Bear Island

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘How do you know?’ He’d shaken me this time, not just a little, or my face would have shown it, but so much that I knew my features stayed rigidly fixed in the same expression.

  ‘You don’t deny it?’

  ‘I don’t know. How do you?’

  ‘I went down to see the props man, this elderly lad they call Sandy. I’d heard he was sick and—’

  ‘Why did you go?’

  ‘If it matters, because he’s not the sort of person that people visit very much. He doesn’t seem liked. Seems a bit hard to be sick and unpopular at the same time.’ I nodded, this would be in character with Smithy. ‘I asked him where his room-mate Halliday was as I hadn’t seen him at breakfast. Sandy said he’d gone for breakfast. I didn’t say anything to Sandy but this made me a bit curious so I had a look in the recreation room. He wasn’t there either, so I got curiouser until I’d searched the Morning Rose twice from end to end. I think I covered every nook and cranny in the vessel where even a stray seagull could be hiding and you can take my word for it. Halliday’s not in the Morning Rose.’

  ‘Reported this to the captain?’

  ‘Well, well, what an awful lot of reaction. No, I haven’t reported it to the captain.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Same reason as you haven’t. If I know my Captain Imrie, he’d at once declare that there was no clause in that agreement you signed that was binding on this particular case, that saying that foul play wasn’t involved in this case also would be altogether too much of a good thing, and turn the Morning Rose straight for Hammerfest.’ Smithy looked at me dead-pan over the rim of his glass. ‘I’m rather curious to see what does happen when we get to Bear Island.’

  ‘It might be interesting.’

  ‘Very non-committal. It might, says he thoughtfully, be equally interesting to provoke some kind of reaction in Dr Marlowe. Just once. Just for the record—my own private record. I wonder if I could do it. Do you remember I said on the bridge in the very early hours of this morning that we might just possibly have to call for help and that if we had to we had a transmitter here that could reach almost anywhere in the northern hemisphere. Not, perhaps, my exact words, but the gist is accurate?’

  ‘The gist is accurate.’ Even to myself the repetition of the words sounded mechanical and I had to make a conscious effort not to shiver as an ice-shod centipede started up a fandango between my shoulder-blades.

  ‘Well, we can call for help till we’re blue in the face, this transmitter here can no longer reach as far as the galley.’ For once, almost unbelievably, Smithy’s face was registering an emotion other than amusement. His face tight with anger, he produced a screwdriver from his pocket and turned to the big steel-blue receiver-transmitter on the inner bulkhead.

  ‘Do you always carry a screwdriver about with you?’ The sheer banality of the question made it apposite in the circumstances.

  ‘Only when I call up the radio station at Tunheim in north-east Bear Island and get no reply. And that’s no ordinary radio station, it’s an official Norwegian Government base.’ Smithy set to work on the face-plate screws. ‘I’ve already had this damned thing off about an hour ago. You’ll see in a jiffy why I put it back on again.’

  While I was waiting for this jiffy to pass I recalled our conversation on the bridge in the very early hours of the morning, the time he’d referred to the radio and the relative closeness— and, by inference, the availability—of the NATO Atlantic forces. It had been immediately afterwards that I’d looked through the starboard screen door and seen the sharp fresh footprints in the snow, footprints, I’d been immediately certain, that had been made by an eavesdropper, a preposterous idea I’d almost as quickly put out of my mind when I’d appreciated that there had been only one set of footprints there, those which I made myself. For some now inexplicable reason it had never occurred to me that any person clever enough to have been responsible for the series of undetected crimes that had taken place aboard the Morning Rose would have been far too clever to have overlooked the blinding obviousness of the advantage that lay in using footsteps already there. The footsteps had, indeed, been newly made, our ubiquitous friend had been abroad again.

  Smithy removed the last of the screws and, not without some effort, removed the face-plate. I looked at the revealed interior for about ten seconds, then said: ‘I see now why you put the face-plate back on. The only thing that puzzles me is that that cabinet looks a bit small for a man to get inside it with a fourteen pound sledgehammer.’

