Bear Island

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Mr Stryker was being over-cautious.’ I sat down on the edge of the mattress and took her wrist. The cocker spaniel next me growled deep in its throat and bared its teeth. ‘If that dog bites me, I’ll clobber it.’

  ‘Rufus wouldn’t harm a fly, would you, Rufus darling?’

  It wasn’t flies I was worried about but I kept silence and she went on with a sad smile: ‘Are you allergic to dogs, Doctor Marlowe?’

  ‘I’m allergic to dog bites.’

  The smile faded until her face was just sad. I knew nothing about Judith Haynes except what I’d heard at second hand, and as all I’d heard had been from her colleagues in the industry I heavily discounted about ninety per cent of what had been told me: the only thing I had so far learned with any certainty about the film world was that back-biting, hypocrisy, double-dealing, innuendo and character assassination formed so integral a part of its conversational fabric that it was quite impossible to know where the truth ended and falsehood began. The only safe guide, I’d discovered, was to assume that the truth ended almost immediately.

  Miss Haynes, it was said, claimed to be twenty-four and had been, on the best authority, for the past fourteen years. This, it was said darkly, explained her predilection for chiffon scarves, for it was there that the missing years showed: equally, she may just have liked chiffon scarves. With equal authority it was stated that she was a complete bitch, her only redeeming quality being her total devotion to her two cocker spaniels and even this back-handed compliment was qualified by the observation that as a human being she had to have something or somebody to love, something or somebody to return her affection. She had tried cats, it was said, but that hadn’t worked: the cats, apparently, didn’t love her back. But one thing was indisputable. Tall, slender, with wonderful titian hair and classically beautiful in the sculptured Greek fashion, Miss Haynes, it was universally conceded, couldn’t act for toffee. Nonetheless, she was a very hot box office attraction indeed: the combination of the wistfully regal expression, which was her trade-mark, and the startling contrast of her lurid private life saw to that. Nor was her career in any way noticeably hindered by the facts that she was the daughter of Otto Gerran, whom she was said to despise, the wife of Michael Stryker, whom she was said to hate, and a full partner in the Olympus Productions company.

  There was nothing much wrong with her physical condition that I could see. I asked her how many tablets of various kinds she had consumed in the course of the day and after dithering about helplessly for a bit and totting up the score with the shapely and tapering forefinger of her right hand on the shapely and tapering fingers of her left—she was alleged to be able to add up pounds and dollars with the speed and accuracy of an IBM computer—she gave me some approximate figures and in return I gave her some tablets with instructions as to how many and when to take them, then left. I didn’t prescribe any sedatives for the dogs—they looked OK to me.

  The cabin occupied by the Count and Antonio was directly opposite across the passageway. I knocked twice, without reply, went inside and saw why there had been no reply: Antonio was there all right, but I could have knocked until doomsday and Antonio would not have heard me, for Antonio would never hear anything again. From the Via Veneto via Mayfair to die so squalidly in the Barents Sea: for the gay and laughing Antonio there could never have been a right or proper or suitable place to die, for if ever I’d met a man in love with life it had been Antonio: and for this cosseted creature of the sybaritic salons of the capitals of Europe to die in those bleak and indescribably bitter surroundings was so incongruous as to be shocking, so unreal as to momentarily suspend both belief and comprehension. But there he was, just there, lying there at my feet, very real, very dead.

  The cabin was full of the sour-sweet smell of sickness and there was physical evidence of that sickness everywhere. Antonio lay not on his bunk but on the carpeted deck beside it, his head arched impossibly far back until it was at right angles to his body. There was blood, a great deal of blood, not yet congealed, on his mouth and on the floor by his mouth. The body was contorted into an almost impossible position, arms and legs outflung at grotesque angles, the knuckles showing ivory. Rolling around, the Count had said, sick, a man on the rack, and he hadn’t been so far out at that, for Antonio had died as a man on the rack dies, in agony. Surely to God he must have cried out, even although his throat would have been blocked most of the time, he must have screamed, he must have, he would have been unable to prevent himself: but with the Three Apostles in full cry, his cries would have gone unheeded. And then I remembered the scream I had heard when I’d been talking to Lonnie Gilbert in his cabin and I could feel the hairs prickling on the back of my neck: I should have known the difference between the high-pitched yowling of a rock singer and the scream of a man dying in torment.

