The Snow Tiger / Night of Error (36 page)

‘What’s his speciality?’

‘Ocean currents. He’s one of those geniuses who can dredge up a bit of water and tell you which way it was flowing a million years ago last Wednesday. I don’t think there’s a name for his line yet, so I’ll call it paleoaquaology – there’s a mouthful for you.’

Geordie raised his eyebrows. ‘Can they really do that kind of thing?’

I grinned. ‘They’d like you to believe so, and I’ve no reason to doubt it. But to my mind there’s a hell of a lot of theory balancing uneasily on too few facts. My line is different – I analyse what I’m given and if anyone wants to build any whacky theories on what I tell ’em, that’s their affair.’

‘And Mark was like yourself – an analytical chemist. Why would he team up with Norgaard? They don’t seem to have anything in common.’

I said slowly, ‘I don’t know; I really don’t know.’ I was thinking of the highly unlikely theory indicated in Mark’s missing notebooks.

‘All right,’ Geordie said. ‘Norgaard’s disappeared – you think. What else have you got?’

‘The next thing is Kane. The whole thing is too damn pat. Kane turns up and we have a burglary. He knew the stuff was coming – I told him.’

Geordie chuckled. ‘And how do you tie in the four Spanish burglars with Kane? Speaking as a non-theoreticist, that is?’

‘I’m damned if I know. There’s something odd about that too. I couldn’t place the accent; it was one I’ve never heard before.’

‘You don’t know them all,’ said Geordie. ‘You’d have to be born Spanish to be that good.’

‘True.’ There was a long silence while I marshalled my thoughts. ‘I wish I could get hold of Kane.’

‘You think there’s something odd about him, don’t you?’

‘I do. But I don’t know what it is. I’ve been trying to bring it to the surface ever since I saw him.’

‘Mike, I think this is all a lot of nonsense,’ Geordie said decisively. ‘I think your imagination is working overtime. You’ve had a shock about Mark’s death and another over the burglary – so have I, come to that. But I don’t think Norgaard has mysteriously disappeared; I think he’s probably sitting somewhere writing a thesis on prehistoric water. As for Kane, you’ve got nothing but a blind hunch. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If Kane is a seaman he’ll probably be down somewhere in dockland, and if you want him that bad I’ll put my boys on to nosing around a bit. It’s a pretty hopeless chance but it’s all I can do.’

‘Thanks, Geordie,’ I said. ‘Meantime, I’d better ring Helen and tell her I’ve been burgled. She’s not going to like hearing that Mark’s stuff is gone but there’s no hope for it. I can only play it down, tell her it was all worthless anyway.’

‘Are you going to pass on the notebook to her?’

I shook my head thoughtfully. ‘What notebook? As far as she’s concerned, it was all stolen. She could never make anything of that stuff of Mark’s – but maybe I can.’

I had nightmares that night.

I dreamed of a lovely Pacific island with white beaches and waving palm fronds where I wandered quite happily until I became aware that the sky was darkening and a cold, icy wind had arisen. I started to run but my feet slipped in the soft sand and I made no progress. And I knew what I was running from.

He caught me at last with my back to a palm trunk, and came nearer and nearer, brandishing a rusty kitchen knife. I knew it was the Dutch doctor, although he was screaming in Spanish,
‘Emplead cuchillo – cuchillo – cuchillo!’

He was drunk and sweaty-faced and as he came nearer I felt powerless to move and I knew he was going to stick me with the knife. At last his face was close to mine and I could see the individual beads of sweat on his shiny forehead and his lean dark face. It was the face of Kane. He drew back his arm and struck with the knife right into my guts.

I woke with a yell.

I was breathing deeply, taking in great gulps of air, and I could feel a slick film of sweat all over my body. The knife-scratch in my arm was aching. And I knew at last what was wrong with Kane’s story.

The bedroom door opened and Geordie said in a low voice, ‘What the devil’s going on?’

I said, ‘Come in, Geordie; I’m all right – just a nightmare.’

I switched on the bedside light and Geordie said, ‘You gave me a hell of a fright, Mike.’

‘I gave myself a hell of a fright,’ I said and lit a cigarette. ‘But I discovered something – or remembered something.’

‘What?’

I tapped Geordie emphatically on the chest with my forefinger. ‘Mark had his appendix out years ago.’

Geordie looked startled. ‘But the death certificate …’

‘I don’t know anything about the death certificate. I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t know if it’s a fake. But I know that Mr Bloody Kane is a fake.’

