Gavin Lyall - Blame The Dead

'Then why didn't he give it back to you?"

'It didn't matter which one of us had it, not when he was alive, as long as it was our side. Now he's dead – well, thank the Lord you got it instead of them.'

'Who's them?'

She cocked her head on one side like a scraggy bright-eyed bird and looked at me suspiciously. Jensen suddenly hauled his weight on to his feet, and my right hand got close to my left sleeve. But he only wanted to find a new bottle of beet in the corner bucket.

Mrs Smith-Bang asked, 'Son – you do know what all this Skadi business is about?'

'Well… I didn't understand the log itself and I've had a fair bit of other stuff to do since then, and-'

'You mean No,' she said.

'Give or take a bit – that's what I mean.'

'Okay, son. It's about time you found out. Want anything to eat while it happens?'

We ate where we sat. Captain Jensen issued some fast orders through a squawk-box fixed to the wall above the bottle bucket and then ducked out. His pipe had made more comments than he had since we'd met, so I wasn't going to miss his flow of ready wit.

A man wearing the classic high-necked white jacket of a ship's steward came in carrying a big tray loaded with small dishes. Mrs Smith-Bang waved a hand and said, 'Guess you haven't been in Norway long enough to get sick of herring yet. Help yourself.'

So I had to: the dishes had herring fillets in vinegar sauce, in tomato sauce, with peppers, with mushrooms, with sliced onions, with shrimps… It was a lot of choice or none at all, depending on your point of view. Until then, mine had been that herrings were something God made just to fill up empty bits of sea and they could go on doing it for ever as far as I was concerned. I found I was wrong – in about eight different ways.

When we'd got organised, she said, 'So where do I begin?'

'A bit before the beginning.'

She cackled. 'Okay, that sounds honest enough. So – the Skadi was one of my ships, around twenty-five hundred tons, dry cargo same as this. That time, last September, she was carrying rolls of newsprint and a deck cargo of wood from the Gulf of Finland. For Tilbury. Then there's the Prometheus Sahara, one of these new liquid-gas tankers, around twelve thousand tons; she was one of the earliest ones, bringing methane from Algeria to Stockholm. British registration – Sahara Line. Say, are you sure you don't recall this?'

Perhaps I did. 'They bumped, didn't they?'

'Bumped and blew to buggery. Like the Fourth of July. You just think of that gas suddenly spilling and igniting – over a cargo of wood."

I certainly remembered something in the papers and TV news – the usual aerial view with the plane's wingtip in the foreground and a ship lying on her, side pouring out smoke from end to end. But it didn't have to be the right disaster: they all look the same to me.

'Remind me – where did this happen?'

'Down in the Skagerrak. In fog, of course."

'Of course?'

She snorted and spat out a peppercorn. 'You get some dumb buggers on ships these days, but they don't usually run each other down if they cansee.'

'It sounds as if somebody got killed in all this.'

'You're damn right. We lost four out of five officers and eight out of eleven crewmen. The Prometheus managed to launch a boat, but she still lost more than half her crew.'

'Both of them sank?'

'The Prometheus did. You know what those methane ships are like?-just a row of special tanks like damn great cauldrons. One gets busted and starts a fire and it heats up the ones on either side and whenthey blow… It must be like taking a coupla torpedoes.

'But in a way, the Skadi wasn't quite so bad off. She got swamped with one rush of fire – that's when our boys got killed, mostly – then drifted clear before the Prometheus really blew. But she was still burning and you can't fight that with four men and two of them badly burned anyhow. So in the end they had to jump. She grounded on a small island near Mandai. Constructive total loss.'

'Eh?'

'A write-off, for insurance purposes. Like some more?'

I shook my head. She let out a hoot like a fog horn and the stewards zipped in and reorganised our plates.

Mrs Smith-Bang gave me a sort of leer and said, 'Don't know if you know the Norwegians only have sandwiches for lunch?'

'I read the guide-book.'

'Fine, so that's what you're getting.'

Well, I suppose it had a couple of pieces of bread to hold it by, but the middle was a great rumpsteak the size of a bedside Bible.

The steward looked down on it with that lean sad face of people who spend their time handing good things to other people. And only occasionally spit on them first.

'Have you eaten meat in Norway yet?' Mrs S-B asked.

Come to think of it – 'No.'

'So don't unless you're eating with me. Norwegian cows are half mountain goat and they've got short legs on one side from feeding on a slope. I get these steaks shipped from Scotland. Hope you like it medium rare.'

Luckily I did. She took a massive crunch at her own, dribbling watery blood on and around her plate.

I got my first mouthful down and asked, 'How big's the ADP line?'

'Nothing so much. This is the biggest, Skadi was the next, and the rest's just a couple of five-hundred-ton coasters. We're one of the few Norwegian lines that ever dock in Norway.'

'D'you come of a shipping family in America?'

'Sure. Our Smiths have been shipping out of New Bedford since you could bring Moby Dick home in a jelly jar.' She swallowed a lump of steak and you could watch the bulge go right down that long thin throat. She looked up and caught me watching. 'You want to hear any more about the Skadi business? Don't you like steak?'

'It's fine.' I took another bite and mumbled out past it, 'Who was to blame for all this?'

'We haven't got to court yet. Everybody's suing and counter-suing everybody else, but that's routine. You should have been a lawyer, Jim. That's where the money goes.'

'Too many ethics involved.'

'Hell, you really think so? '

'Mine, I mean.' She gave a bark of laughter and a few shreds of meat almost reached my side of the room. I went on, 'But it'll be another year or two before they come to trial on a case like this. Don't they have some sort of enquiry as well?'

'Sure. They had the Norwegian one in December, soon's my chief engineer was fit again. The British one'll be in a month or two.'

'What did they prove?'

'They didn'tprove a damn thing. But their report said we were just about totally to blame. If the captain and watch officer hadn't been dead, I guess they'd've been prosecuted. It can happen, under Norwegian law. Bugger it.'

'Will the British one make any difference?'

'Doesn't work quite the same way. Your boys are only interested if your officers have behaved like British officers, what ho?' She munched for a few moments. 'I guess if your Department of Trade and whatnot pulled the licence from under the Prometkeus's captain it wouldn't sound too good in court… but they won't.'

'It's beginning to sound as if your shipwas to blame. Was it?'

She put her half sandwich down on the plate and just gazed at me. 'Now how in hell would I know? Without seeing the log?'

Somewhere below us, somebody knocked over a few tons of cargo and the whole boat shuddered. She didn't notice. I put down my own sandwich – I'd had enough anyway; I was only trying to get one meal out of it – and said very carefully, 'But the log wouldn't show what happened at a collision. You don't stand on a burning bridge writing up the thing.'

'Oh, sure, it's likely twenty-four hours out of date. And I'm not saying it'll prove my boys were sugar-candy saints, God rest and rot 'em. It usually takes two fools to make one collision. But everybody on our bridge was killed: captain, watch officer, helmsman, and we don't even know who else. Just swept off with the first blast of fire. So we can't put up any witnesses to say what the Skadi was doing or their ship either.'