  I knelt, made a cursory examination, finding out no more in the process than any layman would have done, closed the staring eyes aad then, with the advent of rigor mortis in mind, straightened out the contorted limbs with an ease that I found vaguely surprising. Then I left the cabin, locked the door and hesitated for only a moment before dropping the key in my pocket: if the Count were possessed of the delicate sensibilities he claimed, he’d be glad I’d taken the key with me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Dead?’ Otto Gerran’s puce complexion had deepened to a shade where I could have sworn it was overlaid with indigo. ‘Dead, did you say?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’ Otto and I were alone in the dining saloon: it was ten o’clock now and at nine-thirty sharp Captain Imrie and Mr Stokes invariably left for their cabins, where they would remain incommunicado for the next ten hours. I lifted from Otto’s table a bottle of raw fire-water on which someone had unblushingly stuck a label claiming that the contents were brandy, took it to the stewards’ pantry, returned with a bottle of Hine and sat down. It said much for Otto’s unquestioned state of shock that not only had he not appeared to note my brief absence, he even stared directly at me, unblinkingly and I’m sure unseeingly, as I poured out two fingers for myself: he registered no reaction whatsoever. Only something pretty close to a state of total shock could have held Otto’s parsimonious nature in check and I wondered what the source of this shock might be. True, the news of the death of anyone you knew can come as a shock, but it comes as a numbing shock only when the nearest and dearest are involved, and if Otto had even a measurable amount of affection for anyone, far less for the unfortunate Antonio, he concealed it with great skill. Perhaps he was, as many are, superstitious about death at sea, perhaps he was concerned with the adverse effect it might have on cast and crew, maybe he was bleakly wondering where, in the immensity of the Barents Sea, he could lay hands on a make-up artist, hairdresser and wardrobe man, for Otto, in the sacred name of economy, had combined all three normally separate jobs in the person of one man, the late Antonio. With a visibly conscious effort of will-power he looked away from the Hine bottle and focused his eyes on me.

  ‘How can he be dead?’

  ‘His heart’s stopped. His breathing’s stopped. That’s how he can be dead. That’s how anyone can be dead.’

  Otto reached out for the bottle of Hine and splashed some brandy into a glass. He didn’t pour it, he literally splashed it, the spreading stain on the white tablecloth as big as my hand: his own hand was shaking as badly as that. He poured out three fingers as compared to my two, which may not sound so very much more but then Otto was using a balloon glass whereas mine was a tulip. Tremblingly, he lifted the glass to his mouth and half of its contents disappeared in one gulp, most of it down his throat but a fair proportion on his shirt-front. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if ever I found myself in a situation where all seemed lost, and the only faint hope of life depended on having one good man and true standing by my right shoulder, the name of Otto Gerran was not one that would leap automatically to my mind.

  ‘How did he die?’ The brandy had done some good. Otto’s voice was low just abo
ve a whisper, but it was steady.

  ‘In agony, I would say. If you mean why did he die, I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know? You—you’re supposed to be a doctor.’ Otto was having the greatest difficulty in remaining in his seat: with one hand clutching the brandy glass, the other was barely sufficient to anchor his massive weight against the wild plunging of the Morning Rose. I said nothing so he went on: ‘Was it sea-sickness? Could that have done it?’

  ‘He was sea-sick, all right.’

  ‘But you said a man doesn’t die just from that.’

  ‘He didn’t die just from that.’

  ‘An ulcerated stomach, you said. Or heart. Or asthma—’

  ‘He was poisoned.’

  Otto stared at me for a moment, his face registering no comprehension, then he set his glass on the table and pushed himself abruptly to his feet, no mean accomplishment for a man of his bulk. The trawler rolled wickedly. I leaned quickly forward, snatched up Otto’s glass just as it began to topple and at the same moment Otto lurched to one side and staggered across to the starboard— the lee—door of the saloon leading to the upper deck. He flung this open and even above the shrieking of the wind and the crash of the seas I could hear him being violently sick. Presently he re-entered, closed the door, staggered across the deck and collapsed into his chair. His face was ashen, I handed him his glass and he drained the contents, reached out for the bottle and re-filled his glass. He drank some more and stared at me.

