The Dark

by Emma Haughton

  Eventually I fall asleep, and the next morning I’ve recovered enough to tackle the backlog of work that’s accumulated in the ten days since Alex died. I should follow up on my promise to check into the data from Alex’s activity band, but first I need to catch up with the weekly blood tests. I start with Alice, who always comes along willingly – none of the usual face-pulling and griping I get from some of the others.

  ‘How are you?’ I ask, as I grab the blood pressure cuff.

  ‘Okay,’ she shrugs.

  The faint bruising under her eyes tells me otherwise, but I don’t push her. Like any halfway decent doctor, I know you have to let people come to you, not the other way around.

  She glances as the cuff. ‘Can we do bloods first? I’d rather get them over with.’

  ‘Sure.’

  She sits there, seemingly a world away, as I prep a needle and syringe. ‘Can I ask something?’ I say, rolling up her sleeve.

  Alice nods.

  ‘Would you mind going over what happened when you found Alex?’ I get an antiseptic wipe and clean the inside of her elbow.

  She winces as I insert the tip of the needle into her pale skin. ‘Why?’

  ‘I need to put in a full report for the team at UNA,’ I fib, hoping she won’t check this out with Sandrine.

  Alice turns her head away as I ease the needle into the vein. ‘I thought Sandrine already did that,’ she says, as I draw back the plunger and the syringe begins to fill with blood. ‘The UNA report, I mean.’

  ‘She has, but I have to make sure I’ve covered everything from a medical perspective.’

  Her lovely face remains expressionless as I remove the needle and put a plaster over the tiny wound. Sometimes Alice is impossible to read – no way to tell what she’s thinking.

  Finally she sighs, coming to a decision. ‘Sonya wasn’t feeling great when she went to bed that night.’ She rolls down her sleeve. ‘Too much wine gives her a bad stomach, so I decided to launch the balloon for her.’

  ‘You know what to do?’

  ‘It’s pretty simple. Sonya showed me, in case she couldn’t do it. How to take the readings too, in the meteorology hut.’

  ‘Isn’t that kind of data collected automatically?’

  ‘It is,’ Alice confirms, ‘but we do manual checks as well to make certain there are no glitches.’

  I nod. Sounds reasonable. Half the things we do on the base aren’t strictly necessary, but useful for maintaining some sort of routine in the constant darkness. We all find ways to keep ourselves busy.

  ‘So what happened?’ I prompt. ‘How did you …?’ I don’t want to say ‘find the body’. It seems so stark, so unnecessarily clinical.

  ‘I ran the torch around the ice. I always do.’

  No need to ask why. I can relate all too well to that eerie feeling of being out in the darkness, especially when there’s no moonlight. The persistent dread that you’re not alone.

  Silly, yes, but so is most primal fear.

  ‘And that’s when you saw him?’ I ask her.

  ‘I spotted a dark shape, near the base of the tower. I couldn’t tell what it was at first. I walked a little way towards it, before I registered what … who …’ She pauses, swallows. ‘I tried to rouse him, then radioed for help. But no one picked up, so I had to go back. There was snow drift on him, you see. So I knew …’ Her cheeks flush, and she clears her throat. ‘I knew he’d been out there for some time and there wasn’t anything I could do.’

  She glances at me for confirmation that she did the right thing.

  ‘He’d been dead for hours,’ I say. ‘You have nothing to blame yourself for.’

  Alice’s face relaxes a little. She’s been afraid that I – and everyone else – have been judging her I realise. No wonder she was reluctant to talk.

  ‘Did you notice anything else?’ I ask. ‘Any tracks in the snow?’

  She shakes her head. ‘But it was quite breezy, any tracks would have been covered quickly. I could barely see my own on the way back to the station.’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary?’

  Alice ponders my question as I retrieve the blood pressure monitor and attach it to her arm. ‘Apart from the fact he was, you know, wearing so little.’ Without warning, her face crumples and she starts crying. ‘It was awful, Kate,’ she sobs, ‘seeing him lying there like that, virtually naked, frozen. I can’t sleep for thinking about it.’