‘Are you sure about this?’

‘I still know the doctor who operated on Mark. I’ll give him a ring and check on it – but I’m sure.’

‘Perhaps this Dutch doctor made a mistake,’ offered Geordie.

‘He’d be a damned good doctor who could take out an appendix that wasn’t there,’ I said acidly. ‘Doctors can’t make mistakes like that.’

‘Not unless he was covering up. Lots of doctors bury their mistakes.’

‘You mean he was incompetent?’ I thought about that, then shook my head decisively. ‘No, Geordie, that won’t wash. He’d see the old operation scar the moment he made his examination, and he’d know the appendix had already been removed. He wouldn’t stick his neck out by signing a certificate that could be so easily disproved – no one is as incompetent as that.’

‘Aye. If he wanted to cover up he’d put down the cause of death as fever or something like that – something you couldn’t prove one way or another. But we don’t know what he put on the certificate.’

‘We’ll soon find out. They sent it to Helen. And I want to find Kane more than ever – I want to nail that lying bastard.’

‘We’ll do our best,’ said Geordie. He didn’t sound too hopeful.

I had no more dreams that night, but slept heavily and late. It was Geordie who woke me by shaking my shoulder – and incidentally hurting my arm once again. I groaned and turned away, but he persisted until I opened my eyes. ‘You’re wanted on the phone,’ he said. ‘It’s the Institute.’

I put on my dressing gown and was still thick-headed with sleep when I lifted the receiver. It was young Simms. ‘Dr Trevelyan, I’ve taken over your old office while you’re away and you’ve left something behind. I don’t know if it’s valuable or if you want it at all …’

I mumbled, ‘What is it?’

‘A manganese nodule.’

I was jolted wide awake. ‘Where did you find it?’

‘I didn’t. One of the cleaners found it under your desk and gave it to me. What should I do with it?’

‘Stick tight to it. I’ll pick it up this morning. It’s got some – relation to work I’m engaged on. Thanks for calling.’

I turned to Geordie. ‘All is not lost,’ I said, ‘we’ve got a nodule. You dropped some on the floor of my office, remember, and you left one under the desk.’

‘I don’t see what all the fuss is about. All along you’ve been insisting that the damn things are worthless. What’s so exciting about this one?’

I said, ‘There are too many mysteries connected with this particular lot to suit me. I’m going to take a closer look at this one.’

As I breakfasted on a cigarette and a cup of strong coffee I rang Helen and asked her to read out Mark’s death certificate. It was in French, of course, and she had some difficulties over the hand-written parts but we got it sorted out. I put down the phone and said to Geordie, ‘Now I want to talk to that doctor as well as Kane.’ I felt full of anger and frustration.

‘What was the cause of death?’

‘Peritonitis following an appendectomy. And that’s impossible. The doctor’s name is Hans Schouten. It was signed in Tanakabu, in the Tuamotus.’

‘He’s a hell of a long way from here.’

‘But Kane isn’t. Do your damndest to find him, Geordie.’

Geordie sighed. ‘I’ll do my best, but this is a bloody big city, and no one but you and Helen can identify him for sure.’

I dressed and drove down to the Institute, retrieved the nodule from Simms and then went down to the laboratories – I was going to analyse this lump of rock down to the last trace elements. First I photographed it in colour from several angles and took a casting of it in latex – that took care of the external record. Then I cut it in half with a diamond saw. Not entirely unexpectedly, in the centre was the white bone of a shark’s tooth, also neatly cut in two.

One of the pieces I put in the rock mill and, while it was being ground to the consistency of fine flour, I polished and etched the flat surface of the other piece. Then the real work began. By early afternoon everything was well under way and luckily I had had the place almost to myself the whole time, but then Jarvis walked in. He was surprised to see me.

‘You’re supposed to be on leave, Mike. What’s all this?’

He looked at the set-up on the bench. I had no worries about that – I could have been analysing anything, and the identifiable half-rock was out of sight. I said lightly, ‘Oh, just some homework I promised I’d do when I had the chance.’

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. ‘What have you been up to, young feller? Saw something about you in yesterday’s press, didn’t I? And I had a chap in from Scotland Yard asking questions about you – and about manganese nodules. And he said you’d
killed
someone?’

‘I had a burglary two nights ago and knocked a chap off the fire escape,’ I said. I hadn’t seen the papers myself and it hadn’t occurred to me that the story would be public. From Simms’ lack of reaction, however, it seemed not to be exactly front-page news.

