Bear Island

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Where is he?’ she moaned. ‘He’s my husband, my husband. I want to see him.’

  ‘Better not, Miss Haynes.’ Goin could be surprisingly gentle. ‘As Dr Marlowe says, we’ll take care of things. You’ve seen him already and no good can come—’

  ‘Bring him in. Bring him in.’ A voice devoid of life but the will absolute. ‘I must see him again.’

  I rose and went to the door. The Count barred my way. His aquiline, aristocratic features held a mixture of revulsion and horror. ‘You can’t do that. It’s too ghastly—it’s—it’s macabre.’

  ‘What do you think that I think it is?’ I felt savage but I know I didn’t sound that way, I think I only sounded tired. ‘If I don’t bring him in, she’ll just go outside again. It’s not much of a night for being outside.’

  So we brought him in, the same three of us, Jungbeck and Conrad and myself, and we laid him on his back so that the fearful wound in the occiput didn’t show. Judith Haynes rose from her camp-cot, moved slowly towards him like a person in a dream and sank to her knees. Without moving, she looked at him for some moments then reached out and gently touched the gashed face. No one spoke, no one moved. Not without effort, she pulled his right arm close in to his side, made to do the same with his left, noticed that the fist was still clenched and carefully prised it open.

  A brown circular object lay in the palm of his hand. She took it, placed it in the palm of her own hand, straightened—still on her knees—and swung in a slow semi-circle showing us what she held. Then, her hand outstretched towards him, she looked at Allen. We all looked at Allen.

  The brown leather button in her hand matched the still remaining buttons on Allen’s torn coat.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I’m not sure how long the silence went on, a silence that the almost intolerable hiss of the lamps and the ululating moan of the south wind served only to deepen. It must have lasted at least ten seconds, although it seemed many times as long, a seemingly interminable period of time during which nobody moved and nothing moved, not even eyes, for Allen’s eyes were fixed on the button in Judith Haynes’s hand in fascinated uncom-prehension, while every other eye in the room was on Allen. That one small leather-covered button held us all in thrall.

  Judith Haynes was the first to move. She rose, very slowly, as if it called for a tremendous effort of both mind and muscle, and stood there for a moment, as if irresolute. She seemed quiet now and very resigned and because this was the wrong reaction altogether I looked past her towards Conrad and Smithy and caught the eyes of both. Conrad lowered his eyes briefly as if in acknowledgment of a signal, Smithy shifted his gaze towards Judith Haynes and when she began to move away from the body of her husband both of them moved casually towards each other to block off her clearly intended approach to Allen. Judith Haynes stopped, looked at them and smiled.

  ‘That won’t be necessary at all,’ she said. She tossed the button to Allen who caught it in involuntary reaction. He held it in his hand, staring at it, then looked up in perplexity at Judith Haynes, who smiled again. ‘You’ll be needing that, won’t you?’ she said, and walked in the direction of her allocated room.

  I relaxed and was aware that others were doing so also, for I could hear the slow exhalation of breaths of those standing closest to me. I looked away from Judith Haynes to Allen, and that was a mistake because I had relaxed too soon, I’d been instinctively aware that the seemingly quiet and sad resignation had been wholly out of character but had put it down to the effects of the shattering shock she had just received.

  ‘You killed him, you killed him!’ Her voice was an insane scream, but no more insane than the demented fury with which she was attacking Mary Darling who had already stumbled over backwards, the other woman falling on top of her, clawing viciously with hooked fingers. ‘You bitch, you whore, you filthy slut, you—you murderess! You’re the person who killed him! You killed my husband! You! You!’ Sobbing and shrieking maniacal invective at the terrified and momentarily paralysed Mary Darling who had already lost her big horn-rimmed spectacles, Judith Haynes wound one hand round the unfortunate Mary’s hair and was reaching for her eyes with the other when Smithy and Conrad got to her. Both were big strong men but she fought with such crazed and tigerish ferocity—and they had at the same time to cope with two equally hysterical dogs— that it took them quite some seconds to pull her clear, and even then she clung with the strength of madness to Mary’s hair, a grip that Smithy ruthlessly and without hesitation broke by squeezing her wrist until she shrieked with pain. They dragged her upright and she continued to scream hysterically with all the strength of her lungs, no longer attempting even to mouth words, just that horrible nerve-drilling shrieking like some animal in its dying agony, then the sound abruptly ceased, her legs buckled and Smithy and Conrad eased her to the floor.

