'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 to-night. 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 to-night.
'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.
'Yes,' she murmured. 'Thank you for bringing me, Bill.' Her lip was trembling again and she started off down the graveyard path to the gate. I followed her and as we reached the road she said, 'When is the exhumation?'
'There isn't going to be one,' I answered. 'The application has been refused.'