Blame The Dead

by Gavin Lyall

  'I understand. Naturally a man in his state is rather careless about leaving messages. I must see that he writes letters to everybody who is concerned with him.'

  'It runs to quite a number by now. You did know he was a star witness in a big court case? '

  Kari was looking at me with a slightly schoolmarmish frown.

  Rasmussen just nodded. 'He did tell me something. One does not know what to believe with such cases.' He turned to Kari. 'You were very clever to find him here, Froken Skagen. Or did he remember enough to leave a message with somebody?'

  I said quickly, 'We were very clever. Can we have just a quick word with him so that I can tell my superiors in London that he is still alive and… as well as can be expected?'

  The grin was gone now. 'We allow no visitors in the morning, Herr Card. And for Herr Nygaard, at his stage of treatment, we allow no visitors at all. You must understand that.'

  'What stage is he at by now? '

  'I cannot discuss a patient's symptoms, of course.'

  'Good for you, Doctor. But I've also got the shreds of professional ethics. You don't discuss a patient. I don't tell anybody he's still alive unless I've seen him.'

  I started buttoning my coat.

  His big, muscular face was twitching with indecision. Finally he said, 'Wait, please,' did an about-turn, and strode out.

  Kari whispered, 'What is happening?'

  I shrugged, but I unbuttoned my coat again and sat down.

  After a few minutes Rasmussen came back. He looked calm but serious. 'You may see him for a moment only. To reassure yourself. After that I hope you will leave me to complete the cure in peace.'

  We followed him out into the hall and up a flight of broad, shallow stairs, with a big window at the turn. Even that was covered with a heavy wire mesh.

  'Do many of them try to jump?' I asked cheerfully.

  'Not from here. That comes later,' he said soberly. 'It is still about seven per cent that succeed.'

  Kari was looking puzzled. 'Seven per cent? Of what? '

  Rasmussen said, 'Cured male alcoholics who commit suicide – whosucceed, not just who try. We can – often – take away the drinking. We cannot put back what he has drunk away. A marriage, a family, a fortune, sometimes.'

  Kari frowned. Rasmussen added, 'But, of course, some say an alcoholic is trying to commit suicide, subconsciously, by his drinking. So perhaps I meet only those who have suicidal tendencies already.'

  I said, 'Perhaps you're saving ninety-three per cent rather than losing seven, you mean? Pretty good, that.'

  He gave me a disapproving glance. 'You are forgetting those who fail to be cured.'

  'Ah, yes.'

  The corridor was broad and well lit and empty of furniture except for a couple of the metal tea-trolleys that you see carrying drugs and stuff around in hospitals. And the doors weren't the original ones. These were painted in nice bright colours, but it didn't hide their blank solidity, the heavy lock, the central port-hole at eye level.

  Rasmussen peered in through one, then motioned me up to take a look.

  Nygaard was lying in the bed, on his back with his mouth open, apparently asleep. Around him was a room such as you'd expect in a private sanatorium: walls freshly painted a gloss primrose, a heavy wooden wardrobe and cupboard, soft chair for visitors, a water-bottle, mug, and flower vase all in plastic. No glass for Dr Rasmussen's patients. No seven per cent while in his care.

  I nodded, and let Kari take a look. While she was doing so, I leaned inconspicuously on the door-handle. It moved, all right.

  Rasmussen asked, 'Are you satisfied now?'

  Kari looked at me. 'It is him.'

  I nodded. 'I agree. Thank you, Doctor.' He looked momentarily surprised, then led the way back to the stairs.

  Then somebody screamed again – the same long, shaking screech that went through your head like a file across your teeth.

  Rasmussen stopped, listened briefly, and shouted, 'Trond!'

  Big feet clattered on the hallway below and a vast man in a short-sleeved white jacket came around the bottom of the stairs and pounded up towards us. He was built like Hermann Goring, with much the same bloated frog face, but he was fast on his feet and barely puffing when he reached the top. Mind, he was only in his middle thirties, I'd guess, so maybe most of his shape was hereditary.

  The scream reached out again and Rasmussen raised his voice to cut through it. Trond got his orders, nodded, and charged off down the corridor without giving Kari or me a glance.