  ‘Looks just like it, doesn’t it?’ The tangled mess of wreckage inside was, literally, indescribable. The vandal who had been at work had seen to it that, irrespective of how vast a range of spares were carried, the receiver-transmitter could never be made operable again. ‘You’ve seen enough?’

  ‘I think so.’ He started to replace the cover and I said: ‘You’ve radios in the lifeboats?’

  ‘Yes. Hand-cranked. They’ll reach farther than the galley but a megaphone would be about as good.’

  ‘You’ll have to report this to the captain, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then it’s heigh-ho for Hammerfest?’

  ‘Twenty-four hours from now and he can heigh-ho for Tahiti as far as I’m concerned.’ Smithy tightened the last screw. ‘That’s when I’m going to tell him. Twenty-four hours from now. Maybe twenty-six.’

  ‘Your outside limit for dropping anchor in Sor-hamna?’

  ‘Tying up. Yes.’

  ‘You’re a very deceitful man, Smithy.’

  ‘It’s the company I keep. And the life I lead.’

  ‘You’re not to blame yourself, Smithy,’ I said kindly. ‘We live in vexed and troubled times.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When the Norwegian compilers of the report on Bear Island had spoken of it as possessing perhaps the most inhospitably bleak coastline in the world, they had been speaking with the measured understatement of true professional geographers. As we approached it in the first light of dawn—which in those latitudes, at that time of year, and under grey and lowering skies which were not only full of snow but getting rid of it as fast as they could, was as near mid forenoon as made no difference—it presented the most awesome, awe-inspiring and, in the true sense of the word, awful spectacle of nature it had ever been my misfortune to behold. A frightening desolation, it was a weird combination of the wickedly repellent and unwillingly fascinating, an evil and dreadful and sinister place, a place full of the terrifying intimation of mortality, the culmination of all the terrors for our long-lost Nordic ancestors, for whom hell was the land of eternal cold and for whom this would be the eternally frozen purgatory to be visited only in their dying nightmares.

  Bear Island was black. That was the shocking, the almost frightful thing about it. Bear Island was black, black as a widow’s weeds. Here in the regions of year-long snow and ice, where, in winter, even the waters of the Barents Sea ran a milky white, to find this ebony mass towering 1500 vertical feet up into the grey overcast evoked the same feeling of total disbelief, the same numbing impact, although here magnified a hundredfold, as does the first glimpse of the black cliff of the north face of the Eiger rearing up its appalling grandeur among the snows of the Bernese Oberland: this benumbment of the senses stemmed from a dichotomous struggle to accept the evidence before the eyes, for while reason said that it had to be so, that primeval part of the mind that existed long before man knew what reason was just flatly refused to accept it.

  We were just south-west of the most southerly tip of Bear Island, steaming due east through the calmest seas that we had encountered since leaving Wick, but even that term was only relative, it was still necessary to hang on to something if one wished to maintain the perpendicular. Overall, the weather hadn’t changed any for the better, the comparative moderating of the seas was due entirely to the fact that the wind blew now directly from the north and we were in the lee of whatever little shelter was afforded by those giant cliffs. W
e were making this particular approach to our destination at Otto’s request for he was understandably anxious to build up a library of background shots which, so far, was completely non-existent, and those bleak precipices would have made a cameraman’s or director’s dream: but Otto’s luck was running true to form, those driving gusts of snow, which would in any event have driven straight into the camera lens and completely obscured it, more often than not obscured the cliffs themselves.

  Due north lay the highest cliffs of the island, the polomite battlements of the Hambergfjell dropping like a stone into the spume-topped waves that lashed its base, with, standing out to sea, an imposing rock needle thrusting up at least 250 feet: to the north-east, and less than a mile distant, stood the equally magnificent Bird Fell cliffs with, clustered at their foot, an incredible series of high stacks, pinnacles and arches that could only have been the handiwork of some Herculean sculptor, at once both blind and mad.

  All this we—about ten others and myself—could see purely by courtesy of the fact that we were on the bridge which had its for’ard screen windows equipped with a high-speed Kent clear-view screen directly in front of the helmsman—which at this particular moment was Smithy—while on either side were two very large windscreen-wipers which coped rather less effectively with the gusting snow.

