Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

‘Fingerprints? Not after being in petrol. He was probably wearing gloves anyway.’

‘So why did you want it?’

‘Serial number. May be able to trace it. It’s even possible that the killer had a police permit for it. It’s happened before, believe it or not. And you must remember that the killer believed there would be no suspicion of foul play, far less that a search would be carried out for the gun.

‘Anyway, this knife explains the gun. Firing guns is a noisy business and I’m surprised – I was surprised – that the killer risked it. He might have wakened the whole camp. But he had to take the risk because he’d gone and snapped off the business end of this little sticker here. This is a very slender blade, the kind of blade it’s very easy to snap unless you know exactly what you’re doing, especially when extreme cold makes the metal brittle. He probably struck a rib or broke the blade trying to haul it out – a knife slides in easily enough but it can jam against cartilage or bone when you try to remove it.’

‘You mean – you mean the killer murdered a third man?’ Swanson asked carefully. ‘With this knife?’

‘The third man but the first victim,’ I nodded. ‘The missing half of the blade will be stuck inside someone’s chest. But I’m not going to look for it – it would be pointless and take far too long.’

‘I’m not sure that I don’t agree with Hansen,’ Swanson said slowly. ‘I know it’s impossible to explain away the sabotage on the boat – but, my God, this looks like the work of a maniac. All this – all this senseless killing.’

‘All this killing,’ I agreed. ‘But not senseless – not from the point of view of the killer. No, don’t ask me, I don’t know what his point of view was – or is. I know – you know – why he started the fire: what we don’t know is why he killed those men in the first place.’

Swanson shook his head, then said: ‘Let’s get back to the other hut. I’ll phone for someone to keep a watch over those sick men. I don’t know about you, but I’m frozen stiff. And you had no sleep last night.’

‘I’ll watch them meantime,’ I said. ‘For an hour or so. And I’ve some thinking to do, some very hard thinking.’

‘You haven’t much to go on, have you?’

‘That’s what makes it so hard.’

I’d said to Swanson that I didn’t have much to go on, a less than accurate statement, for I didn’t have anything to go on at all. So I didn’t waste any time thinking. Instead I took a lantern and went once again to the lab where the dead men lay. I was cold and tired and alone, and the darkness was falling and I didn’t very much fancy going there. Nobody would have fancied going there, a place of dreadful death which any sane person would have avoided like the plague. And that was why I was going there, not because I wasn’t sane, but because it was a place that no man would ever voluntarily visit – unless he had an extremely powerful motivation, such as the intention of picking up some essential thing he had hidden there in the near certainty that no one else would ever go near the place. It sounded complicated, even to me. I was very tired. I made a fuzzy mental note to ask around, when I got back to the Dolphin, to find out who had suggested shifting the dead men in there.

The walls of the lab were lined with shelves and cupboards containing jars and bottles and retorts and test-tubes and such-like chemical junk, but I didn’t give them more than a glance. I went to the corner of the hut where the dead men lay most closely together, shone my torch along the side of the room and found what I was looking for in a matter of seconds – a floorboard standing slightly proud of its neighbours. Two of the blackened contorted lumps that had once been men lay across that board. I moved them just far enough, not liking the job at all, then lifted one end of the loose floorboard.

It looked as if someone had had it in mind to start up a supermarket. In the six-inch space between the floor and the base of the hut were stacked dozens of neatly arranged cans – soup, beef, fruit, vegetables, a fine varied diet with all the proteins and vitamins a man could want. Someone had had no intention of going hungry. There was even a small pressure-stove and a couple of gallons of kerosene to thaw out the cans. And to one side, lying flat, two rows of gleaming Nife cells – there must have been about forty in all.

I replaced the board, left the lab and went across to the meteorological hut again. I spent over an hour there, unbuttoning the backs of metal cabinets and peering into their innards, but I found nothing. Not what I had hoped to find, that was. But I did come across one very peculiar item, a small green metal box six inches by four by two, with a circular control that was both switch and tuner, and two glassed-in dials with neither figures nor marking on them. At the side of the box was a brass-rimmed hole.

I turned the switch and one of the dials glowed green, a magic-eye tuning device with the fans spread well apart. The other dial stayed dead. I twiddled the tuner control but nothing happened. Both the magic eye and the second dial required something to activate them – something like a preset radio signal. The hole in the side would accommodate the plug of any standard telephone receiver. Not many people would have known what this was, but I’d seen one before – a transistorised homing device for locating the direction of a radio signal, such as emitted by the ‘Sarah’ device on American space capsules which enables searchers to locate it once it has landed in the sea.

What legitimate purpose could be served by such a device in Drift Ice Station Zebra? When I’d told Swanson and Hansen of the existence of a console for monitoring rocket-firing signals from Siberia, that much of my story, anyway, had been true. But that had called for a giant aerial stretching far up into the sky: this comparative toy couldn’t have ranged a twentieth of the distance to Siberia.

I had another look at the portable radio transmitter and the now exhausted Nife batteries that served them. The dialling counter was still tuned into the waveband in which the Dolphin had picked up the distress signals. There was nothing for me there. I looked more closely at the nickel-cadmium cells and saw that they were joined to one another and to the radio set by wire-cored rubber leads with very powerfully spring-loaded saw-tooth clips on the terminals; those last ensured perfect electrical contact as well as being very convenient to use. I undid two of the clips, brought a torch-beam to bear and peered closely at the terminals. The indentations made by the sharpened steel saw-teeth were faint but unmistakable.

I made my way back to the laboratory hut, lifted the loose floorboard again and shone the torch on the Nife cells lying there. At least half of the cells had the same characteristic markings. Cells that looked fresh and unused, yet they had those same markings and if anything was certain it was that those cells had been brand-new and unmarked when Drift Ice Station Zebra had been first set up. A few of the cells were tucked so far away under adjacent floorboards that I had to stretch my hand far in to reach them. I pulled out two and in the space behind I seemed to see something dark and dull and metallic.

It was too dark to distinguish clearly what the object was but after I’d levered up another two floorboards I could see without any trouble at all. It was a cylinder about thirty inches long and six in diameter with brass stopcock and mounted pressure gauge registering ‘full’: close beside it was a package about eighteen inches square and four thick, stencilled with the words ‘RADIO-SONDE BALLOONS’. Hydrogen, batteries, balloons, corned beef and mulligatawny soup. A catholic enough assortment of stores by any standards; but there wouldn’t have been anything haphazard about the choice of that assortment.