Алистер Маклин - Bear Island

‘A giveaway piece of fresh and unmelted snow. From a boot.’ He reached for the lid of the locker. ‘Well, time’s a-wasting. Better open the damn thing.’

‘Better not.’ I’d caught his arm. ‘How do you know it’s not booby-trapped?’

‘There’s that.’ He’d snatched back his hand like a man seeing a tiger’s jaws closing on it. ‘It would save the cost of a time-fuse. How do we open it then?’

‘Gradually. It’s unlikely that he had the time to rig up anything so elaborate as an electrical trigger, but if he did there’ll be contacts in the lid. More likely, if anything, a simple pull cord. In either event nothing can operate in the first two inches of lift for he must have left at least that space to withdraw his hand.’

So we gingerly opened the lid those two inches, examined the rim and what we could see of the interior of the locker and found nothing. I pushed the locker lid right back. There was no sign of any explosive. Nothing had been put inside. But something had been removed – two cans of the quick-dry paint and two brushes.

Smithy looked at me and shook his head. Neither of us said anything. The reasons for removing a couple of paint cans were so wholly inconceivable that, clearly, there was nothing that could be gainfully said. We closed the locker, climbed up the conning-tower and regained the pier. I said: ‘It’s very unlikely that he would have taken them back to the cabin with him. After all, they’re large cans and not easy things to hide in a tiny cubicle, especially if any of your friends should chance to come calling.’

‘He doesn’t have to hide them there. As I said earlier, there are a thousand snowdrifts where you can hide practically anything.’

But if he’d hidden anything he hadn’t hidden them in any of the snowdrifts between the jetty and the cabin, for his tracks led straight back to the latter without any deviation to either side. We followed the footprints right back close up to the cabin walls and there they were lost in the smudged line of tracks that led right round the cabin’s perimeter. Smithy hooded his torch and examined the tracks for some seconds.

He said: ‘I think that track’s wider and deeper than it was before. I think that someone – and it doesn’t have to be the same person – has been making another grand tour of the cabin.’

‘I think you’re right,’ I said. I led the way back to the window of our own cubicle and was about to pull it open when some instinct – or perhaps it was because I was now subconsciously looking for the suspicious or untoward in every possible situation – made me shine my torch on the window-frame. I turned to Smithy. ‘Notice something?’

‘I notice something. The wad of paper we left jammed between the window and frame – well, it’s no longer jammed between window and frame.’ He shone his torch on the ground, stopped and picked something up. ‘Because it was lying down there. A caller or callers.’

‘So it would seem.’ We clambered inside, and while Smithy started screwing the window back in place I turned up the oil lamp and started to look around partly for some other evidence to show that an intruder had been there, but mainly to try to discover the reason for his being there. Inevitably, my first check was on the medical equipment, and my first check was my last, and very brief it was too.

‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘Two birds with one stone. We’re a brilliant pair.’

‘We are?’

‘The lad you saw with his face pressed against that window. Probably had it stuck against it for all of five minutes until he’d made sure he’d been seen. Then, to make certain you were really interested, he went and shone his torch into Judith Haynes’s window. No two actions, he must have calculated, could have been designed to lure us out into the open more quickly.’

‘He was right at that, wasn’t he?’ He looked at my opened medical kit and said carefully: ‘I’m to take it, then, that there’s something missing there?’

‘You may so take it.’ I showed him the velvet-lined gap in the tray where the something missing had been. ‘A lethal dose of morphine.’

‘Four bells and all’s well,’ Smithy said, shaking my shoulder. Neither the call nor the shake was necessary. I was by this time, even in my sleep, in so keyed-up a state that his turning of the door-handle had been enough to have me instantly awake. ‘Time to report to the bridge. We’ve made some fresh coffee.’

I followed him into the main cabin, said a greeting to Conrad who was bent over pots and cups at the oil stove, and went to the front door. To my surprise the wind, now fully round to the west, had dropped away to something of not more than the order of a Force 3, the snow had thinned to the extent that it promised to cease altogether pretty soon, and I even imagined I could see a few faint stars in a clear patch of sky to the south, beyond the entrance of the Sor-hamna. But the cold, if anything, was even more intense than it had been earlier in the night. I closed the door quickly, turned to Smithy and spoke softly.

‘You’re very encouraging,’ Smithy said. ‘What makes you so sure that those five–’ He broke off as Luke, yawning and stretching vastly, entered the main cabin. Luke was a thin, awkward, gangling creature, a tow-headed youth urgently in need of the restraining influences of either a barber or a ribbon.

I said: ‘Do you see him as a gun for hire?’

‘I could have him up for committing musical atrocities with a guitar, I should think. Otherwise – yes, I guess. Very little threat to life and limb. And, yes again, that would go for the other four too.’ He watched as Conrad went into one of the passages, carrying a cup of coffee. ‘I’d put my money on our leading man any day.’

‘Where on earth is he off to?’

‘Bearing sustenance for his lady-love, I should imagine. Miss Stuart spent much of our watch with us.’

I was on the point of observing that the alleged lady-love had a remarkable predilection for moving around in the darker watches of the night but thought better of it. That Mary Stuart was involved in matters dark and devious – Heissman’s being her uncle didn’t even begin to account for the earlier oddity of her behaviour – I didn’t for a moment doubt: that she was engaged in any murderous activities I couldn’t for a moment believe.

Smithy went on: ‘It’s important that I reach Tunheim?’

‘It hardly matters whether you do or not. With Heyter along, only the weather and the terrain can decide that. If you have to turn back, that’s fine with me, I’d rather have you here: if you get to Tunheim, just stay there.’

‘Stay there? How can I stay there? I’m going there for help, am I not? And Heyter will be shouting to come back.’

‘I’m sure they’ll understand if you explain that you’re tired and need a rest. If Heyter makes a noise, have him locked up – I’ll give you a letter to the Met. officer in charge.’

‘You’ll do that, will you? And what if the Met. officer point-blank refuses?’

‘I think you’ll find some people up there who’ll be only too happy to oblige you.’

He looked at me without a great deal of enthusiasm. ‘Friends of yours, of course?’

‘There’s a visiting meteorological team from Britain staying there briefly. Five of them. Only, they’re not meteorologists.’

‘Naturally not.’ The lack of enthusiasm deteriorated into a coldness that was just short of outright hostility. ‘You play your cards mighty close to the chest, don’t you, Dr Marlowe?’

‘Don’t get angry with me. I’m not asking you that, I’m telling you. Policy – I obey orders, even if you don’t. A secret shared is never a secret halved – even a peek at my cards and who knows who’s kibitzing? I’ll give you that letter early this morning.’