Blame The Dead

'How are you doing?' I asked.

'I don't think I can do much more, you know. You had a good sleep.'

'Yes.' I went through into the kitchenette, found another can of beer in the fridge, and took it back to the table.

Willie stood up and stretched and lit another cigarette. 'I've just about translated the whole last voyage. I used your phone to get on to a chap who reads Norwegian properly and got him to do some of the phrases for me, you know? It seemed safer than letting anybody see the whole thing.'

I nodded approvingly. 'Well, what does it all show?'

'Well…' he shuffled some papers. 'She went from Bergen to Leith. From there back to Gothenburg in Sweden. On to Stockholm. Then to Helsinki, then to Tallinn.'

'Where?'

'Tallinn, in Estonia. Russia, really. Just across from Helsinki. I must say I'd like to know what cargoes she was heaving on and off in these places.'

'She ended up with rolls of paper – newsprint – and timber on deck, didn't she?'

'I believe so. Anyway, she was in Tallinn about two days.' He turned the stiffened, wavery pages. 'Then sailed on the morning of the fourteenth."

'Fine, butdid she have engine trouble?'

'Oh yes.' He turned another page. 'That started late on the fifteenth. As far as I can make out, something packed up and they had to shut down one engine. You did know she was diesel-engined?'

'She could have been run by faith, hope, and clockwork for all I knew.'

He frowned briefly. 'Well, she was – that's why she could run with an engine-room staff of one chief and three men. Two Burmeister and Wain thousand-horsepower jobs drivinga single shaft. Shut one down and you naturally halve your power and speed.' He tracked his finger across the page, column by column. 'It all fits, you know. Speed comes down to five knots, that checks with the distance covered, and that with the noon position. I worked it out on the atlas, what? And that engine's off the line right through the sixteenth – and that's the last entry we've got. The collision was next day.' He turned a page and it was bleared and grimy – but blank.

'The chief officer would copy this up daily?' I picked up the log and riffled through it.

'Most likely. It'd be part of his daily routine.'

'So the ADP Line's got its case, has it? '

'It looks like it – provided they've got somebody to swear that the other engine hadn't been restarted some time on the seventeenth, before the crunch.'

'They've got Nygaard, unless the drink's got him first.' Then something else occurred to me. 'There were three other survivors, weren't there? Were any of them from the engine-room?'

'No. They were all deck-hands who'd been off watch at the time. So their evidence about the state of the engines wouldn't be worth a thing, what? And they weren't on the bridge either – everybody up there got killed – so they can't give more than guesses about the speed.'

'They're going to need Nygaard, then.' I tossed the log-book on to the table and it blew ash from the overloaded ashtray. 'Was this the sort of damage you can repair at sea?'

'Just can't say, old boy, and this sort of log doesn't give enough detail. It only says things like-' he picked up a piece of paper ' "still at half speed, engineers working on injection pump" at the end of each watch. Mind you, they'd had pump trouble a few weeks before. Once it took a couple of watches to fix it – about eight hours – once around twelve hours. Sounds as if they needed a new one, you know? This time it could have broken for ever – but Nygaard should be able to say. Pity the engine log wasn't 'the one to survive, really.'

'What about invalidation?'

'Eh? What? Oh – what Paul was going on about.'

'What Fenwick wassupposed to have told him.'

'Yes.' He peered at his fingernails and looked as if he were deciding whether to Tell Tales about the school bully. Finally he cleared his throat and said formally, 'There's nothing in here that suggests it might invalidate the policy at all. And it takes an awful lot to invalidate a Lloyd's policy, you know. That's one reason people insure with us -what?'

I nodded moodily. 'Well – now what, then? '

He began unrolling his shirt sleeves, slow and thoughtful. 'Legally, it must belong to the owners. ADP, I mean. The whole point of a log's to allow the owners to check up on what actually happened on a voyage – you know? So I suppose-'

Then the phone rang. I picked it up. 'Yes?'

Either it was an electric storm calling or one was bugging the line. A tinny, distant shout came through: 'Mister Card?'

'That's me,' I shouted back.

'It is Kari Skagen.'

'Hello. How're things?"

'Chief Engineer Nygaard is gone.'

'Gone? You mean dead?' Behind me, I heard Willie jerk to Action Stations.

'No, I think. He has gone away. From the Home. I do not know where.'

'Well… what about Ruud?'

'He does not know where.'

'Christ Almighty.'

'Pardon?' she shouted.

'Never mind. But… Can you ask anybody else? At the Home and so on? And ring me again?'

'Very well.'

'Is there a number where I can get you?'

She gave one. 'It is a university lodging house, so please leave a message if I am not there.'

Til do that. See you – probably soon.'

When I turned around, Willie was still standing tensed, wound up, and if I'd said 'Fly' he'd have grown feathers.

He asked, 'Did somebody else get killed?'

'No – well, I don't really know. But ADP's lost their witness.'

A little while later I was nibbling on a Scotch – and the hell with it being just after four in the afternoon – and sitting in the one comfortable chair. Willie was still at the table, sipping coffee.

'But when you come right down to it,' I said, 'there's no reason why he shouldn't have gone walkies just by himself. He's past the age of consent, and that place wasn't a prison or a mental bin. He can walk out any time he likes and go anywhere he chooses.'

'Didn't you say he was short of money?' Willie asked.

'I thought he probably was, but he could have a few quid hidden away – enough to go out on a private honk and now he's lying under some bush in the park dead of pneumonia.'

He nodded. 'I suppose that is more likely. than anything sinister. So you're not going to rush back across there?'

'Not yet, anyway. Kari can do more than I could. I'll wait to hear from her.' I splashed more Scotch into my glass.

Willie raised an eyebrow and bounced the book in his hand with a weighing motion. 'You know, old boy, we're the only two people alive who've actually read this thing. The last few pages, anyway. Steen and Martin are dead and so are all the people who'd seen it on the ship itself. The deck-hands certainly wouldn't and there's no reason why the chief engineer should see a deck log – you know what I mean?'

'Are you thinking it's the idol's eye or the moonstone and we're all doomed?'

'Well, you seem to have been, rather.' He smiled wryly. 'But no – I mean nobody else actually knows what's written here. They're just guessing or assuming.'

I eased my back and winced. 'They assume bloody hard, then.'

'Oh, quite so. But the chief officer could have left these pages blank or filled them with rude rhymes – and you'd've had exactly the same troubles you've had these past couple of weeks. Funny.'

'Hilarious.' I reached for the Scotch again.

This time, Willie said, 'I say, old boy, isn't that stuff supposed to inflame a wound, you know?'

'Let it try.'

'I say, are you planning on getting smashed, old boy? '

'Something along those lines. It's a Saturday night and the upper and lower classes traditionally get spiffled on Saturdays. The middle class just look on with jealous disapproval.'

'That isn't the reason.'

'No, that isn't the reason, Willie.'

'Ah. That rather answers a question I was going to…'

'No you weren't, Willie. Not you. You're far too much of a gentleman to ask it. Now get out and leave me to it.'