Blame The Dead

by Gavin Lyall

  'Yes, sir.' He gave me one quick glance and went out.

  After a minute or two, Nygaard bent down with a grunt, picked up the mug, slopped a lot of it out, but drank the rest.

  I said, 'Did you know we'd found the log, the deck log?'

  'Ja?'Question or answer? – or a man who can't remember whether he remembers or not?

  I took the copies from my jacket pocket. 'Do you remember when Steen came to see you? Man called Jonas Steen?'

  He looked up with a flabby sneer, then leaned over and patted his backside. 'You call him man? I think in England you say fairy mostly.'

  I frowned. Nygaard went on leering. 'You like him?'

  'Shut up.' So how could I tell? – I'd only met him dead. Women say to you, 'But I thought men couldalways tell,' just like I can always tell they're not cheating on me and who's going to win the Third World War.

  Wait a moment. 'How doyou know?' Steen might have been Tinkerbell Mark One, but he'd never have waggled at this broken-down old barrel.

  'Everybody know.' He threw the question away with a flap of his right claw. And hadn't Mrs Smith-Bang asked if I'd met this man alive? – before she'd had him killed.

  So now I knew what was in Henrick Lie's suicide note. A 'personal affair', wasn't it? That's what that bastard Inspector (First Class) Vik had been hiding; an unrequited-love story. Had Lie really been homosexual as well, or had Kavanagh invented it for the occasion?

  Never mind. I said, 'it doesn't matter what Steen was. But who's H and Thornton?'

  'I do not-'

  'Oh yes you do, mate. Who are they?'

  'No.'

  I took a box of Kari's matches out of my pocket and shook it once and laid it down. He stared at it as if it was a tarantula. Probably he'd have preferred the spider.

  I said, 'Well?'

  'Hucks and Thornton,' he said hoarsely.

  'Good. And who arethey?'

  'I… they…' His eyes were still on the matchbox. I picked it up, slowly, very slowly, and pressed it gently open… and he watched all the time. Sweat flooded his face.

  Then I said, 'Oh, bugger it. No.' And I pulled open the door and threw the matchbox the length of the main room.

  A car rushed past. Not a Volkswagen, but I was too late at the window to catch it on the only piece of road I could see. But going uphill fairly fast.

  Wasn't the road blocked above here?

  By the time I was out of the door and with a view of the full stretch of road, it was out of sight. I ran back and emptied half a bucket of water into the stove – and nearly blew the cabin down. For a moment, smoke and steam filled the room and the hot metal fizzed like a snake-pit. But it faded quickly. There'd be no sign of life when the car came back.

  But it didn't come back. Not right away and then not just after that and…

  … and David?

  I'd told him to stay off the road and out of sight. He could hear a car as well as I could; I'd just be giving away my own position by stepping out and yelling at him.

  I moved from one window to another and to the front door, open a crack and bleeding cold air in on us. Behind me, Nygaard said, 'Please shut the door.' I didn't.

  Then a figure moved across a gap between two cabins up the road. A figure like – no, I didn't know what it was like. Not just on one glimpse. But the next time it moved, it was Trond. You can't make a mistake about that frog shape, not twice.

  Nygaard said, 'What is happening? It smells burning.'

  'I doused the fire. Now shutup.'

  Trond was moving from cabin to cabin, checking each one and pretending he was an infantryman under fire but forgetting an infantryman has a firm sense of direction. Wrong, maybe, but firm. Trond was hidden from our direction for one moment, then running up and planting his backside to me, peek-a-booing around a corner back the way he'd come.

  When he was within thirty yards, I took out the derringer and cocked it. He checked one last cabin and started for ours. I let him come to fifteen yards… ten – and he stopped. He'd seen the door wasn't quite closed.

  I opened it and stepped out, holding the gun pointed. I wasn't going to shoot at that range, but I wanted him to decide whether he came any closer.

  'Hello, Trond.'

  The wide fleshy face creased into a grin and he stepped forward. Then two shots sounded, back up the valley, and he stopped, head cocked. A distant voice shouted, 'Trond!'