  ‘Poison?’

  ‘Looked like strychnine. Had all—’

  ‘Strychnine? Strychnine! Great God! Strychnine! You—you’ll have to carry out a post-mortem, an—an autopsy.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish. I’ll carry out no such thing, and for a number of excellent reasons. For one thing, have you any idea what an autopsy is like? It’s a very messy business indeed, I can assure you. I haven’t the facilities. I’m not a specialist in pathology—and you require one for an autopsy. You require the consent of the next of kin—and how are you going to get that in the middle of the Barents Sea? You require a coroner’s order—no coroner. Besides, a coroner only issues an order where there’s a suspicion of foul play. No such suspicion exists here.’

  ‘No—no foul play? But you said—’

  ‘I said it looked like strychnine. I didn’t say it was strychnine. I’m sure it’s not. He seemed to show the classical symptoms of having had tetanic spasms and opisthotonos—that’s when the back arches so violently that the body rests on the head and the heels only—and his face showed pure terror: there’s nearly always this conviction of impending death at the onset of strychnine poisoning. But when I straightened him out there were no signs of tetanic contractions. Besides, the timing is all wrong. Strychnine usually shows its first effects within ten minutes and half an hour after taking the stuff you’re gone. Antonio was at least twenty minutes here with us at dinner and there was nothing wrong with him then—well, sea-sickness, that’s all. And he died only minutes ago—far too long. Besides, who on earth would want to do away with a harmless boy like Antonio? Do you have in your employ a raving psycho who kills just for the kicks of it? Does it make any kind of sense to you?’

  ‘No. No, it doesn’t. But—but poison. You said—’

  ‘Food poisoning.’

  ‘Food poisoning! But people don’t die of food poisoning. You mean ptomaine poisoning?’

  ‘I mean no such thing for there is no such thing. You can eat ptomaines to your heart’s content and you’ll come to no harm. But you can get all sorts of food poisoning—chemically contaminated— mercury in fish, for instance—edible mushrooms that aren’t edible mushrooms, edible mussels that aren’t edible mussels—but the nasty one is salmonella. And that can kill, believe me. Just at the end of the war one variety of it, salmonella enteritidis, laid low about thirty people in Stoke-on-Trent. Six of them died. And there’s an even nastier one called clostridium botulinum—a kind of half-cousin of botulinus, a charming substance that is guaranteed to wipe out a city in a night—the Ministry of Health makes it. This clostidium secretes an exotoxin—a poison—which is probably the most powerful occurring in nature. Between the wars a party of tourists at Loch Maree in Scotland had a picnic lunch—sandwiches filled with potted duck paste. Eight of them had this. All eight died. There was no cure then, there is no cure now. Must have been this or something like this that Antonio ate.’

  ‘I see, I see.’ He had some more brandy, then looked up at me, his eyes round. ‘Good God! Don’t you see what this means, man! We’re all at risk, all of us. This dostridium or whatever you call it could spread like wildfire—’

  ‘Rest easy. It’s neither infectious nor contagious.’

  ‘But the galley—’

  ‘You think that hadn’t occurred to me? The source of infection can’t be there. If it were, we’d all be gone—I assume that Antonio—before his appetite deserted him, that was—had the same as all of us. I didn’t pay any particular attention but I can find out probably from the people on either side of him—I’m sure they were the Count and Cecil.’

  ‘Cecil?’

  ‘Cecil Golightly—your camera focus assistant or something like that.’

  ‘Ah! The Duke.’ For some odd reason Cecil, a diminutive, shrewd and chirpy little Cockney sparrow was invariably known as the Duke, probably because it was so wildly unsuitable. ‘That little pig see anything! He never lifts his eyes from the table. But Tadeusz—well, now, he doesn’t miss much.’

