Night Without End (14 page)

     "Nothing," I said shortly. Takes you a damned long time to pour a cup of coffee, I thought savagely. "Most kind, I'm sure." Massaging my frozen face, I walked away into the food tunnel, nodding to Joss. He joined me immediately. 

     "Somebody just tried to murder me out there," I said without preamble. 

     "Murder you!" Joss stared at me for a long moment, then his eyes narrowed. Til believe anything in this lot." 

     "Meaning?" 

     "I was looking for some of the radio spares a moment ago - a few of them seem to be missing, but that's not the point. The spares, as you know, are next to the explosives. Someone's been tampering with them." 

     The explosives!" I had a momentary vision of some maniac placing a stick of gelignite under the tractor. "What's missing?" 

     "Nothing, that's what so damned funny. I checked, all the explosives are there. But they're scattered everywhere, all mixed up with fuses and detonators." 

     "Who's been in here this afternoon?" 

     He shrugged. "Who hasn't?" 

     It was true enough. Everyone had been coming and going there all afternoon and evening, the men for a hundred and one pieces of equipment for the tractor body, the women for food and stores. And, of course, our primitive toilet lay at the farthest end of the tunnel. 

     "What happened to you, sir?" Joss asked quietly. 

     I told him, and watched his face tighten till the mouth was a thin white line in the dark face. Joss knew what it meant to be lost on the ice-cap. 

     "The murderous, cold-blooded she-devil," he said softly. "We'll have to nail her, sir, we'll have to, or God only knows who's next on her list. But - but won't we have to have proof or confession or something? We can't just-" 

     "I'm going to get both," I said. The bitter anger still dominated my mind to the exclusion of all else. "Right now." 

     I walked out of the tunnel and across the cabin to where the stewardess was sitting. 

     "We've overlooked something, Miss Ross," I said abruptly. "The food in your galley on the plane. It might make all the difference between life and death. How much is there?" 

     "In the galley? Not very much, I'm afraid. Only odds and ends for snacks, if anyone was hungry. It was a night flight, Dr Mason, and they had already had their evening meal." 

     Followed by a very special brand of coffee, I thought grimly. "Doesn't matter how little it is," I said. "It might be invaluable. I'd like you to come and show me where it is." 

     "Can't it wait?" The protest came from Marie LeGarde. "Can't you see that the poor girl is chilled to death?" 

     "Can't you see that I am too?" I snapped. It was a measure of the mood I was in when I could bring myself to speak like that to Marie LeGarde. "Coming, Miss Ross?" 

     She came. I was taking no chances this time, so I carried with me the big searchlight with its portable battery and another torch, and gave the stewardess an armful of bamboos. When we had reached the top of the hatchway steps she waited for me to lead the way, but I told her to walk in front. I wanted to watch her hands. 

     The snow was easing now, the wind dropping and visibility just a little improved. We walked the length of the antenna line, angled off a little way north of east, setting down an occasional bamboo, and were at the plane within ten minutes of leaving the cabin. 

     "Right," I said. "You first, Miss Ross. Up you go." 

     "Up?" She turned towards me, and though the big searchlight lying on the ground was no help in letting me see the expression of her face, the puzzled tone of her voice was exactly right. "How?" 

     "Same way as you did before," I said harshly. My anger was almost out of control now, I couldn't have restrained myself any longer. "Jump for it." 

     "The same way-" She stopped in mid-sentence and stared at me. "What do you mean?" Her voice was only a whisper. 

     "Jump for it," I said implacably. 

     She turned away slowly and jumped. Her fingers didn't come within six inches of the sill. She tried again, got no nearer, and on her third attempt I boosted her so that her hands hooked over the sill. She hung there for a moment, then pulled herself up a few inches, cried out and fell heavily to the ground. Slowly, dazedly she picked herself up and looked at me. A splendid performance. 

     "I can't do it," she said huskily. "You can see I can't. What are you trying to do to me? What's wrong?" I didn't answer, and she rushed on. "I - I'm not staying here. I'm going back to the cabin." 

     "Later." I caught her arm roughly as she made to move away. "Stand there where I can watch you." I jumped up, wriggled inside the control cabin, reached down and pulled her up after me, none too gently, and without a word I led her straight into the galley. 

     "The Mickey Finn dispensary," I observed. "An ideal quiet spot it is, too." She had her mask off now, and I held up my hand to forestall her as she opened her mouth to speak. "Dope, Miss Ross. But of course you wouldn't know what I'm talking about." 

     She stared at me unblinkingly, made no answer. 

     "You were sitting here when the plane crashed," I went on. "Possibly on this little stool here? Right?" 

     She nodded, again without speaking. 

     "And, of course, were flung against this front bulkhead here. Tell me, Miss Ross, where's the metal projection that tore this hole in your back?" 

     She stared at the lockers, then looked slowly back to me. 

     "Is - is that why you've brought me here-" 

     "Where is it?" I demanded. 

     "I don't know." She shook her head from side to side and took a backward step. "What does it matter? And - and dope - what is the matter? Please." 

     I took her arm without a word and led her through to the radio cabin. I trained the torch beam on to the top of the radio cabinet. 

     "Blood, Miss Ross. And some navy blue fibres. The blood from the cut on your back, the fibres from your tunic. Here's where you were sitting - or standing - when the plane crashed. Pity it caught you off balance. But at least you managed to retain your hold on your gun." She was gazing at me now with sick eyes, and her face was a mask carved from white papiermache. "Missed your cue, Miss Ross - your next line of dialogue was 'What gun?'. I'll tell you - the one you had lined up on the second officer. Pity you hadn't killed him then, isn't it? But you made a good job of it later. Smothering makes such a much less messy job, doesn't it?" 

     "Smothering?" She had to try three times before she got the word out. 

