Bear Island (36 page)

    I nodded and left. Ten minutes" time-in the right circumstances which in this case were the wrong ones-can bring about a change in a person's features which lies just within the bounds of credibility. The face that had looked merely drawn so very recently, now looked haggard: she looked her real age and then ten hard and bitter years after that. She wept in a sore and aching silence and the tears flowed steadily down her temples and past the carlobes, the damp marks spreading on the grey rough linen of her pillow. I would not have thought it possible that I could ever feel such deep pity for this person and wish to comfort her: but that was how it was. I said: I think you should sleep now.”

    “Why?" Her hands were clenched so tightly that the ivory of the knuckles showed. "What does it matter? I'll have to wake up, won't l?”

    “Yes, I know." It was the sort of situation where, no matter what I said, the words would sound banal. "But the sleep would do you good, Miss Haynes.”

    “Well, yes," she said. It was hard for her to speak through the quiet tears. "All right. Make it a long sleep."

    So, like a fool, I made it a long sleep. Like an even greater fool I went to my cubicle and lay down. And, like the greatest fool of all, I went to sleep myself.

    #

    I slept for over four hours and awoke to an almost deserted cabin. Otto had indeed been as good as his word and had had everyone up and around at what they must have regarded as the most unreasonable crack of dawn. Understandably enough, neither he nor anyone else had seen fit to wake me: I was one of the few who had no functions to perform that day.

    Otto and Conrad were the only two people in the main quarter of the cabin. Both were drinking coffee but as both were heavily muffled they were clearly on the point of departure. Conrad said a civil good morning. Otto didn't bother. He informed me that the Count, Neal. Divine, Allen, Cecil, and Nary Darling had taken off. with the Sno-Cat and cameras along Lerner's Way and that he and Conrad were following immediately. Hendriks and the Three Apostles were abroad with their sound recording equipment. Smithy and Heyter had left over an hour previously for Tunheim. Initially, I found &s vaguely disturbing, I would have thought that Smithy would have at least woken and spoken to me before leaving. On reflection, however, I found this omission less than disturbing: it was a measure of Smithy's confidence in himself and, by implication, my unspoken confidence in himself, that he had not thought it necessary to seek either advice or reassurance before his departure. Finally, Otto told me, Heissman and his hand^held camera, along with Jungbeck, had taken off. on his location reconnaissance in the sixteen-foot work-boat: they had been accompanied by Goin, who had volunteered to stand in for the now absent Heyter.

    Otto stood up, drained his cup and said: "About my daughter, Dr. Marlowe.”

    “She'll be all right." She would never again be all right. "I'd like to talk to her before I go." I couldn't begin to imagine a reason why he should wish to talk to her or she to him, but I refrained from comment. He went on: "You have no objections? Medical ones, I mean?”

    “No. just straightforward commonsense ones. She's under heavy sedation. You couldn't even shake her awake.”

    “But surely-”

    “Two or three hours at the very least. If you don't want my advice, Mr. Gerran, why ask for it?”

    “Fair enough, fair enough. Leave her be." He headed towards the outer door. "Your plans for the day, Dr. Marlowe?”

    “Who's left here?" I said. "Apart from your daughter and myself?"

    He looked at me, his brows levelled in a frown, then said: "Mary Stuart. Then there's Lonnie, Eddie, and Sandy. Why?”

    “They're asleep?”

    “As far as I know. Why?”

    “Someone has to bury Stryker.”

    “Ah, yes, of course. Stryker. I hadn't forgotten, you know, but-yes, of course. Yes, yes. You--"

    “Yes.”

    “I am in your debt. A ghastly business, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly. Thank you again, Dr. Marlowe." He waddled purposefully towards the door. "Come, Charles, we are overdue."

    They left. I poured myself some coffee but had nothing to eat for it wasn't a morning for eating, went outside into the equipment shed and found myself a spade. The frozen snow was not too deep, not much more than a foot, but the permafrost had set into the ground and it cost me over an hour and a half and, what is always dangerous in those high latitudes, the loss of much sweat before I'd done what had to be done. I returned the spade and went inside quickly to change: it was a fine clear morning of bitter cold with the sun not yet in the sky, but no morning for an overheated man to linger.

