Blame The Dead

He glowered at the cabin top. 'Well, perhaps you're right… so now we're sure it's a business between her and… andus, at Lloyd's?' There was shock in his voice.

I said, 'She was blackmailing her own insurer. Not the Sahara Line or anybody.'

'But what about, what? Something in that log?'

'That's what I'm asking Nygaard tomorrow. That's why we've got him, whatever we told Kari.'

The diesel stopped.

The black blank cliffs echoed back tut-tut-tut, beats of a heart that had died already. The water slapped gently against us as we slowed, each tiny sound getting louder and louder in the vast dark silence that seemed to expand around us.

David creaked the tiller, coughed politely, and whispered, 'I haven't touched the throttle.'

Beside him, Kari stood up. 'We have enough fuel, I know.' Her torch came on and she waggled it over the instrument board. 'But yes.'

David said, 'Was it anything I did?'

'God, no,' Willie said. 'Diesels either go or don't, what? Now all we have to do is find out why not.' He pulled off the tarpaulin and then the wooden lid, and flashed the torch down inside.

Over his shoulder, all I could see was a dark, crusted, green-brown engine with a lot of thin metal pipes poking into it. Willie poked the starter button and there was a chuffle-chuffle-chuffle but nothing more.

'What d'you think it is?' David asked.

Willie grunted, 'Probably fuel trouble. It usually is.' Chuffle-chuffle-chuffle on the starter.

'Injector pump?' I suggested, remembering the Skadi's log.

He looked up quickly. 'My God, I hope not. If it is…' Chuffle-chuffle-chuffle. Only not quite as strong now.

I said, 'Should we switch off the light to save the batteries?'

Willie said, 'Oh, I don't think we need-'

The cabin door banged open and Nygaard crawled out like a bear from hibernation. 'Why engine stop?'

Five minutes later, the three of them were deep in the open engine, talking in grunts and mumbles, their faces shining in the light from a torch propped on the cabin top. Kari and I sat back beside the useless tiller, finishing off the sandwiches and talking in whispers. '

'Why did he wake up?' she asked.

'The engine stopping, I suppose. He's so used to being on a ship with the engines turning that the silence automatically wakes him.' And when I thought about it, a man who'd gone to sea at sixteen and retired at sixty could have spent more than half his whole life sleeping to the sound of engines.

I glanced over the side at the black water. 'Are we going to run aground?"

'I think not yet.' We were about two hundred yards from the nearest cliff.

'We couldn't put down an anchor?'

'It is perhaps two hundred metres deep, here.'

I instinctively pulled back into the boat, with the sudden vertigo of a man sitting atop a black glass column. A quick shudder went from my shoulders to my knees. 'I see what you mean.' The longest piece of rope or chain in the boat wasn't over fifty feet.

She said softly, 'He is a good boy, David. He tells me about his father being killed. I did not know about that. I see why you must ask Herr Nygaard questions, but…'

'I'll be as gentle as I can.' Or make sure she was out of the way first.

Then Nygaard stood upright with a grunt of triumph, holding up something like the Devil's heart: spongy, black, and dripping. He dumped it overside and crawled into the cabin again.

'What on earth was that?' I asked Willie.

'The paper fuel filter. Blocked solid. He's seeing if there's a spare. If not…" He looked up and down the fjord. Not a light showed anywhere, not the dim scratch of a road or the outline of a building. We could be a thousand miles or a million years from anything else man-made. 'If not, it'll be a long cold night.'

Then Nygaard crawled out again, waving something pale, so maybe it wouldn't be so long and cold – though it hadn't been short or warm so far. A few minutes afterwards, the filter was back in place, and he motioned Willie to press on the starter. The chuffle-chuffle-chuffle was definitely slow and reluctant.

Nygaard called, 'Stop!' and bent to go on reassembling the engine. Just pulling fuel through the pipe up to the filter itself, I suppose. But it was only a few more minutes until he stood up and wiped his hands with a definite There-you-are motion. Willie set the throttle.

Chuffle-chuffle… chuffle…

Now it was the sound of the king breathing his last in one of those television epics.

Chuff… le… chufff… The king is dead, long live the king.

'Stop!' Nygaard ordered.

'Anybody for a long cold night?' I muttered. 'Told you we should have switched off that damn light.'

Nygaard was asking Willie something; Kari went forward to help out. I caught the word 'Ether', I think, and definitely 'whisky'. Oh, hell; the old boy's asking for his reward, now. I stood up and joined in.

Kari explained, sounding puzzled, 'He wants some whisky for the engine – but we must do it. He does not want to see.'

Willie and I stared at each other, then David. I said, 'Okay. Try anything. Get out the whisky, Willie.'

He unwrapped the carefully hidden bottle and Nygaard crawled away into the cabin. Kari hauled the Primus stove out into the deck, lit it, and started heating a cupful of whisky in a pan.

David asked quietly, 'Why doesn't he want to see?'

'He's scared stiff of naked flame – since the Skadi burned.'

The whisky hissed and bubbled. Willie took off the big round air filter, Kari sloshed hot whisky into the inlet manifold, and Willie snapped his lighter at it. Blue-yellow flames flared up.

Willie said, 'God damn!' in a slightly charred tone, and stabbed the starter.

Chuff… chuffff – the flames were sucked inside and the engine blasted to life.

Kari took the tiller while Willie and David put the engine covers back on again. When Willie turned around, he was still shaking his head. 'I thought I knew something about diesels but that… I suppose a chief engineerought to know his stuff, still…' He stuck his burnt hand into his mouth and sucked.

David said wonderingly, 'But do you really think he was drunk while he was doing all that? '

'He seemed normal enough, didn't he?'

'Well, yes. That's what I mean.'

'So he must be drunk. If I had as much alcohol in me as he has, I'd be unconscious. You'd be dead.'

After a few moments, he said, 'But you think of drunks as being, well, happy and wild, or just sick.'

'They're amateurs. He's the real pro.'

After another few minutes, he said, 'There was one funny thing. He hasn't asked what he's doing on this boat at all, has he? He just sort of… accepted it.'

'He's ashamed to ask; he assumes he's already been told and he's forgotten. That happens, too.'

He made a small shivery noise.

Forty-one

I'd told Willie to hire a Volkswagen as being nice and inconspicuous, but things aren't that easy with him; I should have guessed from that dolled-up Mini. This was the Volks 1600 fastback version, and a nice bright orange to contrast with the pale pastel cars the rest of Norway drives. But at least nobody had stolen it.

The drive itself took just under an hour and we had the road all to ourselves – not that there was much room for a second car most of the time. Beyond the head of the fjord it ran fast and straight for about five miles of scattered farms and houses, then suddenly into a narrow gorge and a hundred yards of tunnel through rock that leaked water like a thunderstorm. The clatter on the roof almost woke the back-seat brigade: Kari, David, and Nygaard all jammed together and all asleep after the first mile.

Beyond that, we reached the snow line. First just patches of it on the slope beside us, glowing briefly in the headlights, then places where we were driving between small walls of it, and finally, beyond the last crossroads and a handful of houses that felt important enough to call itself Byrkjedal, the road itself was rutted snow and ice, weaving uphill beside a slope that was solid white except where it was too steep for the snow to cling.