Алистер Маклин - Bear Island

‘Agreed. But I’m a very choosy whisky man. What is it?’

Halliday peered. ‘Black Label.’

‘None better. But I’m a malt man myself. You’re cold, you try some. It’s on the house. Stole it from Otto.’

‘I’m not much of a one for scotch. Now bourbon–’

‘Corrodes the digestive tract. I speak as a medical man. Now, one sip of that stuff there and you’ll swear off those lethal Kentucky brews for ever. Go on. Try it.’

Halliday looked at the bottle, as if uncertainly. I said to Mary Stuart: ‘How about you? Just a little? You’ve no idea how it warms the cockles.’

She opened her eyes and gave me that oddly expressionless look. ‘No thank you. I hardly ever drink.’ She closed her eyes again.

‘The flaw that makes for perfection,’ I said absently, because my mind was on other things. Halliday wouldn’t drink from that bottle, Mary Stuart wouldn’t drink from that bottle, but Halliday seemed to think it was a good idea that I should. Had they both remained in their seats during my absence or had they been busy little bees, one keeping guard against my premature return while the other altered the character of the Black Label with ingredients not necessarily made in Scotland? Why else had Halliday come up to the saloon if not to lure me away? Why hadn’t he gone direct to the lounge with blankets and pillow instead of wandering aimlessly up here to the saloon where he must have known from mealtimes that the temperature was considerably colder than it was down below? Because, of course, before Mary Stuart had made her presence known to me here, she’d seen me through the outer windows and had reported to Halliday that a certain problem had arisen that could only be solved by bringing about my temporary absence from the saloon. Sandy’s sickness had been a convenient coincidence – if it had been a coincidence, I suddenly thought: if Halliday was the person, or was in cahoots with the person who was so handy with poisons, then the introduction of some mildly emetic potion into Sandy’s drink would have involved no more problem than that of opportunity. It all added up.

I became aware that Halliday was on his feet and was lurching unsteadily in my direction, bottle in one hand and glass in the other: the bottle, I noticed almost mechanically, was about one-third full. He halted, swaying, in front of me and poured a generous measure into the glass, bowed lightly, offered me the glass and smiled. ‘Maybe we’re both on the hide-bound and conservative side, Doc. In the words of the song, I will if you will so will I.’

I smiled back. ‘Your willingness to experiment does you credit. But no thanks. I told you, I just don’t like the stuff. I’ve tried it. Have you?’

‘No, but I–’

‘Well, how can you tell, then?’

‘I don’t think–’

‘You were going to try it anyway. Go on. drink it.’

Mary Stuart, opened her eyes. ‘Do you always make people drink against their will? Is this what doctors do – force alcohol on those who don’t want it?’

I felt like scowling and saying, ‘Why don’t you shut up?’ but instead I smiled and said: ‘Teetotal objections overruled.’

‘So what’s the harm?’ Halliday said. He had the glass to his lips. I stared at him until I remembered I shouldn’t be staring, which was all of a fraction of a second, smiled indulgently, glanced at Mary Stuart whose ever so slightly compressed lips registered no more than a trace of prudish disapproval, then looked back in time to see Halliday lowering his half empty glass.

‘Not bad,’ he pronounced. ‘Not bad at all. Kind of a funny taste, though.’

‘You could be arrested in Scotland for saying that,’ I said mechanically. The villain had nonchalantly quaffed the hemlock while his accomplice had looked on with indifference. I felt very considerably diminished, a complete and utter idiot: as a detective, my inductive and deductive powers added up to zero. I even felt like apologizing to them except that they wouldn’t know what I was talking about.

‘You may in fact be right, Doc, one could even get to like this stuff.’ Halliday topped up his glass, drunk again, took the bottle across to its wrought-iron rest and resumed his former seat. He sat there silently for perhaps half a minute, finished off the scotch with a couple of swallows and rose abruptly to his feet. ‘With that lot inside me I can even ignore Lonnie’s hob-nails. Good night.’ He hurried from the saloon.

I looked at the doorway through which he had vanished, my mind thoughtful, my face not. I still didn’t understand why he had come to the saloon in the first place: and what thought had so suddenly occurred to him to precipitate so abruptly a departure? An unprofitable line of thinking to pursue, I couldn’t even find a starting-point to begin theorizing. I looked at Mary Stuart and felt very guilty indeed: murderesses, I knew, came in all shapes, sizes and guises but if they came in this particular guise then I could never trust my judgement again. I wondered what on earth could have led me to entertain so ludicrous a suspicion: I must be even more tired than I thought.

As if conscious of my gaze she opened her eyes and looked at me. She had this extraordinary ability to assume this still and wholly expressionless face, but beneath this remoteness, this distance, this aloofness lay, I thought, a marked degree of vulnerability. Wishful thinking on my part, it was possible: but I was oddly certain it wasn’t. Still without speaking, still without altering her expression or lack of it, she half-rose, hobbled awkwardly in her cocoon of steamer rugs and sat close beside me. In my best avuncular fashion I put my arm round her shoulders, but it didn’t stay there for long for she took hold of my wrist and deliberately and without haste lifted my arm over the top of her head and pushed it clear of her. Just to show that doctors are suprahuman and incapable of being offended by patients who aren’t really responsible for their own behaviour, I smiled at her. She smiled back at me and her eyes, I saw with an astonishment that I knew was not reflected in my face, were filled with unshed tears: almost as if she were aware of those tears and wished to hide them, she suddenly swung her legs up on the settee, turned towards me and got back to the short-range examination of my shirt-front, only this time she put both her arms around me. As far as freedom of mobility was concerned I was as good as handcuffed, which was doubtless what she wanted anyway. That she harboured no lethal intent towards me I was sure: I was equally sure that she was determined not to let me out of her sight and that this was the most effective way she knew of doing just that. How much it cost that proud and lonely person to behave like this I couldn’t guess: even less could I imagine what made her do it at all.

I sat there and tried to mull things over in my now thoroughly befogged mind and, predictably, made no progress whatsoever. Besides, my tired eyes were being almost hypnotized by the behaviour of the scotch inside the Black Label bottle, with the almost metronomic regularity with which the liquid ascended and descended the opposite sides of the bottle in response to the regular pitching of the Morning Rose . One thing led to another and I said: ‘Mary dear?’

‘Yes?’ She didn’t turn her face up to look at me and I didn’t have to be told why: the area around the level of my fourth shirt-button was becoming noticeably damp.

‘I don’t want to disturb you but it’s time for my nightcap.’

‘Whisky?’

‘Ah! Two hearts that beat as one.’

‘No.’ She tightened her arms.

‘No?’

‘I hate the smell of whisky.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said sotto voce , ‘I’m not married to you.’