Blame The Dead

by Gavin Lyall

  Kari said, 'Frau Smith-Bang: you forget it was Saturday. The bars and the Vinmonopolet are closed for Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday he could not have gone out to drink; for that he must have stayed in at home.'

  I'd forgotten it myself, since I'd only met it in the guidebook. So he wasn't in the back room of some bar. But also he probably wasn't frozen stiff under some bush.

  Mrs Smith-Bang said, 'Hell, yes. You're right, girlie. Don't do much bar-crawling myself nowadays, so I forgot… Well, what do we do now?'

  Kari said, 'We could tell the police.'

  Mrs Smith-Bang and I both sighed in chorus, glanced at each other, and grinned ruefully. She said, 'You say it, Jim.'

  'Well, I'm not an expert on Norwegian law, but in most of the world it's no offence to be missing. Not even if you've a wife and ten starving kids complaining, the cops have got no case to hunt a man down. Not until he's done something really serious like not paying a parking fine. Then he's a criminal and they can haul him back from the hot end of hell at public expense. Mind you-' I looked at Mrs Smith-Bang '-you might invent something along those lines. Can't you create a legal hearing and get a subpoena on him or something?'

  She nodded her long bony head. 'It's an idea, son. But, God damn it, I don't want to antagonise the old bar-sponge. Whatever happens, he's not vulnerable. A chief engineer can't be blamed for a collision. But, like you say, I need his evidence to tie down that log-book.'

  I nodded. Kari looked at me curiously; I'd forgotten she hadn't heard of the book until we came here – unless Nygaard himself had mentioned it, which didn't seem likely.

  'Okay,' I said. 'But there're still private-detective agencies. International's got a bureau here, and there're others.'

  'I thought you were one of them yourself,' Mrs Smith-Bang said calmly. I felt Kari's sudden hot glance without looking into the glare of it.

  'Tell you what I'll do, Jim,' Mrs Smith-Bang went on. 'You look around, ask questions, check in with me. If you're not happy at the end of the day, I'll farm it out – right?'

  'Well, maybe…'

  'D'you want any advance expenses?'

  'Je-sus.' As if I didn't have enough employers already. I waved a hand weakly and avoided Kari's icy-hot eyes. 'No advances. And let's see at the end of the day- okay?'

  I stood up and tried to look more decisive than I felt. But that's what military training's mostly about. 'Come on, love,' to Kari, and I went out without catching her eye. But she followed.

  The chap in the grey apron materialised from nowhere and opened the front door for us. Outside, the cloud had dropped a couple of hundred feet and we were in solid fog. That was going to be fun.

  Mrs Smith-Bang poked her long nose out and cackled. 'Great weather, ain't it, Jim? Like the Newfoundland Banks upside down and without Spencer Tracy. Give me a ring, son.' She held out her hand and I shook it and headed for the Volkswagen. Kari muttered something that sounded polite and hurried after me. The engine wound up to its normal nagging whine and we hippedy-hopped out on to the hillside road and plunged into the mist.

  She asked coldly, 'Are you really a detective?'

  'No. But I've worked for one, or two. Watch the road!'

  The car levitated itself back on to flat ground. She shook her head and the long fair tresses swished impatiently. 'Then what are you?'

  'Most of the time I'm a security adviser.' She obviously didn't understand what that was, and I didn't rush to explain. 'But we're both after the same thing, right now: finding Nygaard. Agreed?'

  She nodded; then, thank God, we ran out of the fog and there was Bergen spread out below, the headlands like fingers of a hand reaching away from us out into the grey sea. She asked, 'What do we do now?'

  'Try for Ruud again, I suppose. How did you tackle him before?- what sort of questions did you ask? '

  'Oh, just… where was Engineer Nygaard, when did he go… I think that is all.'

  And they say women are inquisitive.

  'All right. Now we'll try it my way. I won't get rough, but just stay calm, whatever I say, and agree with me.'

  There was a trace of suspicion in her face, but that wasn't exactly surprising; I was a foreigner to her country and an outsider to her relationship with Nygaard. But she nodded again.

  Thirty-six

  Ruud himself opened the door this time. His eyes flicked from her face to mine, puzzled to see us together.

