by L. A. Larkin
He turns his head to look at her. ‘Of course.’
Wolfe focuses on the pavement ahead. It’s like she’s talking to her dad about her sex life. Feels wrong. ‘I’ll write them down but my boyfriends are few and far between. Anyway, I never bring them to my flat.’
‘Doesn’t matter, Liv. One of them could’ve followed you home.’
Wolfe frowns at him, uncomfortable with the thought. They are silent for a while.
‘From what you’ve told me,’ ruminates Butcher, ‘he doesn’t sound like a sexual predator. It’s unlikely he’d take this long to attack you.’
‘Jees, that’s reassuring.’
‘Who else has threatened you?’
Wolfe considers the question for a moment. ‘Davy’s wife? She swore she’d get her revenge.’
‘Yup, I can see her doing it. But I’m not sure she’s the subtle type. She’s more likely to throw a brick through your window or try to run you over.’
‘True.’
‘Anyone else?’ He scrutinises her face.
‘Jerry, just go through my features. There’s a long list.’
They turn right down Trinity Road, passing Tooting Bec Tube station on the corner.
‘You’re missing someone obvious.’
Wolfe chews at an already stunted fingernail. ‘He’s in prison.’
‘Yup,’ nods Butcher, ‘but that doesn’t mean he can’t get to you.’
‘I just don’t think he’d do it.’
‘Really? You helped put your brother away for seven years. Don’t you think he’s a little angry?’
9
Your pale body flashes by the camera like a ghost. Then you are gone. I lean back in my swivel chair, rest my socked feet on the desk and plough into a packet of ready salted crisps. I’m bathed in blue light from my monitor. The rest of the room has fallen away into blackness. Nevertheless, I sense Dr Sharma’s report, calling me like a siren to doomed sailors. Each one of six photocopied pages is neatly Blu-Tack’d to the wall facing me, the paper barely visible as ghostly shapes hovering in the gloom. There’s a copy in the bathroom. And my bedroom. Mustn’t forget the kitchen either. And my underwear drawer. And taped above a shelf in the garden shed. The good doctor and I are locked in an embrace from which I can’t escape. I resist the urge to switch on the light and read it again, my finger tracing each line, as I mouth the words. A partial truth. One day, I will discover what really happened.
Through the locked door I hear a burble of voices, a TV blaring, clanking pots in the kitchen, a creaking floorboard above. They know better than to disturb me. They’ve seen what happens. Boiling water poured over a hand sorts out these misunderstandings rather effectively, I find. An accident, of course, and I was so very sorry. But I don’t want anyone poking around. This place is mine. It’s the only thing that really is. Mind you, it’s not that the fuckwits will ever get to read my diary. My iPad automatically locks after five minutes of inactivity and my fingerprint alone unlocks it. Only I have a key to my study, if you can call a room too small to fit a bed, which used to be full of junk, a study.
Bored, I divide my screen-viewing in two, and log into a hackers’ chat room under the name H5N1. Invisible, always morphing, and, usually, deadly. Scanning the online conversations, I’m not at all surprised to find Slave Trader - otherwise known as my computing and systems development tutor, Warren Butler - online, boasting he’ll soon have a new ‘slave’ for sale. I can still smell his vinegary sweat and see his pudgy fingers on my keyboard. When he’s at my house, we use my old laptop. I can’t risk him using my iPad. The sneaky fat twat could install spyware in the blink of an eye. I’m pretty good at this stuff, but I’m still learning. And re-learning.
Warren has a weakness, or perhaps I should call it an obsession: he likes spying on attractive women, watching them inside their homes, ideally the bedroom, but that depends where the computer is located. One lunch break at college, I caught him doing it, and in return for my silence, he’s teaching me all I need to know about cyber-stalking. It’s slow going. But when I’ve finished with you, Olivia, Warren gets full viewing rights. Of course, he’ll sell them. If only you knew the number of sad gits who’ll be wanking off watching you from the comfort of their homes. I make a note to hack the voyeurs and anonymously email you some footage so you can see how thoroughly your privacy has been violated. But for now, you are my very own private Olivia Wolfe Show.
You are back on screen again, unaware of the Remote Access Trojan, or RAT, you unwittingly downloaded earlier today. That email wasn’t really from Mozart Cohen. Lurking inside the attachment was a nifty little piece of code that gives me control over your computer, including your webcam. I read every email, see every website you visit, watch you write. I guess the end of your sentences. I’m usually correct. And now I can switch your webcam on and off whenever I choose and you have no way of knowing I’ve invaded your life, your home and your thoughts, because the malware has deactivated your webcam’s green ‘on’ light.
Wearing a white, towelling bathrobe, you lean over your desk to adjust the position of your monitor, your face monstrously large, your eyelids - framed by thick dark eyelashes - heavy with tiredness, your black bob tucked behind your ears. Along your cheekbone, almost hidden by the purple bruise, is a semi-circular cut. Your smartphone rings. You answer. All I can see is your torso.
I catch my breath.
Your robe isn’t tied and has fallen open. Warren boasts that some of his slaves use their computers in their underwear. Some webcams even face the bed. I have hit the jackpot. Your dark pubic hair is shaped like a postage stamp and the pearl on your bellybutton ring catches the light from your desk lamp. I reach out and touch the screen, brushing my fingers across your pert B-cup breasts, and trace small circles around your dark areolae, each marred by a sluttish silver ring.
