Bear Island

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Perhaps your assistant—’

  ‘Charlie? That bone-idle layabout. Not him. Besides, he’s off-duty tonight.’ Haggerty scratched the grey bristle of his hair. ‘Lord knows why they did it but it must have been Moxen or Scott.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It must have been.’

  I was so tired that I could think of nothing other than my cabin and my bunk. I was so tired that it wasn’t until I had arrived at my cabin and looked on the bare bunk that I recalled that all my blankets had been taken away for Smithy and Oakley. I glanced idly at the small table where I’d left the toxicological books that I had been consulting and my tiredness very suddenly left me.

  The volume on Medical Jurisprudence that had provided me with the information on aconitine was lying with its base pressed hard against the far fiddle of the table, thrown there, of course, by one of the violent lurches of the Morning Rose. The silken bookmark ribbon attached to the head of the book stretched out most of its length on the table, which was an unremarkable thing in itself were it not for my clear and distinct recollection that I’d carefully used the bookmark to mark the passage I’d been reading.

  I wondered who it was who knew I’d been reading the article on aconitine.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I suddenly didn’t fancy my cabin very much any more. Not, that was, as a place to sleep in. The eccentric shipping millionaire who’d had the Morning Rose completely stripped and fitted for passenger accommodation had had a powerful aversion to locks on cabin doors and, having had the means and the opportunity to do so, had translated his theories into practice. It may have been just a phobia or it may have stemmed from his assertion that many people had unnecessarily lost their lives at sea through being trapped in locked cabins as their ships went down—which, in fact, I knew to be true. However it was, it was impossible to lock a cabin door in the Morning Rose from the inside: it didn’t even have a sliding bolt.

  The saloon, I decided, was the place for me. It had, as I recalled, a very comfortable corner bulkhead settee where I could wedge myself and, more importantly, protect my back. The lockers below the settee seats had a splendid assortment of fleecy steamer rugs, another legacy, like the lockless doors, from the previous owner. Best of all, it was a brightly lit and public place, a place where people were liable to come and go even at that late hour, a place where no one could sneak up on you unawares. Not that any of this would offer any bar to anyone so ill-disposed as to take a potshot at me through the saloon’s plate glass windows. It was, I supposed, some little consolation that the person or persons bent on mayhem had not so far chosen to resort to overt violence, but that hardly constituted a guarantee that they wouldn’t: why the hell couldn’t the publishers of reference books emulate the prestigious Encyclopaedia Britannica and do away with bookmarks altogether?

  It was then that I recalled that I’d left the board of Olympus Productions in full plenary session up in the saloon. How long ago was that? Twenty minutes, not more. Another twenty minutes, perhaps, and the coast would be clear. It wasn’t that I harboured any particular suspicion towards any of the four: they might just consider it very odd if I were to elect to sleep up there for the night when I’d a perfectly comfortable cabin down below.

  Partly on impulse, partly to kill some of the intervening time, I decided to have a look at the Duke, to check on his condition, to ensure him a restful night by promising he’d be back on full rations come breakfast time and to find out if Sandy had been telling the truth. His was the third door to the left: the second to the right was wide open, the door stayed back at 90 degrees. It was Mary Stuart’s cabin and she was inside but not asleep: she sat in a chair wedged between table and bunk, her eyes wide open, her hands in her lap.

  ‘What’s this, then?’ I said. ‘You look like someone taking part in a wake.’

  ‘I’m not sleepy.’

  ‘And the door open. Expecting company?’

  ‘I hope not. I can’t lock the door.’

  ‘You haven’t been able to lock the door since you came aboard. It doesn’t have a lock.’

  ‘I know. It didn’t matter. Not till tonight.’

  ‘You—you’re not thinking that someone might sneak up and do you in while you’re sleeping?’ I said in a tone of a person who could never conceive of such a thing happening to himself.

  ‘I don’t know what to think. I’m all right. Please.’

  ‘Afraid? Still?’ I shook my head. ‘Fie on you. Think of your namesake, young Mary Darling. She’s not scared to sleep alone.’

