Bear Island

by Alistair MacLean

  As if conscious of my gaze she opened her eyes and looked at me. She had this extraordinary ability to assume this still and wholly expressionless face, but beneath this remoteness, this distance, this aloofness lay, I thought, a marked degree of vulnerability. Wishful thinking on my part, it was possible: but I was oddly certain it wasn’t. Still without speaking, still without altering her expression or lack of it, she half-rose, hobbled awkwardly in her cocoon of steamer rugs and sat close beside me. In my best avuncular fashion I put my arm round her shoulders, but it didn’t stay there for long for she took hold of my wrist and deliberately and without haste lifted my arm over the top of her head and pushed it clear of her. Just to show that doctors are suprahuman and incapable of being offended by patients who aren’t really responsible for their own behaviour, I smiled at her. She smiled back at me and her eyes, I saw with an astonishment that I knew was not reflected in my face, were filled with unshed tears: almost as if she were aware of those tears and wished to hide them, she suddenly swung her legs up on the settee, turned towards me and got back to the short-range examination of my shirt-front, only this time she put both her arms around me. As far as freedom of mobility was concerned I was as good as handcuffed, which was doubtless what she wanted anyway. That she harboured no lethal intent towards me I was sure: I was equally sure that she was determined not to let me out of her sight and that this was the most effective way she knew of doing just that. How much it cost that proud and lonely person to behave like this I couldn’t guess: even less could I imagine what made her do it at all.

  I sat there and tried to mull things over in my now thoroughly befogged mind and, predictably, made no progress whatsoever. Besides, my tired eyes were being almost hypnotized by the behaviour of the scotch inside the Black Label bottle, with the almost metronomic regularity with which the liquid ascended and descended the opposite sides of the bottle in response to the regular pitching of the Morning Rose. One thing led to another and I said: ‘Mary dear?’

  ‘Yes?’ She didn’t turn her face up to look at me and I didn’t have to be told why: the area around the level of my fourth shirt-button was becoming noticeably damp.

  ‘I don’t want to disturb you but it’s time for my nightcap.’

  ‘Whisky?’

  ‘Ah! Two hearts that beat as one.’

  ‘No.’ She tightened her arms.

  ‘No?’

  ‘I hate the smell of whisky.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said sotto voce, ‘I’m not married to you.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I said “Yes, Mary dear”.’

  Five more minutes passed and I realized that my mind had closed down for the night. Idly I picked up the Olympus manifesto, read some rubbish about the sole completed copy of the screenplay being deposited in the vaults of a London bank, and put it down again. Mary Stuart was breathing quietly and evenly and seemed to be asleep. I bent and blew lightly on the left eyelid which was about the only part of her face that I could see. It didn’t quiver. She was asleep. I shifted my position experimentally, not much, and her arms automatically tightened round me, she’d clearly left a note to her subconscious before turning in for the night. I resigned myself to remaining where I was, it wasn’t a form of imprisonment that was likely to scar me permanently: I wondered vaguely whether the idea behind this silken incarceration was to prevent me from doing things or from chancing upon some other devilry that might well be afoot. I was too tired to care. I made up my mind just to sit there and keep a sleepless vigil until the morning came: I was asleep within not more than two minutes.

  Mary Stuart was not and didn’t look as if she was built along the lines of a coal-heaver but she wasn’t stuffed with swansdown either, for when I woke my left arm was asleep, wholly numb and almost useless, a realization that was brought home to me when I had to reach across my right hand to lift up my left wrist to see what time the luminous hands of my watch said it was. They said it was 4.15.

  It says much for my mental acuity that at least ten seconds elapsed before it occurred to me why it had been necessary for me to consult the luminous hands. Because it was dark, of course, but why was the saloon dark? Every light had been on when I’d gone to sleep. And what had wakened me? Something had, I knew without knowing why that I hadn’t wakened naturally but that there had been some external cause. What and where was the cause? A sound or a physical contact, it couldn’t be anything else, and whoever was responsible for whatever it had been was still with me. He had to be, insufficient time had elapsed since I’d woken for him to have left the saloon: more importantly the hairs on the back of my neck told me there was another and inimical presence in the saloon with me.

