week before, and the black of the road stood out against the prevailing white–as, too, did the bright daffodil-yellow patches on the snowy verges, part of the great dog postal network. There was hardly a soul about. The Norwegians had mostly had their Sunday constitutional, and had retreated home for their Sunday
middag
. As the man walked along, the extractor fans of various houses flung out to the cold afternoon air odours of meat-balls in tomato sauce, fried cod and roast pork in gluttonous profusion.

The man was medium height, slight but running to tummy, with fat red cheeks and a splendid furry hat. He had skis on his shoulder, carried somewhat inexpertly. The dog was brown and nondescript–a sort of basic dog, but perky and interested. They proceeded spasmodically, from daffodil patch to daffodil patch. The sun shone on them, watery but welcome.

They turned into Anton Jakobsensvei–past the supermarket, past the Ebenezer chapel with the long icicles hanging from its guttering, cold as nonconformist charity, past the road up to the cable car. A few stragglers were stepping it out manfully from the bottom station back home to eat. These were not going up the mountain to ski, however: that was for experts. They went on, past the houses for naval officers, and then, just before the turn-off
down to Isbjørnvei (where the man had lived for a time, when he came here from the Middle East), up towards the mountain. Here there were open spaces and gentle slopes. Now was the time of little light; now was the time when the younger members of the family finally dragged themselves in for television children's hour; now was the time when the novice skier could get in a little practice on the easier slopes, unembarrassed by kindly adults or frankly contemptuous children.

The brown dog, already excited at the recognition of old haunts, became delirious as they turned off the road into the snow and he was let off his lead. The snow here was not too thick, after a mild winter and the recent thaw. Along the best paths it had been nicely packed down by skiers. The man walked a bit, away from the lights of the road, and turned towards the increasing gloom. The dog went around inconsequently, on and off the ski tracks, sniffing, giving little yelps of recognition, and sometimes bounding off at nothing. Eventually the man unloaded his skis from his shoulder, and began inexpertly the business of getting them on his feet.

It's just a bloody clumsy way of walking, he said to himself.

While he fumbled with the straps his eye caught a moving black shape to his right. There was a man some hundreds of yards away, skiing down the mountain. Damn. He'd expected to be alone. He fussed over the straps once more, determined to take his time. The skier would soon be past him and on to the road, and then he could begin an exploratory practice.

A sharp bark. Another–questioning, uncertain, summoning. Come and tell me what to do about this, you. The man looked up, one ski on, one still half off. The dog was now just a dark shape against the snow. He was barking, whining, approaching, looking round, digging furiously,
looking round again, wagging his tail experimentally. The man, his skis now on, stood up and cautiously moved forward. As he did so, the skier from the mountain also neared the dog and swerved to make a classy halt. The dog now was more confident, and had begun tugging at something.

The two men came together, and the owner called ‘Jingle', without much confidence, clearly not expecting to be obeyed. The dog looked at him, then went on tugging, backing away, then going back to tug again. In the gathering gloom the two men went forward, to get a closer look at what he had got hold of.

It was a human ear.

No body looks its best in a morgue. There is something abstract, wholesale, impersonal about the setting which robs the corpse of individuality or pathos. It requires an effort of the imagination to summon up the sympathetic responses that would have come unbidden if the body had been seen resting its last rest on a bed or in a coffin.

The body that had been found on the snowy slopes behind Anton Jakobsensvei lay in the long, cold room in the university's Medical Department, which served as the morgue of the Tromsø Police Force. It was naked, as it had been found. No scrap of clothing or possible identifying object had been left on it. Some damage had been done to the right ear, but it was nothing to the damage done to the back of the skull, which had been smashed in by a single blow from a heavy implement. It was the body of a young man, just under six feet in height, fair-haired, slim. In other circumstances one might have felt he was ‘carrying back bright to the coiner the mintage of man'. Now he was just a body on a slab in a police morgue.

Standing by the body and looking at it with the police surgeon was Inspector Fagermo of the Tromsø police. He had one of those fair, unlined, ageless Norwegian heads. How old was he? Perhaps somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. But if he had said twenty-eight or fifty-five one would hardly have been surprised. It was a good face, deceptively sleepy but regular, intelligent, blue-eyed; only the occasional crinkling at the edges of the
mouth signified the presence of a sense of humour that was un-Norwegian in its irony and blackness.