  ‘She’s not sleeping alone.’

  ‘She isn’t? Ah, well, we live in a permissive age.’

  ‘She’s with Allen. In the recreation room.’

  ‘Ah! Then why don’t you join them? If it’s safety you wrongly imagine you need, why then, there’s safety in numbers.’

  ‘I do not like to play—what you say— gooseberry.’

  ‘Oh, fiddlesticks!’ I said and went to see the Duke. He had colour, not much but enough, in his cheeks and was plainly on the mend. I asked him how he was.

  ‘Rotten,’ said the Duke. He rubbed his stomach.

  ‘Still pretty sore?’

  ‘Hunger pains,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing tonight. Tomorrow, you’re back on the strength—forget the tea and toast. By the way, that wasn’t very clever of you to send Sandy up to raid the galley. Haggerty nabbed him in the act.’

  ‘Sandy? In the galley?’ The surprise was genuine. ‘I didn’t send him up.’

  ‘Surely he told you he was going there?’

  ‘Not a word. Look, Doc, you can’t pin—’

  ‘Nobody’s pinning anything on anybody. I must have taken him up wrong. Maybe he just wanted to surprise you—he said something about you feeling peckish.’

  ‘I said that all right. But honest to God—’

  ‘It’s all right. No harm done. Good night.’

  I retraced my steps, passing Mary Stuart’s open door again. She looked at me but said nothing so I did the same. Back in my cabin I looked at my watch. Five minutes only had elapsed, fifteen to go. I was damned if I was going to wait so long, I was feeling tired again, tired enough to drop off to sleep at any moment, but I had to have a reason to go up there. For the first time I devoted some of my rapidly waning powers of thought to the problem and I had the answer in seconds. I opened my medical bag and extracted three of the most essential items it contained—death certificates. For some odd reason I checked the number that was left—ten. All told, thirteen. I was glad I wasn’t superstitious. I stuffed the certificates and a few sheets of rather splendidly headed ship’s notepaper—the previous owner hadn’t been a man to do things by half—into my briefcase.

  I opened the cabin door wide so as to have some light to see by, checked that the passage was empty and swiftly unscrewed the deck-head lamp. This I dropped on the deck from gradually increasing heights starting with about a foot or so until a shake of the lamp close my ear let me hear the unmistakable tinkle of a broken filament. I screwed the now useless lamp back into its holder, took up my briefcase, closed the door and made for the bridge.

  The weather, I observed during my very hurried passage across the upper deck and up the bridge ladder, hadn’t improved in the slightest. I had the vague impression that the seas were moderating slightly but that may have been because of the fact that I was feeling so tired that I was no longer capable of registering impressions accurately. But one aspect of the weather was beyond question: the almost horizontally driving snow had increased to the extent that the masthead light was no more than an intermittent glow in the gloom above.

  Allison was at the wheel, spending more time looking at the radarscope than at the compass, and visibility being what it was, I could see his point. I said: ‘Do you know where the captain keeps his crew lists? In his cabin?’

  ‘No.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘In the chart-house there.’ He hesitated. ‘Why would you want those, Dr Marlowe?’


  I pulled a death certificate from the briefcase and held it close to the binnacle light. Allison compressed his lips.

  ‘Top drawer, port locker.’

  I found the lists, entered up the name, address, age, place of birth, religion and next of kin of each of the two dead men, replaced the book and made my way down to the saloon. Half an hour had elapsed since I’d left Gerran, his three co-directors and the Count sitting there, and there all five still were, seated round a table and studying cardboard-covered folders spread on the table before them. A pile of those lay on the table, some more were scattered on the floor where the rolling of the ship had obviously precipitated them. The Count looked at me over the rim of his glass: his capacity for brandy was phenomenal.

  ‘Still abroad, my dear fellow? You do labour on our behalf. Much more of this and I suggest that you be co-opted as one of our directors.’

  ‘Here’s one cobbler that sticks to his last.’ I looked at Gerran. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but I’ve some forms to fill up. If I’m interrupting some private session—’

  ‘Nothing private going on here, I assure you.’ It was Goin who answered. ‘Mainly studying our shooting script for the next fortnight. All the cast and crew will have one tomorrow. Like a copy?’

