Blame The Dead

by Gavin Lyall

  The guns were still safe in the cistern. I dried them as much as I could on the toilet paper but I wasn't going to risk wearing one-or, by implication, firing it – until I'd had a chance to strip them properly. So I just finished my beer and headed back to the Norge. And there was a telephone message waiting: please ring Mrs Smith-Bang at a given number.

  'Smith-Bang?'

  The desk clerk smiled briefly and nodded. 'Bang is a usual Norwegian name, sir. Some time a Bang married a Smith, I think.'

  'Ah, but did Smith bang Bang or Bang bang Smith?' After a single beer? 'I'm sorry. You wouldn't happen to have heard of the lady, would you?'

  He'd gone a little stiff and puzzled. But he reached for the message and looked at it – at the telephone number, I suppose, then said, 'Excuse me' and went away and came back with a telephone directory. 'Yes, it is the Mrs Smith Bang who is a -you say "widow", I think, who owns the ship line.'

  'Which one?' Not that I'd know it anyway.

  'The ADP line, sir.'

  'Thanks. I'll call her back.'

  But the first thing I did upstairs was to field-strip the Mauser and derringer, wipe them down with more toilet paper, and spread the bits over the radiator to dry. The ammunition should be all right – modern stuff should survive a few hours in water – but how d'you know until you're wrong? So I planned to wear the derringer: if the first one didn't go bang, thumb-cocking was easier than working the slide of the Mauser. And that reminded me.

  A man's voice answered the phone – in Norwegian.

  I said carefully, 'My name's James Card: I think Mrs Smith-Bang wanted me to call her.'

  'Oh, yes, sir. She is out, I am afraid, but I have a message. She asks if youwill please go to have a drink at the Hringhorni.'

  'The what?'

  'The ship, sir, Hringhorni.'

  'Ummm…' How d'you explain that you've learnt to be cagey about accepting invitations in this town and will the lady please swear her intentions are honourable or at least nonviolent? '… well, where is it?'

  He told me the berth number. 'Near to the Bergen Line.'

  Oh, well, it was a fairly public invitation. 'Okay, but I don't want to make it a long one -1 want to catch the half-past-two. plane.'

  So I accepted for twelve noon.

  By then I'd packed up, paid my bill, been told insincerely that the Norge could hardly wait to see me back again (you could read in the clerk's eyes what he thought of guests who get called on by police Inspectors [First Class]), carried my own luggage out of the door as usual, and got myself taxied down to the docks.

  Twenty-four

  The Hringhorni was a smallish, old-fashioned cargo boat with her superstructure stuck in the middle instead of right aft like a lot of modern jobs you see nowadays. The hull was a light grey-green where it wasn't long smears of rust, and the funnel was painted black with a white band that broadened into a stylized snowflake with the letters ADP in red.

  The derricks around the foremast (or whatever) were hauling crates into the hold, but when I'd climbed the shaky metal-and-rope gangway there wasn't anybody around. Still, that was normal; every time I've gone aboard a ship in harbour I could have stolen the propellers, the skipper's pyjamas, and half the cargo before anybody noticed I was there. I chose the nearest doorway and ducked in out of the wind.

  There wasn't anybody there, either, only a faint buzz of chat from a stairway leading upwards. I followed it up, along a stretch of metal corridor, through an open door and a heavy green curtain – and I was home. Maybe it had been an initiative test.

  The inhabitants were a middle-aged square man with four stripes on his uniform sleeve and a big brier pipe – and Mrs Smith-Bang, I presume. She took a couple of long strides and held out a bony brown hand.

  'You're Jim Card, are you? Well, hi there. What're you drinking? Scotch suit you? Great. Meet Captain Jensen. Now sid-down, siddown. How d'you like this Bergen weather? This is the only place in the world they talk about the climate more than you English. Now you know why, ha? '

  I shook hands, a little dazed, and sat in an armchair with a very loose cover in a coarse floral fabric. The Captain went over to a large enamel kitchen bucket in the corner, full of bottles and ice, and started organising my drink.

