Blame The Dead

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 didn'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.