  I pull off the arm cuff and hand her a tissue, mentally admonishing myself. The poor woman is traumatised, and who can blame her? I should have caught on to it sooner – made sure she was coping.

  I must check up on Drew, I think. Luuk too. Retrieving the body probably shook both of them up, and the effects of trauma can take a while to emerge.

  ‘It must have been terrible,’ I say soothingly to Alice, imagining how terrifying it was to be alone out there on the ice, confronted with the dead body of a colleague. ‘But honestly, Alice, there’s absolutely nothing you could have done.’

  She nods, takes the tissue, and wipes her eyes.

  ‘Stop by here later, okay?’ I tell her. ‘I’ll give you a few sleeping pills so you can get some proper rest. And if you need to talk, you know where I am.’

  She gives me a grateful hug. ‘Thanks, Kate.’

  I find Drew in the gym, running full pelt on the treadmill, headphones in his ears. I move to the front of the machine and give him a wave.

  ‘Kate.’ He slows the pace to a walk and returns my smile. ‘You okay?’

  I nod. ‘Can we talk?’

  ‘Sure.’ He turns off the treadmill and dismounts, breathing hard as he towels down his forehead and neck. I marvel again at what good shape he’s in despite his evident exhaustion; while many of us are looking distinctly frayed around the edges, Drew still appears as healthy and fit as the day I met him.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ He takes a long slug of water from his flask. Stands there, appraising me while I run through the same routine as with Alice. But Drew has nothing to add to her account.

  ‘You didn’t see anything unusual? Even when you went back out later with Luuk?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Why are you asking?’

  ‘Just trying to build up a picture, a timeline. When a body is that … frozen, it can be hard to pinpoint the time of death. If you’d noticed any unusual tracks, we might be able to work out from the level of snow drift, how much they were covered, approximately when he went out there.’

  ‘That figures. I should have checked when we reached Alex. I mean, we – Luuk and I – all we were thinking was to get him inside asap. In case there was something that could be done. I should have thought of it though. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Of course. Don’t blame yourself.’ I nod, then take a breath. ‘So do you have any theories about what happened?’

  He shrugs. ‘I guess I agree with Sandrine. Seems like suicide.’

  I gaze at him, wondering what to say. In the face of Drew’s confidence, I’m starting to think both of them are right. What if Alex was more troubled than Caro realised? What if those marks on his ankles have some completely innocent explanation?

  ‘Why?’ he asks, frowning. ‘Do you disagree?’

  ‘No,’ I say a tad too quickly. ‘I just want to be certain we’re not overlooking anything, that’s all.’

  Drew regards me steadily. ‘Actually, I’ve been wanting to talk,’ he says gently. ‘I’m worried about you. You all right, Kate?’

  ‘Yes. I’m fine.’

  Drew studies my face, as if he doesn’t believe me. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but you seem kind of …’ He doesn’t finish the sentence.

  ‘Kind of what?’

  He shrugs. ‘Overwhelmed. Like you’ve got the whole world on your shoulders.’

  Drew’s right, of course, and for a moment I’m tempted to open up and share my misgivings over what happened to Alex. I am desperate to talk to someone other than Caro, to work out whether her suspicions are justified
or if she’s mistaken.

  He takes a step forward. For a second I’m sure Drew’s about to try to kiss me again, but he simply peers into my eyes. ‘Listen, you can talk to me any time. Remember that.’

  He pauses, rubs the stubble on his cheek as he grasps for the words. ‘I … I really don’t want what happened between us to get in the way of our friendship. I don’t want you feeling you have to keep your distance. I understand totally why you didn’t want things to go any further. You were right. Relationships in this place,’ Drew gestures around him to indicate the whole station, ‘are a really bad idea. I get that, Kate. But we all need people to confide in – that’s all I’m saying.’

  He wraps an arm around my shoulder and squeezes me into a hug. I don’t pull away. I’m grateful for what he said, for reassuring me that we’re still friends.

  ‘Thanks, Drew.’ My voice breaks a little as he releases me. ‘I really appreciate that.’

  A big grin cracks his face. ‘No worries, kiddo,’ he says, ruffling my hair. ‘Any time.’