  I was standing with Conrad, Lonnie and Mary Stuart in front of the port wiper. Conrad, who was by no means as dashing in real life as he was on the screen, appeared to have struck up some kind of diffident friendship with Mary, which, I reflected, was as well for her social life as she’d barely spoken to me since the morning of the previous day, which might have been interpreted as being a bit graceless of her considering I’d incurred a large variety of aches and cramps in preventing her from falling to the floor during most of the preceding night. She hadn’t exactly avoided me in the past twenty-four hours but neither had she sought me out, maybe she had certain things on her mind, such as her conscience and her unforgiveable treatment of me: nor had I exactly sought her out for I, too, had a couple of things on my mind, the first of which was herself.

  I had developed towards her a markedly ambivalent feeling: while I had to be grateful to her for having, however unwittingly, saved my life because her aversion to scotch had prevented me from having the last nightcap I’d ever have had in this world, at the same time she’d prevented me from moving around and, just possibly, stumbling upon the lad who had been wandering about in the middle watches with illintent in his heart and a sledge-hammer in his hand. That she, and for whomsoever she worked, knew beyond question that I was a person who might have reason to be abroad at inconvenient hours I no longer doubted. And the second thing in my mind was the ‘whomsoever’: I no longer doubted that it was Heissman and perhaps he didn’t even stand in need of an accomplice: doctors, by the nature of their profession, are even more fallible and liable to error than the average run of mankind and I might well have been in error when I’d seen him on his bed in pain and judged him unfit to move around. Moreover, Goin apart, he was the only man with a cabin to himself and so able to sally out and return undetected by a room-mate. And, of course, there was always this mysterious Siberian background of his. None of which, not even his secret meeting with Mary Stuart, was enough to hang a cat on.

  Lonnie touched my arm and I turned. He smelt like a distillery. He said: ‘Remember what we were talking about? Two nights ago.’

  ‘We talked about a lot of things.’

  ‘Bars.’

  ‘Don’t you ever think of anything else, Lonnie? Bars? What bars?’

  ‘In the great hereafter,’ Lonnie said solemnly. ‘Do you think there are any there? In heaven, I mean. I mean, you couldn’t very well call it heaven if there are no bars there, now could you? I mean, I wouldn’t call it an act of kindness to send an old man like me to a prohibition heaven, now would you? It wouldn’t be kind.’

  ‘I don’t know, Lonnie. On biblical evidence I should expect there would be some wine around. And lots of milk and honey.’ Lonnie looked pained. ‘What leads you to expect that you’re ever going to be faced with the problem?’

  ‘I was but posing a hypothetic question.’ The old man spoke with dignity. ‘It would be positively unChristian to send me there. God, I’m thirsty. Unkind is what I mean. I mean, charity is the greatest of Christian virtues.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘An act of the greatest uncharity, my dear boy, the very negation of the spirit of kindness.’ Lonnie gazed out through a side window at the fantastically shaped islets of Keilhous Oy, Hosteinen and Stappen, now directly off our port beam and less than half a mile distant. His face was set in lines of tranquil sacrifice. He was as drunk as an owl.

  ‘You do believe in this kindness, Lonnie?’ I said curiously. After a lifetime in the cinema business I didn’t see how he possibly could.

  ‘What else is there, my dear boy?’

  ‘Even to those who don’t deserve it?’

  ‘Ah! Now. There is the point. Those are the ones who deserve it most.’

  ‘Even Judith Haynes?’

  He looked as if I had struck him and when I saw the expression on his face I felt as if I had struck him, even although I felt his to be a mysteriously exaggerated reaction. I reached out a hand even as I was about to apologize for I knew not what, but he turned away, a curious sadness on his face, and left the bridge.

  ‘Now I’ve seen the impossible,’ Conrad said. He wasn’t smiling but he wasn’t being censorious either. ‘Someone has at last given offence to Lonnie Gilbert.’

  ‘One has to work at it,’ I said. ‘I’ve transgressed against Lonnie’s creed. He thinks that I’m unkind.’