    Five minutes later, a pair of binoculars slung round my neck, I closed the front door softly behind me. Despite the fact that it was now close on ten o'clock, Eddie, Sandy, Lonnie, and Mary Stuart had not as yet put in an appearance. The presence of the first three would have given me no cause for concern for all were notorious for their aversion to any form of physical activity and it was extremely unlikely that any would have suggested that they accompany me on my outing: Mary Stuart might well have done so, for any number of reasons: curiosity, the wish to explore, because she'd been told to keep an eye on me, even, maybe, because she would have felt safer with me than being left behind at the cabin. But whatever her reasons might have been I most definitely didn't want Mary Stuart keeping an eye on me when I was setting out to keep an eye on Heissman.

    But to keep an eye on Heissman I had first of all to find him and Heissman, inconveniently and most annoyingly, was nowhere to be seen. The intention, as I had understood it, was that he, with Jungbeck and Goin, should cruise the Sor-Hamna in the sixteen-footer, in search of likely background material. But there was no trace of their boat anywhere in the Sor-Hamna and from where I stood in the vicinity of the cabin I could take in the whole sweep of the bay at one glance. Against the remote possibility that the boat might have temporarily moved in behind one of the tiny islands on the east side of the bay I kept the glasses on those for a few minutes. Nothing stirred. Heissman, I was sure, had left the Sor-Hamna.

    He could have moved out to the open sea to the cast by way of the northern tip of the island of Makehl, but this seemed unlikely. The northerly seas were whitecapped and confused, and apart from the fact that Heissman was as far removed from the popular concept of an intrepid seaman as it was possible to imagine it seemed unlikely that he would have forgotten Smithy's warning the previous day about the dangers inherent in taking an open-pooped boat out in such weather. Much more likely, I thought, he'd moved south out of the Sor-Hamna into the sheltered waters of the next bay to the south, the Eviebukta.

    I, too, made my way south. Initially, I moved in a southwesterly direction to give the low cliffs of the bay as wide a berth as possible, not from any vertiginous fear of heights but because Hendriks and the Three Apostles were down there somewhere recording, or hoping to record, the cries of the kittiwake gulls, the fulmars, the black guillernots which were reputed to haunt those parts: I had no reason to fear anything at their hands, I just didn't want to go around arousing too much curiosity.

    The going, diagonally upwards across a deceptively easy-looking slope, proved very laborious indeed. Mountaineering ability was not called for, which in view of my lack of expertise or anything resembling specialised equipment, was just as well: what was required was some form of in-built radar to enable me to detect the presence of hidden fissures and sudden dips in the smooth expanse of white, and in this, unfortunately, I was equally lacking, with the result that I fell abruptly and at fairly regular intervals into drifts of newly formed snow that at times reached as high as my shoulders. There was no physical danger in this, the cushioning effect of newly driven snow is almost absolute, but the effort of almost continuously extricating myself from those miniature ravines and struggling back up to something resembling terra firma-which even then had seldom less than twelve or fifteen inches of soft snow-was very wearing indeed. If it were so difficult for me to make progress along such relatively simple ground I wondered how Smithy and Heyter must be faring in the so much more wildly rugged mountainous terrain to the north.

    It took me just on an hour and a half to cover less than a mile and arrive at a vantage point of a height of about five hundred feet that enabled me to see into the next bay-the Evjebukta. This wide U-shaped bay, stretching from Kapp Malmgren in the northeast to Kapp Kolthoff in the southwest, was just over a mile in length and perhaps half of that in width: the entire coastline of the bay consisted of vertical cliffs, a bleak, forbidding, and repellent stretch of grey water and precipitous limestone that offered no haven to those in peril on the sea.