  24

  3 July

  ‘You got any particular reason for wanting to see this?’

  Rob glances around, as he sits at my screen in the clinic. While he’s dressed in his usual uniform of tight black T-shirt and jeans, I notice he’s stopped bleaching his hair and dark roots are beginning to show.

  ‘Due diligence,’ I say ambiguously. ‘I have to submit a medical report to UNA about Alex’s state of mind in the run-up to his death.’

  This isn’t entirely true – I’ve already debriefed at length to the psychiatrist in Brussels, Johan Hanner. It was an excruciating interview. I couldn’t shake off the sense that I’d failed, that if I’d intervened earlier or more forcefully, Alex would still be alive.

  If Hanner came to any conclusions, he wasn’t sharing them with me. Nor have I heard back from the medical team about the pictures I’d sent of those obscure marks on Alex’s ankles.

  ‘Right …’ Rob clicks on what appears to be some kind of map … a series of coloured dots set against a flat plan of the base. The dots zigzag backwards and forwards all over the place. Impossible to work out what’s going on.

  ‘This shows all the available data on Alex’s movements for his last twenty-four hours,’ Rob explains. ‘What do you want to know?’

  Isn’t it obvious? I bite back my irritation. ‘Can you narrow down the time frame to that evening?’

  Rob taps on the keyboard. Most of the dots disappear. I peer at the screen, trying to make sense of the rest. ‘Are these tracks?’

  He nods.

  ‘Is there any way of knowing when they occurred?’

  ‘One sec.’ Rob clicks a few more things and time stamps hover over each dot. ‘Here he was from 7.24 p.m. to 10.41 p.m., first the canteen, then the lounge.

  ‘And then?’

  Rob studies the data. ‘Looks like he went to his cabin and stayed there.’

  ‘Can you check his heart rate?’

  Rob brings up another screen. I study the graph. Alex’s pulse rate drops, shortly after returning to his room, most likely indicating he’s fallen asleep. Then spikes again suddenly a couple of hours later – but only for a few minutes.

  I frown, puzzled. ‘What’s the latest data point you have for him?’

  ‘2.53 a.m.’

  ‘And nothing after that?’

  Rob shakes his head. ‘That’s the final record from his band. Or at least when it last synced with the main system.’

  ‘How often does it do that?’

  ‘They’re set to upload every two hours – or as soon as it can connect with the station intranet.’

  ‘So if we can find his band, it might have unsynced data?’

  ‘It’s certainly possible.’ Rob swivels in the chair to look at me. ‘I hear he wasn’t wearing it when he was brought in.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t,’ I confirm. No point lying about it.

  ‘What do you think he did with it?’

  I consider this. To be honest, I haven’t given the lost activity band enough thought, too caught up with the immediate aftermath of Alex’s death.

  So what happened to it? I ask myself now. If Sandrine is right, and he committed suicide, why would Alex bother to remove it? Even if someone realised he was missing, there was little chance they’d go to all this trouble to track him down.

  Besides, asks a voice in my head, who falls asleep shortly before they kill themselves? Surely anyone that distressed would find rest impossible?

  Caro’s right. Nothing adds up – at least in Sandrine’s version of events.

  I gaze at my computer. What if somebody removed Alex’s band and destroyed it, precisely because they didn’t want any proof of whatever occurred in those last minutes of his life? I think of Alex’s torn shirt, the ligature marks on his ankles – all evidence of some sort of struggle, which might well have shown up in the data.

  Like the sudden spike in his heart rate – consistent with someone entering his room and unexpectedly rousing him from sleep.

  Cette pauvre fille.

  That poor girl. Jean-Luc’s words fill my head. What was it Alex said, that night I tackled him in the canteen. That the doctor was upset about some woman who lost her life on the ice.

  Three people, I think, who’ve died out there. Three people with question marks over their deaths. Antarctica is a dangerous place, no doubt about it. But this seems to be adding up to a whole lot more than coincidence.

  ‘Anything else you want me to do?’ Rob’s voice pulls me back.

  I inhale, releasing my breath, trying to hide my mounting unease. ‘What about that night … could you access the data for everyone, see if there’s anything unusual?’