  Gently I took hold of Mary Stuart’s wrists to ease her arms away. Again the resistance was automatic, hers was not a subconscious to go to sleep on the job, but I was in no mood to be balked by any subconscious. I prised her arms free, slid along the settee, lowered her carefully to the horizontal, rose and moved out towards the middle of the saloon.

  I stood quite still, my hands grasping the edge of a table to brace myself, my breathing almost stopped as I listened intently. I could have spared myself the trouble. I was sure that the weather had moderated, not a great deal but enough to be just noticeable, since I’d gone to sleep, but it hadn’t moderated to the extent where any stealthy movements—and I could expect none other— could possibly be heard above the sound of the wind and the seas, the metallic creakings and groanings of the ancient plates and rivets of the Morning Rose.

  The nearest set of light switches—there was a duplicate set by the stewards’ pantry—was by the lee door. I took one step in the remembered direction then stopped. Did the presence in the room know that I was awake and on my feet? Were his eyes more attuned to the darkness than my newly opened ones? Could he dimly discern my figure? Would he guess that my first move would be towards the switches and was he preparing to block my way? If he were, how would he block my way? Would he be carrying a weapon and what kind of weapon—I was acutely aware that all I had were two hands, the left one still a fairly useless lump of tingling pins and needles. I stopped, irresolute.

  I heard the metallic click of a door handle and a gust of icy air struck me: the presence was leaving by the lee door. I reached the door in four steps, stepped outside on to the deck, flung up an instinctively protective right forearm as a bright light abruptly struck my eyes and immediately wished I had used my left forearm instead for then it might have offered me some measure of protection against something hard, heavy and very solid that connected forcibly and painfully with the left side of my neck. I clung to the outside edge of the door to support myself but I didn’t seem to have much strength left in my hands: and I seemed to have none at all in my legs for although I remained quite conscious I sank to the deck as if my legs had been filleted: by the time the momentary paralysis had passed and I was able to use the support of the door to drag myself shakily to my feet, I was alone on the deck. I had no idea where my assailant had gone and the matter was one of only academic interest, my legs could barely cope with supporting my weight in a static position: even the thought of running or negotiating ladders and companionways at speed was preposterous.

  Still clinging to whatever support was to hand I stepped back into the saloon, fumbled the lights on and pulled the lee door closed behind me. Mary Stuart was propped on an elbow, the heel of one palm rubbing an eye while the lid of the other was half open in the fashion of a person just rousing from a very deep or drugged sleep. I looked away, stumbled towards Captain Imrie’s table and sat down heavily in his chair. I lifted the bottle of Black Label from its stand. It was half full. For what seemed quite a long time but could have been no more than seconds I stared at this bottle, not seeing it, then looked away to locate the glass that Halliday had been using. It was nowhere to be seen, it could have fallen and rolled out of sight in a dozen different directions. I selected another glass from the table rack, splashed some scotch into it, d
rank it and made my way back to my seat. My neck felt awful. One good shake of my head and it would fall off.

  ‘Don’t breathe through your nose,’ I said, ‘and you’ll hardly smell the demon drink at all.’ I propped her up to a sitting position, rearranged her rugs and forestalled her by, for a change, putting my arms around her. I said: ‘There now.’

  ‘What was it? What happened?’ Her voice was low and had a shake to it.

  ‘Just the door. Wind blew it open. Had to close it, that’s all.’

  ‘But the lights were off.’

  ‘I put them off. Just after you’d gone to sleep.’

  She wriggled an arm free from the blankets and gently touched the side of my neck.

  ‘It’s colouring already,’ she whispered. ‘It’s going to be a huge ugly bruise. And it’s bleeding.’ I reached up with my handkerchief and she wasn’t making any mistake: I stuffed my handkerchief into my collar and left it there. She went on in the same little voice: ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘One of those stupid things. I slipped on the snow and struck my neck on the storm-sill of the door. Does ache a bit, I must say.’

