Алистер Маклин - Bear Island

Otto had almost as many locks as I had keys. As befitted the chairman of Olympus Productions, the producer of the film and the de facto leader of the expedition he carried a great number of bits and pieces of equipment with him. Most of the belongings were personal and most of these clothes, for although Otto, because of his spherical shape, was automatically excluded from the list of the top ten best-dressed men, his sartorial aspirations were of the most soaring, and he carried at least a dozen suits with him although what he intended to do with them on Bear Island was a matter for conjecture. More interestingly, he had two small squat brown suitcases that served merely as cover for two metal deed-boxes.

Those were hasp-bound with imposing brass padlocks that a blind and palsied pick-lock could have opened in under a minute, and it didn’t take me much longer. The first contained nothing of importance, that was, to anyone except Otto: they consisted of hundreds of press clippings, no doubt carefully selected for the laudatory nature of their contents, and going back for twenty-odd years, all of them unanimous in extolling Otto’s cinematic genius: precisely the sort of ego-feeding nourishment that Otto would carry around with him. The second deed-box contained papers of a purely financial nature, recorded Otto’s transactions, incomes and outgoes over a number of years, and would have proved, I felt certain, fascinating reading for any Inland Revenue Inspector or law-abiding accountant, if there were any such around, but my interest in them was minimal: what did interest me though, and powerfully, was a collection of cancelled cheque-books, and as I couldn’t see that those were going to be of any use to Otto in the Arctic I pocketed them, checked that everything was as I had found it, and left.

Goin, as befitted the firm’s accountant, was also much given to keeping things under lock and key, but because the total of his impediments didn’t come to much more than a quarter of Otto’s, the search took correspondingly less time. Again as befitted an accountant, Goin’s main concern was clearly with matters financial, and as this coincided with my own current interest I took with me three items that I judged likely to be handsomely rewarding of more leisured study. Those were the Olympus Productions salary lists, Goin’s splendidly-padded private bank-book and a morocco diary that was full of items in some sort of private code but was nonetheless clearly concerned with money, for Goin hadn’t bothered to construct a code for the columns of pounds and pence. There was nothing necessarily sinister about this: concern for privacy, especially other people’s privacy, could be an admirable trait in an accountant.

In the next half-hour I went through four cubicles. In Heissman’s I found what I had expected to find, nothing. A man with his background and experience would have discovered many years ago that the only safe place to file his records was inside his head. But he did have some innocuous items – I supposed he had used them in the production of the Olympus manifesto for the film – which were of interest to me, several large-scale charts of Bear Island. One of those I took.

Neal Divine’s private papers revealed little of interest except a large number of unpaid bills, IOUs and a number of letters, all of them menacing in varying degrees, from an assortment of different bankers – a form of correspondence that went well with Divine’s nervous, apprehensive and generally down-trodden mien. At the bottom of an old-fashioned Gladstone in the Count’s room I found a small black automatic, loaded, but as an envelope beside it contained a current London licence for a gun this discovery might or might not have significance: the number of law-abiding people in law-abiding Britain who for divers law-abiding reasons consider it prudent to own a gun are, in their total, quite remarkable. In the cubicle shared by Jungbeck and Heyter I found nothing incriminating. But I was intrigued by a small brown paper packet, sealed, that I found in Jungbeck’s case. I took this into the main cabin where Mary Stuart was moving from window to window – there were four of them – keeping watch.

‘Nothing?’ I said. She shook her head. ‘Put on a kettle, will you.’

‘There’s coffee there. And some food.’

‘I don’t want coffee. A kettle – water – half an inch will do.’ I handed her the packet. ‘Steam this open for me, will you?’

‘Steam – what’s in it?’

‘If I knew that I wouldn’t ask you to open it.’

I went into Lonnie’s cubicle but it held nothing but Lonnie’s dreams – an album full of faded photographs. With few exceptions, they were of his family – clearly Lonnie had taken them himself. The first few showed a dark attractive girl with a wavy shoulder-length thirties hair-do holding two babies who were obviously twins. Later photographs showed that the two babies were girls. As the years had passed Lonnie’s wife, changing hair-styles apart, had changed remarkably little while the girls had grown up from page to page, until eventually they had become two rather beautiful youngsters very closely resembling their mother. In the last photograph, about two-thirds of the way through the album, all three were shown in white summer dresses of an unconscionable length leaning against a dark open roadster: the two girls would then have been about eighteen. I closed the album with that guilty and uncomfortable feeling you have when you stumble, however inadvertently, across another man’s private dreams.

I was crossing the passage to Eddie’s room when Mary called me. She had the package open and was holding the contents in a white handkerchief. I said: ‘That’s clever.’

‘Two thousand pounds,’ she said wonderingly. ‘All in new five-pound notes.’

‘That’s a lot of money.’ They were not only new, they were in consecutive serial number order. I noted down the first and last numbers, tracing would be automatic and immediate: somebody was being very stupid indeed or very confident indeed. This was one item of what might be useful evidence that I did not appropriate but locked up again, re-sealed, in Jungbeck’s case. When a man has that much money around he’s apt to check on its continued presence pretty frequently.

Neither Eddie’s nor Hendriks’s cubicles revealed any item of interest, while the only thing I learned from a brief glance at Sandy’s room was that he was just that modicum less scrupulous in obtaining his illicit supplies than Lonnie: Sandy stocked up on Otto’s scotch by the bottleful. The Three Apostles’ quarters I passed up: a search in there would, I was convinced, yield nothing. It never occurred to me to check on Conrad.

It was just after three o’clock, with the light beginning to fade from the sky, when I returned to the main cabin. Lonnie and the other two should have contacted Otto and the others a long time ago, their return, I should have thought, was considerably overdue. Mary, who had eaten – or said she had – gave me steak and chips, both of the frozen and pre-cooked variety, and I could see that she was worried. Heaven knew she had enough reason to be worried about a great number of things, but I guessed that her present worry was due to one particular cause.

‘Where on earth can they all be?’ she said. ‘I’m sure something must have happened to them.’

‘He’ll be all right. They probably just went farther than they intended, that’s all.’

‘I hope so. It’s getting dark and the snow’s starting–’ She broke off and looked at me in embarrassed accusation. ‘You’re very clever, aren’t you?’

‘I wish to God I were,’ I said, and meant it. I pushed my almost uneaten meal away and rose. ‘Thank you. Sorry, and it’s nothing to do with your cooking, but I’m not hungry. I’ll be in my room.’