Hammond Innes - Blue Ice

I left the others and went up to the hotel alone. A waitress in national costume of black with embroidered bodice and frilled lace blouse stood in the entrance hall. ‘Is Mr Ulvik in the hotel?’ I asked.

She shook her head and laughed. ‘Et oyeblikk sa skal jeg finne eieren.’

I waited. There were tiers of postcards, all of ice and snow and violent, blasted crags. Behind the porter’s desk hung handmade rugs in brilliant colours, belts stamped out of leather and strange shaped walking sticks. On the desk were several pairs of slippers made by hand from what I later discovered to be reindeer. They had originally been made by the inhabitants for walking on frozen snow, but were now produced for the tourist trade on which the village lived. In a corner of the hall were piled rucksacks, rope, climbing boots, ice axes and a pair of skis. The atmosphere of the place was so different from the islands.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs. I looked up. A short, fat little man hurried towards me. He wore a black suit and white collar and looked as out of place as a clerk in a gymnasium. He held out a white, podgy hand. ‘You are Mr Gansert, perhaps,’ he said. There was a gleam of gold fillings in his wide smile.

‘Are you Mr Ulvik?’ I asked.

‘Yes. That is me.’ He spoke English with a slight American accent. ‘Come. We will go into the lounge. You have had tea?’

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘Then we have some tea.’ He took hold of my arm and led me into a room where walls and ceiling were delicately hand-painted. The place was empty. ‘It is early in the season,’ he said. ‘Fjaerland is too cold yet. The hotel is only just open.’ He ordered tea and then said, ‘Now Mr Gansert, I must tell you that I have not got what you want. Our application for the exhumation of this man, Bernt Olsen, is — how do you say it? — quashed.’

‘Quashed!’ I exclaimed. ‘Why?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I do not know.’ The waitress came in with a tray laden with cakes and buttered toast. When she had gone, he said, ‘First, everything goes well, you understand. I see the doctor at Leikanger. We go to the police. They say there will be no difficulty. They take a telephone to Bergen. I am in Leikanger all yesterday. The application is granted and I make the necessary arrangements. And then, just as I am leaving to catch the steamer, the police tell me the arrangements must be cancelled. They have the telephone from Bergen to say that it has been decided after all that there are no reasons for the exhume.’

‘Look,’ I said angrily. ‘I told you I didn’t care how much it cost. Did you get on to the lawyers at Bergen?’

His white hand with its fat little fingers caressed my arm as though he were a doctor soothing a fractious patient. ‘Please believe me, Mr Gansert. I do everything that is possible to do. I telephone our lawyers. I telephone to a man very high in the police at Bergen. I even telephone Oslo, to one of the members of the Storting. But it is impossible. Something is blocking it. It is against policy, I fear.’

Against policy! That could mean only one thing. Jorgensen had used his influence to prevent the exhumation. Why? That was what puzzled me. Why was he scared to have Farnell’s body exhumed? Had the man been murdered? And had Jorgensen had something to do with it? I drank my tea in silence, trying to figure it out. Jorgensen wouldn’t directly involve himself in a thing like that. But where big money was involved I knew these things could happen — they could happen in England and they could happen in Norway. ‘Who is blocking the application?’ I asked Ulvik.

‘I do not know,’ he answered. ‘I try to find out. But everyone is very careful. I think somebody very important.’

I looked at him. He fidgeted nervously under my gaze. Had he been bought? But I dismissed the thought. I didn’t like him. But he was the company’s agent. And the company was shrewd enough not to employ foreign representatives who could be bought. But still, the money might be bigger than usually available for bribes.

‘I do everything I can,’ he declared as though reading my thoughts. ‘Please believe that, Mr Gansert. I have represented your company for fifteen years here in Norway. I work with the resistance. I build up contacts even while the Germans are here and Britain is losing the war. I do not often fail in anything. But this — this is something very strange. There is important business involved, I think.’

I nodded. ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. I looked out of the window to the ice-green waters of the fjord. A man was fishing from a rowing boat. The sunlight, striking on the green of the opposite shore, had the brittle quality of evening. Why didn’t they want Farnell’s body examined? I was now more convinced than ever that the answer to the mystery lay in the graveyard by the church we had passed. I pushed back my chair. ‘You’ve brought some money for me?’ I asked.

‘Yes — yes, of course,’ he answered, smiling with the relief of having been able to do something. ‘I have it here in my pocket all ready for you. One hundred thousand kroner. Will that be sufficient?’

‘How much is that?’

‘A kroner is a shilling.’ He brought out a thick pocket book. ‘There,’ he said, handing a pile of notes over to me. ‘That is five thousand pounds. Will you please sign this — for the accounts of my agency, you know.’

I counted the notes and signed. Then I got to my feet. ‘It is enough, eh?’ he asked. He was like a puppy wriggling for a pat on the head.

‘It’ll do for the moment,’ I answered.

‘Now please, what will you wish me to do? Sir Clinton Mann wrote me that I was to place myself unreservedly at your disposal. Anything I can be of service to you with, Mr Gansert-’

‘Go back to Bergen,’ I said, ‘and sit on the end of a telephone. What’s your number?’

‘Bergen 155 102.’

‘Good. And find out for me who blocked that exhumation order.’

‘Yes. I will do that. And I will wait for you to telephone me.’ He bustled after me as I went to the door. ‘I will leave tonight if you do not mind. There is a boat going to Balestrand tonight. It is much wanner at Balestrand. You have your boat here, eh? Do you go to Balestrand?’

‘I don’t know,’ I answered. An idea was forming in my mind. Thank God he was leaving tonight.

‘Then I wait for you to telephone me, please. Anything I can do-‘

‘Yes, I’ll telephone you,’ I said and went down the steps to the driveway.

At the road I hesitated. But instead of turning left towards the quay, I turned right and walked slowly towards the church.

It stood alone on a slight mound some distance beyond the hotel. Its white paint caught the slanting sunlight. It was a fairy church, so bright and gay against the gloomy background of the fjord winding down to the Sogne. Above it, up a long, boulder-strewn valley, towered the mountains, cold and forbidding, their snows crystal white. Beyond the graveyard, a torrent went rushing down to the fjord. I opened the gate and went up the path towards the church, searching the graves as I passed. Some had stone monuments, but many were marked with small wooden crosses on which the names of the buried were painted in black. The shadow of the church lay right across the graveyard and out to the edge of the fjord. In the sunlight beyond, I found what I was looking for — a freshly painted cross with the name Bernt Olsen on it. It was just as it had been in that newspaper cutting — the small white cross and the church behind. What the cutting had not shown was the towering mountains beyond and the atmosphere of the place — so remote and chill. I remembered Farnell out in Rhodesia. I remembered him talking of places like this, talking endlessly of the snows and the glaciers up in the mountains and the narrow fjords as the lamp-smoke thickened in our hut and the whisky got lower in the bottle. It had all seemed so remote out there, for at that time of the year the land had been dry as dust under a blazing sun. But now I understood what he had been talking about. And I was glad to know he’d been buried here in the land he loved and for whose riches he had sacrificed everything.