Bear Island (17 page)

    For whom, then, the tears? Not for me, of that I was certain, why in the world for me: I scarcely knew her, she scarcely knew me, I was only a shoulder to cry on, likely enough I was only a doctor's shoulder to cry on, people have the oddest misconceptions about doctors and maybe their shoulders are regarded as being more reliable and comforting than the average. Or more absorbent. Nor were the tears for herself, I was equally certain of that, to survive, intact, the kind of upbringing shed hinted she'd had, one had to be possessed of an unusual degree of self-reliance and mental toughness that almost automatically excluded considerations of self-pity. So for whom, then, the tears?

    I didn't know and, at that moment, I hardly cared. In normal circumstances and with no other matter so significantly important as to engage my attention, so lovely a girl in such obvious distress would have had my complete and undivided concern, but the circumstances were abnormal and my thoughts were elsewhere engaged with an intensity that made Mary Stuart's odd behaviour seem relatively unimportant.

    I couldn't keep my eyes from the bottle of Scotch by the captain's table. When Halliday had had, at my insistence as I now bitterly recalled, his first drink, the bottle had been about a third full: after his second drink it had been about a quarter full: and now it was half full. The quiet and violent man who had so recently switched off the lights and moved through the saloon had switched bottles and, for good measure, had removed the glass that Halliday had used.

    Mary Stuart said something, her voice so muffled and indistinct that I couldn't make it out: what with salt tears and salt blood this night's work was going to cost me a new shirt. I said: "What?"

    She moved her head, enough to enable her to speak more clearly, but not enough to let me see her face.

    "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I was such a fool. Will you forgive me?"

    I squeezed her shoulder in what was more or less an automatic gesture, my eyes and my thoughts were still on that bottle, but she seemed to take it as sufficient answer. She said hesitantly: "Are you going to sleep again?" She hadn't stopped being as foolish as she thought: or perhaps she wasn't being foolish at all.

    "No, Mary dear, I'm not going to sleep again." Whatever tone of firm resolution my tone carried, it was superfluous: the throbbing pain in my neck was sufficient guarantee of my wakefulness.

    "Well, that's all right then." I didn't ask what this cryptic remark was intended to convey. Physically, we couldn't have been closer but mentally I was no longer with her. I was with Halliday, the man whom I had thought had come to kill me, the man I'd practically forced to have a drink, the man who'd drunk what had been intended for me.

    I knew I would never see him again. Not alive.

    6

    Dawn, in those high latitudes and at that time of year, did not come until half-past ten in the morning, and it was then that we buried the three dead men, Antonio and Moxen and Scott, and surely their shades would have forgiven us for the almost indecent dispatch with which their funerals were carried out, for that driving blizzard was still at its height, the wind was full of razored knives and struck through both clothes and flesh and laid its icy fingers on the marrow. Captain Imrie, a large and brassbound Bible in his mittened hands, read swiftly through the burial service or at least I assumed he did, he could have been reading the Sermon on the Mount for all I could tell, the wind just plucked the inaudible words from his mouth and carried them out over the grey-white desolation of waters. Three times a canvas-wrapped bundle slid smoothly out from beneath the Morning Bose's only Union flag, three times a bundle vanished soundlessly beneath the surface of the sea: we could see the splashes but not hear them for our cars were full of the high and lonely lament of the wind's requiem in the frozen rigging.

    On land, mourners customarily find it difficult to tear themselves away from a newly filled grave, but here there was no grave, there was nothing to look at and the bitter cold was sufficient to drive from every mind any thought other than that of immediate shelter and warmth: besides, Captain Imrie had said that it was an old fisherman's custom to drink a toast to the dead. Whether it was or not I had no idea, it could well have been a custom that Imrie had invented himself, and certainly the deceased had been no fisherman: but whatever its origin I'm sure that it made its contributory effect towards the extremely rapid clearing of the decks.

