Алистер Маклин - Athabasca

“Lugging corpses is conspicuous. So?”

“He wouldn’t even have had to be a corpse. I think he was silenced in his own bedroom and bundled straight out the window. The cold would have finished him off. Here come your friends. I’ll go get some more flashlights.”

Outside, the cold was breathtaking. The temperature, as Houston had said, stood at thirty below. The forty-mile-per-hour gale brought the combination of temperature and chill-factor down to minus seventy. Even double-wrapped as a polar bear, without an exposed inch of flesh, the fact remains that one still has to breathe – and breathing in those conditions, until numbness intervenes, is a form of exquisite and refined agony. In the initial stages it is impossible to tell whether one is inhaling glacial air or super-heated steam: a searing sensation dominates all else. The only way to survive for any length of time is to breathe pure oxygen from a suitably insulated tank – but those are not readily available in the Arctic.

Houston led them round the right-hand corner of the main building. After about ten yards he stopped, bent down and shone his flashlight between the supporting pilings. Other beams joined his.

A body lay face down, an insignificant heap already half-covered by the drifting snow. Dermott shouted: “You have sharp eyes, Houston. A lot of people would have missed this. Let’s get him inside.”

“Don’t you want to examine him here, have a look around?”

“I do not. When this wind drops we’ll come back and look for clues. In the meantime, I don’t want to join Finlayson here.”

“I agree,” Morrison said. His teeth chattered audibly, and he was shaking with the cold.

Recovering the body from under the building provided the four men with no problem. Even if Finlayson had weighed twice as much, they would have had him out in seconds flat, such was their determination to regain shelter and warmth as soon as possible. As it was, Finlayson was slightly-built, and handling him was like handling a 150-pound log, so solidly frozen had he become. When they were clear of the pilings Dermott looked up at a brightly lit window above and yelled through the wind: “Whose room is that?”

Houston shouted: “His.”

“Your theory fits, doesn’t it?”

“It does.”

When they brought Finlayson into the reception area, there were perhaps half-a-dozen men sitting or standing around. For a moment nobody said anything. Then one man stepped forward and, with some diffidence, asked: “Shall I bring Dr Blake?”

Mackenzie shook his head, sadly. “I’m sure he’s an excellent doctor, but no medical school has yet got round to offering a course on raising a man from the dead. Thanks all the same.”

Dermott said: “Have we got an empty room where we can put him?” Houston looked at him and Dermott shook his head in self-reproach. “Okay. So my mind’s gummed up with cold or lack of sleep or both. His own room, of course. Where can we find a rubber sheet?”

So they took Finlayson to his room and laid him on the rubber sheet on top of his bed. Dermott said: “Is there an individual thermostat control in here?”

“Sure,” said Houston. “It’s set on seventy-two.”

“Turn it up.”

“What for?”

“Dr Blake will want to do a post-mortem. You can’t examine a person who’s frozen solid. We’re getting experienced at this sort of thing. Too experienced.” Dermott turned to Mackenzie. “Houston thinks Finlayson was silenced in this room. Killed, knocked out, we don’t know. He also thinks that our friends got rid of him by the simple expedient of opening the window and dumping him on to the snow-bank beneath.”

Mackenzie crossed to the window, opened it, shivered at the icy blast of air that swept into the room, leaned out and peered down. Seconds later he had the window firmly closed again.

“Has to be that. We’re directly above the spot where we found him. And it’s in deep shadow down there.” He looked at Houston. “Is there much traffic along there at night?”

“None. Nor during the day. No call for it. Track leads nowhere.”

“So the killers left either by the front door or by this same window. They did the obvious thing – just stuffed him under the building, hoping the snow would have drifted over him before daylight came.” Mackenzie sighed. “He couldn’t by any chance have felt sick, opened the window for some fresh air, fell and crawled under the building?”

Dermott said: “You believe that’s possible?”

“No. John Finlayson wouldn’t get a breath of fresh air that way. He caught his death of it. Murder.”

“Well, I think the boss should be told.”

“He’s sure going to be pleased, isn’t he?”

Brady was furious. His black scowl accorded ill with his heliotrope pyjamas. He said: “Progress on all fronts. What do you two intend to do?”

Mackenzie said pacifically: “That’s why we’re here. We thought you might be able to give us a lead.”

“A lead? How the hell can I give you a lead? I’ve been asleep.” He corrected himself. “Well, for a few minutes, anyway. Sad about Finlayson. Fine man, by all accounts. What do you reckon, George?”

“One thing’s for sure. The similarities between what happened here tonight and what occurred at Pump Station Four are too great to be a coincidence. As with the two engineers, so with Finlayson. They all saw or heard too much for their own health. They recognised a person or persons they knew well and who knew them, and those people were engaged in some things that couldn’t be explained away. So they had to be silenced in the most final way.”

Brady thought for a moment, and asked: “Is there a direct connection between Bronowski being clobbered and Finlayson being killed?”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Dermott said. “Tie-up looks too obvious. You could argue that Bronowski escaped because he didn’t catch his assailants red-handed in whatever they were doing, and that Finlayson died because he did. But that’s too easy, too glib.”

“What does Houston think?”

“He doesn’t appear to have any more idea about it than we do.”

“‘Appear’.” Brady seized on the word. “You mean he may know more than he’s telling?”

“At the moment he’s not saying or telling anything.”

“But you don’t trust him?”

“No. And while we’re at it, I don’t trust Bronowski.”

“Hell, man, he’s been savagely assaulted.”

“Assaulted. Not savagely. I don’t trust Dr Blake, either.”

“Because he’s unhelpful and unco-operative?”

“A good enough reason.”

Brady became tactful. “Well, you do tend to ride a bit roughshod over people’s feelings.”

“To hell with their delicate sensibilities! We’re dealing here with three cases of murder. Come to that, I don’t trust Black either.”

“You don’t trust Black? General manager, Alaska?”

“He can be the King of Siam for all I care,” Dermott said forcefully. “Some of the most successful businessmen in history number in their ranks the biggest swindlers ever. I’m not suggesting he is a swindler. All I say is that he’s crafty, cagey, cold, and unco-operative. In short, I don’t trust anyone.”

“Look, friends. We’re looking at this from the wrong angle,” Brady suggested. “We’re on the inside trying to look out. Maybe we should be on the outside trying to look in. Think of it this way. Who wants to hit the pipeline here and the tar sands of Athabasca? Do you see any significance in the fact that here they receive their instructions from Edmonton while in Alberta they come from Anchorage?”

“None.” Dermott was positive. “May be just coincidence, at best a crude attempt to confuse us. Surely they can’t be so naïve as to try to convey the impression that Canada is trying to interfere with America’s oil supplies and vice versa. Idea’s ludicrous. In these times of an acute oil shortage, what have two friendly neighbours to gain by cutting each other’s throats?”