  She didn’t answer. She freed her other arm, caught me by both lapels, stared at me with a face full of misery and put her forehead on my shoulder. Now it was my collar’s turn to become damp. It was the most extraordinary behaviour for a wardress—that her function was to keep tabs on and effectively immobilize me I was increasingly sure—but then, she was the most extraordinary wardress I’d ever come across. And the nicest. Dr Marlowe, I said, the lady is in distress and you are but human. I let my suspicions take five and stroked the tangled yellow hair. I’d been led to believe, I forget by what or by whom, that nothing was as conducive to the calming of upset feminine feelings as that soothing gesture: only seconds later I was wondering where I’d picked up this piece of obviously blatant misinformation for she suddenly pushed herself upright and struck me twice on the shoulder with the base of her clenched left fist. I was more than ever convinced that she wasn’t made of swansdown.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘All right,’ I said agreeably. ‘I won’t do that. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, no, please! I’m sorry. I don’t know what made me—I really—’ She stopped speaking, although her lips kept on moving, and stared at me with tear-filled eyes, the no longer beautiful face defenceless and defeated and full of despair: it made me feel acutely uncomfortable for I do not like to see proud and self-contained people thus reduced. There was a quick indrawing of breath, then, astonishingly, she had her arms wound round my neck and so tightly that it would appear that she was bent upon my instant asphyxiation. She wept in silence, her shoulders shaking.

  Splendidly done, I thought approvingly, quite splendidly done. Irrespective of for whose benefit it might be—and then I despised myself for my cynicism. Quite apart from the fact that her acknowledged limitations as an actress put such a performance out of the question I was convinced, without knowing why I was convinced, that what I was seeing was genuine uninhibited emotion. And what on earth had she to gain by pretending to lower her defences in front of me?

  For whom, then, the tears? Not for me, of that I was certain, why in the world for me? I scarcely knew her, she scarcely knew me, I was only a shoulder to cry on, likely enough I was only a doctor’s shoulder to cry on, people have the oddest misconceptions about doctors and maybe their shoulders are regarded as being more reliable and comforting than the average. Or more absorbent. Nor were the tears for herself, I was equally certain of that, to survive, intact, the kind of upbringing she’d hinted she’d had, one had to be possessed of an unusual degree of self-reliance and mental toughness that almost automatically excluded considerations of self-pity. So for whom, then, the tears?

  I didn’t know and, at that moment, I hardly cared. In normal circumstances and with no other matter so significantly important as to engage my attention, so lovely a girl in such obvious distress would have had my complete and undivided concern, but the circumstances were abnormal and my thoughts were elsewhere engaged with an intensity that made Mary Stuart’s odd behaviour seem relatively unimportant.

  I couldn’t keep my eyes from the bottle of scotch by the captain’s table. When Halliday had had, at my insistence as I now bitterly recalled, his first drink, the bottle had been about a third full: after his second drink it had been about a quarter full: and now it was half full. The quiet and violent man who had so recently switched off the lights and moved through the saloon had switched bottles and, for good measure, had removed the glass that Halliday had used.

  Mary Stuart said something, her voice so muffled and indistinct that I couldn’t make it out: what with salt tears and salt blood this night’s work was going to cost me a new shirt. I said: ‘What?’

  She moved her head, enough to enable her to speak more clearly, but not enough to let me see her face.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was such a fool. Will you forgive me?’

  I squeezed her shoulder in what was more or less an automatic gesture, my eyes and my thoughts were still on that bottle, but she seemed to take it as sufficient answer. She said hesitantly: ‘Are you going to sleep again?’ She hadn’t stopped being as foolish as she thought: or perhaps she wasn’t being foolish at all.

  ‘No, Mary dear, I’m not going to sleep again.’ Whatever tone of firm resolution my tone carried, it was superfluous: the throbbing pain in my neck was sufficient guarantee of my wakefulness.

  ‘Well, that’s all right then.’ I didn’t ask what this cryptic remark was intended to convey. Physically, we couldn’t have been closer but mentally I was no longer with her. I was with Halliday, the man whom I had thought had come to kill me, the man I’d practically forced to have a drink, the man who’d drunk what had been intended for me.

