Free Death in a Cold Climate by Robert Barnard

or girl-friend to have been on to you with questions.’
    â€˜Well, nobody’s come in here. Perhaps he wasn’t intending to come back here after Tromsø anyway. What do you want us to do now? I suppose we could go through our records, start picking out likely names and checking up on them.’
    â€˜Yes–that’s what I’d like.’
    â€˜It’ll take time, as you know. And of course they’ll all scream “victimization”!’
    â€˜You could confine yourself to men from the English-speaking countries, and I think you can cut out the States and Canada. They are usually recognizable when they try to speak Norwegian, and two of the people who spoke to him are quite positive that he wasn’t American. Check on anyone between, say, eighteen and late twenties. Those are the outside limits. I’d have said early twenties myself.’
    â€˜That narrows it a bit. But we’ve got hundreds of the buggers here, remember.’
    â€˜I know. But make it top priority, will you?’
    â€˜Sure, sure,’ said the voice at the other end, in an intonation Norwegians take on when wishing to convey that they wouldn’t be hurried by the last trump itself.
    This casualness on the part of the Trondheim police, this refusal to be unduly put out by other people’s problems, was all the more aggravating the more Fagermo thought about the case, since he did not see how he could make a real start on essentials or make any significant progress before he had got for his corpse a name, a history, a personality. Here the boy was, murdered in a town in which he had just arrived–murdered, no doubt, by someone he met here, either by arrangement or by accident. But surely the reason for the killing must lie behind, lie elsewhere, in the boy’s past. This was no casual knock on the head from a drunken teenager. The concealment of the body surely proved that. The investigation therefore had to be two-pronged: establishing precisely what the boy did during his two days in Tromsø; establishing his past and his personality, with a view to finding connecting links with Tromsø. Until he could get some lead on the second strand of the investigation–and surely the vital information must lie in Trondheim, or Britain, or at any rate elsewhere–then he would merely be marking time.
    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 itlooked 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