  I leaned a casual hand against the door, just to save further ringings and knockings, and said as formally as I could, 'I understand that this is no longer the address of Herr Nygaard?'

  The eyes flickered again, the face made mumbling movements. Then,'Ja. He is gone away.'

  'Good. Now, all I need for my office is your statement to that effect, all right? May we come in?'

  Sheer bewilderment had rotted the defiance he'd been prepared to throw at me. He just let go the door and it creaked open. I said, 'After you.'

  His own room was on the ground floor at the back, overlooking a small concrete courtyard with some straggly plants in wooden tubs. The room itself was small, dark, and jammed with furniture and pictures and vases; Ruud was obviously the type who couldn't bring himself to sling anything out. But it was all fairly clean and very neat.

  He weaved expertly through it all, his tin leg just missing a chair, a table, a standing lamp, as it always would in his own careful setting. Then he sat in a high-backed chair like a throne, the leg stuck straight out in front. I found myself at a small Victorian table with a heavy tasselled cloth; I put down a handful of papers, took out my pen, and got stuck in before he could object.

  'Herr Nygaard first came here when? '

  'In… before Christmas.'

  'December? You don't remember the exact date?'

  'No-o.'

  Kari was still standing up, hardly daring to move for fear of knocking something over. I asked her, 'Do you confirm that he came in December?'

  She nodded.'Ja.'

  'Good.' I wrote it down. 'And he left when?'

  Ruud frowned, coughed, and muttered, 'On Saturday.'

  'Do you remember if it was morning or afternoon?'

  He gave me a resentful glance. 'Morning.'

  'Good.' I wrote that down, too. 'Was he alone?'

  'What is this about?' A spat of the old anger – maybe of the old concern.

  'Only a statement. But you don't know if he went alone or not? – it doesn't much matter.'

  There was a long thick silence. Then Kari sat gently on the arm of a green velvet sofa and it creaked like a jungle bird. Ruud growled, 'I think there was an auto.'

  'Taxi?'

  'I do not know.' Getting stubborn, now.

  So, very politely and uninterestedly, I asked, 'Did he carry his own luggage?'

  After another pause, he said, 'I do not know.' I heard Kari give a prim little gasp at the obvious lie.

  But I played satisfied; actually, I was – so far. 'Fine,' I said briskly, and held up the paper and read from it. ' "Herr Nygaard came to the Gulbrandsen's Seamen's Home last December. He left last Saturday morning. I did not see him go. I do not know where he has gone." Is that correct?'

  'I did not say about where he has gone.'

  'Well, do you know?'

  A low reluctant growl, 'No.'

  'Then this is correct. Will you sign, please?'

  I gave him the paper and pen. He took them, peered at the paper and then back at me. 'Why should I sign?'

  'Isn't it true?'

  'Ja, but…'

  'We're all going to sign. We're witnesses.'

  'Witness? Of what?' The eyes were really hunted now, flickering from one to the other of us and finding no hiding place.

  'The truth, you said.'

  He crunched the paper, hurled it into a corner, and said something. Kari stiffened, so it must have been quite an interesting something. But it didn't gain him any sympathy.

  I stood up. 'It doesn't matter. We both agree on what he said, I think?' The girl nodded
; I went on, 'Good. That's all, then, Herr Ruud. Thank you very much. You'll probably hear something before the end of today.' And I moved towards the door.

  Ruud said, 'Wait. I…"

  I turned back slowly. 'Well?'

  T think he went with a doctor.'

  'Oh, yes? Whereto?'

  'The home for… for drinking, you understand?'

  'Alcoholics' home, you mean? Where?'

  'On Saevarstad.'

  'Never heard of it.'

  Kari said, 'It is a small island near Stavanger.'

  'Good.' I sat down again and got out another piece of paper.

  As we drove away, Kari asked, 'But why did you write it all down again and make him sign?'

  'Just to impress him. Now he can never say it wasn't him told us. And that might stop him telling somebody that we've found out. If that matters.'

  'I see.' She thought this over. 'You are a bit cruel.*

  'Are you glad we know, or not?'

