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.

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.

The other side was a river except where it broadened into narrow black lakes, with an eighteen-inch wall doing its best to keep us on the road. The ragged gaps every few hundred yards gave me the idea its best wasn't always good enough.

Willie asked, 'How far to go now?'

I flashed a torch on the map. 'Ten kilometres, about. I'll wake Kari in a minute.'

'No rush. Light me another cigarette, would you?'

I took his packet, lit one, passed it over. He was driving with solid concentration, mostly third-gear work but never letting the engine get away from him.

'You never smoked yourself? ' he asked.

'Tried it as a boy, of course. But once I was in I Corps it didn't seem a good thing. An interrogator shouldn't have habits that give away his own mental state. He should try, anyway.'

He gave me a snap glance and smiled. 'The compleat professional, what?' And then, more thoughtfully, 'But how did you get into the bodyguarding business, what? '

'When I was with NATO Intelligence, they asked me to form a small section. I was already interested in pistols and stuff then, so…'

'Did the Russians really try assassinations, then?'

'Russians be damned, the worst times we had were when some clever German general wanted to go and revisit the scene of his nineteen-forty triumphs in France or Holland. In uniform, of course. Those lads really needed protection.'

He chuckled gently to himself, and after a time said, 'I thought the old boy did rather well in the boat tonight.'

'Was it difficult, that stuff with the engine? '

'No, not really. But how quickly he decided it was the filter, the way he took it down and put it together, you know. Then that trick with the whisky…'

'I'm glad he knows two tricks with whisky.'

'Yees… But I never realised he was quite that scared of fire.'

'I suppose it's natural – if you've seen your ship and most of its crew burnt up. And he's not kidding; he nearly went through the ceiling once when he thought I was going to light a cigarette.'

'God, I must remember that.' He looked anxiously in the mirror.

'Don't worry, he's asleep.'

'The smell doesn't bother him?'

'Doesn't seem to. But even your cigarettes don't smell like methane and burnt flesh.'

'Thanks, old boy. Better wake Kari now, if you can.'

It wasn't a village: the cabins were too standardised, too scattered, for that. More like a formalised gold-rush camp, each cabin standing on its own little claim across the shallow bowl in the hillside. Between them, the snowy ground was broken with boulders and small gulleys, bridged with single planks. Not a light showed anywhere.

Willie pulled carefully off the road, skidded through a small snowdrift, and stopped just before a gulley. In the abrupt silence, you could hear the distant whispering roar of a waterfall that fell almost vertically down the slope across the river, glowing to itself in the starlight.

'Which cabin?' Willie asked.

She pointed to one about thirty yards up the slope, solidly roofed with snow and nicely decorated with icicles. A thick pile of snowed-up logs sat by the steps up to the door.

The three of us got out and started organising, leaving David and Nygaard asleep for the moment. We certainly weren't the first up there this year: the snow was rutted and flattened in places, and some of the snow on the roofs was melted around the chimney-pots.

'They come at the weekend to ski,' Kari explained.