  Then he scuttled away around a cabin and out of sight. I waited. Nothing. I dropped down the steps, derringer in hand -and the car rushed past down the road. A white Cortina, old model, that could be the one we'd seen in Rasmussen's drive, or maybe not.

  I shouted, 'David?' The far slope bounced back a sloppy echo. But I was still prowling and shouting when Willie and Kari got back, half an hour afterwards.

  Forty-four

  He bounced out of the Volkswagen almost before it had stopped, screaming. 'You bloody idiot! They've got David!' I just nodded. By then I was sitting perched on the parapet at the side of the road and feeling rather tired, plus other things.

  'How do you know?' I asked dully.

  'They stopped us on the road!' Kari was out now, staring white-faced at me. Willie went on, 'I saw him!'

  'And who else?'

  'What does that…? Well, there were three of them, men. Two British, I think. The other was Trond.'

  'One of them with a bandage on his hand?'

  'I didn't see. They said-'

  'White Cortina, was it?'

  'Yes. Do you want to know what they said?'

  'I can guess, but go on.'

  'They'll swap him for Nygaard.'

  Kari said, 'We cannot do this.'

  I said, 'I guessed that, too. Why not?'

  'He is a person! Not a slave! You do not give him away -even for an English schoolboy.'

  I looked at Willie. 'Did they say when and where?'

  'At the crossroads at Byrkjedal, at four.' He looked at his watch. 'Fifty minutes/ 'So there's no rush.' I looked at Kari. 'I don't think Nygaard's in any danger, you know. He's still a key witness in a big case. Once we're down the hill, we can report him to the police and have them pick him up as an alcoholic. Get him properly committed to somewhere. We can do that, too, under Norwegian law. No problem. Now start packing him up.'

  I led the way confidently towards the cabin. That's what majors are for, isn't it? -to show confidence?

  Ten minutes later we were all packed – well, the Volkswagen was – and three of us standing around sipping a last cup of coffee while Nygaard sat in his uniform greatcoat on the bench and shivered at other things beside the cold.

  Willie murmured, 'Did you solve the mystery of the Marie Celeste?'

  'No. I missed it. But it's there. In him and in the log.'

  'What'll they – I mean Ellie Smith-Bang – what will she do to him?'

  'Why anything? She seems happy with him as he is.'

  Nygaard got slowly to his feet, so slowly I didn't notice until he was nearly upright, his eyes fixed on the door. He let out a low, horrified moan.

  My coffee mug spun away and the derringer was aimed – but not at the devils he could see. Thirty-eight Specials aren't enough for them. I slipped the gun back into its clip.

  He was still watching the door – or whatever had walked through it. He began a gentle, gradual, horrible scream…

  Now I'd got him. Now he'd tell me any damn thing he knew, or could fake or could remember – and I'd know the difference. He'd put his naked soul on the counter and I could buy it for a half glass of whisky – as long as I didn't pay.

  I looked at Willie. Then Kari. 'Give him a drink.'

  'But no!' She was horrified.

  'Why not? He'll get worse from now on – and it's the first thingthey'll give him, down the hill.'

  She said pitifully, 'But weren't you curing him?'

  'No. Just starving him. So that he'd tell me something. It doesn't matter now – does it?' I looked back at Willie. 'Only forty thousand, that
and three men's lives so far.' Back to Kari. 'A real cure is something else. And it'll only work if he wants it to, if he's got a reason for it to. Find that and you'll find the cure. Maybe. But meantime give him a drink.'

  She said, 'You are very cruel, I think.' But she went outside to dig up the whisky and brought it back and slammed it into my hands.

  He hadn't noticed any of it.

  I sloshed some into a mug and gave it to him. He took a gulp, choked and splattered, gashed and gulped again. The second shot went down easier. In half a minute he took on nearly a quarter bottle and was sitting happily at the table sipping the next quarter as politely as any Paris boulevardier.

  I said to Willie, 'That's it, then. Come outside, I want to talk to you.'

  He frowned, but came.

  The sky still began a bare two hundred feet higher, and now a few grains of snow were tippling down in the wind. Instinctively we began a parade-ground circuit of the cabin.

  I said, 'Simple yes-or-no answer: was Martin Fenwick a homosexual?'