     "On cue, on time," I approved. "Smothering. When you murdered the second officer in the cabin last night." 

     "You're mad," she whispered. Her lips, startlingly red against the ashen face, were parted and the brown eyes, enormous with fear and sick despair. "You're mad," she repeated unsteadily. 

     "Crazy as a loon," I agreed. Again I caught her arm, pulled her out on to the flight deck and trained my flashlight on the captain's back. "You wouldn't, of course, know anything about this either." I leaned forward, jerked up the jacket to expose the bullet hole in the back, then stumbled and all but fell as she gave a long sigh and crumpled against me. Instinctively I caught her, lowered her to the floor, cursed myself for having fallen for the fainting routine even for a second, and ruthlessly stabbed a stiff couple of fingers into the solar plexus, just below the breastbone. 

     There was no reaction, just no reaction at all. The faint had been as genuine as ever a faint can be and she was completely unconscious. 

     The next few minutes, while I sat beside her on the front seat of the plane waiting for her to recover consciousness, were some of the worst I have ever gone through. Self-reproach is a hopeless word to describe the way I swore at myself for my folly, my utter stupidity and unforgivable blindness, above all for the brutality, the calculated cruelty with which I'd treated this poor, crumpled young girl by my side. Especially the cruelty in the past few minutes. Perhaps there had been excuse enough for my earlier suspicions, but there was none for my latest actions: if I hadn't been so consumed by anger, so utterly sure of myself so that the possibility of doubt never had a chance to enter my mind, if my mind hadn't been concentrated, to the exclusion of all else, on the exposure of her guilt, I should have known at least that it couldn't have been she who had jumped down from the control cabin half an hour ago when I had rushed up the aisle, for the simple but sufficient reason that she had been incapable of getting up there in the first place. Quite apart from her injury, I should have been doctor enough to know that the arms and shoulders I had seen while attending to her back that evening weren't built for the acrobatic performance necessary to swing oneself up and through the smashed windscreen. That had been no act she had put on when she had fallen back into the snow, I could see that clearly now; but I should have seen it then. 

     I still hadn't got beyond the stage of calling myself by every name I could think of when she stirred, sighed and straightened in the crook of the arm with which I was supporting her. Her eyes opened slowly, focused themselves on me, and I could feel the pressure on my forearm as she shrank away. 

     "It's all right, Miss Ross," I urged her. "Please don't be afraid. I'm not mad - really I'm not - just the biggest blundering half-witted idiot you're ever likely to meet in all the rest of your days. I'm sorry, I'm most terribly sorry for all I've said, for all I've done. Do you think you can ever forgive me?" 

     I don't think she heard a word I said. Maybe the tone of my voice gave her some reassurance, but it was impossible to tell. She shuddered, violently, and twisted her head to look in the direction of the flight deck. 

     "Murder!" The word was so low that I could hardly catch it. Suddenly her voice became high-pitched, unsteady. "He's been murdered! Who - who killed him?" 

     "Now take it easy, Miss Ross." My heavens, I thought, of all the fatuous advice. "I don't know. All I know is that you had nothing to do with it." 

     "No." She shook her head tiredly. "I don't believe it. I can't believe it. Captain Johnson. Why should anyone - he hadn't an enemy in the world, Dr Mason!" 

     "Maybe Colonel Harrison hadn't an enemy either." I nodded towards the rear of the plane. "But they got him too." 

     She stared down the plane, her eyes wide with horror, her lips moving as if to speak, but no sound came. 

     "They got him too,'I repeated. "Just as they got the captain. Just as they got the second officer - and the flight engineer." 

     "They?" she whispered. "They?" 

     "Whoever it was. I only know it wasn't you." 

     "No," she whispered. Again she shuddered, even more uncontrollably than before, and I tightened my arm round her. "I'm frightened, Dr Mason. I'm frightened." 

     "There's nothing-" I'd started off to say there was nothing to be frightened of, before I realised the idiocy of the words. With a ruthless and unknown murderer among us, there was everything in the world to be frightened of. I was scared myself: but admitting that to this youngster wasn't likely to help her morale any. So I started talking, telling her of all the things we had found out, of the suspicions we had and of what had happened to me, and when I finished she looked at me and said: "But why was I taken into the wireless cabin? I must have been, mustn't I?" 

     "You must have been," I agreed. "Why? Probably so that someone could turn a gun on you and threaten to kill you if the second officer - Jimmy Waterman, you called him, wasn't it -didn't play ball. Why else?" 

     "Why else?" she echoed. She gazed at me, the wide brown eyes never leaving mine, and then I could see the slow fear touching them again and she whispered: "And who else?" 

     "How do you mean 'Who else'?" 

     "Can't you see? If someone had a gun on Jimmy Waterman, someone else must have had one on the pilots. You can see yourself that no one could cover both places at the same time. But Captain Johnson must have been doing exactly as he was told, just as Jimmy was." 

     It was so glaringly obvious that a child could have seen it: it was so glaringly obvious that I'd missed it altogether. Of course there must have been two of them, how else would it have been possible to force the entire crew to do as they were ordered? Good heavens, this was twice as bad, ten times as bad as it had been previously. Nine men and women back there in the cabin, and two of them killers, ruthless merciless killers who would surely kill again, at the drop of a hat, as the needs of the moment demanded. And I couldn't even begin to guess the identity of either of them. 

     "You're right, of course, Miss Ross," I forced myself to speak calmly, matter-of-factly. "It was blind of me, I should have known." I remembered how the bullet had passed clear through the man in the back seat. "I did know, but I couldn't add one and one. Colonel Harrison and Captain Johnson were killed by different guns - the one by a heavy carrying weapon, like a Colt or a Luger, the other by a less powerful, a lighter weapon, like something a woman might have used."