    I remained where I was. I felt inhibited from joining the others not because I found Captain Imrie's proposal distasteful or ethically objectionable-only the most hypocritical could find in the Christian ethic a bar to wishing bon voyage to the departed-but because, in crowded surroundings, it could be very difficult to see who was filling my glass and what he was filling it with. Moreover, I'd had no more than three hours' sleep the previous night, my mind was tired and a bit fuzzy round the edges and it was my hope that the admittedly heroic treatment of exposure to an Arctic blizzard might help to blow some of the cobwebs away. I took a firm hold on one of the numerous lifelines that were rigged on deck, edged my way out to the largest of one of the numerous deck cargoes we were carrying, took what illusory shelter was offered in its lee and waited for the cobwebs to fly away.

    Halliday was dead. I hadn't found his body, I'd searched, casually and unobtrusively, every likely and most of the unlikely places of concealment on the Morning Rose: he had vanished and left no trace. Halliday, I knew, was lying in the black depths of the Barents Sea. How he'd got there I didn't know and it didn't seem to be important: it could be that someone had helped him over the side but it was even more probable that he had required no assistance. He'd left the saloon as abruptly as he had because the poison in his Scotch-my Scotch-had been as fast acting as it had been deadly. He had felt the urgent need to be sick and the obvious place to be sick was over the side: a slip on the snow or ice, one of the hundreds of trough-seeking lurches that the trawler had experienced during the night and in what must have been by that time his ill, weakened, and dazed state, he would have been quite unable to prevent himself from pitching over the low guardrails. The only consolation, if consolation it was, was that he had probably succumbed from poison before his lungs had filled with water. I did not subscribe to the popular belief that death from drowning was a relatively easy and painless way to go if for no other reason than that it was a theory that in the nature of things lacked positive documentation.

    I was as certain as could be that Halliday's absence had so far gone unnoticed by everyone except myself and the person responsible for his death and there was not even certainty about that last point, it was quite possible that he knew nothing of Halliday's brief visit to the saloon. True, Halliday had not appeared for breakfast but as a few others had done the same and those who had come had done so intermittently over the best part of a couple of hours, his absence had gone unremarked. His cabin-mate, Sandy, was still feeling under the weather to the extent that Halliday's presence or absence was a matter of total indifference to him: and as Halliday had been very much a solitary there was no one who would be sufficiently concerned to enquire anxiously as to his whereabouts'. I hoped that his absence remained undiscovered as long as possible: although the signed guarantee given to Captain Imrie that morning had contained no specific reference as to the action to be taken in the event of someone going missing he was quite capable of seizing upon this as a pretext to abandon the trip and make with all speed for Hammerfest.

    The match I'd left jammed between the foot of my cabin door and the sill had no longer been in position when I'd returned to my cabin early in the morning. The Coins I'd left in the linen pockets of the lids of my suitcases had shifted position from the front to the back of the pockets, sure evidence that my cases had been opened in my absence. It says much for my frame of mind that the discovery occasioned me no particular surprise-which was in itself surprising, for although someone aboard was aware that the good doctor had been boning up on aconitine and so had more than a fair idea that the poisoning had not been accidental, that in itself was hardly reason to start examining the doctor's hand luggage. More than ever, it behooved me to watch my back.

    I heard a sound behind my back. My instinctive reaction was to take a couple of rapid steps forward, who knew what hard or sharp implement might be coming at my occiput or shoulder blades, then whirl round, but a simultaneous reasoning told me that it was unlikely that anyone would propose to do me in on the upper deck in daylight under the interested gaze of watchers on the bridge, so I turned round leisurely and saw Charles Conrad moving into what little shelter was offered in the lee of the bulk deck cargo.

    "What's this, then?" I said. "The morning constitutional at all costs? Or don't you fancy Captain Imrie's Scotch?”

    “Neither." He smiled. "Curiosity, is all." He tapped the tarpaulin covered bulk beside us. It was close on ten feetin height, semicylindrical--the base was flat--and was lashed in position by at least a dozen steel cables. "Do you know what this is?"

    “Is this a clever question?”

    “Yes.”

    “Prefabricated Arcticised buts. Or so the word went in Wick. Six of them, designed to fit one inside the other for ease of transportation.”

