Gavin Lyall - Blame The Dead

I said. 'With sea and air fares, she must have spent at least two hundred pounds on that jaunt.'

'Probably more than we've spent on you, so far, what?'

'Certainly.'

'Impressive, rather.'

'Maybe it just proves she was in love with him. Sex hardly proves that, these days.'

'Bit cynical, what, old boy?'

I just shrugged again.

The houses in The Bishop's Avenue have just two things in common, they're all set back from the road, giving room for nice big lawns and a good piece of driveway, and people like you and me couldn't afford them in a million years. These aspects apart, each house is different – and intended to be. Not just Stockbroker's Tudor and Banker's Georgian, but everything from the Third Gothic Age to North London Château of the Loire via green-tiled Haciendaàla Rudolph Valentino and Plantation Scarlett O'Hara.

This last was Mockby's: a square-cut block of the deep South in red brick with a white Grecian portico and a flood of wide steps sweeping down to the green tarmac drive. Willie found a bellpush in among the brasswork of the double front doors, but the house was too big and solid for you to hear it ring inside.

After a cold wait, one side of the doors opened and the big chauffeur I'd met at my flat looked stonily out.

Willie said pleasantly, 'Mr Mockby's expecting us.'

The big one nodded at me.'And him?'

I gave him a friendly smile. 'Passed your finals in robbery with violence yet? Or d'you want some more lessons?'

He bunched his fist. Willie looked at me reprovingly. Then, from somewhere inside, Mockby bellowed, 'Don't fart about, Charles! Let 'em in!'

We went through an inner set of french doors, along a big hallway with enough furniture to start a chain store, and into the lounge.

It was a big room but with an odd confined feeling. There must have been windows somewhere behind the gold silk drapes, but you wouldn't bother with them: there was too much to look at inside. The place was jammed with furniture; usable stuff like fat wing chairs and sofas and couches, unusable bits like tiny tables covered in silver photo frames, carved benches, embroidered footstools. Even the flock wallpaper was put up in panels, and each panel with a gold-framed still life of dead pheasants and careful beads of moisture on every grape.

Willie must have seen it all before, but I thought I heard Mm give a little sad sigh.

Mockby was standing in the middle, wrapped in a vast red velvet smoking jacket with green lapels.

'Hullo, Willie,' he called, 'What are you doing with that blackmailing bastard?'

Willie twitched like a nervous horse. His faith in me wasn't even skin deep, after all: he'd taken me more or less on David's trust.

'Blackmailing?' he asked warily.

'Of course,' said Mockby. 'Trying to sell us something that belongs to us already.'

I said, 'You mean the Skadi's log?'

'That's what I mean, sonny.'

Willie said, 'Oh, that,' and looked vaguely relieved. Even he couldn't believe I was fool enough to try and sell Mockby something I hadn't got.

Mockby seemed puzzled, but recovered fast. 'Well, have you come to do business now?'

I shrugged. 'Anything could happen.'

'I suppose you want a drink first.' He strode over to a bookcase that turned out, of course, of course, to be a cocktail cabinet lined in rose-tinted mirror glass (one of these days I'm going to market a cocktail cabinet that turns out to be a bookcase; there must besome secret readers in The Bishop's Avenue).

'Scotch? And you, Willie?'

'Ah – pink gin if you could.'

'Oh, Christ,' Mockby said impatiently. 'Mix your own.' He strode back with two big cut-glass tumblers and shoved one into my hand. Willie went and started necromancing with the little bottle of bitters.

Mockby and I drank; then he said, 'Well, now are you going to hand it over?'

Willie called, I've never seen this thing. Which log are we talking about?'

Mockby swung round. 'Deck log – chief officer's log. Not the rough one that went with the bridge, but the fair copy they kept below.'

'Ali, yes.' He went on blending.

'Well?' Mockby asked me.

'What does it prove? – the log, I mean.'

'You've had it long enough, haven't you?'

Willie was zigzagging elegantly among the furniture towards us. 'I don't suppose Mr Card reads Norwegian sea-going terms frightfully well, what?'

You know, it's damn silly, but maybe it was hearing all those Norwegians talking perfect English that had made me forget they'd write up their logs in Norwegian. I'd somehow imagined Fenwick skimming through the book and saying, 'Aha! – the Captain's butler did it!'

'Did Martin Fenwick read Norwegian?' I asked quickly.

Mockby and Willie looked at each other; Willie sipped his pale-pink mixture and shrugged delicately. Mockby said, 'Bit, I think. Not much.'

So Fenwick must have got an explanatory letter with the log. Or phone call. But if you're parcelling up the log, you'd add a letter as well anyway. Would Fenwick have kept that? Say, in the bureau at his flat? And would an interested party have swiped it before I got there?

Mockby was staring down into his glass, baby features crowded into a slight frown.

I said, 'So, what did he tell you the log showed?'

He stretched his big chest with a deep breath. 'Oh, something about whether it invalidated the policy or not.'

Willie stared at him.'Invalidated it? Did he really say that?'

Mockby got angry. 'Of course he did. I just said so.'

I said, 'If you do pay out in full on the collision, how much? – it'll be pretty big, won't it?'

Mockby heaved his shoulders in a big shrug. 'The whole claim comes to about half a million – plus bloody great fees to every lawyer that can get his greedy great gob into the honey-pot. We had a line of seven-and-a-half per cent. It'll cost us about forty thousand quid.'

I frowned. 'That doesn't sound too bad… I mean, it does to me, but…'

'Two per cent of turnover on the year. We pay out over ninety per cent in the best years; it's been over a hundred. That's insurance.'

'But the Prometheus Sahara must've been worth a lot more than any ofthat?'

Willie said, 'About ten million, I'd imagine. These liquid-gas jobs come expensive. All that stainless steel and whatnot, you know?'

'But if it's your side's fault, aren't you responsible?'

Mockby looked contemptuous. 'You really think we write policies like that at Lloyd's? Just because we're all gentlemen, it doesn't mean our heads are full of horse-shit. Since there're no salvage costs, the most we can pay on this one is the cost of the Skadi-about a quarter of a million – plus the same again to the other side. Half a million, like I said.'

'Who pays the rest, then? The ADP – if they're to blame?'

'Limitation,' he barked. 'You don't know bugger-all about marine insurance, do you? The owner applies to the courts to limit the liability; the figures get a bit fancy, but it comes out that you can't owe the other side more than the value of your own ship – about what the Lloyd's policy covers anyway.'

Willie said mildly, 'It was originally to protect the small shipowner – make sure he couldn't be ruined by a single accident. They didn't want to create a monopoly situation such as you've got with the airlines these days, you know? And after all, you don't usually get a dinghy sinking the QE2.'

'Just bad luck when it does happen, eh? Incidentally, how could a small boat like the Skadi sink a big tanker? '

'She had a strengthened bow – almost an ice-breaker. They'd been using her on the Saint Lawrence Seaway trade.'

I nodded. 'But there's still nine-and-something million to be found. Who pays that?'

Mockby said, 'The Sahara Line's insurers. Lloyd's again, but not the same syndicates. Not us, anyway.'