‘Um’, said Jarvis. ‘Very unfortunate. Place is getting like Chicago. Nasty for you. But what’s it got to do with nodules?’

‘A couple were nicked from my place, with other stuff. I told him they weren’t of much value.’

‘I made that plain to the Inspector,’ growled Jarvis. ‘And I take it he’s now convinced that your burglars were surprised and took the first things that came to hand. I gave you a reasonable character, by the way.’

I had my doubts about the Yard’s acceptance of the front story. The Inspector had struck me as being full of deep suspicions.

‘Well, my boy, I’ll leave you to it. Anything interesting?’ He cast an inquisitive glance at the bench.

I smiled. ‘I don’t know yet.’

He nodded. ‘That’s the way it is,’ he said rather vaguely and wandered out. I looked at the bench and wondered if I was wasting my time. My own knowledge, backed by that of an expert like Jarvis, told me that this was just an ordinary Pacific nodule and nothing out of the ordinary. Still, I
had gone so far, I might as well carry on. I left the glassware to bubble on its own for a while and went to take photomicrographs of the etched surface of the half-nodule.

I was busy for another couple of hours and having to use my bad arm didn’t help. Normally I would have used the services of a laboratory technician but this was one job I wanted to do myself. And it was fortunate that I had taken that precaution because what I finally found astounded me. I looked incredulously at the table of figures that was emerging, breathing heavily with excitement and with my mind full of conflicting conjectures.

Then I became even busier, carefully dismantling the glassware and meticulously washing every piece. I wanted no evidence left of what I’d been up to. That done, I phoned the flat.

Geordie answered. ‘Where the devil have you been?’ he demanded. ‘We’ve had the cops, the press, the insurance people – the lot.’

‘Those are the last people I want to be bothered with right now. Is everything clear now?’

‘Aye.’

‘Good. I don’t suppose you found Kane.’

‘You suppose rightly. If you’re so suspicious of him why don’t you take what you’ve got to the police? They can do a better job of finding him than I can.’

‘I don’t want to do that right now. I’m coming home, Geordie. I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘Have you eaten, boy?’

I suddenly realized that I hadn’t eaten a mouthful all day. I felt very hungry. ‘I’ve been too busy,’ I said hopefully.

‘I thought so. I’ll tell you what; I’ll cook up something in this kitchen of yours – one of my slumgullions. Then we won’t have to go out and maybe get tagged by one of the newspaper blokes.’

‘Thanks. That’ll be fine.’

On the way home I bought some newspapers and found that the story had already sunk with no trace. A local shop produced me a copy of the previous day’s press and the story was a short one, buried in the body of the paper, lacking in detail and with no mention of what had been stolen, which suited me very well. I didn’t want to be questioned on anything concerning manganese nodules. I’m not naturally a good liar.

When I entered the flat I found Geordie busy in the kitchen surrounded by a mouth-watering aroma, and a remarkably well cleaned up living room. I made a mental note never to have glass-fronted bookshelves again – I didn’t much like them anyway. Geordie called out, ‘It’ll be ready in about an hour, so you can get your news off your chest before we eat. I’ll be out in two ticks.’

I went to the cabinet for the whisky bottle and two glasses, then picked my old school atlas off the bookshelf. Ink-blotted and politically out-of-date as it was, it would still suit my purpose. I put it on the table and turned to the pages which showed the Pacific.

Geordie came out of the kitchen and I said, ‘Sit here. I want to tell you something important.’

He saw the glint of excitement in my eye, smiled and sat down obediently. I poured out two whiskies and said, ‘I’m going to give you a little lecture on basic oceanography. I hope you won’t be bored.’

‘Go ahead, Mike.’

‘At the bottom of the oceans – particularly the Pacific – there is a fortune in metallic ores in the form of small lumps lying on the seabed.’ I took the half-nodule from my pocket and put it on the table. ‘Like this lump here. There’s no secret about this. Every oceanographer knows about them.’

Geordie picked it up and examined it. ‘What’s this white bit in the middle?’

‘A shark’s tooth.’

‘How the hell did that get in the middle of a piece of rock?’

‘That comes later,’ I said impatiently, ‘in the second lesson. Now, these lumps are composed mainly of manganese dioxide, iron oxide and traces of nickel, cobalt and copper, but to save time they’re usually referred to as manganese nodules. I won’t tell you how they got onto the seabed – that comes later too – but the sheer quantity is incredible.’