  I knew I would never see him again. Not alive.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dawn, in those high latitudes and at that time of year, did not come until half-past ten in the morning, and it was then that we buried the three dead men, Antonio and Moxen and Scott, and surely their shades would have forgiven us for the almost indecent dispatch with which their funerals were carried out, for that driving blizzard was still at its height, the wind was full of razored knives and struck through both clothes and flesh and laid its icy fingers on the marrow. Captain Imrie, a large and brass-bound Bible in his mittened hands, read swiftly through the burial service, or at least I assumed he did, he could have been reading the Sermon on the Mount for all I could tell, the wind just plucked the inaudible words from his mouth and carried them out over the grey-white desolation of waters. Three times a canvas-wrapped bundle slid smoothly out from beneath the Morning Rose’s only Union Flag, three times a bundle vanished soundlessly beneath the surface of the sea: we could see the splashes but not hear them for our ears were full of the high and lonely lament of the wind’s requiem in the frozen rigging.

  On land, mourners customarily find it difficult to tear themselves away from a newly-filled grave, but here there was no grave, there was nothing to look at and the bitter cold was sufficient to drive from every mind any thought other than that of immediate shelter and warmth: besides, Captain Imrie had said that it was an old fisherman’s custom to drink a toast to the dead. Whether it was or not I had no idea, it could well have been a custom that Imrie had invented himself, and certainly the deceased had been no fishermen: but whatever its origin I’m sure that it made its contributory effect towards the extremely rapid clearing of the decks.

  I remained where I was. I felt inhibited from joining the others not because I found Captain Imrie’s proposal distasteful or ethically objectionable— only the most hypocritical could find in the Christian ethic a bar to wishing bon voyage to the departed—but because, in crowded surroundings, it could be very difficult to see who was filling my glass and what he was filling it with. Moreover, I’d had no more than three hours’ sleep the previous night, my mind w
as tired and a bit fuzzy round the edges and it was my hope that the admittedly heroic treatment of exposure to an Arctic blizzard might help to blow some of the cobwebs away. I took a firm hold on one of the numerous lifelines that were rigged on deck, edged my way out to the largest of one of the numerous deck cargoes we were carrying, took what illusory shelter was offered in its lee and waited for the cobwebs to fly away.

  Halliday was dead. I hadn’t found his body, I’d searched, casually and unobtrusively, every likely and most of the unlikely places of concealment on the Morning Rose: he had vanished and left no trace. Halliday, I knew, was lying in the black depths of the Barents Sea. How he’d got there I didn’t know and it didn’t seem to be important: it could be that someone had helped him over the side but it was even more probable that he had required no assistance. He’d left the saloon as abruptly as he had because the poison in his scotch—my scotch—had been as fast acting as it had been deadly. He had felt the urgent need to be sick and the obvious place to be sick was over the side: a slip on the snow or ice, one of the hundreds of trough-seeking lurches that the trawler had experienced during the night and in what must have been by that time his ill, weakened and dazed state, and he would have been quite unable to prevent himself from pitching over the low guard-rails. The only consolation, if consolation it was, was that he had probably succumbed to poison before his lungs had filled with water. I did not subscribe to the popular belief that death from drowning was a relatively easy and painless way to go, if for no other reason than that it was a theory that in the nature of things lacked positive documentation.

  I was as certain as could be that Halliday’s absence had so far gone unnoticed by everyone except myself and the person responsible for his death, and there was not even certainty about that last point, it was quite possible that he knew nothing of Halliday’s brief visit to the saloon. True, Halliday had not appeared for breakfast but as a few others had done the same and those who had come had done so intermittently over the best part of a couple of hours, his absence had gone unremarked. His cabin-mate, Sandy, was still feeling under the weather to the extent that Halliday’s presence or absence was a matter of total indifference to him: and as Halliday had been very much a solitary there was no one who would be sufficiently concerned to inquire anxiously as to his whereabouts. I hoped that his absence remained undiscovered as long as possible: although the signed guarantee given to Captain Imrie that morning had contained no specific reference as to the action to be taken in the event of someone going missing, he was quite capable of seizing upon this as a pretext to abandon the trip and make with all speed for Hammerfest.