  ‘Unusual how?’ Rob frowns.

  ‘I don’t know. I just want to check.’

  He sighs, clearly wondering where I’m going with all this. ‘Okay, but some people remove their activity bands at night, so you won’t get much in the way of data there.’

  Rob’s right. Despite urging everyone to keep them on for the sake of the sleep data, compliance has pretty much dropped through the floor. I can’t blame them. The plastic bands can irritate the skin, and people are always complaining they make their wrists sweat.

  ‘Sure. But would you mind having a look?’

  Rob clicks his way into yet another screen, studying it carefully. I wait as patiently as I can. It’s been three hours since my last dose, and the urge for a top-up is getting harder to ignore, a growing itch I’m desperate to scratch.

  ‘What is it?’ I prompt after a minute. Rob is gazing at the screen with an air of confusion.

  Reluctantly he twists it into my view. I recognise the same flat plan as earlier, zoomed in on the sleeping quarters. ‘This is Alex’s room again, at 2.15 a.m. You can see the signal for his tracker here.’ Rob points to a clump of dots concentrated on the bunks in the corner of the cabin. ‘If we scroll forwards several minutes, you’ll notice a second signal.’

  I feel my own pulse start to race as another series of dots appears in the corridor. A moment later they centre right in Alex’s room.

  ‘Whoever it was stayed for …’ Rob clicks the screen shot forwards slightly. ‘Three minutes and thirteen seconds.’

  My breath catches. ‘Who was it?’ I ask.

  Rob looks strangely embarrassed. I watch him hesitate, on the brink of indecision, and I wait for him to refuse, to tell me I’m crossing an ethical line.

  But finally he answers. Just one word. A name.

  ‘Luuk.’

  25

  3 July

  It takes an age to track Luuk down. In the end, Sonya tips me off, after I’ve hunted all over the station, including every workshop and storeroom in Beta.

  ‘You tried the igloo?’ she asks, as I catch her emerging from the boot room.

  ‘The igloo?’ I echo. ‘Why would he be in there?’

  Sonya shrugs. ‘A hunch.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, heart sinking. ‘
I’ll take a look.’

  ‘You want me to come with you?’

  I consider her offer. It would make sense. Not simply because I’m scared of venturing out by myself into the dark, but because confronting Luuk alone in a remote location away from the base might not be the best idea in the world.

  ‘It’s okay. I know the way.’

  Sonya’s gaze lingers. ‘You shouldn’t go out there on your own, Kate.’

  I stare back at her. What does she mean? Is she referring to the outside? Or is she suggesting Luuk might really present some kind of danger?

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I assure her, endeavouring to sound more confident than I feel. ‘I won’t be long. And you know where I’m going.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says, heading off towards the canteen. ‘But don’t forget to take one of the walkie-talkies out with you.’

  I call into my clinic after kitting up in my thermals, help myself to a sizeable dose of Valium to calm my nerves. All the same, as I pull on my outdoor gear in the boot room, I’m swamped by feelings of dread. I’ve avoided going anywhere outside on my own since that incident with the aurora, and the closer I get to stepping back into that darkness, the more anxious I feel.

  I can’t dispel that image of Alex. The look frozen on his face.

  Gritting my teeth. I stuff a walkie-talkie into my goose-down jacket. I grab one of the larger flashlights, then squeeze a smaller torch into my pocket for good measure; if I lose one, I’ll have the other for backup.

  Bracing myself for the shock of cold air, I open the door and carefully descend the steps to the ice. It’s only when I reach the bottom that I realise I’m not actually certain how to get to the igloo. At least not in the dark. Drew and I usually do the snow samples just beyond the western perimeter of the station, but the igloo lies somewhere between the meteorology hut and Gamma. In daylight I’d have no problem finding it, but in pitch blackness?

  I stand there, heart picking up speed, shining my torch out into the darkness. There’s no moonlight, just black space. This is stupid. I should go back inside and tell Sonya I’ve changed my mind, that I’d like her to come with me. Or ask Arne or Drew to give me a lift on a skidoo.