  'Oh, really, old boy…' All the woolly speech mannerisms were suddenly back.

  'And Jonas Steen was his steady boyfriend. That was why he gave Steen the surveying jobs – and why Steen gave him the log of the Skadi, even sent it to his flat in London. It was probably why hehad the flat, why his whole life pattern – Jesus, the things I didn't notice!'

  Willie cleared his throat and wriggled a bit and said, 'Well, you know, he obviously wasn'tentirely, if you see what I mean…'

  'You mean David?' There was no question but hewas Fenwick's son, not with the amount he'd done for him. 'Christ, why do these people have to be dynastic, as well?'

  But hadn't Lois used almost that word at me – when she was trying to convince me how great a lover our Martin had been and he hadn't probably touched her in years? Keeping up the image her father had seen through? Building him that over-masculine study at Kingscutt? Taking me to bed?

  Willie said gently, 'You can never be sure, you know. I mean, some women marry them because they're sure they can change them – you know?'

  I just nodded and kicked at a snowdrop that had been stupid enough to bloom in a patch of bare turf in my path. Its head ripped off and spun into a gulley.

  'And Maggie Mackwood,' I said. 'She wasn't having an affair with him any more than with the Cat in the Hat.'

  'That wasn't entirely her fault,' he said dryly.

  'Maybe – but he wasn't being blackmailed about her, then. Just about his queerness. Would that have buggered him up at Llovd's – if you'll pardon the expression?'

  'Well… Lloyd's is pretty old-fashioned, and everything rather depends on what brokers think of an underwriter… Yes,' he admitted finally. 'It would have finished him.'

  'But Mockby must have known?'

  'Oh, yes, and a few of Martin's closest friends. But you know Paul: he judges a man by his profitability, that's all. And it wasn't as if Martin dressed up and chased the young clerks -they aren't all like that, you know.'

  'Of course I know; I was in the Army.'

  'Yes, but in your shop you'd probably just think of him as a security risk.'

  'Well, in the end he was, wasn't he? He laid the syndicate open to blackmail. Because every few months you'd club together and send him off for a nice discreet dirty weekend in Bergen and write it off as "keeping in touch with Norwegian shipping developments".' I shook my head slowly. 'Christ.'

  He stopped and his jaw jutted, and if I said the wrong thing now I was going to need a face transplant. 'You were saying?'

  I shrugged. 'The same that everybody's always saying: I make a lousy detective. I've been working on Fenwick, backtracking him, trying to see what made him tick… and all the time it was somebody else's arse.'

  He threw a right-hander, but I'd known he would before he did himself. I stepped aside and he went on one knee in the slippery grass.

  'Try that again, Willie,' I said, 'and I'll break you in places you didn't know you'd got. I haven't fought clean in my life and I'm too old to start now.'

  He straightened up slowly; his voice sounded a bit breathless, but fairly controlled. 'I shouldn't have expected sympathy from you, I suppose.'

  'Sympathy be damned. He had the job he wanted, a son he loved, a wife and boyfriend who loved him – and a hell of a lot of good friends like you to protect him. What was he missing – an Olympic medal?'

  'It got him killed.'

  'Balls. He didn't get killed because he was a homo, he got killed – and blackmailed – because he was pretending he wasn't. He wanted it both ways – in both senses. Well, you can do it – but at a price. It came high.'

  Willie wiped his knee thoughtfully.

  I said, 'But the moment you knew about the blackmail, you knew it was about him and Steen. And you still didn't tell me. Why?'

  'Well, old boy,' he drawled, 'you have been rather the fearless seeker after truth – what? – but not doing much with it when you got it. I mean, you seem sort of happy enough just knowing what's happened without actually doing anything about it. All the things you don't tell various police forces, you know… Well, maybe it's the Intelligence Corps training: just finding out, not having to act on it.'

  I felt cold, far colder than the wind. Somehow, we'd started walking again; we did half a circuit of the cabin in silence. Then I nodded. 'All right, but it was all over when he died. You still could have-'

  'What about David?'

  The thickening snowflakes stung my eyes. 'Of course. He wouldn't know. That's who you're protecting now.'

