Алистер Маклин - Bear Island

I had developed towards her a markedly ambivalent feeling: while I had to be grateful to her for having, however unwittingly, saved my life because her aversion to scotch had prevented me from having the last nightcap I’d ever have had in this world, at the same time she’d prevented me from moving around and, just possibly, stumbling upon the lad who had been wandering about in the middle watches with illintent in his heart and a sledge-hammer in his hand. That she, and for whomsoever she worked, knew beyond question that I was a person who might have reason to be abroad at inconvenient hours I no longer doubted. And the second thing in my mind was the ‘whomsoever’: I no longer doubted that it was Heissman and perhaps he didn’t even stand in need of an accomplice: doctors, by the nature of their profession, are even more fallible and liable to error than the average run of mankind and I might well have been in error when I’d seen him on his bed in pain and judged him unfit to move around. Moreover, Goin apart, he was the only man with a cabin to himself and so able to sally out and return undetected by a room-mate. And, of course, there was always this mysterious Siberian background of his. None of which, not even his secret meeting with Mary Stuart, was enough to hang a cat on.

Lonnie touched my arm and I turned. He smelt like a distillery. He said: ‘Remember what we were talking about? Two nights ago.’

‘We talked about a lot of things.’

‘Bars.’

‘Don’t you ever think of anything else, Lonnie? Bars? What bars?’

‘In the great hereafter,’ Lonnie said solemnly. ‘Do you think there are any there? In heaven, I mean. I mean, you couldn’t very well call it heaven if there are no bars there, now could you? I mean, I wouldn’t call it an act of kindness to send an old man like me to a prohibition heaven, now would you? It wouldn’t be kind.’

‘I don’t know, Lonnie. On biblical evidence I should expect there would be some wine around. And lots of milk and honey.’ Lonnie looked pained. ‘What leads you to expect that you’re ever going to be faced with the problem?’

‘I was but posing a hypothetic question.’ The old man spoke with dignity. ‘It would be positively un Christian to send me there. God, I’m thirsty. Unkind is what I mean. I mean, charity is the greatest of Christian virtues.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘An act of the greatest uncharity, my dear boy, the very negation of the spirit of kindness.’ Lonnie gazed out through a side window at the fantastically shaped islets of Keilhous Oy, Hosteinen and Stappen, now directly off our port beam and less than half a mile distant. His face was set in lines of tranquil sacrifice. He was as drunk as an owl.

‘You do believe in this kindness, Lonnie?’ I said curiously. After a lifetime in the cinema business I didn’t see how he possibly could.

‘What else is there, my dear boy?’

‘Even to those who don’t deserve it?’

‘Ah! Now. There is the point. Those are the ones who deserve it most.’

‘Even Judith Haynes?’

He looked as if I had struck him and when I saw the expression on his face I felt as if I had struck him, even although I felt his to be a mysteriously exaggerated reaction. I reached out a hand even as I was about to apologize for I knew not what, but he turned away, a curious sadness on his face, and left the bridge.

‘Now I’ve seen the impossible,’ Conrad said. He wasn’t smiling but he wasn’t being censorious either. ‘Someone has at last given offence to Lonnie Gilbert.’

‘One has to work at it,’ I said. ‘I’ve transgressed against Lonnie’s creed. He thinks that I’m unkind.’

‘Unkind?’ Mary Stuart laid a hand on the arm I was using to steady myself. The skin under the brown eyes was perceptibly darker than it had been thirty-six hours ago and was even beginning to look puffy and the whites of the eyes themselves were dulled and slightly tinged with red. She hesitated, as if about to say something, then her gaze shifted to a point over my left shoulder. I turned.

Captain Imrie closed the starboard wheel-house door behind him. Insofar as it was possible to detect the shift and play of expression on that splendidly bewhiskered and bearded face, it seemed that the captain was upset, even agitated. He crossed directly to Smithy and spoke to him in a low and urgent voice. Smithy registered surprise, then shook his head. Captain Imrie spoke again, briefly. Smithy shrugged his shoulders, then said something in return. Both men looked at me and I knew there was more trouble coming, if not actually arrived, if for no reason other than that so far nothing untowards had happened with which I hadn’t been directly or indirectly concerned. Captain Imrie fixed me with his piercing blue eyes, jerked his head with most uncharacteristic peremptoriness towards the chart-room door and headed for it himself. I shrugged my own shoulders in apology to Mary and Conrad and followed. Captain Imrie closed the door behind me.

‘More trouble, mister.’ I didn’t much care for the way he called me ‘mister’. ‘One of the film crew, John Halliday, has disappeared.’

‘Disappeared where?’ It wasn’t a very intelligent question but then it wasn’t meant to be.

‘That’s what I’d like to know.’ I didn’t much care for the way he looked at me either.

‘He can’t just have disappeared. I mean, you’ve searched for him?’

‘We’ve searched for him, all right.’ The voice was harsh with strain. ‘From anchor locker to stern-post. He’s not aboard the Morning Rose .’

‘My God,’ I said. ‘This is awful.’ I looked at him in what I hoped registered as puzzlement. ‘But why tell me all this?’

‘Because I thought you might be able to help us.’

‘Help you? I’d like to, but how? I assume that you can only be approaching me in my medical capacity and I can assure you that there’s absolutely nothing in what I’ve seen of him or read in his medical history–’

‘I wasn’t approaching you in your bloody medical capacity!’ Captain Imrie had started to breathe very heavily. ‘I just thought you might help me in other ways. Bloody strange, isn’t it, mister, that you’ve been in the thick of everything that’s been happening?’ I’d nothing to say to this, I’d just been thinking the same thing myself. ‘How it was you who just “happened” to find Antonio dead. How it was you who just “happened” to go to the bridge when Smith and Oakley were ill. How was it you who went straight to the stewards’ cabin in the crew quarters. Next thing, I suppose, you’d have gone straight to Mr Gerran’s cabin and found him dead also, if Mr Goin hadn’t had the good luck to go there first. And isn’t it bloody strange, mister, that a doctor, the one person who could have helped those people and seemingly couldn’t is the one person aboard with enough medical knowledge to make them sick in the first place?’

No question – looking at it from his angle – Captain Imrie was developing quite a reasonable point of view. I was more than vaguely surprised to find that he was capable of developing a point of view in the first place. Clearly, I’d been underestimating him: just how much I was immediately to realize.

‘And just why were you spending so much time in the galley late the night before last – when I was in my bed, damn you? The place where all the poison came from. Haggerty told me. He told me you were poking around – and got him out of the galley for a spell. You didn’t find what you wanted. But you came back later, didn’t you? Wanted to find out where the food left-overs were, didn’t you? Pretended you were surprised when they were gone. That would look good in court.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, you silly old–’