Bear Island (26 page)

    “That's what I like," Smithy said. "Simple straightforward answers. And there's the second point that may have escaped your attention. If our friends are on to you the chances are that they're on to me too. That eavesdropper on the bridge.”

    “The point had not escaped my attention. And not because of the bridge, although that may have given pause for thought, but because you deliberately skipped ship. It doesn't matter what most of them think, one person or possibly more is going to be convinced that you did it on purpose. You're a marked man, Smithy.”

    “So that when you drag me back there not everyone is going to feel genuine pangs of sorrow for poor old Smithy? Some may question the bona fides of my injuries?”

    “They won't question. They'll damn well know. But we have to act as if.”

    “Maybe you'll watch my back too? Now and again?"

    “I have a lot on my mind, but I'll try."

    I had Smithy by the armpits, head lolling, heels and bands trailing in the snow, when two flashlights picked us up less than five yards from the door of the main cabin.

    "You've found him, then?" It was Goin, Harbottle by his side. "Good man!" Even to my by now hypersensitive car Goin's reaction sounded genuine.

    "Yes. About quarter of a mile away." I breathed very quickly and deeply to give them some idea as to what it must have been like to drag a two hundred-pound dead weight over uneven snow-covered terrain for such a distance. "Found him in the bottom of a gully. Give me a hand, will you?"

    They gave me a hand. We hauled him inside, fetched a camp cot and stretched him out on this.

    "Good God! Good God! Good God!" Otto wrung his hands, the anguished expression on his face testimony to the fresh burden now added to the crippling weight of the cross he was already carrying. "What's happened to the poor fellow?" The only other occupant of the cabin, Judith Haynes, had made no move to leave the oil stove she was monopolising, unconscious men being borne into her presence might have been so routine an affair as not even to merit the raising of an eyebrow. "I'm not sure," I said between gasps. "Heavy fall, I think, banged his head on a boulder. Looked like.”

    “Concussion?”

    “Maybe." I probed through his hair with my fingertips, found a spot on the scalp that felt no different from anywhere else and said: "Ah!"

    They looked at me in anxious expectancy.

    "Brandy," I said to Otto. I fetched my stethoscope, went through the necessary charade, and managed to revive the coughing, moaning Smithy with a mouthful or two of brandy. For one not trained to the boards, he put up a remarkable performance high-lighted, at its end, with a muted series of oaths and an expression of mingled shock and chagrin when I gently informed him that the Morning Rose had sailed without him.

    During the course of the histrionics most of the other searchers wandered in in twos or threes. I watched them all carefully without seeming to, looking for an expression that was other than surprise or relief, but I might have spared myself the trouble: if there was one or more who was neither surprised nor relieved he had his emotions and facial muscles too well schooled to show anything. I would have expected nothing else.

    After about ten minutes our concern shifted from a now obviously recovering Smithy to the fact that two members of the searching party, Allen and Stryker, were still missing. After the events of that morning I felt that the absence of those two, of all of us, to be rather Coincidental, after fifteen minutes I felt it odd and after twenty minutes I felt it downright ominous, a feeling that was clearly shared by nearly everyone there. Judith Haynes had abandoned her squatter's rights by her oil stove and was walking up and down in short, nervous steps, squeezing her hands together. She stopped in front of me.

    “I don't like it, I don't like it!" Her voice was strained and anxious, it could have been acting but I didn't think so. "What's keeping him? Why is he so long? He's out there with that Allen fellow. Something's wrong. I know it is, I know it." When I didn't answer she said: "Well, aren't you going out to look for him?”

    “Just as you went out to look for Mr. Smith here," I said. It wasn't very nice but then I didn't always feel so very kind to other people as Lonnie did. "Maybe your husband will come back when he feels like it."

    She looked at me without speaking, her lips moving but not speaking, no real hostility in her face, and I realised for the second time that day that her rumoured hatred for her husband was, in fact, only a rumour and that, buried no matter how deep, there did exist some form of concern for him. She turned away and I reached for my torch.

    "Once more unto the breach," I said. "Any takers?"

