Blame The Dead

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.