  ‘Unkind?’ Mary Stuart laid a hand on the arm I was using to steady myself. The skin under the brown eyes was perceptibly darker than it had been thirty-six hours ago and was even beginning to look puffy and the whites of the eyes themselves were dulled and slightly tinged with red. She hesitated, as if about to say something, then her gaze shifted to a point over my left shoulder. I turned.

  Captain Imrie closed the starboard wheel-house door behind him. Insofar as it was possible to detect the shift and play of expression on that splendidly bewhiskered and bearded face, it seemed that the captain was upset, even agitated. He crossed directly to Smithy and spoke to him in a low and urgent voice. Smithy registered surprise, then shook his head. Captain Imrie spoke again, briefly. Smithy shrugged his shoulders, then said something in return. Both men looked at me and I knew there was more trouble coming, if not actually arrived, if for no reason other than that so far nothing untowards had happened with which I hadn’t been directly or indirectly concerned. Captain Imrie fixed me with his piercing blue eyes, jerked his head with most uncharacteristic peremptoriness towards the chart-room door and headed for it himself. I shrugged my own shoulders in apology to Mary and Conrad and followed. Captain Imrie closed the door behind me.

  ‘More trouble, mister.’ I didn’t much care for the way he called me ‘mister’. ‘One of the film crew, John Halliday, has disappeared.’

  ‘Disappeared where?’ It wasn’t a very intelligent question but then it wasn’t meant to be.

  ‘That’s what I’d like to know.’ I didn’t much care for the way he looked at me either.

  ‘He can’t just have disappeared. I mean, you’ve searched for him?’

  ‘We’ve searched for him, all right.’ The voice was harsh with strain. ‘From anchor locker to stern-post. He’s not aboard the Morning Rose.’

  ‘My God,’ I said. ‘This is awful.’ I looked at him in what I hoped registered as puzzlement. ‘But why tell me all this?’

  ‘Because I thought you might be able to help us.’

  ‘Help you? I’d like to, but how? I assume that you can only be approaching me in my medical capacity and I can assure you that there’s absolutely nothing in what I’ve seen of him or read in his medical history—’

  ‘I wasn’t approaching you in your bloody medical capacity!’ Captain Imrie had started to breath
e very heavily. ‘I just thought you might help me in other ways. Bloody strange, isn’t it, mister, that you’ve been in the thick of everything that’s been happening?’ I’d nothing to say to this, I’d just been thinking the same thing myself. ‘How it was you who just “happened” to find Antonio dead. How it was you who just “happened” to go to the bridge when Smith and Oakley were ill. How was it you who went straight to the stewards’ cabin in the crew quarters. Next thing, I suppose, you’d have gone straight to Mr Gerran’s cabin and found him dead also, if Mr Goin hadn’t had the good luck to go there first. And isn’t it bloody strange, mister, that a doctor, the one person who could have helped those people and seemingly couldn’t is the one person aboard with enough medical knowledge to make them sick in the first place?’

  No question—looking at it from his angle—Captain Imrie was developing quite a reasonable point of view. I was more than vaguely surprised to find that he was capable of developing a point of view in the first place. Clearly, I’d been underestimating him: just how much I was immediately to realize.

  ‘And just why were you spending so much time in the galley late the night before last—when I was in my bed, damn you? The place where all the poison came from. Haggerty told me. He told me you were poking around—and got him out of the galley for a spell. You didn’t find what you wanted. But you came back later, didn’t you? Wanted to find out where the food left-overs were, didn’t you? Pretended you were surprised when they were gone. That would look good in court.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, you silly old—’

  ‘And you were very, very late abroad that night, weren’t you? Oh, yes, I’ve been making inquiries. Up in the saloon—Mr Goin told me: up on the bridge—Oakley told me: down in the lounge—Gilbert told me: and—’ he paused dramatically—’in Halliday’s cabin—his cabin-mate told me. And, most of all, who was the man who stopped me from going to Hammerfest when I wanted to and persuaded the others to sign this worthless guarantee of yours absolving me from all blame? Tell me that, eh, mister?’