  Conrad looked at me. ‘Act two?’ He was breathing heavily and looked pale.

  ‘No. This is real. Will you please take her to her cubicle?’ I looked at the shocked and sobbing Mary but she didn’t need any immediate assistance from me, for Allen, his own injuries forgotten, had dropped to his knees beside her, raised her to a sitting position and was using a none too clean handkerchief to dab at the three deep and ugly scratches that had been torn down the length of her left cheek. I left them, went into my cubicle, prepared a hypodermic and entered the cubicle where Judith Haynes had been taken. Smithy and Conrad were standing watchfully by and had been joined by Otto, the Count and Goin. Otto looked at the syringe and caught my arm.

  ‘Is that—is that for my daughter? What are you going to do to her? It’s all over now, man—good God, you can see she’s unconscious.’

  ‘And I’m going to see that she bloody well stays that way,’ I said. ‘For hours and hours and hours. That way it’s best for her and best for all of us. All right, I’m sorry for your daughter, she’s had a tremendous shock, but medically I’m not concerned with that, I’m just concerned with how best to treat her for the condition she’s in now, which is frankly unbalanced, unstable and highly dangerous. Or do you want to have a look at Mary Darling again?’

  Otto hesitated but Goin, calmly reasonable as always, came to my help. ‘Dr Marlowe is perfectly right, Otto—and it’s for Judith’s own good, after such a shock a long rest can only help. This is the best thing for her.’

  I wasn’t so sure about that, I’d have preferred a strait-jacket, but I nodded my thanks to Goin, administered the injection, helped bundle her into a zipped sleeping-bag, saw that she was covered over and above that with a sufficiency of blankets and left her. I took the dogs with me and put them in my own cubicle—I don’t much like having animals, especially highly-strung ones, in the company of a person under sedation.

  Allen had Mary Darling seated on a bench now but was still dabbing her cheek. She’d stopped sobbing now, was just breathing with long quivering in-drawn gasps and, scratches apart, didn’t seem much the worse for an experience that must have been as harrowing as it was brief. Lonnie was standing a few feet away, looking sorrowfully at the girl and shaking his head.

  ‘Poor, poor lassie,’ he said quietly. ‘Poor little girl.’

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘If I do a halfway job the scratches won’t even scar.’ I looked at Stryker’s body and decided that its removal to the tractor shed was clearly the first priority: apart from Lonnie and Allen, no one had eyes for anything else, and even although out of sight would not necessarily be out of mind, the absence of that mutilated body could hardly fail to improve morale.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about young Mary.’ Lonnie had my attention again. ‘I was thinking about Judith Haynes. Poor, lonely lassie.’ I looked at him closely but I should have known him well enough by then to realize that he was incapable of either dissimulation or duplicity: he looked as sad as he sounded.

  ‘Lonnie,’ I said, ‘you never cease to astonish me.’ I lit the oil stove, put some water on to heat, then turned to Stryker. Both Smithy and Conrad wer
e waiting and words were unnecessary. Lonnie insisted on coming with us, to open doors and hold a flash-light: we left Stryker in the tractor shed and went back to the main cabin. Smithy and Conrad went inside but Lonnie showed no intentions of following them. He stood there as if deep in thought, seemingly oblivious of a wind now strong enough to have to lean against, of a thickening driving snow now approaching the proportions of a blizzard, of the intense and steadily deepening cold.

  ‘I think I’ll stay out here a bit,’ he said. ‘Nothing like a little fresh air to clear the head.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ I said. I took the torch from him and directed its beam at the nearest hut. ‘In there. On the left.’ Wherever else Olympus Productions may have fallen short in the commissariat department, it hadn’t been in the line of alcoholic stimulants.