  He nodded.

  'And that means Mrs Smith-Bang can blackmail Fenwick beyond the grave. If we let her.'

  He nodded again and just looked at me expressionlessly.

  I said, 'David hired me to find out what happened to his father. And why.'

  'I'll pay you more.'

  'People like Mockby and Smith-Bang say things like that, Willie. And have.'

  He frowned thoughtfully, finally said, 'Sorry.'

  I said, 'I'm not promising anything… Best be getting down the hill.'

  As we turned, he said, 'One thing, you know – we know Ellie Smith-Bang didn't find out through Steen that Martin had the log – but how did she find out? '

  Should I say? But when he thought about it, he'd probably come up with the same guess that I had. 'When did Maggie Mackwood join the syndicate's office?'

  'Six months ago. About.'

  'Just time. To fall for the boss, to get turned down because he doesn't go for girls, to act the Woman Spurned and tell Smith-Bang – anonymously – that he'd got hold of the log.'

  'Well, I'm damned,' he said softly.

  'But she couldn't have guessed what might happen. She must have gone through her own private hell since… That's why she was spending money on private detectives, trying to protect Fenwick's name, atone somehow. I'd forget her, Willie.'

  After a while, he nodded.

  Forty-five

  In an odd way, it was a cheerful ride down the hill. The whisky bottle was empty and Nygaard was full, for the moment, and telling Kari a few things she'd rather not have known about the night life in Pernambuco. Or so my limited grasp of Norwegian plus Kari's expression led me to believe. But I spent most of my time studying the road map. And outside, the snow thickened in the air swirling about us.

  The Byrkjedal crossroads wasn't exactly quite that; more a couple of road forks, with the few houses in between. The last fork gave us a choice of last night's route back into Stavanger, or a half-made road around various lakes that fed out on to the main road to Sandnes and Stavanger, except another twenty kilometres south.

  'You've never taken the left fork at Byrkjedal, have you?' I asked Willie.

  'What? – no.' He was driving with tight-lipped concentration.

  'Apart from Trond and the bloke whose right hand youdidn't notice, did the other chap have a boxer's face?'

  He flipped me a quick glance. 'You might say, yes.'

  'Or like a mil
itary policeman?'

  'Something like it.'

  We reached Byrkjedal just before the hour, with the snow swirling with real confidence, and visibility down to about a hundred yards. We passed the first fork, a handful of houses, and coming up to the second fork – there were two cars parked on the right.

  'Stopbehind them!' I snapped. Willie pulled in about ten yards back.

  Closest was the white Cortina, beyond that the Saab 99. Two men climbed out of the Cortina and stood carefully spaced across the road. Tanner and Kavanagh, of course.

  Willie said, 'Were you expecting a second car, then?'

  'More or less.' I pushed open my door and got out into the whirling snow, but keeping the door in front of me and the derringer in my hand below its window level. Ahead of me, neither Tanner nor Kavanagh was showing a gun, but they weren't showing any hands, either. Just dark figures against a white kaleidoscope of snow.

  Tanner called, 'Afternoon, Major. Things seem to have got a bit complicated.'

  'All in the day's work,' I called back. 'By the way – was there really a security job for me if I'd stayed around in London?'

  'Of course, Major. All fixed. You should have taken it.'

  'I'm beginning to agree with you.'

  'So no hard feelings?' he called – but not getting any closer. 'The lady just wants her witness back, and that's that, okay?'

  'Fine. He's all yours. How do we do it – like the agents across the border bit?'

  I could hear his laugh at that distance and through the snow. 'We've both been on those ones, eh, Major? Okay, get him started.'

  I turned to the car. 'Get Nygaard out. Willie, stay there.' Without looking away, I reached back and pulled the seat-back forwards. Nygaard oozed uncertainly out behind me.

  And Kari followed. 'I am going with him.'

  Willie blew up. 'You'renot!'

  'I came with him, I go with him.'

  I said, 'She can try. They won't take her.'

  She looked at me curiously, then started to help Nygaard across the patch of swirling whiteness towards the other cars.

  He seemed suddenly subdued inside his greatcoat with its glistening epaulettes.