‘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.
As though I had spoken my thoughts aloud, a voice said softly — This is where he would like to have been buried, isn’t it?’
I ‘turned. It was Jill. Her face was very pale and her lips trembled. I think she had been crying, but I was not sure. ‘I was thinking just that,’ I said. I looked round at the fjord and the mountains. ‘This was what he lived for.’ And then I looked again at the little cross stuck in the heaped-up mound of earth that was so fresh that the sods had not yet bound together to form a solid covering of grass. Had he died a natural death — or had he been murdered? Why had the application to exhume the body been blocked? The answer lay right there. I had only to lift the sods and dig down to the coffin … I glanced at Jill. She had been prepared to face a legal exhumation. There was no difference really. And yet… ‘He’ll be happy here,’ I said quickly, for fear she would divine my thoughts.