  The doctor looked at me and smiled wanly. 'What do they see? – we can never know. Hell is aprivate place.'

  Kari was looking startled and bewildered. Rasmussen said, 'The symptoms of withdrawal, that is the most likely time for the delirium tremens. Then they start to meet the terrors. We try to soften it with drugs, but… each body is different, we cannot always make it the perfect dose.'

  He started downstairs. Behind us, the scream started, wavered, and drifted into a muffled gulping sound.

  'Often,' Rasmussen said, 'it is just somebody to touch them, like Trond, to make them know there is a world still around them.'

  'Trond must be a great comfort to you,' I said.

  He looked at me sharply, then bent his head in agreement. 'A good boy. And very strong. For a few, very few, we need that.'

  'Who committed Nygaard to you, Doctor?'

  He stopped and frowned. 'There was no "committing" – this is not prison or insanity.'

  'Sorry, Doctor. I'd just read something about a Sobriety Board that can commit alcoholics for a cure. If they're given the right evidence.'

  He shrugged and started down again. 'It happens for perhaps one per cent of cases.'

  'Ah, I wonder how he came to hear of you, though?'

  'Alcoholism is not rare with sailors. The cheap drink, the long boredom… He is not the first seaman officer in this house.'

  'I'll bet.' We reached the hall and the doctor kept going towards the front door. Nothing we could do but follow.

  There was another car in the drive – a tattered old Ford Cortina with a youngish driver leaning across the bonnet breathing cigarette smoke at the sky.

  Kari said, 'The taxi. We asked for it.'

  Of course." Well, anything's better than exercise. I turned to Rasmussen. 'Thank you for letting us barge in like this, Doctor.

  But try and get him to write those letters soon, huh?'

  He nodded stiffly, not much liking somebody else telling him what to do, but having to take it this time. We shook hands – a firm, dry hand – and I paused at the top of the porch steps and looked around. Off to both sides, beyond the flower beds with the first daffodils and the driveway, there were thick clumps of laurel and rhododendron and conifer bushes.

  'Must be nice in summer,' I commented. 'I hope your patients appreciate their luck, Doctor. Thanks again.' I walked across to the taxi.

  Kari had been chatting up the driver. 'The next boat is not until an hour, but he will drive us around the island if you like. He does not speak English.'

  The face was young, bony, friendly, and somehow it was nice to meet a Norwegian who didn't give a damn aboutmy language. 'Okay, let's drive around the island.'

  'He says there is a very interesting church of the twelfth century.'

  'If you want to see, go ahead.'

  'I would like to.' She took the front seat.

  The island itself went on being just as it had in the distance we'd walked: small bright houses and rich grass – but just the occasional raw rock poking through. Driving round it took twenty minutes and exactly nine kilometres on the clock, and we were almost back at the sanatorium when we came to the church.

  To me it was just a whitewashed stone barn with narrow arched windows, even if it had been built by Eric the Red, so I wandered outside while she went in. Even at that time of year the grass in the churchyard was thick and wet around my ankles, and the stone wall was the same slate grey as the church roof and the gently restless
sea a couple of hundred yards down the slope and past the road. Did they call it the Norwegian Sea up here? It didn't matter; it was really the same grey Atlantic, and the same stone church just beyond its reach that you see a hundred times on the west coast of Scotland and Ireland and wherever else the fishermen come home to be buried – some of them.

  Inside, the tablets would say 'Lost at sea'; here outside were the ones that would translate 'drowned', the ones the sea gave back – but maybe after a month or two of quiet revenge from the cod and the hungry gulls. The ones identified from a bracelet or a gold tooth, the ones you'd like to turn away again, but never can. Any fishing village – or island – writes its history on stones like these.

  Then the taxi driver gave an exaggerated cough and, when I looked up, glanced conspicuously at his watch. I nodded and walked slowly among the tombstones towards him; Kari came out as I reached the gate.

  We'd been back in the car for five minutes before she said, 'Inside that church, I saw names on the… the stones.'

  'Me too, outside.'

  'Ah. Bang?'