I turned to the atlas and moved my forefinger from south to north off the shoreline of the Americas, starting at Chile and moving towards Alaska. ‘Proved deposits here, at the average of one pound a square foot, cover an area of two million square miles and involve twenty-six
billion
tons of nodules.’

I swept my finger out to Hawaii. ‘This is the mid-Pacific Rise. Four million square miles – fifty-seven billion tons of nodules.’

‘Hell’s teeth,’ said Geordie. ‘You were right about incredible figures.’

I ignored this and moved my finger south again, to Tahiti. ‘Fourteen million square miles in central and south-eastern Pacific. Two hundred billion tons of nodules. Like grains of dust in the desert.’

‘Why haven’t I heard about this before? It sounds like front page news.’

‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have, but you won’t find it in the newspapers. It’s not very interesting. You’d have to read the right technical journals. There’s been no secret made of it; they were first discovered as far back as 1870 during the
Challenger
expedition.’

‘There must be a snag. Otherwise somebody would have done something about it before this.’

I smiled. ‘Oh yes, there are snags – as always. One of them is the depth of the water – the average depth at which these things lie is over fourteen thousand feet. That’s a good
deal of water to go through to scoop up nodules, and the pressure on the bottom is terrific. But it could be done. An American engineer called John Mero did a post-graduate thesis on it. He proposed dropping a thing like a giant vacuum-cleaner and sucking the nodules to the surface. The capitalization on a scheme like that would run into millions and the profit would be marginal at one pound a square foot of ocean bed. It’s what we’d call a pretty lean ore if we found it on land.’

Geordie said, ‘But you have a card up your sleeve.’

‘Let me put it this way. The information I’ve given you is based on the IGY surveys, and the one pound a square foot is a crude approximation.’

I stabbed my finger at the eastern Pacific. ‘Zenkevitch, of the Soviet Institute of Oceanology – the Russians are very interested, by the way – found 3.7 pounds a square foot right there. You see, the stuff lies in varying concentrations. Here they found five pounds a square foot, here they found eight, and here, seven.’

Geordie had been listening with keen interest. ‘That sounds as though it brings it back in line as an economic proposition.’

I shook my head tiredly. ‘No, it doesn’t. Manganese isn’t in short supply, and neither is iron. If you started picking up large quantities of nodules all that would happen is that you’d saturate the market, the price would slip accordingly, and you’d be back where you started – with a marginal profit. In fact, it would be worse than that. The big metals firms and mining houses – the only people with the massed capital to do anything about it – aren’t interested. They already run manganese mines on land, and if they started anything like this they’d end up by wrecking their own land-based investments.’

‘It seems that you’re running in circles,’ said Geordie acidly. ‘Where is all this getting us?’

‘Have patience. I’m making a point. Now, I said there are traces of other metals in these nodules – copper, nickel and cobalt. You can forget the copper. But here, in the southeast Pacific, the nodules run to about 1.6 per cent nickel and about .3 per cent cobalt. The Mid-Pacific Rise gives as much as 2 per cent cobalt. Keep that in mind, because I’m going to switch to something else.’

‘For God’s sake, Mike, don’t spin it out too long.’

I was and I knew it, and enjoyed teasing him. ‘I’m coming to it,’ I said. ‘All the figures I’ve given you are based on the IGY surveys.’ I leaned forward. ‘Guess how many sites they surveyed.’

‘I couldn’t begin to make a guess.’

I took a sip of whisky. ‘They dredged and photographed sixty sites. A lousy sixty sites in sixty-four million square miles of Pacific.’

Geordie stared at me. ‘Is that all? I wouldn’t hang a dog on evidence like that.’

‘The orthodox oceanographer says, “The ocean bed is pretty much of a piece – it doesn’t vary greatly from place to place – so what you find at site X, which you’ve checked, you’re pretty certain to find at site Y, which you haven’t checked.” ‘

I tapped the atlas. ‘I’ve always been suspicious of that kind of reasoning. Admittedly, the ocean bed is pretty much of a piece, but I don’t think we should rely on it sight unseen. And neither did Mark.’

‘Did Mark work together with you on this?’

‘We never worked together,’ I said shortly. ‘To continue. In 1955 the Scripps expedition fished up a nodule from about – here.’ I pointed to the spot. ‘It was two feet long, twenty inches thick and weighed a hundred and twenty-five pounds. In the same year a British cable ship was grappling for a broken cable here, in the Philippines Trench. They got the cable up, all right, from 17,000 feet, and in a
loop of cable they found a nodule 4 feet long and 3 feet in diameter. That one weighed 1700 pounds.’