I nodded, and let Kari take a look. While she was doing so, I leaned inconspicuously on the door-handle. It moved, all right.

Rasmussen asked, 'Are you satisfied now?'

Kari looked at me. 'It is him.'

I nodded. 'I agree. Thank you, Doctor.' He looked momentarily surprised, then led the way back to the stairs.

Then somebody screamed again – the same long, shaking screech that went through your head like a file across your teeth.

Rasmussen stopped, listened briefly, and shouted, 'Trond!'

Big feet clattered on the hallway below and a vast man in a short-sleeved white jacket came around the bottom of the stairs and pounded up towards us. He was built like Hermann Goring, with much the same bloated frog face, but he was fast on his feet and barely puffing when he reached the top. Mind, he was only in his middle thirties, I'd guess, so maybe most of his shape was hereditary.

The scream reached out again and Rasmussen raised his voice to cut through it. Trond got his orders, nodded, and charged off down the corridor without giving Kari or me a glance.

The doctor looked at me and smiled wanly. 'What do they see? – we can never know. Hell is aprivate place.'

Kari was looking startled and bewildered. Rasmussen said, 'The symptoms of withdrawal, that is the most likely time for the delirium tremens. Then they start to meet the terrors. We try to soften it with drugs, but… each body is different, we cannot always make it the perfect dose.'

He started downstairs. Behind us, the scream started, wavered, and drifted into a muffled gulping sound.

'Often,' Rasmussen said, 'it is just somebody to touch them, like Trond, to make them know there is a world still around them.'

'Trond must be a great comfort to you,' I said.

He looked at me sharply, then bent his head in agreement. 'A good boy. And very strong. For a few, very few, we need that.'

'Who committed Nygaard to you, Doctor?'

He stopped and frowned. 'There was no "committing" – this is not prison or insanity.'

'Sorry, Doctor. I'd just read something about a Sobriety Board that can commit alcoholics for a cure. If they're given the right evidence.'

He shrugged and started down again. 'It happens for perhaps one per cent of cases.'

'Ah, I wonder how he came to hear of you, though?'

'Alcoholism is not rare with sailors. The cheap drink, the long boredom… He is not the first seaman officer in this house.'

'I'll bet.' We reached the hall and the doctor kept going towards the front door. Nothing we could do but follow.

There was another car in the drive – a tattered old Ford Cortina with a youngish driver leaning across the bonnet breathing cigarette smoke at the sky.

Kari said, 'The taxi. We asked for it.'

Of course." Well, anything's better than exercise. I turned to Rasmussen. 'Thank you for letting us barge in like this, Doctor.

But try and get him to write those letters soon, huh?'

He nodded stiffly, not much liking somebody else telling him what to do, but having to take it this time. We shook hands – a firm, dry hand – and I paused at the top of the porch steps and looked around. Off to both sides, beyond the flower beds with the first daffodils and the driveway, there were thick clumps of laurel and rhododendron and conifer bushes.

'Must be nice in summer,' I commented. 'I hope your patients appreciate their luck, Doctor. Thanks again.' I walked across to the taxi.

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.'

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.'