Blame The Dead

Willie said, 'Oh, that ship? Well, sorry, old boy, but we aren't looking forthe log. Do you mean the deck log or the engine log or the rough draughts of either, or the official log? Not to mention the movements book-what?'

'So don't mention it, then,' I growled. 'Mrs Smith-Bang didn't tell me.'

'Oh, you saw her?'

'You know her?'

'Everybody in shipping knows her. And the ADP line was one of our regulars."

'So I gathered. Well-' And I started to tell my story.

They listened quietly, Willie sipping his tea and looking equally pained at each sip, David just ploughing through his pasty and watching me carefully.

When I finished, Willie said, 'You do live, don't you?'

'Barely.'

David said, 'You were jolly lucky about your Mauser and finding it first.'

'Not entirely. The other side was counting on luck as well. Somebody else might have found the body before I could possibly have got there – I could have had a perfect alibi, like boozing in a bar with the king, or something.'

'It was still your pistol,' he pointed out.

'Oh, yes, but I'd only have been in trouble with the Min of Def for not having reported it lost. That's not murder. No, they had the luck that theoretically I could have done the killing and the bad luck that I was snoopy enough to get there first and start fiddling the evidence. Or unfiddling it.'

Willie said slowly. 'So it mattered more to them to kill Steen before you saw him than to get you blamed for it?'

T'm sure of that.'

'But all he was going to do – from his notes – was tell you about the Chief Engineer, Nygaard, and where he lived.'

'And H and Thornton. And anything else he thought of before he saw me.'

'Yees.' He scratched his cheekbone.

David asked, 'But why was Daddy having to take this log to Arras?'

Willie watched me carefully. I shrugged. 'Being blackmailed, I think.'

'Was he? What about?'

T don't really know; it doesn't matter. The important thing is that they tried the same trick with me and I ended up doing exactly the same thing: playing along to see if I could find out who was behind it, and taking some protection. I took Draper, like your father had taken me.'

David was only half listening. 'But how could they blackmail him? Do you think he was having an affair? '

Willie made a strangled coughing-gulping noise. I tried to look uninterested.

David said, as much to himself as anybody, 'I suppose he might have done… but with whom? Anybody we know. It could be Miss Mackwood, couldn't it, and that was why she was involved?' He glanced at Willie, who did a good job of not having heard of Fenwick, Maggie, or fornication, either.

I said firmly, 'But at least we got a solid identification out of it. According to Draper, this Kavanagh's a bit of a hard case. Herb apparently fired him for trying to bribe a juryman, and before that he'd left the police in something of a hurry. Sounds like one of those times when they say "Oh, he's a terribly nice chap, he'd never do a thing like that," and privately tell him to resign in six months, or else.'

David's eyes opened a little wider. 'Do they do that?'

'Every organisation does it, what?' said Willie, glad to find something new to talk about. 'Including the public schools. But what are you proposing to do about Kavanagh? – tell the police?'

'Whose? The Steen case is closed; I never reported the truth-drug business over here, and as for Arras-'

I stopped. David had gone very white and his clenched fists were bouncing nervously on the edge of the table. His eyes glittered at me. 'Do you think,' he said in a thick voice, 'that he killed my father?'

I wished I'd seen where I'd been leading. Smearing as much calm consideration on my voice as possible, I said, 'We know there weretwo men in Arras; from what we now know of Kavanagh he could have been one of them, and I'm going to get the word to Arras – indirectly – to check his name in hotels and any cross-channel passenger lists they can find. Not that such things exist much nowadays.'

I wasn't looking directly at him, but from the edge of my eye I could see he was cooling down. I went on with my lecture. 'Meanwhile, Draper's doing some quiet work trying to find out what Kavanagh's been doing recently – remember, we've got an advantage that he doesn't know we know him. But also, he's not working for himself and we don't know who he is working for.'

David was staring down at his plate, nodding gently to himself. In the corner, one fifteen-year-old voice said, 'And don't tell me that was a director's film. Two directors walked off it before he got there.'

Another voice asked, 'Have youseen the film?'

'No, of course not. What are film reviews for?'

Tve often wondered that.'

Closer to home, Willie lit a cigarette carefully and said, 'But it does rather bring up the question of who the other side is in all this.'

I said, 'First, does Mrs Smith-Bang's story hold up? About engine trouble and the log proving it?'

'Yes, it sounds pretty possible, you know. Could be an important point, all right. Though to my mind, it doesn't so much prove the Prometheus Sahara officers are liars as that their radar set must have had a screw loose. And that's rather a worse offence, in fog. The courts expect the odd tall story, you know; most collisions take place between two stationary ships ten miles apart both hooting and firing off rocket signals, if you know what I mean? But trusting a duff radar set – that's serious.'

I grinned. 'Fine. So the Sahara Line's got a good case for wanting that log suppressed.'

He sighed. 'Yes, but… they're a big, solid company, you know. They don't do the sort of thing like… like Arras.'

But David took it calmly, this time.

I said, 'That's bunk, Willie. As you said yourself, all organisations do, and the bigger the oftener. Were you and your Lancers ever in the Middle East?'

He shook his head.

'Well, halfour work in Intelligence out there was finding out if the oil companies were going to start a revolution, never mind the Russians and Egyptians and our friends in the CIA. It's never the chairman of the board who does it, of course, and he may not even know, but somewhere down the line somebody else gets the idea that the boss is interested in results and not methods, and a few more steps down somebody picks up a gun and goes bang. Somebody hired Kavanagh and others to get that log; he wasn't working on spec.'

Willie nodded sadly and we sat silent for a while. Then he said, 'Of course, I don't suppose it would do any good, but you could always ask Paul.'

David said, 'D'you mean Mr Mockby, sir?'

'Yes. He's a director of the Sahara Line, you know.'

Twenty-eight

The pubs were just open by the time Willie and I started back, so we stopped at one halfway down the Hill and he phoned around to find Mockby while I washed away the taste of that tea. He didn't tell me what Mockby had said, apart from come and see me at home at half past six, but his expression showed the fat man hadn't undergone any injections of Christian charity on my behalf. Well, I could live with or without that from Mr Paul Mockby.

It was getting dark and the outbound traffic was the usual bad-tempered, many-eyed snake plus a few kamikaze pilots -as usual. Willie drove thoughtfully and quietly, his slightly melted Greek-god profile outlined against the passing headlights.

After a time, he asked, 'Do you really think Paul could be… ah… well, you know?'

'I don't know, but if there's a profit in it and he wouldn't be caught, I'm sure the answer's Yes. Am I right?'

'Probably, I'm afraid.' He said nothing for a distance, and then, 'I didn't want to mention it with David there, you know – but do you have a real idea why Martin was being blackmailed?"

'Well, hewas having it off with Maggie Mackwood. Didn'tyou know?'

'Er… but how did you find out?'

'She told me herself.'

'Good God Almighty.' But he said it gently, mostly to himself. 'I suppose youdid have to mention blackmail to David?'