  Mrs Smith-Bang waved her own glass – it looked like a dry martini – and said, 'Cheers. Nice of you to drop around. Sorry it couldn't be my house, but this tub's supposed to be sailing at four o'clock and I have to make sure everybody's aboard and half sober. Maybe you're wondering who in hell I am?'

  'You're the boss of the ADP line.' Just as if I'd always known.

  The boss of the ADP line nodded and looked pleased. She must have been at least sixty-plus, but she had the long-lasting sharp lines of a Boston clipper along with the genuine Yankee accent. Her hair was a frizzy cloud of tobacco-stained grey, her face long and grained like sea-worn wood, her eyes very bright grey pebbles. She wore a raw-silk blouse, a soft tabby-coloured tweed skirt, anda. matching coat slung around her shoulders.

  'That's righty,' she said. 'I've run the thing since my last husband went to glory or wherever they put my husbands. He was Bang, I was Smith, and damn if I wanted to see a good New England name like that get lost just because I needed a third husband in a hurry.' And she cackled like a slatting mainsail.

  I sipped – no, gulped – and looked carefully around. With the cheap wood panelling and the worn red carpet the cabin could have been a small-time city office – except that it all hummed and trembled faintly from some power source. That and the rust bubbles in the white-gloss ceiling and the rows of thick, round-cornered windows looking out into the wavering tree of derricks.

  Mrs Smith-Bang was watching me. 'Who're you working for, son? Lloyd's or Lois?'

  Lois? Lois? – oh, Mrs Fenwick, of course. I just shrugged and looked inscrutable.

  She sighed. 'Yeah, I heard you'd been in the spy business. You'd be good at it, with that face. Okay, son, I'll level with you. I think you've got something from Martin Fenwick that belongs to me. I'll buy it off you if you like, but I'm betting you're more interested in finding out why he got himself killed – right?'

  'Could be. You knew Fenwick?'

  'Martin? – sure. He's been taking a first line on my fleet for years now. Hell, he's had more hot dinners in my house than I've had nights with my knees up, and I wasn't a late starter, son.' And she laughed again. Captain Jensen stiffened, blushed, and made burbling noises through his pipe.

  I nodded – meaninglessly – and said, 'What d'you think I've got, then?'

  'The log of the Skadi.'

  So now I knew. It was as easy as that.

  So now I knewwhat? I kept the last dregs of inscrutability on my face and asked, 'It belongs to you, does it?"

  'The Skadi did, the log must. Any log belongs to the owners.'

  Wasn't that what Steen had said: 'It belongs to the owners'? And I hadn't had thenous to see that he meant 'shipowners'.

  Captain Jensen gave me a severe red-faced look and nodded ponderously, backing her up.

  I tried the casual touch. 'Why d'you think I've got it?'

  'You think I don't keep in touch with my insurance on a thing like this?' Well, it was no secret around Lloyd's that I'd got away with a certain package Fenwick had been carrying.

  'How did you know Fenwick had got it?'

  'He told me, of course.'

  'Then why didn't he give it back to you?"

  'It didn't matter which one of us had it, not when he was alive, as long as it was our side. Now he's dead – well, thank the Lord you got it instead of them.'

  'Who's them?'

  She cocked her head on one side like a scraggy bright-eyed bird and looked at me suspiciously. Jensen suddenly hauled his weight on to his feet, and my right hand got close to my left sleeve. But he only wanted to find a new bottle of beet in the corner bucket.

  Mrs Smith-Bang asked, 'Son – you do know what all this Skadi business is about?'

  'Well… I did
n't understand the log itself and I've had a fair bit of other stuff to do since then, and-'

  'You mean No,' she said.

  'Give or take a bit – that's what I mean.'

  'Okay, son. It's about time you found out. Want anything to eat while it happens?'

  We ate where we sat. Captain Jensen issued some fast orders through a squawk-box fixed to the wall above the bottle bucket and then ducked out. His pipe had made more comments than he had since we'd met, so I wasn't going to miss his flow of ready wit.

  A man wearing the classic high-necked white jacket of a ship's steward came in carrying a big tray loaded with small dishes. Mrs Smith-Bang waved a hand and said, 'Guess you haven't been in Norway long enough to get sick of herring yet. Help yourself.'