    “That's it. Made of bonded ply, kapok insulation, asbestos, and aluminium." He pointed to another bulky item of deck cargo immediately foreword of the one behind which we were sheltering. This peculiarly shaped object appeared to be roughly oval along its length, perhaps six feet high. "And this?”

    “Another clever question?”

    “Of course."

    .And my answer will be wrong? Again?"

    "If you still believe what you were told in Wick, yes. Those aren't huts because we don't need huts. We're heading for an area called the SorHamna-the South Haven-where there already are huts, and perfectly usable ones. Bloke called Lerner came there seventy years ago, prospecting for coal-which he found, by the way: a bit of an odd-ball who painted the rocks on the shore in the German national colours to indicate that this was private property. He built huts-he even built a road across the headland to the nearest bay, the Kvalross Bukta or Walrus Bay. After him a German fishing company based themselves here-and they built huts. More importantly, a Norwegian scientific expedition spent nine months here during the most recent International Geophysical Year and they built huts. Whatever else is lacking at South Haven it's not accommodation."

    "You're very well informed."

    “I don't forget something that I finished reading only half an hour ago. Comin" and Goin's been making the rounds this morning handing out copies of the prospectus of what's going to be the greatest film ever made. Didn't you get one from him?"

    "Yes. He forgot to give me a dictionary, though."

    "A dictionary would have helped." He tapped the tarpaulin "beside us. This is a mock-up of the central section of a submarine-just a shell, nothing inside it. When I say it's a mock-up, I don't mean it’s made of cardboard--it's made of steel and weighs ten tons, including four tons of iron ballast. That other item in front is a conning tower which is to be bolted onto this once it's in the water."

    "Ah!" I said because I couldn't think of any other comment. "And those alleged tractors and drums of fuel on the afterdeck--they'll be tanks and antiaircraft guns?"

    “'Tractors and fuel, as stated." He paused. "Do you know there's only one copy of the screenplay for this film and that that's locked up in the Bank of England or some such?"

    “I went to sleep about that bit."

    "They haven't even got a shooting script for the scenes to be shot on the island. Just a series of unrelated incidents which taken together make no sense at all. Sure, there must be connecting links to make sense of it all: but they're all in the vaults in Threadneedle Street or wherever this damned bank is. No part of it makes sense."

    "Maybe it's not meant to make sense." I was conscious that my feet were slowly turning into blocks of ice. "Not at this stage. There may be excellent reasons for the secretiveness. Besides, don't some producers encourage directors who play it off the cuff, who improvise as they go along and as the mood takes them?"

    "Not Neal Divine. He's never shot an off-the-cuff scene in his life." Not much of Conrad's forehead was to be seen beneath the thick brown hair that the snow and wind had brought down almost to eyebrow level, but what little was visible was very heavily corrugated indeed. If a Divine shooting script calls for you to be wearing a bowler hat and doing the can-can in Scene 289, then you're doing a bowler-hatted can-can in 289. As for Otto, he never moves until everything's calculated out to the last matchstick and the last penny. Especially the last penny."

    "He has the reputation for being a little careful."

    "Careful!" Conrad shivered. "Doesn't the whole set-up strike you as being crazy?"

    "The entire film world," I said candidly, "strikes me as being crazy, but as an ordinary human being being exposed to it for the first time I wouldn't know whether this current particular brand of craziness differs from the norm or not. What do your fellow actors think of it?"

    “What fellow actors?" Conrad said glumly. "Judith Haynes is still closeted with those two pooches of hers. Mary Stuart is writing letters in her cabin, at least she says it's letters, it's probably her last will and testament. And if Gunther Jungbeck and Jon Heyter have any opinion on everything they're carefully keeping it to themselves. Anyway, they are a couple of odd-balls themselves."

    "Even for actors?"

    "Touche." He smiled, but he wasn't trying too hard. "Sea burials bring out the misanthrope in me. No, it's just that they know so little about the Elm world, at least the British film world, understandable enough I suppose, Heyter's done all his acting in California, Jungbeck in Germany. They're not odd, really, it's just that we have nothing in common to talk about, no points of reference."