    I stretched out gratefully on the snow and, when the thumping of my heart and the rasping of my breathing had quietened sufficiently for me to hold a pair of binoculars steady, I used them to quarter the Evjebukta. It was completely bereft of life. The sun was up now, low over the southeastern horizon, but even although it was in my eyes, visibility was good enough and the resolution of the binoculars such that I could have picked up a seagull floating on the waters. There were some little islands to the north of the bay and, of course, there were the cliffs immediately below me that blocked off. all view of what might be happening at their feel?: but if the boat was concealed either behind an island or under the cliffs, it was most unlikely that Heissman would remain in such positions long for there would he nothing to detain him.

    I looked south beyond the tip of Kapp Kolthoff and there, beyond the protection of the headland, the sun glinted off the broken tops of white water. I was as certain as one could be without absolute proof that they would not have ventured beyond the protection of the point: Heissman's unseamanlike qualities apart, Goin was far too prudent a man to step unheedingly into anything that would even smack of danger.

    How long I lay there waiting for the boat to appear either from behind an island or out from under the concealment of the nearest cliffs I didn't know: what I did know was that I suddenly became aware of the fact that I was shaking with the cold and that both hands and feet were almost completely benumbed. And I became aware of something else. For several minutes now I'd had the binoculars trained not on the north end of the bay but at the foot of the cliffs to the south on a spot where, about three hundred yards northwest of the tip of Kapp Kolthoff, there was a peculiar indentation in the cliff walls. Partly because of the fact that it appeared to bear to the right and out of sight behind one of the cliff faces guarding the entrance and partly because, due to the height of the cliffs and the fact that the sun was almost directly behind, the shadows cast were very deep, I was unable to make out any details beyond this narrow entrance. But that it was an entrance to some cove beyond I didn't doubt. Of any place within the reach of my binoculars it was the only one where the boat could have lain concealed: Why anyone should wish to lie there at all was another matter altogether, a reason for which I couldn't even guess at. One thing was for certain, a landward investigation from where I lay was out of the question: even if I didn't break my neck in the minimum of the two-hour journey it would take me to get there, nothing would be achieved by making such a trip anyway for not only did the descent of those beetling black cliffs seem quite suicidal but, even if it were impossibly accomplished, what lay at the end of it removed any uncertainty about the permanency of the awaiting reception: for there was no foreshore whatever, just the precipitous plunge of those limestone walls into the dark and icy seas.

    Stiffly, clumsily, I rose and headed back towards the cabin. The trip back was easier than the outwards one for it was downhill and by following my own tracks I was able to avoid most of the involuntary descents into the sunken snowdrifts that had punctuated my climb. Even so, it was nearer one o'clock than noon when I approached the cabin.

    I was only a few paces distant when the main door opened and Mary Stuart appeared. One look at her and my heart turned over and something cold and leaden seemed to settle in the pit of my stomach. Dishevelled hair, a white and shocked face, eyes wild and full of fear, I'd have had to be blind not to know that somewhere, close, death had walked by again.

    "Thank God!" Her voice was husky and full of tears. "Thank God you're here! Please come quickly. Something terrible has happened."

    I didn't waste time asking her what, clearly I'd find out soon enough, just followed her running footsteps into the cabin and along the passage to Judith Haynes's opened door. Something terrible had indeed happened but there had been no need for haste. Judith Haynes had fallen from her cot and was lying sideways on the floor, half-covered by her blanket which she'd apparently dragged down along with her. On the bed lay an opened and three-part empty bottle of barbiturate tablets, a few scattered over the bed: on the floor, its neck still clutched in her hand, lay a bottle of gin, also three-parts empty. I stooped and touched the marble forehead: even allowing for the icy atmosphere in the cubicle, she must have been dead for hours. Make it a long sleep, she'd said to me: make it a long sleep.

    "Is she-is she-?" The dead make people speak in whispers.

    "Can't you tell a dead person when you see one?" It was brutal of me but I felt flooding into me that cold anger that was to remain with me until we'd left the island.

    “I-I didn't touch her. I-”

    “When did you find her?”

    “A minute ago. Two. I'd just made some food and coffee and I came to see-”

    “Where are the others? Lonnie, Sandy, Eddie?”

    “Where are-- I don't know. They left a little while ago--said they were going for a walk." A likely tale. There was only one reason that would make at least two of the three walk as far as the front door. I said: "Get them. You'll End them in the provision shed.”