  So I had to: the dishes had herring fillets in vinegar sauce, in tomato sauce, with peppers, with mushrooms, with sliced onions, with shrimps… It was a lot of choice or none at all, depending on your point of view. Until then, mine had been that herrings were something God made just to fill up empty bits of sea and they could go on doing it for ever as far as I was concerned. I found I was wrong – in about eight different ways.

  When we'd got organised, she said, 'So where do I begin?'

  'A bit before the beginning.'

  She cackled. 'Okay, that sounds honest enough. So – the Skadi was one of my ships, around twenty-five hundred tons, dry cargo same as this. That time, last September, she was carrying rolls of newsprint and a deck cargo of wood from the Gulf of Finland. For Tilbury. Then there's the Prometheus Sahara, one of these new liquid-gas tankers, around twelve thousand tons; she was one of the earliest ones, bringing methane from Algeria to Stockholm. British registration – Sahara Line. Say, are you sure you don't recall this?'

  Perhaps I did. 'They bumped, didn't they?'

  'Bumped and blew to buggery. Like the Fourth of July. You just think of that gas suddenly spilling and igniting – over a cargo of wood."

  I certainly remembered something in the papers and TV news – the usual aerial view with the plane's wingtip in the foreground and a ship lying on her, side pouring out smoke from end to end. But it didn't have to be the right disaster: they all look the same to me.

  'Remind me – where did this happen?'

  'Down in the Skagerrak. In fog, of course."

  'Of course?'

  She snorted and spat out a peppercorn. 'You get some dumb buggers on ships these days, but they don't usually run each other down if they cansee.'

  'It sounds as if somebody got killed in all this.'

  'You're damn right. We lost four out of five officers and eight out of eleven crewmen. The Prometheus managed to launch a boat, but she still lost more than half her crew.'

  'Both of them sank?'

  'The Prometheus did. You know what those methane ships are like?-just a row of special tanks like damn great cauldrons. One gets busted and starts a fire and it heats up the ones on either side and whenthey blow… It must be like taking a coupla torpedoes.

  'But in a way, the Skadi wasn't quite so bad off. She got swamped with one rush of fire – that's when our boys got killed, mostly – then drifted clear before the Prometheus really blew. But she was still burning and you can't fight that with four men and two of them badly burned anyhow. So in the end they had to jump. She grounded on a small island near Mandai. Constructive total loss.'

  'Eh?'

  'A write-off, for insurance purposes. Like some more?'

  I shook my head. She let out a hoot like a fog horn and the stewards zipped in and reorganised our plates.

  Mrs Smith-Bang gave me a sort of leer and said, 'Don't know if you know the Norwegians only have sandwiches for lunch?'

  'I read the guide-book.'

  'Fine, so that's what you're getting.'

  Well, I suppose it had a couple of pieces of bread to hold it by, but the middle was a great rumpsteak the size of a bedside Bible.

  The steward looked down on it with that lean sad face of people who spend their time handing good things to other people. And only occasionally spit on them first.

  'Have you eaten meat in Norway yet?' Mrs S-B asked.

  Come to think of it – 'No.'

  'So don't unless you're eating with me. Norwegian cows are half mountain goat and they've got short legs on one side from feeding on a slope. I get these steaks shipped from Scotland. Hope you like it medium rare.'

  Luckily I did. She took a massive crunch at her own, dribbling watery blood on and around her plate.

  I got my first mouthful down and asked, 'How big's the ADP line?'

  'Nothing so much. This is the biggest, Skadi was the next, and the rest's just a couple of five-hundred-ton coasters. We're one of the few Norwegian lines that ever dock in Norway.'

  'D'you come of a shipping family in America?'

  'Sure. Our Smiths have been shipping out of New Bedford since you could bring Moby Dick home in a jelly jar.' She swallowed a lump of steak and you could watch the bulge go right down that long thin throat. She looked up and caught me watching. 'You want to hear any more about the Skadi business? Don't you like steak?'

  'It's fine.' I took another bite and mumbled out past it, 'Who was to blame for all this?'

  'We haven't got to court yet. Everybody's suing and counter-suing everybody else, but that's routine. You should have been a lawyer, Jim. That's where the money goes.'

