Jon Breen - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 114, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 697 & 698, September/October 1999

Drake turned just as Owen Foster, without his lantern, loomed up in front of him, serrated knife in hand.

Foster moved toward him. Drake backed off and directed the blazing light of his own lantern directly in Foster’s face. Inside Foster’s helmet, Drake saw his eyes squint blindly. Even so, Foster continued forward and Drake saw his hand come up and slash the water in front of him with the knife. Frantically, Drake fumbled in his utility pack for the ice nail. Again Foster advanced, again the knife slashed. After what seemed like an eternity, Drake found the heavy nail and thumbed off the piece of protective cork he had put over its needle point. But when Foster’s knife hewed close to him a third time, he realized that he could not get past it to use the nail without fatally exposing himself. He had hoped to come up on Foster from behind and puncture his dive suit in one of the armpits, where there was less reinforcement; now that plan had been neutralized by the knife and Foster’s unexpected aggression. But Drake knew he had to do something—

In desperation, Drake let himself drop several feet and spun to his right, down and away from the hand that held the knife. Reaching out with the nail, he tried to drive it into one leg of Foster’s suit, but could not reach it. Foster cut recklessly with the knife again, slashing downward, and this time the blade struck Drake’s helmet and twisted out of Foster’s hand. Both Foster and Drake watched the knife float as if in slow motion down out of the light path into darkness and disappear.

Foster regrouped quickly from the loss of his weapon, drew his knees up, and maneuvered over Drake until he was behind him, then lowered himself and locked both legs around the neck of Drake’s helmet. Their combined weight drove them several feet deeper, but that did not concern Drake; he was too relieved by the knowledge that he now had Foster in an irreversible position of vulnerability. Foster no longer had the knife — but Drake still had the ice nail.

Closing his eyes, thinking about Claire, hating this man above him who had beaten her, Drake reached up with the ice nail and pushed its point smartly through the skin of Owen Foster’s dry suit.

There was an immediate reduction of weight on Drake as Foster’s suit depressurized and the legs locked around Drake’s neck went limp. Drake untangled himself from Foster, working down and a few feet away, then held depth, treading.

“Pat, we’re getting a depress warning on Owen!” Harley’s urgent voice sounded. “Where is he?”

“I can’t see him,” Drake bed, “but his light is about thirty feet starboard of me and eight feet above. Want me to go over there?”

“Negative! Stay away from his lines! We’re bringing him up!”

“Ten-four.”

Reaching up, Drake held onto Foster’s feet. He felt tension from above as they tried to pull Foster up, but managed to hold on enough to keep him down. They pulled, he held — for a full minute, until Drake’s arms began to give out. Then he let go. Pull him up, he thought then. You’re bringing up a dead man.

Suddenly Drake felt very warm and cozy in his own dry suit, very secure and almost lightheaded, now that what he had to do was over. He thought of Claire and the life they would have together, of the Nobel prize he would almost certainly receive — an individual prize, too, because he would be the one to bring up the first conclusive proof of premature warming. When the expedition was further funded and they got new, deeper dive equipment, he would personally do all the diving; it would be his name in the scientific history books—

Almost as if it were a sign, a signal, of his new enthrallment with the future, Drake’s peripheral vision picked up something new: a reflection, a gleam, something pinpoint and shiny. It was down five or six feet, over about ten, on the flat facing of an undersea wall. Drake dropped on an angle until he was next to it, and peered out at his finding through the faceplate. His eyes grew wide as they had earlier, but when his lips parted this time it was not in silence.

“I’ll be damned,” he said aloud.

Inches in front of him was the most beautiful colony of algae he had ever seen. Beautiful yellow algae. Beautiful orange algae. Beautiful warm algae. Algae that conclusively proved the expedition’s theory.

“Pat, Mayday!” Harley’s voice reached Drake again. “Mayday, Pat, wake up! What’s your depth? Mayday—!”

Drake lazily pressed the depth button on his arm. The digital numbers read: 93.

Seconds later, Drake’s lungs turned to ice.

Claire lugged her duffel over to the blockhouse and dropped it just inside the door to take off her thermals. Emil Porter was already there, his own duffel in the same place. They were waiting for the helicopter to return for them, its third trip that morning after taking Ed Latham and Paul Green, then Sally Gossett and Harley Neil, to Ushuaia on two earlier trips. As Claire sat down at one of the card tables, Porter poured a shot of vodka into a cup of tomato juice for her. At the same time, she showed Porter an envelope.

“Sally gave me this before she flew out. Pat left it for me in case anything happened to him under the ice shelf.”

“What is it?” Porter asked, sipping his own Bloody Mary.

“A handwritten amendment to a will he has on file back in Minnesota, making me the beneficiary of his foundation dive insurance, and leaving me his beachfront home and laboratory in Tahiti.”

Porter raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Well, you said that Pat was as generous and protective as Owen was petty and possessive. Looks like you knew them both pretty well.” He tilted his head slightly. “Do you realize what this means, Claire? A million dollars from Owen’s dive policy, a million from Pat’s, and now the property in Tahiti in addition. You’re a wealthy woman.”

“Except that I feel a little shabby about what I did to Pat,” she confessed.

Porter reached across the table and took her hands. “Don’t make a guilt trip out of it, Claire,” he said quietly. “What happened to Pat and Owen, they did to themselves. We told a couple of lies: you about having bruises, me about Harley Neil’s fitness to dive. We put Pat and Owen under the ice together, that’s all. Maybe what happened was over you, maybe it was over a Nobel prize, maybe both. Whatever, it was their doing.”

From outside came the sound of helicopter rotor blades. Porter rose and gently drew Claire to her feet, pulling her close.

“Look, based on the sample they found on Pat’s belt, there’ll be a new team up here in thirty days, so our expedition was a success. You and I got what we wanted, each other — plus a lot more, it turns out. Put the past behind you, Claire. Focus on tomorrow. You’ve waited a long time to be happy again. Enjoy it. With me.”

Claire nodded, smiling a slight little smile of solace, and let Porter lead her to the front door to don their thermals.

Moments later, carrying their duffels, they walked together across the great shelf of ice toward the helicopter.

©1999 by John Mortimer

Nearly everyone knows John Mortimer’s character Horace Rumpole. Many of the stories readers have read in EQMM first saw life as scripts for the TV series shown on BBC and PBS. As Crime and Mystery Writers says, “Mortimer paints a wicked picture of the British legal practitioners: the ambitious, indifferent prosecutor; the biased judge...” But it is Rumpole’s ironic take on ordinary life that makes him unforgettable to this reader.

“What’s better than the presence of mind in an accident? Absence of body.” So far as I recall, this was my old father’s only joke, if you can flatter it by calling it a joke. But when it comes to a trial for murder, the failure of the corpse to put in an appearance can be a considerable embarrassment to all concerned. So it was when the possibly late Charley Twineham failed to turn up, even in phantom form, at Number One Court in the Old Bailey, where his wife, Pauline, commonly known as “Poppy” Twineham, was on trial for his murder.