  ‘I’ll ask. I’ll also check the galley, the food store and the cold room. Not a chance in ten thousand— I think we’ll find that Antonio had his own little supply of tinned delicacies—but I’ll check anyway. Do you want me to see Captain Imrie for you?’

  ‘Captain Imrie?’

  I was patient. ‘The master must be notified. The death must be logged. A death certificate must be issued—normally, he’d do it himself but not with a doctor aboard—but I’ll have to be authorized. And he’ll have to make preparations for the funeral. Burial at sea. Tomorrow morning, I should imagine.’

  He shuddered. ‘Yes, please. Please do that. Of course, of course, burial at sea. I must go and see John at once and tell him about this awful thing.’ By ‘John’ I assumed he meant John Cummings Goin, production accountant, company accountant, senior partner in Olympus Productions and widely recognized as being the financial controller— and so in many ways the virtual controller—of the company. ‘And then I’m going to bed. Yes, yes, to bed. Sounds terrible, I know, poor Antonio lying down there, but I’m dreadfully upset, really dreadfully upset.’ I couldn’t fault him on that one, I’d rarely seen a man look so unhappy.

  ‘I can bring a sedative to your cabin.’

  ‘No, no, I’ll be all right.’ Unthinkingly, almost, he picked up the bottle of Hine, thrust it into one of the capacious pockets of his tent-like jacket and staggered from the saloon. As far as insomnia was concerned, Otto clearly preferred homemade remedies to even the most modern pharmaceutical products.

  I went to the starboard door, opened it and looked out. When Smithy had said that the weather wasn’t going to improve, he’d clearly been hedging his bets: conditions were deteriorating and, if I were any judge, deteriorating quite rapidly. The air temperature was now well below freezing and the first thin flakes of snow were driving by overhead, almost parallel to the surface of the sea. The waves were now no longer waves, just moving masses of water, capriciously tending, it seemed, in any and all directions, but in the main still bearing mainly easterly. The Morning Rose was no longer just cork-screwing, she was beginning to stagger, falling into a bridge-high trough with an explosive impact more than vaguely reminiscent of the flat, whip-like crack of a not so distant naval gun, then struggling and straining to right herself only to be struck by a following wall of water that smashed her over on her beam ends again. I leaned farther outwards, looking upwards and was vaguely puzzled by the dimly seen outline of the madly flapping flag on the foremast: puzzle
d, because it wasn’t streaming out over the starboard side, as it should have been, but towards the starboard quarter. This meant that the wind was moving round to the north-east and what this could portend I could not even guess: I vaguely suspected that it wasn’t anything good. I went inside, yanked the door closed with some effort, made a silent prayer for the infinitely reassuring and competent presence of Smithy on the bridge, made my way to the stewards’ pantry again and helped myself to a bottle of Black Label, Otto having made off with the last of the brandy—the drinkable brandy, that is. I took it across to the captain’s table, sat in the captain’s chair, poured myself a small measure and stuck the bottle in Captain Imrie’s convenient wrought-iron stand.

  I wondered why I hadn’t told Otto the truth. I was a convincing liar, I thought, but not a compulsive one: probably because Otto struck me as being far from a stable character and with several more pegs of brandy inside him, in addition to what he had already consumed, he seemed less than the ideal confidant.

  Antonio hadn’t died because he’d taken or been given strychnine. Of that I was quite certain. I was equally certain that he hadn’t died from clostridium botulinum either. The exotoxin from this particular anaerobe was quite as deadly as I had said but, fortunately, Otto had been unaware that the incubation period was seldom less than four hours and, in extreme cases, had been known to be as long as forty-eight—not that the period of incubation delay made the final results any less fatal. It was faintly possible that Antonio might have scoffed, say, a tin of infected truffles or suchlike from his homeland in the course of the afternoon, but in that case the symptoms would have been showing at the dinner table, and apart from the odd chartreuse hue I’d observed nothing untoward. It had to be some form of systematic poison, but there were so many of them and I was a long way from being an expert on the subject. Nor was there any necessary question of foul play: more people die from accidental poisoning than from the machinations of the ill-disposed.