  'Bang.' After a while, I added, 'Probably she inherited a good part of this island as well as the shipping line. She could own the sanatorium.'

  'Then – she must know Engineer Nygaard is here, no?'

  'She must have put him here.'

  Kari thought about that all the way down to the dock. Our ferry was just coming in around the corner of the island, hooting gloomily.

  As we walked aboard, she asked, 'But then she is… hiding him while he becomes cured, ja?'

  'She's certainly hiding him. But he's no more taking the cure than I am.'

  Thirty-eight

  We met Willie in the Victoria – he'd just signed in, and sat down around a pot of coffee in the lounge beside the dining-room. I introduced Kari and gave him the quick word about Nygaard, but he wasn't really interested.

  When I gave him space, he said, 'All fine, old boy, but what about the log-book?'

  'I've got photostats of the last four pages.'

  He just looked at me.

  I said, 'I made a mistake trusting a private detective in London. He arranged my getaway but he tipped off the French policeand had my luggage gone over. I'm sorry.'

  'Aren't we all?' he said heavily. Then, 'Well, you found it, so I suppose you've a right to lose it again – what? But who's got it?'

  'The people Dave Tanner was working for – I don't know who, but the same people he was working for in Arras.'

  'Are you sure about that?'

  'Close enough.'

  He frowned. 'But now – what's Mrs Smith-Bang playing at, hiding away her witness like that?' And he looked at Kari as well as me.

  What he got back was a solemn wide-eyed stare. Whether he knew it or not, he'd rung the bell with her, with his curly fair hair, neat grey suit, club tie, glittering shoes – the perfect Englishman and all veryclean; you couldn't imagine a smudge on Willie any more than you could dust on the Crown Jewels.

  I shrugged. 'She's just hiding him.'

  'From us?'

  'Since she lied to us, yes, she's hiding him from us, but not necessarilyonly us.'

  He absorbed this. 'But how did she get him to go there?'

  'She's got some sort of hold on him.' I glanced at Kari, but she was looking elsewhere. 'And there's only one thing that Nygaard cares about, so my guess is she's been paying for his booze all along. Now she's moved the bottle and he had to follow.'

  'Damned if I see the logic of that,' he said – and then apologised to Kari. She blushed prettily. He went on, 'I mean, why keep your chief witness permanently stewed as a prune? He's not going to make a frightfully good impression on a court, what? Make more sense if hedid take the cure, you know?'

  I shrugged, 'I don't pretend to understand it, Willie.'

  Kari asked, 'But what can we do, then?'

  'If I could sit down with Nygaard and just ask him questions, we'd find out everything.'

  'The trained interrogator, eh?' Willie murmured. 'How do we get him, though?"

  'Go and take him.'

  Just then, David Fenwick walked in.

  'My God, what areyou doing here?'

  'Hello, sir.' We shook hands, and he grinned cheerily. 'Oh, when I heard Mr Winslow was coming over I asked if I could come, too, and Mummy said I could, if it was with him, so… here we are. It was all a bit of a rush; school only broke up today and I had to catch the plane still in uniform. I've just been changing.'

  Now he was wearing khaki denim trousers, a blue-and-green flowered shirt, and a light macintosh zip jacket. I introduced him to Kari and he bowed politely.

  Then I said to Willie, 'You might have told me.'

  'Sorry, old boy; forgot you didn't know. All fixed up in a bit of a hurry last night, after you'd rung.' But he wasn't really concentrating.

  David asked, 'What have we decided, now?'

  'Your employee here,' Willie said heavily, 'is just introducing us to the kidnapping business.'

  'Oh?' David sounded interested.

  'Rescue, he means,' I said hastily, keeping a watch on Kari. She was the one that mattered.

  She frowned slightly. 'You meant to take him away from Saevarstad?'

  'Tha's right. What chance has he got to make his own decisions where he's only got a whisky bottle for company? Every time he wakes up they offer him another drink – and he takes it. But get him away and let him sober up a bit and maybe he'll have a chance to make up his own mind.'

  Willie looked at me rather sharply, but said nothing.

  'But Doctor Rasmussen…' Kari said doubtfully.