    Conrad, Jungbeck, Heyter, and Hendriks accompanied me. Volunteers there were in plenty but I reasoned that not only would increased numbers get in one another's way but the chances of someone else becoming lost would be all that greater. Immediately after leaving the hut the five of us fanned out at intervals of not more than fifteen feet and moved off to the north.

    We found Alien inside the first thirty seconds: more accurately, he found us, for he saw our torches-he'd lost his own-and came stumbling towards us out of the snow and the darkness. "Stumbled" was the operative word, he was weaving and swaying like one far gone in alcohol or exhaustion and when he tried to speak his voice was thick and slurred. He was shivering like a man with the ague. it seemed not only pointless but cruel to question him in that condition so we hurried him inside.

    I had a look at him as we sat him on a stool by an oil stove and I didn't have to look twice or very closely to see that this hadn't exactly been Alien's day. Alien had been in the wars again and the damage that had been inflicted on him this time at least matched up to the injuries he'd received that morning. He had two nasty cuts above what had been up till then his undamaged eye, a bruised and scratched right cheek and blood came from both his mouth and nose, blood already congealed in the cold: but his worst injury was a very deep gash on the back of the head, the scalp laid open clear to the bone. Someone had given young Alien a very thorough going over indeed.

    "And what happened to you this time?" I asked. He winced as I started to clean up his face. "Or should I say, do you know what happened to you?"

    “I don't know," he said thickly. He shook his head and drew his breath in sharply as some pain struck through either head or neck. I don't know. I don't remember.”

    “You've been in a fight, laddie," I said. "Again. Someone's cut you up, and quite badly."

    “I know. I can feel it. I don't remember. Honest to God, I don't remember. I-I just don't know what happened."

    “But you must have seen him," Goin said reasonably. "Whoever it was, you must have been face to face with him, God's sake, boy, your shirt's tom and there's at least a couple of buttons missing from your coat. And he had to be standing in front of you when he did this to you. Surely you must have caught a glimpse of him at least.”

    “It was dark," Allen mumbled. "I didn't see anything. I didn't feel anything, all I knew was that I woke up kind of groggy like in the snow with the back of my head hurting. I knew I was bleeding and-please, I don't know what happened.”

    “Yes, you do, yes, you Do" Judith Haynes had pushed her way to the front. The transformation that had taken" place in her face was as astonishing as it was ugly and although her morning performance had partially prepared me for something of this kind and though this expression was different from the one that had disfigure her face that time, it was still an almost frightening thing to watch. The red gash of the mouth had vanished, the lips drawn in and back over hared teeth, the green eyes were no more than slits and, as had happened that morning, the skin was stretched back over her cheekbones until it appeared far too tight for her face. She screamed at him: "You damned liar! Wanted your own back, didn't you? You dirty little bastard, what have you done with my husband? Do you hear me? Do you hear me? What have you done with him, damn you? Where is he? Where did you leave him?"

    Allen looked up at her in a half-scared astonishment, then shook his head wearily. "I'm sorry, Miss Haynes, I don't know what--"

    She hooked her long-nailed fingers into talons and lunged for him but I'd been waiting for it. So had both Goin and Conrad. She struggled like a trapped wildcat, screaming invective at Allen, then suddenly relaxed, her breath coming in harsh, rasping sobs.

    "Now then, now then, Judith," Otto said. "There's no--”

    “Don't you "now then" me, you silly old bastard!" she screamed. Filial respect was clearly not Judith Haynes's strong point but Otto, though clearly nervous, accepted his daughter's abuse as if it were a matter of course. "Why don't you find out instead what this young swine's done to my husband? Why don't you? Why don't you!" She struggled to free her arms and as she was trying to move away we let her go. She picked up a torch and ran for the door.

    "Stop her," I said.

    Heyter and Jungbeck, big men both, blocked her flight.

    "Let me go, let me out!" she shouted. Neither Heyter nor Jungbeck moved and she whirled round on me. "Who the hell are you to--I want to go out and find Michael!”

    “I'm sorry, Miss Haynes," I said. "You're in no condition to go to look for anyone. You'd just run wild, no trace of where you'd been, and in five minutes" time you'd be lost too and perhaps lost for good. We're leaving in just a moment."