  ‘My dear fellow.’ He retrieved his torch with a firm grasp. ‘I personally supervised its storage.’

  ‘And not even a lock to contend with,’ I said.

  ‘And what if there was? Otto would give me the key.’

  ‘Otto would give you a key?’ I said carefully.

  ‘Of course. Do you think I’m a professional safe-cracker who goes around festooned with strings of skeleton keys? Who do you think gave me the keys to the lounge locker on the Morning Rose?’

  ‘Otto did?’ I said brightly.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What kind of blackmail are you using, Lonnie?’

  ‘Otto is a very, very kind man,’ Lonnie said seriously. ‘I thought I’d told you that?’

  ‘I’d just forgotten.’ I watched him thoughtfully as he plodded purposefully through the deep snow towards the provisions hut, then went inside the main cabin. Most of the people inside, now that Stryker had gone, had transferred their attention to Allen, who was clearly self-consciously aware of this, for he no longer had his arm around Mary, although he still dabbed at her cheek with a handkerchief. Conrad, who had clearly become more than a little smitten by Mary Stuart for he’d sought out her company whenever possible in the past two days, was sitting beside her chafing one of her hands—I assumed she’d been complaining of the temperature which was still barely above freezing—and although she seemed half-reluctant and was smiling in some embarrassment, she wasn’t objecting to the extent of making a song and dance about it. Otto, Goin, the Count and Divine were talking in low voices near one of the oil stoves: Divine, not surprisingly, was there not in the capacity of a contributor to the conversation, but as a bar-tender for he was laying out glasses and bottles under Otto’s fussy direction. Otto beckoned me across.

  ‘After what we’ve just been through,’ he said, ‘I think we’re all badly in need of a restorative.’ That Otto should be lashing out so recklessly with his private supplies was sufficient indication of the extent to which he had been shaken. ‘It will also give us time to decide what to do with him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Allen, of course.’

  ‘Ah. Well, I’m sorry, I’m afraid you gentlemen will have to count me out for both drink and deliberations.’ I nodded to Allen and Mary Darling, both of whom were watching us with some degree of apprehension. ‘A little patching up to do there. Excuse me.’

  I took the now hot water from the oil stove, brought it into my cubicle, put a white cloth on the rickety table that was there, laid out a basin, instruments and what medicaments I thought I’d require, then returned to where Conrad and Mary Stuart were sitting in the main body of the cabin. Like all the other little groups in the cabin they were talking in voices so low as to be virtually whispering, whether from a desire for privacy or because they still felt themselves to be in the presence of death I didn’t know. Conrad, to my complete lack of surprise, was now industriously massaging her other hand, and as that was her left or faraway one I assumed that he hadn’t had to fight for it.

  I said: ‘I’m sorry to interrupt the first-aid but I want to patch up young Allen a bit. I wonder if Mary dear will look after Mary darling for a bit?’

  ‘Mary dear?’ Conrad raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  ‘To distinguish her from Mary darling,’ I explained. ‘It’s what I call her when we’re alone in the long watches of the night.’ She smiled slightly but that was her only reaction.

  ‘Mary dear,’ Conrad said appreciatively. ‘I like it. May I call you that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said mock-seriously. ‘Perhaps it’s copyright.’

  ‘He can have the patent under licence,’ I said. ‘I can always rescind it. What were you two being so conspiratorial about?’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Conrad said. ‘Your opinion, Doc. That stone out there, I mean the lump of rock Stryker was clobbered with. I’d guess the weight about seventy pounds. Would you?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘I asked Mary here if she could lift a rock like that above her head and she said don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Unless she’s an Olympic weight-lifter in disguise, well, yes, you are ridiculous. She couldn’t. Why?’

  ‘Well, just look at her.’ He nodded across at the other Mary. ‘Skin and bone, just skin and bone. Now how—’

  ‘I wouldn’t let Allen hear you.’

  ‘You know what I mean. A rock that size. “Murderess”, Judith Haynes called her. Well, so OK, she was out there looking with the others, but how on earth—’

  ‘I think Miss Haynes had something else in mind,’ I said. I left them, beckoned to Allen, then turned to Smithy who was sitting close by. ‘I require a surgery assistant. Feeling up to it now?’

