We met Willie in the Victoria – he'd just signed in, and sat down around a pot of coffee in the lounge beside the dining-room. I introduced Kari and gave him the quick word about Nygaard, but he wasn't really interested.
When I gave him space, he said, 'All fine, old boy, but what about the log-book?'
'I've got photostats of the last four pages.'
He just looked at me.
I said, 'I made a mistake trusting a private detective in London. He arranged my getaway but he tipped off the French policeand had my luggage gone over. I'm sorry.'
'Aren't we all?' he said heavily. Then, 'Well, you found it, so I suppose you've a right to lose it again – what? But who's got it?'
'The people Dave Tanner was working for – I don't know who, but the same people he was working for in Arras.'
'Are you sure about that?'
'Close enough.'
He frowned. 'But now – what's Mrs Smith-Bang playing at, hiding away her witness like that?' And he looked at Kari as well as me.
What he got back was a solemn wide-eyed stare. Whether he knew it or not, he'd rung the bell with her, with his curly fair hair, neat grey suit, club tie, glittering shoes – the perfect Englishman and all veryclean; you couldn't imagine a smudge on Willie any more than you could dust on the Crown Jewels.
I shrugged. 'She's just hiding him.'
'From us?'
'Since she lied to us, yes, she's hiding him from us, but not necessarilyonly us.'
He absorbed this. 'But how did she get him to go there?'
'She's got some sort of hold on him.' I glanced at Kari, but she was looking elsewhere. 'And there's only one thing that Nygaard cares about, so my guess is she's been paying for his booze all along. Now she's moved the bottle and he had to follow.'
'Damned if I see the logic of that,' he said – and then apologised to Kari. She blushed prettily. He went on, 'I mean, why keep your chief witness permanently stewed as a prune? He's not going to make a frightfully good impression on a court, what? Make more sense if hedid take the cure, you know?'
I shrugged, 'I don't pretend to understand it, Willie.'
Kari asked, 'But what can we do, then?'
'If I could sit down with Nygaard and just ask him questions, we'd find out everything.'
'The trained interrogator, eh?' Willie murmured. 'How do we get him, though?"
'Go and take him.'
Just then, David Fenwick walked in.
'My God, what areyou doing here?'
'Hello, sir.' We shook hands, and he grinned cheerily. 'Oh, when I heard Mr Winslow was coming over I asked if I could come, too, and Mummy said I could, if it was with him, so… here we are. It was all a bit of a rush; school only broke up today and I had to catch the plane still in uniform. I've just been changing.'
Now he was wearing khaki denim trousers, a blue-and-green flowered shirt, and a light macintosh zip jacket. I introduced him to Kari and he bowed politely.
Then I said to Willie, 'You might have told me.'
'Sorry, old boy; forgot you didn't know. All fixed up in a bit of a hurry last night, after you'd rung.' But he wasn't really concentrating.
David asked, 'What have we decided, now?'
'Your employee here,' Willie said heavily, 'is just introducing us to the kidnapping business.'
'Oh?' David sounded interested.
'Rescue, he means,' I said hastily, keeping a watch on Kari. She was the one that mattered.
She frowned slightly. 'You meant to take him away from Saevarstad?'
'Tha's right. What chance has he got to make his own decisions where he's only got a whisky bottle for company? Every time he wakes up they offer him another drink – and he takes it. But get him away and let him sober up a bit and maybe he'll have a chance to make up his own mind.'
Willie looked at me rather sharply, but said nothing.
'But Doctor Rasmussen…' Kari said doubtfully.
'He said he'd got no power to keep Nygaard there. If he calls the police in – okay. We explain our mistake. But if he doesn't call the police then he shows he's been acting illegally.'
After a time, she said, 'How do we do this, then?'
Willie gave a long, sad sigh.
I suppose, if I'd sat down and thought about it, I'd've realised that kidnapping – I mean rescuing – is a complicated, professional business. First, you need transport, and that included a boat. But Kari knew of one: a diesel-engined fishing-boat belonging to an old boy who took her out to do the hard work whenever she visited Stavanger. And, yes, she could borrow it to visit some imaginary friend on a small island.
You also need a hideout, and not the Victoria Hotel, Stavanger, no matter what else it's good at. But Kari knew that, too: her aunt owneda 'summer hut' on the Hunnedalen, which -from the map – was a valley road running up to the hills fifty miles from Stavanger, most of which was marked 'closed in winter'. But she thought the closed bits would be farther uphill from the hut. If she was wrong, it was going to be a damn crowded car stuck in a snowdrift overnight.
The car itself was easy: I just sent Willie out to hire one, and by the way, buy a couple of sleeping bags on the way back; Kari had some camping gear stored with her aunt. Rather late, I remembered to sendher out to organise some food.
By sundown, we were ready. By nine o'clock, we were on our way.
The night was clear, starry and cold – and you never remember how cold it becomes the instant you get in a boat. This boat particularly.
It was a wooden job, broad and shallow and smelling like the cat's supper. Maybe a bit over twenty feet long, with the front third decked over to give a cabin that was honestly no more than three feet high but had a Calor gas stove, two bunks, a cupboard, a wood-burning stove in the bows sticking its chimney up like a flagpole through the deck, and a row of dangling pans that clattered in tune with the chug of the diesel.
Behind us, the lights of Stavanger didn't fade away, they just ruddy stayed there.
'How fast are we going?' I called to Kari.
'Five knots, I think.' She was just a bulky shape against the stars, hands in anorak pockets, woolly ski cap on top, riding the tiller and steering it with her thighs.
'How fastcould we go?"
'Seven, perhaps eight. Shall I show you?'
Willie said, 'No thank you.' He and David and the engine itself were in the middle of the boat, both of them studying it by thin torchlight. I was hunched on the deck, in among a clutter of rusty chains, ends of rope, and plastic buckets.
'What the hell do you know or care about diesels, Willie?' I asked grumpily. The cold was beginning to bite.
He said evenly, 'They occasionally cropped up in my end of the Army, old boy.'
'Sorry. I'd forgotten the cavalry hadn't invented the high-compression horse.'
'You wouldn't say that if you'd ever been rolled on by one.'
I grinned unwillingly in the darkness. 'And around us, the busy evening went on, down, maybe, but busy enough: ferries that were just bright strips of light, fishing-boats that were patterns of coloured light, motorboats that sparkled white and roared and changed direction every five seconds; Piccadilly Circus on water. Kari just chugged us through it, confident of a small tricoloured light slung to our stumpy mast and steering by occasional glances at a small tourist map of the bay and fjords; not even a compass. You find more charts, books, depth-sounders, and stuff on a weekender's dinghy than you do in a serious fishing-boat.
Willie stuck the cover back on the engine, lit a cigarette, and came and crouched beside me on the deck. He was wearing a thick, double-breasted fawn overcoat – like the old Army 'British Warm' – and the first thing he said was, 'Doesn't feel quite like D-Day must have done.'
'What d'you want? Couple of airborne divisions and battleship bombardment?'
'Something more than that little two-shot peashooter of yours, anyway, what? Seems to me it's just big enough to be illegal and nothing more.'
'It was never meant to be a first gun. But I don't expect any rough stuff.'
'How are we going to tackle it, then? '
'David stays in the boat. The rest of us just tag along, knock on the door, see what happens next.'
He grunted. 'Must say I'd rather we were doing it in a more military way.'
'If we're doing it the military way, we start with you standing up straight and calling me "sir" – lieutenant.'
For a moment I think he was really offended. Then he chuckled.
'In the Lancers we never called anybody "sir" except our wine merchants.'