  When she didn't answer, I asked, 'How do you get to Stavanger from here?'

  'You are going? There is a hydrofoil – but I think it is too late, now. There is an aeroplane.'

  'Good. Back to the terminal, then, please."

  She said thoughtfully, 'I think I will come, too. I have an aunt who lives near there.'

  'Fine.' I was surprised, though. 'But what about the university?'

  'The term ends tomorrow. And I can say my aunt is ill. She is, often. But can you lend me the money for the ticket?'

  'I owe it you, after all this driving around." But of course she wasn't takingthat. Anyway, we caught the six-thirty-five plane.

  Stavanger is another port, smaller than Bergen, just a hundred airline miles south. And since it was dark by the time we got into the town itself, that was about all I knew or could see. But Kari knew her way around; we took a taxi out to the ferry quayside and found there was one ferry still to go out to Saevarstad – but not another coming back. If we went now, we were stuck for the night on an island that couldn't be two miles long, and not even a youth hostel. I wanted more room for manoeuvre than that.

  So I booked in at the Victoria Hotel, right down on the waterfront, and Kari rang her aunt, then caught a local train to spend the night at Sandnes – another small town about ten miles up the fjord. She'd pick me up at nine in the morning.

  With her gone, I could take a serious drink in comfort, so I did that, while the hotel put through a call to Willie. The Victoria suited its name: old-fashioned, comfortable, ceilings as high as its principles, and polite with it. They said how terribly sorry they were they couldn't find Mr Winslow, but it was promised he'd ring back. So I took a bath and he rang back in the middle of that.

  'Hello – Mr Card? James? Is it you, old boy? You got to Norway all right, then, but what are you doing in Stavanger?'

  'Various complications, chum. Nygaard's down near here. I 'hope to find him tomorrow.'

  'I see. Good, what? But the log's all right, is it?'

  I must have stayed silent too long, because he said, 'I say, it is all right, isn't it?'

  'Let's say I know who's got it.'

  'Oh, crikey.' A humming pause. 'It sounds as if I'd better pop across, what?'

  'You're welcome. I'm at the Victoria.'

  Til be there by lunchtime or so.'

  I thought of going back to my bath, but then put in a call to my London answering service – just in case. There was the usual amount of communicational fluff, but also a message from Draper; he'd heard that Pat Kavanagh was last heard of working for Dave Tanner.

  Now he tells me.

  Thirty-seven

  It was a glittering blue morning; the sun warm but not yet the air. I finished breakfast early and got out for a quick stroll along the quayside before Kari arrived. Past the old wooden warehouses, the red-tiled chandlers' shops, through the bright umbrellas of the flower and vegetable market and into the sudden aroma of the fish-market. But it wasn't until then that I'd realised the weird thing: there'd been no salt sea smell in the air. That was taking the Scandinavian passion for cleanliness a bit far.

  Kari was there just before nine and we walked out around the quay to the north side, where the ferries started. The place was like Piccadilly Circus on water, with every size of ferry loading cars and trucks for trips half a mile across the bay or fifty miles up the coast, 'It is how we travel in Norway,' she said. 'Do you know how long it would take me to drive to Bergen? Three days, and even that would need one ferry crossing, and I cannot do it now anyway because the roads are blocked with snow.'

  Just beside us, a scruffy little trawler-shaped boat was unloading a whole family, furniture, potted plants, and cat. A removal van. Why not?

  We walked aboard our own boat, one of the smaller jobs, fitted to carry about six cars and maybe forty passengers. It did a regular round tour of the smaller islands up to about ten miles away; we sat down on a wooden bench and bought tickets off the conductor. The romance of the Viking country.

  Saevarstad, according to the tourist map I'd nicked from the hotel, was about five miles away, a kidney-shaped blob marked for a church and a circuit road that couldn't have been more than four miles in all. We weaved towards it, never seeing a real horizon, never more than half a mile from some other island and stopping briefly at two of them. After three-quarters of an hour, we were there.

  It looked like a neat little wooden village with the quay itself as the village square. There were a few parked cars and trucks, a storage shed, a heap of crates and oil drums, and two shops. One was half hardware, half ship's chandler for the dozen or so motorboats moored at the quayside, the other the post office and everything else. It was the only one open, so we started there.

