But hadn't Lois used almost that word at me – when she was trying to convince me how great a lover our Martin had been and he hadn't probably touched her in years? Keeping up the image her father had seen through? Building him that over-masculine study at Kingscutt? Taking me to bed?

Willie said gently, 'You can never be sure, you know. I mean, some women marry them because they're sure they can change them – you know?'

I just nodded and kicked at a snowdrop that had been stupid enough to bloom in a patch of bare turf in my path. Its head ripped off and spun into a gulley.

'And Maggie Mackwood,' I said. 'She wasn't having an affair with him any more than with the Cat in the Hat.'

'That wasn't entirely her fault,' he said dryly.

'Maybe – but he wasn't being blackmailed about her, then. Just about his queerness. Would that have buggered him up at Llovd's – if you'll pardon the expression?'

'Well… Lloyd's is pretty old-fashioned, and everything rather depends on what brokers think of an underwriter… Yes,' he admitted finally. 'It would have finished him.'

'But Mockby must have known?'

'Oh, yes, and a few of Martin's closest friends. But you know Paul: he judges a man by his profitability, that's all. And it wasn't as if Martin dressed up and chased the young clerks -they aren't all like that, you know.'

'Of course I know; I was in the Army.'

'Yes, but in your shop you'd probably just think of him as a security risk.'

'Well, in the end he was, wasn't he? He laid the syndicate open to blackmail. Because every few months you'd club together and send him off for a nice discreet dirty weekend in Bergen and write it off as "keeping in touch with Norwegian shipping developments".' I shook my head slowly. 'Christ.'

He stopped and his jaw jutted, and if I said the wrong thing now I was going to need a face transplant. 'You were saying?'

I shrugged. 'The same that everybody's always saying: I make a lousy detective. I've been working on Fenwick, backtracking him, trying to see what made him tick… and all the time it was somebody else's arse.'

He threw a right-hander, but I'd known he would before he did himself. I stepped aside and he went on one knee in the slippery grass.

'Try that again, Willie,' I said, 'and I'll break you in places you didn't know you'd got. I haven't fought clean in my life and I'm too old to start now.'

He straightened up slowly; his voice sounded a bit breathless, but fairly controlled. 'I shouldn't have expected sympathy from you, I suppose.'

'Sympathy be damned. He had the job he wanted, a son he loved, a wife and boyfriend who loved him – and a hell of a lot of good friends like you to protect him. What was he missing – an Olympic medal?'

'It got him killed.'

'Balls. He didn't get killed because he was a homo, he got killed – and blackmailed – because he was pretending he wasn't. He wanted it both ways – in both senses. Well, you can do it – but at a price. It came high.'

Willie wiped his knee thoughtfully.

I said, 'But the moment you knew about the blackmail, you knew it was about him and Steen. And you still didn't tell me. Why?'

'Well, old boy,' he drawled, 'you have been rather the fearless seeker after truth – what? – but not doing much with it when you got it. I mean, you seem sort of happy enough just knowing what's happened without actually doing anything about it. All the things you don't tell various police forces, you know… Well, maybe it's the Intelligence Corps training: just finding out, not having to act on it.'

I felt cold, far colder than the wind. Somehow, we'd started walking again; we did half a circuit of the cabin in silence. Then I nodded. 'All right, but it was all over when he died. You still could have-'

'What about David?'

The thickening snowflakes stung my eyes. 'Of course. He wouldn't know. That's who you're protecting now.'

He nodded.

'And that means Mrs Smith-Bang can blackmail Fenwick beyond the grave. If we let her.'

He nodded again and just looked at me expressionlessly.

I said, 'David hired me to find out what happened to his father. And why.'

'I'll pay you more.'

'People like Mockby and Smith-Bang say things like that, Willie. And have.'

He frowned thoughtfully, finally said, 'Sorry.'

I said, 'I'm not promising anything… Best be getting down the hill.'

As we turned, he said, 'One thing, you know – we know Ellie Smith-Bang didn't find out through Steen that Martin had the log – but how did she find out? '

Should I say? But when he thought about it, he'd probably come up with the same guess that I had. 'When did Maggie Mackwood join the syndicate's office?'

'Six months ago. About.'

'Just time. To fall for the boss, to get turned down because he doesn't go for girls, to act the Woman Spurned and tell Smith-Bang – anonymously – that he'd got hold of the log.'

'Well, I'm damned,' he said softly.

'But she couldn't have guessed what might happen. She must have gone through her own private hell since… That's why she was spending money on private detectives, trying to protect Fenwick's name, atone somehow. I'd forget her, Willie.'

After a while, he nodded.

In an odd way, it was a cheerful ride down the hill. The whisky bottle was empty and Nygaard was full, for the moment, and telling Kari a few things she'd rather not have known about the night life in Pernambuco. Or so my limited grasp of Norwegian plus Kari's expression led me to believe. But I spent most of my time studying the road map. And outside, the snow thickened in the air swirling about us.

The Byrkjedal crossroads wasn't exactly quite that; more a couple of road forks, with the few houses in between. The last fork gave us a choice of last night's route back into Stavanger, or a half-made road around various lakes that fed out on to the main road to Sandnes and Stavanger, except another twenty kilometres south.

'You've never taken the left fork at Byrkjedal, have you?' I asked Willie.

'What? – no.' He was driving with tight-lipped concentration.

'Apart from Trond and the bloke whose right hand youdidn't notice, did the other chap have a boxer's face?'

He flipped me a quick glance. 'You might say, yes.'

'Or like a military policeman?'

'Something like it.'

We reached Byrkjedal just before the hour, with the snow swirling with real confidence, and visibility down to about a hundred yards. We passed the first fork, a handful of houses, and coming up to the second fork – there were two cars parked on the right.

'Stopbehind them!' I snapped. Willie pulled in about ten yards back.

Closest was the white Cortina, beyond that the Saab 99. Two men climbed out of the Cortina and stood carefully spaced across the road. Tanner and Kavanagh, of course.

Willie said, 'Were you expecting a second car, then?'

'More or less.' I pushed open my door and got out into the whirling snow, but keeping the door in front of me and the derringer in my hand below its window level. Ahead of me, neither Tanner nor Kavanagh was showing a gun, but they weren't showing any hands, either. Just dark figures against a white kaleidoscope of snow.

Tanner called, 'Afternoon, Major. Things seem to have got a bit complicated.'

'All in the day's work,' I called back. 'By the way – was there really a security job for me if I'd stayed around in London?'

'Of course, Major. All fixed. You should have taken it.'

'I'm beginning to agree with you.'

'So no hard feelings?' he called – but not getting any closer. 'The lady just wants her witness back, and that's that, okay?'

'Fine. He's all yours. How do we do it – like the agents across the border bit?'