After a few moments, I asked Kari, 'What did they say at the end?'

'They asked where is his father.'

'And you said?'

' "He sleeps." ' She paused and said hesitantly, 'And also – "Go to hell." I thought a fisherman's boy might say that, but do you think I should tell David what I made him say?'

Willie's warm chuckle of relief flowed over my right ear.

I said, 'I think maybe he's old enough to know.' I slipped the derringer's hammer off cock and put it back in the arm clip. Behind us, Nygaard snored on.

The lights of the towns and villages vanished behind us, switched off or blanked out by islands and headlands. Ahead, the land rose up above us; closed in around and finally behind us. We were a beetle of noise crawling along between silent black cliffs, the dim path of water ahead matching the narrow path of sky above. Maybe we threw an echo, 0r maybe it was the loneliness that made us sound so loud and feel so bright. When Willie snapped his lighter beside me, it was like a gunshot.

'What does this tell us about Ellie Smith-Bang?' he asked carefully.

'After you'd left the sanatorium, the bloke I shot at back there – and missed – is Pat Kavanagh. He killed Steen in Bergen; he's been working for Dave Tanner, the private detective in London who got the log off me. Between them, Kavanagh and Tanner sound like the two boys in Arras."

Willie turned quickly, making a hushing sound. But David was still back in the stern, still steering, but with Kari crouched beside him sipping coffee from a Thermos top.

'Sorry, old boy,' Willie said. Then, softly, 'So which one killed Martin?'

'In law, both of them are equally guilty.'

'Can you prove it against either of them?'

'I hadn't much thought about that, not yet.'

He breathed smoke and it whipped away ahead of him -though we were leaning on the cabin roof facing forwards. The wind was behind us, and coming up the funnel of the fjord it worked itself into a real cold temper.

Willie said, 'So you mean, if it was Tanner and Kavanagh from the beginning, it was Smith-Bang from the beginning.

She'd hired themto handle the blackmail and all – what?'

'Something like that.'

'If they killed Steen, just so he couldn't talk to you,' he said carefully, 'then why did they wait so long?'

'I'd guess-' Did the engine miss a beat, there? I glanced at Willie and he seemed to have sensed something, too. But now it was running smoothly enough. I went on, 'I'd guess because Smith-Bang didn't know he was involved, that he'd found the log, until after Martin was dead. Somebody burgled the London flat, you know, soon after Arras.'

'How doyou know?'

'I burgled it myself – or rather, David lent me a key.'

'Did you, by God?' A little more shocked than I'd expected. 'I don't suppose you reported that to the police, either? The amount youdon't tell the police forces of various countries would fill a whole book of reports, what? You were saying…?'

'Again I'm guessing, but the log-book must have had a covering letter, and Fenwick probably filed it in his flat. It wasn't there when I looked. So they'd know Steen was the middleman – but it would still take time to arrange his death.

You don't buy a killing off a stall in the Portobello Road – or the Bergen fish-market. Anyway, Smith-Bang already had killers on hire in London, so it was the economical thing to bring one of them over. By then I was going as well – dammit, I eventold Tanner I was going – so they worked it to blackmail me as a bonus.'

This time the diesel definitely stuttered. Willie said, 'I hope that damn thing isn't going to…" and he went on glaring at it – through a layer of tarpaulin, a layer of wood, and in midnight darkness anyhow.

Then, 'I still can't accept the idea of Ellie Smith-Bang hiring killers to… to…'

'To save the ADP Line and keep herself out of the poor-house? For a half-million insurance claim? People put their wives through the meat-mincer just for having a quick poke from the milkman which didn't cost them a penny. Probably got them cheap milk, if they'd sat down to work out the economics of it.'

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.'