  'He said he'd got no power to keep Nygaard there. If he calls the police in – okay. We explain our mistake. But if he doesn't call the police then he shows he's been acting illegally.'

  After a time, she said, 'How do we do this, then?'

  Willie gave a long, sad sigh.

  I suppose, if I'd sat down and thought about it, I'd've realised that kidnapping – I mean rescuing – is a complicated, professional business. First, you need transport, and that included a boat. But Kari knew of one: a diesel-engined fishing-boat belonging to an old boy who took her out to do the hard work whenever she visited Stavanger. And, yes, she could borrow it to visit some imaginary friend on a small island.

  You also need a hideout, and not the Victoria Hotel, Stavanger, no matter what else it's good at. But Kari knew that, too: her aunt owneda 'summer hut' on the Hunnedalen, which -from the map – was a valley road running up to the hills fifty miles from Stavanger, most of which was marked 'closed in winter'. But she thought the closed bits would be farther uphill from the hut. If she was wrong, it was going to be a damn crowded car stuck in a snowdrift overnight.

  The car itself was easy: I just sent Willie out to hire one, and by the way, buy a couple of sleeping bags on the way back; Kari had some camping gear stored with her aunt. Rather late, I remembered to sendher out to organise some food.

  By sundown, we were ready. By nine o'clock, we were on our way.

  The night was clear, starry and cold – and you never remember how cold it becomes the instant you get in a boat. This boat particularly.

  It was a wooden job, broad and shallow and smelling like the cat's supper. Maybe a bit over twenty feet long, with the front third decked over to give a cabin that was honestly no more than three feet high but had a Calor gas stove, two bunks, a cupboard, a wood-burning stove in the bows sticking its chimney up like a flagpole through the deck, and a row of dangling pans that clattered in tune with the chug of the diesel.

  Behind us, the lights of Stavanger didn't fade away, they just ruddy stayed there.

  'How fast are we going?' I called to Kari.

  'Five knots, I think.' She was just a bulky shape against the stars, hands in anorak pockets, woolly ski cap on top, riding the tiller and steering it with her thighs.

  'How fastcould we go?"

  'Seven, perhaps eight. Shall I show you?'

  Willie said, 'No t
hank you.' He and David and the engine itself were in the middle of the boat, both of them studying it by thin torchlight. I was hunched on the deck, in among a clutter of rusty chains, ends of rope, and plastic buckets.

  'What the hell do you know or care about diesels, Willie?' I asked grumpily. The cold was beginning to bite.

  He said evenly, 'They occasionally cropped up in my end of the Army, old boy.'

  'Sorry. I'd forgotten the cavalry hadn't invented the high-compression horse.'

  'You wouldn't say that if you'd ever been rolled on by one.'

  I grinned unwillingly in the darkness. 'And around us, the busy evening went on, down, maybe, but busy enough: ferries that were just bright strips of light, fishing-boats that were patterns of coloured light, motorboats that sparkled white and roared and changed direction every five seconds; Piccadilly Circus on water. Kari just chugged us through it, confident of a small tricoloured light slung to our stumpy mast and steering by occasional glances at a small tourist map of the bay and fjords; not even a compass. You find more charts, books, depth-sounders, and stuff on a weekender's dinghy than you do in a serious fishing-boat.

  Willie stuck the cover back on the engine, lit a cigarette, and came and crouched beside me on the deck. He was wearing a thick, double-breasted fawn overcoat – like the old Army 'British Warm' – and the first thing he said was, 'Doesn't feel quite like D-Day must have done.'

  'What d'you want? Couple of airborne divisions and battleship bombardment?'

  'Something more than that little two-shot peashooter of yours, anyway, what? Seems to me it's just big enough to be illegal and nothing more.'

  'It was never meant to be a first gun. But I don't expect any rough stuff.'

  'How are we going to tackle it, then? '

  'David stays in the boat. The rest of us just tag along, knock on the door, see what happens next.'

  He grunted. 'Must say I'd rather we were doing it in a more military way.'

  'If we're doing it the military way, we start with you standing up straight and calling me "sir" – lieutenant.'