  'Too many ethics involved.'

  'Hell, you really think so? '

  'Mine, I mean.' She gave a bark of laughter and a few shreds of meat almost reached my side of the room. I went on, 'But it'll be another year or two before they come to trial on a case like this. Don't they have some sort of enquiry as well?'

  'Sure. They had the Norwegian one in December, soon's my chief engineer was fit again. The British one'll be in a month or two.'

  'What did they prove?'

  'They didn'tprove a damn thing. But their report said we were just about totally to blame. If the captain and watch officer hadn't been dead, I guess they'd've been prosecuted. It can happen, under Norwegian law. Bugger it.'

  'Will the British one make any difference?'

  'Doesn't work quite the same way. Your boys are only interested if your officers have behaved like British officers, what ho?' She munched for a few moments. 'I guess if your Department of Trade and whatnot pulled the licence from under the Prometkeus's captain it wouldn't sound too good in court… but they won't.'

  'It's beginning to sound as if your shipwas to blame. Was it?'

  She put her half sandwich down on the plate and just gazed at me. 'Now how in hell would I know? Without seeing the log?'

  Somewhere below us, somebody knocked over a few tons of cargo and the whole boat shuddered. She didn't notice. I put down my own sandwich – I'd had enough anyway; I was only trying to get one meal out of it – and said very carefully, 'But the log wouldn't show what happened at a collision. You don't stand on a burning bridge writing up the thing.'

  'Oh, sure, it's likely twenty-four hours out of date. And I'm not saying it'll prove my boys were sugar-candy saints, God rest and rot 'em. It usually takes two fools to make one collision. But everybody on our bridge was killed: captain, watch officer, helmsman, and we don't even know who else. Just swept off with the first blast of fire. So we can't put up any witnesses to say what the Skadi was doing or their ship either.'

  I thought I was getting the idea, now. 'So the court of enquiry had to believe what the Prometheus'sofficers said?'

  'You're right, son. They put up the captain, another officer, and a helmsman to swear we were doing ten knots – full speed – through fog, when we hit her.'

  She looked around, found her glass, and drained the last few drops. 'Son, the Skadi couldn't have been doing more than five knots if the whole crew had been facing forward and eating beans. Half our power had cracked up the day before andthat log'll prove it.', She leaned back and stared at me, chewing on thin old lips that looked permanently dry. 'But d'you see whatelse
that proves? It proves three damn liars on the bridge of the Prometheus Sahara, that's what it proves. Collusion. Conspiracy – what you damn like. Prove that, and the case bursts wide open.'

  After a while I cleared my throat of something that wasn't there and said, 'But didn't you argue this at the enquiry?'

  'Oh sure: one old tramp-ship chief engineer up against three smooth young Limeys off – sorry, Jim, I was forgetting where you come from.'

  'Scotland, mostly.'

  'Well, then… Anyhow, that log'll prove it.'

  Without really meaning to, I got up and walked over to the bucket and organised another Scotch for myself. The bump on the side of my head was throbbing gently but insistently. I sat down again.

  'That means,' I said, 'that the other people interested in the log are the other line. Sahara Line, you said – right?'

  'The way I see it, there's only two sides to this one.'

  Plus Paul Mockby, of course, who'd be ready to make up a third on anybody's wedding night. But thinking about him had never helped my digestion yet.

  I said, 'And they'd be happy to see it buried at sea again. Where it was supposed to be. You think they were after Fen-wick, then?'

  'That's your end of the business, son. I want that log out in open court, that's all. You want some coffee? '

  I nodded and she went across to the intercom and pushed various switches and yelled something aboutkaffe each time. The artillery calls it a 'barrage'.

  She came back, looked at the rags of her steak sandwich -she'd eaten far more than I had, though where she put it in a figure shaped like a mainmast I couldn't tell-and pushed it aside. Then, 'Well, what d'you say?'

  'This could make a big difference – financially – to you, the ADP line, if you could fight this case seriously?'

  She shrugged. 'Not much, no.'

  'No?'

  'We were insured, we've been paid, they're building a new Skadi right now. Our next premiums'll cost more, of course, but that's all. The case is really between two lots of insurers; it'stheir money.'