  ‘Thank you. After I’ve finished this. Afraid my cabin light has gone on the blink and I’m not much good at writing by the light of matches.’

  ‘We’re just leaving.’ Otto was still looking grey and very tired but he was mentally tough enough to keep going long after his body had told him to stop. ‘I think we could all do with a good night’s sleep.’

  ‘It’s what I would prescribe. You could postpone your departure for five minutes?’

  ‘If necessary, of course.’

  ‘We’ve promised Captain Imrie a guarantee or affidavit or what will you exonerating him from all blame if we have any further outbreaks of mysterious illness. He wants it on his breakfast table, and he wants it signed. And as Captain Imrie will be up at 4 a.m. and I suspect his breakfast will be correspondingly early, I suggest it would be more convenient if you all signed it now.’

  They nodded agreement. I sat at a nearby table and in my best handwriting, which was pretty bad, and best legal jargon, which was awful, I drafted a statement of responsibility which I thought would meet the case. The others apparently thought so too or were too tired to care, for they signed with only a cursory glance at what I had written. The Count signed too and I didn’t as much as raise an eyebrow. It had never even crossed my mind that the Count belonged to those elevated directorial ranks, I had thought that the more highly regarded cameramen, of which the Count was undoubtedly one, were invariably freelance and therefore ineligible for election to any film company board. But at least it helped to explain his lack of proper respect for Otto.

  ‘And now, to bed.’ Goin eased back his chair. ‘You, too, Doctor?’

  ‘After I’ve filled out the death certificates.’

  ‘An unpleasant duty.’ Goin handed me a folder. ‘This might help amuse you afterwards.’

  I took it from him and Gerran heaved himself upright with the usual massive effort. ‘Those funerals, Dr Marlowe. The burials at sea. What time do they take place?’

  ‘First light is customary.’ Otto closed his eyes in suffering. ‘After what you’ve been through, Mr Gerran, I’d advise you to give it a miss. Rest as long as possible tomorrow.’

  ‘You really think so?’ I nodded and Otto removed his mask of suffering. ‘You will stand in for me, John?’

  ‘Of course,’ Goin said. ‘Good night, Doctor. Thank you for your co-operation.’

  ‘Yes, yes, thank you, thank you,’ Otto said.

  They trooped off unsteadily and I fished out my death certificate forms and filled them out. I put those in one sealed envelope, the signed affidavit—I just in time remembered to add my own signature—in another, addressed them to Captain Imrie and took them up to the bridge to ask Allison to hand them over to the captain when he came on watch at four in the morning. Allison wasn’t there. Instead, Smithy, heavily clad and muffled almost to the eyebrows, was sitting on a high stool before the wheel. He wasn’t touching the wheel, which periodically spun clockwise and counter-clockwise as of its own accord, and he’d turned up the rheostat. He looked pale and had dark circles under his eyes but he didn’t have a sick look about him any more. His recuperative powers were quite remarkable.

  ‘Automatic pilot,’ he explained, almost cheerfully, ‘and all the lights of home. Who needs night-sight in zero visibility?’

  ‘You ought to be in bed,’ I said shortly.

  ‘I’ve just come from there and I’m just going there. First Officer Smith is not yet his old self and he knows it. Just come up to check position and give Allison a break for coffee. Also, I thought I might find you here. You weren’t in your cabin.’

  ‘I’m here now. What did you want to see me about?’

  ‘Otard-Dupuy,’ he said. ‘How does that sound?’

  ‘It sounds fine.’ Smithy slid off his stool and headed for the cupboard where Captain Imrie kept his private store of restoratives. ‘But you weren’t hunting the ship to offer me a brandy.’

  ‘No. Tell you the truth, I’ve been trying to figure out some things. No dice with the figuring, if I was bright enough for that I’d be too bright to be where I am now. Thought you could help me.’ He handed me a glass.

  ‘We should make a great team,’ I said.