  ‘Sure.’ He rose. ‘Anything to take my mind off Captain Imrie and the report he must be writing out about me right now.’

  There was nothing I could do to Allen’s face that nature couldn’t do better so I concentrated on the gash on the back of his head. I froze it, shaved the area around it, and jerked my head to Smithy to have a look. He did this and his eyes widened a little but he said nothing. I put eight stitches in the wound and covered it with plaster. During all of this we hadn’t exchanged a word and Allen was obviously very conscious of this.

  He said: ‘You haven’t got much to say to me, have you, Dr Marlowe?’

  ‘A good tradesman doesn’t talk on the job.’

  ‘You’re just thinking what all the others are thinking, aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what all the others are thinking. Well, that’s it. Just comb your hair straight back and no one will know you’re prematurely bald.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ He turned and faced me, hesitated and said: ‘It does look pretty black against me, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not to a doctor.’

  ‘You—you mean you don’t think I did it?’

  ‘It’s not a matter of thinking. It’s a matter of knowing. Look, all in all you’ve had a pretty rough day, you’re more shaken up than you realize, and when that anaesthetic wears off you’re going to hurt a bit. Your cubicle’s next to mine, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Go and lie down for a couple of hours.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘And I’ll send Mary through when I’ve finished with her.’

  He made to speak, then nodded wearily and left. Smithy said: ‘That was nasty. The back of his head, I mean. It must have been one helluva clout.’

  ‘He’s been lucky that his skull isn’t fractured. Doubly lucky in that he’s not even concussed.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Smithy thought for a moment. ‘Look, I’m not a doctor and I’m not very good at coining phrases, but doesn’t this put a rather different complexion upon matters?’

  ‘I am a doctor and it does.’

  He thought some more. ‘Especially when you have a close look at Stryker?’

  ‘Especially that.’

  I brought Mary Darling in. She was very pale, still apprehensive and had a little-girl-lost look about her, but she had herself under control. She looked at Smithy, made as if to speak, hesitated, changed her mind and let me get on with doing wh
at I could. I cleaned and disinfected the scratches, taped them up carefully and said: ‘It’ll itch like fury for a bit, but if you can resist the temptation to haul the plasters off then you’ll have no scars.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor. I’ll try.’ She looked very wan. ‘Can I speak to you, please?’

  ‘Of course.’ She looked at Smithy and I said: ‘You can speak freely. I promise you it will go no farther.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know, but—’

  ‘Mr Gerran is dispensing free scotch out there,’ Smithy said, and made for the door. ‘I’d never forgive myself if I passed up an experience that can happen only once in a lifetime.’

  She had me by the lapels even before Smithy had the door fully closed behind him. There was a frantic worry in her face, a sick misery in the eyes that made me realize just how much it had cost her to maintain her composure while Smithy had been there.

  ‘Allen didn’t do it, Dr Marlowe! He didn’t, I know he didn’t, I swear he didn’t. I know things look awful for him, the fight they had this morning, and now this other fight and that button in—in Mr Stryker’s hand and everything. But I know he didn’t, he told me he didn’t, Allen couldn’t tell a lie, he wouldn’t tell me a lie! And he couldn’t hurt anything, I mean just not kill anybody, I mean hurt anybody, he just couldn’t do it! And I didn’t do it.’ Her fists clenched until the knuckles showed, she was even, for some odd reason, trying to shake me now, and tears were rolling down her face; whatever she’d known in her short life hadn’t prepared her for times and situations like those. She shook her head in despair. ‘I didn’t, I didn’t! A murderess, that’s what she called me! In front of everybody, she called me a murderess! I couldn’t kill anybody, Dr Marlowe, I—’

  ‘Mary.’ I stopped the hysterical flow by the simple process of putting my fingers across her lips. ‘I seriously doubt whether you could dispose of a fly without worrying yourself sick afterwards. You and Allen together—well, if it were a particularly obnoxious fly you just might manage it. I wouldn’t bet on it, though.’