Алистер Маклин - Ice Station Zebra

‘You can hardly call that proof of guilt,’ Swanson interrupted.

‘I’m not adducing evidence,’ I said wearily. ‘I’m merely introducing pointers. Pointer number two. You, Naseby, felt pretty bad about your failure to wake up your two friends, Flanders and Bryce. You could have shaken them for an hour and not woken them up. Jolly, here, used either ether or chloroform to lay them out. This was after he had killed Major Halliwell and the three others; but before he started getting busy with matches. He realised that if he burnt the place down there might be a long, long wait before rescue came and he was going to make damned certain that he wasn’t going to go hungry. If the rest of you had died from starvation – well, that was just your bad luck. But Flanders and Bryce lay between him and the food. Didn’t it strike you as very strange, Naseby, that your shouting and shaking had no effect? The only reason could be that they had been drugged – and only one man had access to drugs. Also, you said that both Hewson and yourself felt pretty groggy. No wonder. It was a pretty small hut and the chloroform or ether fumes had reached and affected Hewson and yourself – normally you’d have smelt it on waking up, but the stink of burning diesel obliterates every other smell. Again, I know this is not proof of any kind.

‘Third pointer. I asked Captain Folsom this morning who had given the orders for the dead men to be put in the lab. He said he had. But, he remembered, it was Jolly’s suggestion to him. Something learnedly medical about helping the morale of the survivors by putting the charred corpses out of sight.

‘Fourth pointer. Jolly said that how the fire started was unimportant. A crude attempt to sidetrack me. Jolly knew as well as I did that it was all-important. I suppose, by the way. Jolly, that you deliberately jammed all the fire-extinguishers you could before you started the fire. About that fire, Commander. Remember you were a bit suspicious of Hewson, here, because he said the fuel drums hadn’t started exploding until he was on his way to the main bunkhouse. He was telling the truth. There were no fewer than four drums in the fuel stores that didn’t explode – the ones Jolly, here, used to pour against the huts to start the fire. How am I doing, Dr Jolly?’

‘It’s all a nightmare,’ he said very quietly. ‘It’s a nightmare. Before God, I know nothing of any of this.’

‘Pointer number five. For some reason that is unclear to me Jolly wanted to delay the Dolphin on its return trip. He could best do this, he reckoned, if Bolton and Brownell, the two very sick men still left out on the station, could be judged to be too sick to be transferred to the Dolphin. The snag was, there were two other doctors around who might say that they were fit to be transferred. So he tried, with a fair measure of success, to eliminate us.

‘First Benson. Didn’t it strike you as strange, Commander, that the request for the survivors to be allowed to attend the funeral of Grant and Lieutenant Mills should have come from Naseby in the first place, then Kinnaird? Jolly, as the senior man of the party with Captain Folsom, here, temporarily unfit, was the obvious man to make the approach – but he didn’t want to go calling too much attention to himself. Doubtless by dropping hints, he engineered it so that someone else should do it for him. Now Jolly had noticed how glass-smooth and slippery the ice-banked sides of the sail were and he made a point of seeing that Benson went up the rope immediately ahead of him. You must remember it was almost pitch dark – just light enough for Jolly to make out the vague outline of Benson’s head from the wash of light from the bridge as it cleared the top of the rail. A swift outward tug on the rope and Benson overbalanced. It seemed that he had fallen on top of Jolly. But only seemed. The loud sharp crack I heard a fraction of a second after Benson’s body struck was not caused by his head hitting the ice – it was caused by Jolly, here, trying to kick his head off. Did you hurt your toes much, Jolly?’

‘You’re mad,’ he said mechanically. ‘This is utter nonsense. Even if it wasn’t nonsense, you couldn’t prove a word of it.’

‘We’ll see. Jolly claimed that Benson fell on top of him. He even flung himself on the ice and cracked his head to give some verisimilitude to his story – our pal never misses any of the angles. I felt the slight bump on his head. But he wasn’t laid out. He was faking. He recovered just that little bit too quickly and easily when he got back to the sick-bay. And it was then that he made his first mistake, the mistake that put me on to him – and should have put me on guard for an attack against myself. You were there, Commander.’

‘I’ve missed everything else,’ Swanson said bitterly. ‘Do you want me to spoil a hundred per cent record?’

‘When Jolly came to he saw Benson lying there. All he could see of him was a blanket and a big gauze pack covering the back of his head. As far as Jolly was concerned, it could have been anybody – it had been pitch dark when the accident occurred. But what did he say? I remember his exact words. He said: ‘Of course, of course. Yes, that’s it. He fell on top of me, didn’t he?’ He never thought to ask who it was – the natural, the inevitable question in the circumstances. But Jolly didn’t have to ask. He knew.’

‘He knew.’ Swanson stared at Jolly with cold bleak eyes and there was no doubt in his mind now about Jolly. ‘You have it to rights, Dr Carpenter. He knew.’

‘And then he had a go at me. Can’t prove a thing, of course. But he was there when I asked you where the medical store was, and he no doubt nipped down smartly behind Henry and myself and loosened the latch on the hatch-cover. But he didn’t achieve quite the same high degree of success this time. Even so, when we went out to the station next morning he still tried to stop Brownell and Bolton from being transferred back to the ship by saying Bolton was too ill. But you overruled him.’

‘I was right about Bolton,’ Jolly said. He seemed strangely quiet now. ‘Bolton died.’

‘He died,’ I agreed. ‘He died because you murdered him and for Bolton alone I can make certain you hang. For a reason I still don’t know. Jolly was still determined to stop this ship. Delay it, anyway. I think he wanted only an hour or two’s delay. So he proposed to start a small fire, nothing much, just enough to cause a small scare and have the reactor shut down temporarily. As the site of his fire he chose the machinery space – the one place in the ship where he could casually let something drop and where it would lie hidden, for hours if need be, among the maze of pipes down there. In the sick-bay he concocted some type of delayed action chemical fuse which would give off plenty of smoke but very little flame – there are a dozen combinations of acids and chemicals that can bring this about and our friend will be a highly-trained expert well versed in all of them. Now all Jolly wanted was an excuse to pass through the engine-room when it would be nice and quiet and virtually deserted. In the middle of the night. He fixed this too. He can fix anything. He is a very, very clever man indeed is our pal here; he’s also an utterly ruthless fiend.

‘Late on the evening of the night before the fire the good healer here made a round of his patients. I went with him. One of the men he treated was Bolton in the nucleonics lab – and, of course, to get to the nucleonics lab you have to pass through the engine-room. There was an enlisted man watching over the patients and Jolly left special word that he was to be called at any hour if Bolton became any worse. He was called. I checked with the engine-room staff after the fire. The engineer officer was on watch and two others were in the manoeuvring-room but an engine-man carrying out a routine lubrication job saw him passing through the engine-room about 1.30 a.m. in answer to a call from the man watching over the patients. He took the opportunity to drop his little chemical fuse as he was passing by the machinery space. What he didn’t know was that his little toy lodged on or near the oil-saturated lagging on the housing of the starboard turbo-generator and that when it went off it would generate sufficient heat to set the lagging on fire.’