  He smiled briefly. ‘Three dead and four half dead. Food poisoning. What poisoning?’

  I told him the story about the sporing anaerobes, the one I’d given Haggerty. But Smithy wasn’t Haggerty.

  ‘Mighty selective poison, isn’t it? Clobbers A and kills him, passes up B, clobbers C and doesn’t kill him, passes up D and so on. And we all had the same food to eat.’

  ‘Poisons are notoriously unpredictable. Six people at a picnic can eat the same infected food: three can land in hospital while the others don’t feel a twinge.’

  ‘So, some people get tummy-aches and some don’t. But that’s a bit different from saying that a poison that is deadly enough to kill, and to kill violently and quickly, is going to leave others entirely unaffected. I’m no doctor but I flat out don’t believe it.’

  ‘I find it a bit odd myself. You have something in mind?’

  ‘Yes. The poisoning was deliberate.’

  ‘Deliberate?’ I sipped some more of the Otard-Dupuy while I wondered how far to go with Smithy. Not too far, I thought, not yet. I said: ‘Of course it was deliberate. And so easily done. Take our poisoner. He has this little bag of poison. Also, he has this little magic wand. He waves it and turns himself invisible and then flits around the dining tables. A pinch for Otto, none for me, a pinch for you, a pinch for Oakley, no pinches for, say, Heissman and Stryker, a double pinch for Antonio, none for the girls, a pinch for the Duke, two each for Moxen and Scott, and so on. A wayward and capricious lad, our invisible friend: or would you call it being selective?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’d call it,’ Smithy said soberly. ‘But I know what I’d call you—devious, off-putting, side-tracking and altogether protesting too much. Without offence, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I wouldn’t rate you as anybody’s fool. You can’t tell me that you haven’t had some thoughts along those lines.’

  ‘I had. But because I’ve been thinking about it a lot longer than you, I’ve dismissed them. Motive, opportunity, means—impossible to find any. Don’t you know that the first thing a doctor does when he’s called in to a case of accidental poisoning is to suspect that it’s not accidental?’

  ‘So you’re satisfied?’

  ‘As can be.’

  ‘I see.’ He paused. ‘Do you know we have a transmitter in the radio office that can reach just about any place in the northern hemisphere? I’ve got a feeling we’re going to have to use it soon.’

  ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘Help.’

/>   ‘Help?’

  ‘Yes. You know. The thing you require when you’re in trouble. I think we need help now. Any more funny little accidents and I’ll be damn certain we need help.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You’re way beyond me. Besides, Britain’s a long long way away from us now.’

  ‘The NATO Atlantic forces aren’t. They’re carrying out fleet exercise somewhere off the North Cape.’

  ‘You’re well informed,’ I said.

  ‘It pays to be well informed when I’m talking to someone who claims to be as satisfied as can be over three very mysterious deaths when I’m certain that someone would never rest and could never be satisfied until he knew exactly how those three people had died. I’ve admitted I’m not very bright but don’t completely under-estimate what little intelligence I have.’

  ‘I don’t. And don’t overestimate mine. Thanks for the Otard-Dupuy.’

  I went to the starboard screen door. The Morning Rose was still rolling and pitching and shaking and shuddering as she battered her way northwards through the wild seas but it was no longer possible to see the wind-torn waters below: we were in a world now that was almost completely opaque, a blind and bitter world of driving white, a world of snowy darkness that began and ended at scarcely an arm length’s distance. I looked down at the wing bridge deck and in the pale light of wash from the wheel-house I could see footprints in the snow. There was only one set of them, sharp and clearly limned as if they had been made only seconds previously. Somebody had been there, for a moment I was certain that someone had been there, listening to Smith and myself talking. Then I realized there was only one set, the set I had made myself, and they hadn’t been filled in or even blurred because the blizzard driving horizontally across the wind-dodger was clearing the deck at my feet. Sleep, I thought, and sleep now: for with that lack of sleep, the tiring events of the past few hours, the sheer physical exhaustion induced by the violent weather and Smithy’s dark forebodings, I was beginning to imagine things. I realized that Smithy was at my shoulder.