'Ah, yes. Are you going to… go on interrogating?'

'Yes. I want you to take the girl out shopping this afternoon. Just down to the crossroads to buy a tin of beans or something, but out. He's going to get worse.'

He frowned thoughtfully. 'It's not going to bring Martin back to life… and Nygaard's a… a person, as well.'

'Dammit, I know. But he knowssomething about the collision. Something he told Steen or Steen guessed from him and that log.'

'But I'm not sure it matters, does it, old boy? As Paul said, it's only forty thousand against us, a small piece of the year's business. He was telling the truth there.'

I stared at him. 'Hell's teeth, Willie, we've come so far-'

'Speaking as Light Cavalry, that always struck me as a jolly good reason to turn back.'

It was a quiet lunch, and without Nygaard; he'd wrapped himself in the sleeping bag and retired to a bedroom. Not hungry. The rest of us ate tinned fish soup and scrambled eggs and biscuits and cheese, and I hurt Willie's feelings by taking a shot of his whisky. He was getting pretty tired of his job as a teetotal chauffeur.

'I mean, justone whisky,' he grumbled. 'In Britain that wouldn't make the slightest difference, I could drive all over the country, through any traffic. And that road out there isn't exactly liable to be swarming with police, is it?'

Then he caught the horrified expression on Kari's face. 'Do you really feel youmust have a drink? '

His turn to look horrified. 'Good God, no. It's just that, about lunchtime, well, it's my habit to have one, you know?'

'The habit is how it begins.' And she gave me a brisk, cool look.

I shrugged. 'I just hope I live long enough to die of drink.'

She started clearing away with a fair amount of unnecessary clatter.

I went outside to see them off; David had decided to stay with me. As he climbed into the car, Willie looked back at the cabin and asked, 'D'you think anybody'11 be looking for us?'

I looked back for myself. I suppose if you knew, for sure, we were in one cabin, you could pick out which: there was a slight bare patch in the snow around the chimney-pipe, and an occasional whisp of smoke from the top. But not much more; the ground was too rough, the snow too old and trampled already for our footprints to show any patterns.

I said, "I hope they'll think it's hopeless. We could be anywhere in Stavanger – or anywhere out of it – by now. And we didn't tell the hotel where we'd be."

'We didn't book out, either,' Willie reminded me.

'No.' We'd need the rooms again – and anyway, we had to have somewhere to leave most of our luggage. The Volkswagen couldn't have taken all that and the sleeping bags and all.

'Well,' Willie said firmly, 'we'll be finished by this evening. We'll go down the hill then.' He caught my eye and stared unblinking. And that was that.

I shrugged. Well, I'd got a few hours left. The Volkswagen crawled on to the road and buzzed off down it.

I'd just turned back to the cabin when David burst out of it. 'Mr Card! Mr Card!'

I ran. He pointed inside, white-faced, and I jumped the steps and crashed through the door.

Nygaard was standing at the table, holding the paraffin lamp in one shaking hand and a mug in the other…

I ripped the lamp away and the mug scattered the fuel across the room. 'For Christ's sake! You can't drink that stuff!'

Couldn't he, though. The little eyes were hot coals of hatred. The mug fell from one twisted claw and then he rammed both hands on the table to try to stop the shaking that was rattling his whole body like a bumpy road.

'I want a drink,' he pleaded.

'Let's get back in there.' I could feel David behind us, guess at his sick, horrified expression. I took Nygaard's arm and led him through into the tiny bedroom. He slumped on the edge of the folding metal bed.

'I want to go home to Gulbrandsen's,' he moaned.

'Not Rasmussen's?'

'Who is Rasmussen?' His body suddenly clenched with a shuddering spasm.

'Do you know where you are? '

'By Bergen, of course.'

And Mrs Smith-Bang was going into court withhis memory to help prove that log-book?

Gradually the spasm passed; his shoulders sagged wearily and he panted heavily. Watching him carefully, I opened the door again and called to David, 'Can you make us some coffee or something?'

He could. I came back and leaned against the wall by the window. 'Where was the engine-room in the Sfeocii? Right aft? -or amidships?'

'Amidships.' Between shivering teeth.

'How did you get in and out? Stairs or a ladder?'

"There is both. The stairs to inside – where the cabins are. The ladder to the hatch on the deck.'

'Which did you usually use?'

'The stairs. But in summer, the good weather, we open the hatch also.'

'Where was the hatch? Ahead of the bridge or aft of it?'

'In front.'

I didn't need to ask how the other engineers had died. Fire flooding – just that – in from the bows, sweeping the deck, cracking the hatch, sucked down inside into the lungs of the ship by that hungry-breathing diesel. Or diesels.

I didn'thave, to ask how they died, down there. But I asked anyway.

He looked up quickly, shook his head, gave another brief shudder.

'What happened?' I said again.

'Just – the fire.' He flapped his crumpled hands in a downwards motion.

'When did your hands get burned?'

He stared at the floor. 'On the ladder… I reach up… ah!'

'On theladder?'

'No, I mean the stair. I open the door at the top…'

'You'd better remember which when it comes to court.'

' But I already knewhe'd been in his cabin at the time, anyway.

Then David knocked and came in carrying two mugs of coffee. He looked pale and tense.

'Thanks.' I took both, put one on the floor beside Nygaard's feet.

David said, 'I think, sir… I think I'd like to go for a walk.'

I didn't blame him. 'Okay. But keep off the road and if you hear a car, any car, get under cover. All right?'

'Yes, sir.' He gave me one quick glance and went out.

After a minute or two, Nygaard bent down with a grunt, picked up the mug, slopped a lot of it out, but drank the rest.

I said, 'Did you know we'd found the log, the deck log?'

'Ja?'Question or answer? – or a man who can't remember whether he remembers or not?

I took the copies from my jacket pocket. 'Do you remember when Steen came to see you? Man called Jonas Steen?'

He looked up with a flabby sneer, then leaned over and patted his backside. 'You call him man? I think in England you say fairy mostly.'

I frowned. Nygaard went on leering. 'You like him?'

'Shut up.' So how could I tell? – I'd only met him dead. Women say to you, 'But I thought men couldalways tell,' just like I can always tell they're not cheating on me and who's going to win the Third World War.

Wait a moment. 'How doyou know?' Steen might have been Tinkerbell Mark One, but he'd never have waggled at this broken-down old barrel.

'Everybody know.' He threw the question away with a flap of his right claw. And hadn't Mrs Smith-Bang asked if I'd met this man alive? – before she'd had him killed.

So now I knew what was in Henrick Lie's suicide note. A 'personal affair', wasn't it? That's what that bastard Inspector (First Class) Vik had been hiding; an unrequited-love story. Had Lie really been homosexual as well, or had Kavanagh invented it for the occasion?

Never mind. I said, 'it doesn't matter what Steen was. But who's H and Thornton?'

'I do not-'

'Oh yes you do, mate. Who are they?'

'No.'

I took a box of Kari's matches out of my pocket and shook it once and laid it down. He stared at it as if it was a tarantula. Probably he'd have preferred the spider.