Blame The Dead

'No. I missed it. But it's there. In him and in the log.'

'What'll they – I mean Ellie Smith-Bang – what will she do to him?'

'Why anything? She seems happy with him as he is.'

Nygaard got slowly to his feet, so slowly I didn't notice until he was nearly upright, his eyes fixed on the door. He let out a low, horrified moan.

My coffee mug spun away and the derringer was aimed – but not at the devils he could see. Thirty-eight Specials aren't enough for them. I slipped the gun back into its clip.

He was still watching the door – or whatever had walked through it. He began a gentle, gradual, horrible scream…

Now I'd got him. Now he'd tell me any damn thing he knew, or could fake or could remember – and I'd know the difference. He'd put his naked soul on the counter and I could buy it for a half glass of whisky – as long as I didn't pay.

I looked at Willie. Then Kari. 'Give him a drink.'

'But no!' She was horrified.

'Why not? He'll get worse from now on – and it's the first thingthey'll give him, down the hill.'

She said pitifully, 'But weren't you curing him?'

'No. Just starving him. So that he'd tell me something. It doesn't matter now – does it?' I looked back at Willie. 'Only forty thousand, that and three men's lives so far.' Back to Kari. 'A real cure is something else. And it'll only work if he wants it to, if he's got a reason for it to. Find that and you'll find the cure. Maybe. But meantime give him a drink.'

She said, 'You are very cruel, I think.' But she went outside to dig up the whisky and brought it back and slammed it into my hands.

He hadn't noticed any of it.

I sloshed some into a mug and gave it to him. He took a gulp, choked and splattered, gashed and gulped again. The second shot went down easier. In half a minute he took on nearly a quarter bottle and was sitting happily at the table sipping the next quarter as politely as any Paris boulevardier.

I said to Willie, 'That's it, then. Come outside, I want to talk to you.'

He frowned, but came.

The sky still began a bare two hundred feet higher, and now a few grains of snow were tippling down in the wind. Instinctively we began a parade-ground circuit of the cabin.

I said, 'Simple yes-or-no answer: was Martin Fenwick a homosexual?'

'Oh, really, old boy…' All the woolly speech mannerisms were suddenly back.

'And Jonas Steen was his steady boyfriend. That was why he gave Steen the surveying jobs – and why Steen gave him the log of the Skadi, even sent it to his flat in London. It was probably why hehad the flat, why his whole life pattern – Jesus, the things I didn't notice!'

Willie cleared his throat and wriggled a bit and said, 'Well, you know, he obviously wasn'tentirely, if you see what I mean…'

'You mean David?' There was no question but hewas Fenwick's son, not with the amount he'd done for him. 'Christ, why do these people have to be dynastic, as well?'

But hadn't Lois used almost that word at me – when she was trying to convince me how great a lover our Martin had been and he hadn't probably touched her in years? Keeping up the image her father had seen through? Building him that over-masculine study at Kingscutt? Taking me to bed?

Willie said gently, 'You can never be sure, you know. I mean, some women marry them because they're sure they can change them – you know?'

I just nodded and kicked at a snowdrop that had been stupid enough to bloom in a patch of bare turf in my path. Its head ripped off and spun into a gulley.

'And Maggie Mackwood,' I said. 'She wasn't having an affair with him any more than with the Cat in the Hat.'

'That wasn't entirely her fault,' he said dryly.

'Maybe – but he wasn't being blackmailed about her, then. Just about his queerness. Would that have buggered him up at Llovd's – if you'll pardon the expression?'

'Well… Lloyd's is pretty old-fashioned, and everything rather depends on what brokers think of an underwriter… Yes,' he admitted finally. 'It would have finished him.'

'But Mockby must have known?'

'Oh, yes, and a few of Martin's closest friends. But you know Pauclass="underline" he judges a man by his profitability, that's all. And it wasn't as if Martin dressed up and chased the young clerks -they aren't all like that, you know.'

'Of course I know; I was in the Army.'

'Yes, but in your shop you'd probably just think of him as a security risk.'

'Well, in the end he was, wasn't he? He laid the syndicate open to blackmail. Because every few months you'd club together and send him off for a nice discreet dirty weekend in Bergen and write it off as "keeping in touch with Norwegian shipping developments".' I shook my head slowly. 'Christ.'

He stopped and his jaw jutted, and if I said the wrong thing now I was going to need a face transplant. 'You were saying?'

I shrugged. 'The same that everybody's always saying: I make a lousy detective. I've been working on Fenwick, backtracking him, trying to see what made him tick… and all the time it was somebody else's arse.'

He threw a right-hander, but I'd known he would before he did himself. I stepped aside and he went on one knee in the slippery grass.

'Try that again, Willie,' I said, 'and I'll break you in places you didn't know you'd got. I haven't fought clean in my life and I'm too old to start now.'

He straightened up slowly; his voice sounded a bit breathless, but fairly controlled. 'I shouldn't have expected sympathy from you, I suppose.'

'Sympathy be damned. He had the job he wanted, a son he loved, a wife and boyfriend who loved him – and a hell of a lot of good friends like you to protect him. What was he missing – an Olympic medal?'

'It got him killed.'

'Balls. He didn't get killed because he was a homo, he got killed – and blackmailed – because he was pretending he wasn't. He wanted it both ways – in both senses. Well, you can do it – but at a price. It came high.'

Willie wiped his knee thoughtfully.

I said, 'But the moment you knew about the blackmail, you knew it was about him and Steen. And you still didn't tell me. Why?'

'Well, old boy,' he drawled, 'you have been rather the fearless seeker after truth – what? – but not doing much with it when you got it. I mean, you seem sort of happy enough just knowing what's happened without actually doing anything about it. All the things you don't tell various police forces, you know… Well, maybe it's the Intelligence Corps training: just finding out, not having to act on it.'

I felt cold, far colder than the wind. Somehow, we'd started walking again; we did half a circuit of the cabin in silence. Then I nodded. 'All right, but it was all over when he died. You still could have-'

'What about David?'

The thickening snowflakes stung my eyes. 'Of course. He wouldn't know. That's who you're protecting now.'

He nodded.

'And that means Mrs Smith-Bang can blackmail Fenwick beyond the grave. If we let her.'

He nodded again and just looked at me expressionlessly.

I said, 'David hired me to find out what happened to his father. And why.'

'I'll pay you more.'

'People like Mockby and Smith-Bang say things like that, Willie. And have.'

He frowned thoughtfully, finally said, 'Sorry.'

I said, 'I'm not promising anything… Best be getting down the hill.'

As we turned, he said, 'One thing, you know – we know Ellie Smith-Bang didn't find out through Steen that Martin had the log – but how did she find out? '

Should I say? But when he thought about it, he'd probably come up with the same guess that I had. 'When did Maggie Mackwood join the syndicate's office?'

'Six months ago. About.'

'Just time. To fall for the boss, to get turned down because he doesn't go for girls, to act the Woman Spurned and tell Smith-Bang – anonymously – that he'd got hold of the log.'

'Well, I'm damned,' he said softly.

'But she couldn't have guessed what might happen. She must have gone through her own private hell since… That's why she was spending money on private detectives, trying to protect Fenwick's name, atone somehow. I'd forget her, Willie.'