  A middle-aged spinsterish-looking bird told us that the sanatorium was a couple of kilometres out along the coast road southwards. Big yellow house. And she was sorry the island taxi wasn't around – would we like her to phone hither and yon to try and find it?

  I said, 'Nevermind. But if it comes, send it on after us.'

  T will. Does Doctor Rasmussen know you are coming, or shall I ring to him?'

  'He knows,' I said quickly. And we started walking.

  The road was narrow – barely wider than a car – but properly made up. And around us, the land was lush and green and neat and, in a small way, prosperous. Once we were clear of the village it became a series of small holdings, some with rows of well-kept greenhouses, others with a couple of cows or a small flock of sheep. How they could scratch even a living out of plots that size I couldn't guess, but every house was in good repair and freshly painted.

  Kari explained, 'They are all also fishermen, in winter. For prawns and lobsters as well.' Well, maybe that told me something. Certainly we passed three or four tiny landing-places, with or without a small fishing-boat moored alongside.

  It took about half an hour to the sanatorium itself, a three-storey-and-semi-basement wooden house with a steeply pitched tile roof built, at a guess, by a rich Victorian family. It was painted primrose yellow, with the carved bits under the eaves and the balustrades of the roofed porch that ran the width of the front picked out in white.

  There was a Volkswagen Microbus painted up as an ambulance standing in the gravel drive, a Saab 99 parked around the side of the house. We walked up the half-dozen wooden steps on to the porch and I rang the bell. There were a couple of weather-worn old rocking-chairs out there, where maybe you sat on a summer evening and dreamed of the dry martinis and whisky sours gone by for ever. Or maybe not; when you got close to the house, you could see that every window, right to the top, was barred.

  The door opened with a complicated clicking and clacking of locks and a matronly woman in crisp white uniform stared woodenly out at us.

  Kari said something quick in Norwegian, then introduced me. No handshake, just a brief starched nod. Then we switched to English.

  'We would like to visit Engineer Nygaard,' the girl explained. 'We are friends.'

  'We do
not have visitors in the morning.'

  'We have come from Bergen,' Kari explained.

  'If you had telephoned you would have been told. You should have telephoned.'

  I chipped in my piece, 'Sorry, that's my fault. I've come from London in a bit of a hurry. Can I have a word with Doctor Rasmussen?'

  Somewhere inside the house somebody screamed. Not just in pain; a long, wavering, sobbing howl of simple terror that practically tore off my scalp.

  But not with matron. She cocked her head and listened thoughtfully, like somebody trying to identify a tricky bird-call. Feet clattered on the stairs and a door slammed.

  She sighed briefly. 'I will see if the doctor can speak with you. But he is very busy. Please to come in and wait.'

  We waited in a big, bright, well-furnished room that still had that impersonal look you get in even the best of doctors' waiting-rooms. The pile of magazines, the chairs arranged so you didn't have to chat to anybody else waiting there, the carefully placed ashtrays.

  We waited. Kari said in a carefully hushed voice, 'Perhaps we should have telephoned."

  'I doubt it. They'd just have told us not to come at any time yet.'

  It was another five minutes before Dr Rasmussen came in. He must have been about fifty, but very fit with it: deep-chested and solid-shouldered, with a bouncy gait and a rich tan on his knobbly face. He wore a short-sleeved white coat showing thick forearms covered with fine blond hairs, though the top of his head was a careful arrangement of thin grey.

  This time we shook hands. He said, 'I am sorry you have come all this way for nothing. If you had rung up, I could have told you.'

  'I wouldn't say it was for nothing, Doctor. At least we've established that Engineer Nygaard is still alive. I suppose he still is?'

  He looked briefly startled, then laughed jovially. 'Of course. Did you really come all this way to prove that?'

  'Maybe. When an elderly man in not very good health suddenly vanishes without telling somebody who's been helping look after him-' I waved a hand at Kari '-or his ex-employer, who's paying his pension, the least anybody can do is get a bit worried. There's an obvious chance that he's fallen into the harbour or frozen to death sleeping it off under a bush in the park.'