Blame The Dead

'No. I'll be okay.'

The garage was as cold as Caesar's nose, and I didn't waste time there. I hauled the solid black-leather suitcase out of the boot and slammed the lid. Actually it did make my back twinge a bit.

Back in the house I humped it up the stairs and into his bedroom and on to the bed and opened it. The log of the Skadi was the first thing I saw.

Thirty-two

'Just as simple as that?' Willie asked.

'You could say so.'

'So Martin was ready to hand over the real thing if it came to it. What? If they called his bluff?'

'Well – he was keeping that option open, anyway. The blackmail was working that well, at least.'

'M'yessss.' And he went back to staring at the log.

I'd rung him from Kingscutt and we'd met at my flat. I'd given him a rough, rather simplified outline of the night's events and then handed over the log. For the moment he was happy, but I had a feeling he was going to come back to last night.

The book itself was the size I'd expected – about fourteen inches by twelve, and bound in stiff fawn cardboard, like a big but not too expensive desk diary. What I hadn't expected was the mess it was in, which was silly of me when I remembered it had spent at least four wintry months in a burnt-out hulk. The covers were soaked in oil and stained with rust and rubbed away at the corners; the pages themselves were buckled and wavy with damp, and some torn besides-but not stuck together (unless Steen had separated them, of course). But luckily the entries were all in ball-point and hadn't run… What did I mean 'luckily'? Damp must be a problem sailors have met before.

Willie held it like a first folio and leafed slowly through it without seeming to breathe.

'D'you make anything of it?' I asked.

'Not a lot yet. I read some Norwegian but… I think I can see what most of the figures are. And I know what a British log looks like; this is just about the same, you know.'

Each page was laid out like some crazy ledger, with sixteen thin vertical columns and one wide one. Horizontally, it was divided into two batches of twelve, subdivided into fours, with some extra bits and pieces at the end of each twelve. Even I could work out that each page was a day, each line an hour and each four a 'watch', but the headings and the figures written into each column didn't mean a dicky-bird.

Willie explained, 'Oh, they're things like course steered, compass error, wind force and direction, that one's obviously the barometer reading, air and sea temperatures – you know?'

'Is it the right log?'

He turned hastily to the last filled-in page. 'September sixteenth. Yes, that was the day before the accident. That'd be right.'

'Who fills in this sort of log – the captain? '

'Oh, no, the chief officer. He does this. The master does the official log, but that's mostly about personnel, you know? Smith was sentenced to twenty lashes. Brown lost a sock overboard, the cat had kittens, that sort of thing.'

I nodded, then yawned. I couldn't help it. 'Sorry. So, what now? – d'you want to take it round to somebody who reads Norwegian?'

'I don't think so, not yet. I mean, we don't want to make a song-and-dance about having it, do we?'

'Everybody else has been singing-and-dancing, and mostly on me, when theythought I had it… No, you're quite right. So what now?'

'I'd just like to see what I can make of it, from the figures and so on, you know?'

'You're happy just sitting here?'

'Oh, yes, old boy. You want to get a bit of a snooze, what? How's the back?'

'Not so bad, but – it was a long night.'

'Rather eventful, too.' But his face was sweet innocence. 'You don't expect any frightful comebacks, do you? After shooting that chap and all that?'

'I just hope it keeps Mockby quiet for a day or two.'

He nodded and frowned down at the table. 'I suppose he did send those chaps down because… because of what I said back at his place when-'

'And because of what I'd said before that and Fenwick before me and probably Steen before him.' I was too tired even to listen to regrets. 'There's some beer in the fridge and some eggs – no, I'm out of eggs – arid a lock on the door, and I'm in bed.'

And half a minute later, that was true.

It was three o'clock when I woke up, soaked in sweat and completely lost, the way you get after a deep daytime sleep. But gradually I began to remember who I was, where and why. After a time I put on a fresh shirt and staggered through into the main room.

Willie was still at the table, which was littered with full ashtrays, a plate with a few crumbs on it, a coffee mug, an empty beer can, papers, atlas – and the log. He didn't look any tidier himself, with his hair rumpled and his shirt sleeves rolled up.

'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?'