    She took three quick steps towards Otto, her fists clenched, her teeth showing again.

    "You let him push me around like this?" This with an incinerating glare in my direction. "Spineless, that's you, absolutely spineless! Anybody can walk over you!" Otto blinked nervously at this latest tirade but said nothing. "Aren't I supposed to be your bloody daughter? Aren't you supposed to be the bloody boss? God's sake, who gives the orders about here? You or Marlowe?”

    “Your father does," Goin said. "Naturally. But, without any disrespect to Dr. Marlowe, we don't hire a dog just to bark ourselves. He's a medical man and we'd be fools not to defer to him in medical matters.”

    “Are you suggesting I'm a medical case?" All the colour had drained from her cheeks and she looked uglier than ever. "Are you? Are you, then? A mental case, perhaps?"

    Heaven knows I wouldn't have blamed Goin if he'd said "yes" straight out and left it at that but Goin was far too balanced and diplomatic to say any such thing and, besides, he'd clearly been through this sort of crisis before. He said, quietly but not condescendingly: "I'm suggesting no such thing. Of course you're distressed, of course you're overwrought, after all it is your husband that's missing. But I agree with Dr. Marlowe that you're not the person to go looking for him. We'll have him back here all the quicker if you co-operate with us, Judith."

    She hesitated, still halfway between hysteria and rage, then swung away. I taped the gash on Allen's head and said: "That'll do till I come back. Afraid I'll have to shave off. a few locks and stitch it." On the way to the door I stopped and said quietly to Goin: "Keep her away from Allen, will you?"

    Goin nodded.

    "And for heaven's sake keep her away from Mary darling."

    He looked at me in what was as close to astonishment as he was capable of achieving. "That kid?”

    “That kid. She's next on the list for Miss Haynes's attentions. When Miss Haynes gets around to thinking about it, that is."

    I left with the same four as previously. Conrad, the last out, closed the door behind him and said: "Jesus! My charming leading lady. What a virago she is!”

    “She's a little upset," I said mildly.

    "A little upset! Heaven send I'm in the next county if she ever gets really mad. What the hell do you think can have happened to Stryker?"

    “I have no idea," I said, and because it was dark I didn't have to assume an honest expression to go with the words. I moved closer to him so that the others, already fanned out in line of search, couldn't hear me. "Seeing we're such a bunch of odd-balls anyway, I hope an odd request from another odd-ball won't come amiss.”

    “You disappoint me, Doctor. I thought you and I were two of the very few halfway normal people around here.”

    “By the prevailing standards, any moderate odd-ball is normal. You know anything of Lonnie's past?"

    He was silent for a moment then said: "He has a past?”

    “We all have a past. If you think I mean a criminal past, no. Lonnie hasn't got one. I just want to find out if he was married or had any family. That's all.”

    “Why don't you ask him yourself "

    “If I felt free to ask him myself, would I be asking you?"

    Another silence. "Your name really Marlowe, Doe?”

    “Marlowe, as ever was. Christopher Marlowe. Passport, birth certificate, driving licence-they're all agreed on it.”

    “Christopher Marlowe? Just like the playwright, eh?”

    “My parents had literary inclinations.”

    “Uh-huh." He paused again. "Remember what happened to your namesake-stabbed in the back by a friend before his thirtieth birthday?”

    “Rest easy. My thirtieth birthday is lost in the mists of time.”

    “And you're really a doctor?"

    "Yes.”

    “And you're really something else, too?"

    "Yes.”

    “Lonnie. Marital status. Children or no. You may rely on Conrad's discretion.”

    “Thanks," I said. We moved apart. We were walking to the north for two reasons-the wind, and hence the snow, were to our backs and so progress was easier in that direction, and Allen had come stumbling from that direction. In spite of Allen's professed total lack of recall of what had happened, it seemed likely to me that we might find Stryker also somewhere in that direction. And so it proved.

    "Over here! Over here!" In spite of the muffling effects of the snow Hendriks's shout sounded curiously high-pitched and cracked. "I've found him, I've found him!"