You sit, pulling your robe around you so you’re covered again, arguing with Cohen. I hear your side of the conversation only, but I get the gist of it: Cohen is furious about your deal with Casburn. He wants you to leave the Lalzad-Isil story alone. You stop speaking and stare, wide-eyed, at the phone. I’m guessing Cohen has slammed it down on you. You ring him back. Contrite. Apologise. Promise that while you’re working the Antarctic story, you’ll pass Casburn’s intel on to Soames. But I can see your face. Moz can’t. Nooria means too much to you; you’re lying. Moz wishes you a safe trip. You sip at your green tea, deep in thought.
‘Come on, Olivia, do something!’
As if you’re responding to my command as effectively as your laptop does, you lean forward, touch typing fast, never glancing at the keyboard. It’s as if you are looking straight at me, but your eyes move very slightly, following the words as they dance across the screen. My skin tingles.
Cohen has forwarded to you Professor Heatherton’s emails, along with the CVs of his team; what the drilling project entails; and a detailed timeline of mishaps and death that have ground the project to a halt. You skim-read, devouring the data, and so do I, almost keeping up, missing the last phrase or two. You hone in on Vitaly Yushkov. No record of his birth, no school photos. He would have done conscription, but you cannot find anything to suggest he stayed in the military. His CV says he spent thirteen years as a ship’s engineer but nothing about where he got his training. No social media or mainstream media or blogs about his defection. His life history has more holes than a sieve.
‘Who censored you?’ you ask aloud.
Your eyelids droop. A yawn. You swivel in your chair and stare at the wall behind you. Where Nooria’s picture used to hang, there is now a bare white space amidst black square frames. I imagine you frowning; perhaps you feel some discomfort, like heartburn? You are plagued by her death, aren’t you? How distressing to find her picture stolen. Closing down your computer, we part company for the night.
I look down into my bin. There Nooria lies, the glass shattered.
10
Wolfe has been cooped up with Trent Rundle in the t
ractor’s cabin for four hours as they traverse the Ellsworth Mountains to reach the camp. She’s sixteen thousand kilometres from London and feels she has truly reached the end of the Earth.
Rundle is the most junior member of Heatherton’s team and, Wolfe suspects, the most garrulous. By now, she probably knows as much about the twenty-eight-year-old Rundle as his girlfriend, Miranda, twenty-six, who wants to get married and if he doesn’t propose when he gets home, she’ll probably dump him. Miranda won’t move in with him until they’re engaged, he says, rolling his eyes, so he still has Sunday lunch at his mum’s house and she washes his dirty laundry. None of this helps Wolfe further her investigation. She steers the conversation to the hot water drilling, which has resumed, now the boiler is working at full capacity. As machinist and water probe design engineer on secondment from the National Oceanography Centre, Rundle is clearly proud of his contribution to Project Persephone.
‘Aren’t you needed at the drill site?’
‘The probe isn’t used until the drilling’s over, and we estimate twenty-four hours before we reach the lake’s surface. Besides, I know this route like the back of my hand, where all the crevasses are. Michael doesn’t trust the old girl with anyone else.’ Rundle pats the tractor’s steering wheel, then gives Wolfe a cheeky grin. ‘Or its precious cargo.’
But when she broaches the subject of Kevin Knox’s death and rumours of sabotage, he goes very quiet.
‘Poor sod,’ is all Rundle will say.
Earlier, at Union Glacier, she’d watched Rundle and the pilot carry the dead man, shrouded in a white body bag, into the plane’s cargo hold to be flown home to his grieving family in Lancashire.
Wolfe stares ahead through the tractor windscreen, which extends from the footwell up to the roof, the headlights illuminating the swirling ice particles that slam into the safety glass. Long windscreen wipers sweep them away and the heater inside the cabin helps to keep their view clear, even if it’s like peering through fog. Out front, the huge curved blades of the snowplough are raised. From front-on they remind Wolfe of a scorpion’s pincers. The tractor crawls forward on caterpillar tracks, like a military tank, and the cabin vibrates as the engine roars, rattling her bones. Even so, she’s managed to grab some much-needed sleep.
‘Not long now,’ Trent says, glancing her way. ‘We’re through the worst of it.’
‘How many times have you done this?’ she asks.
‘Twelve, towing eighteen tonnes of equipment each time.’
Since landing on the ice runway at Union Glacier, vicious winds do their best to harry them and impede Wolfe from completing her interminable journey. She sits up straight and moves her stiff neck from side to side, and tries raising her arms above her head to stretch, but there isn’t enough room.
‘So tell me about hypothermia,’ she says, having one last go at getting Rundle talking about a potential traitor. She knows about hypothermia’s effects first hand, having suffered from a mild dose herself in the Safed Koh mountains of Afghanistan.
There is reluctance in Rundle’s mahogany brown eyes, the same colour as his wavy hair and beard.
‘I’m not a doctor, Olivia.’
‘Oh, come on, Trent. Help me out here. I know jack-shit about this stuff.’ Pleading ignorance often encourages people to talk.
He nods, then gives her the kind of boyish grin that would melt hearts.
‘You’re a whole lot more interesting than Charles Harvey, and a whole lot prettier. It’s nice to have some female company for a change.’ His cheeks flush red. ‘Apart from Stacy, of course. But she’s one of the lads.’
He is referring to the only woman on the ten-person team: Dr Stacy Price. Rundle gives Wolfe a cheeky grin. He’s good looking and uses it to cover his gaffes.
‘So tell me why you think Kevin threw his coat and boots away.’
He shrugs once. ‘I dunno. They say when hypothermia is really bad, you feel like you’re overheating.’
‘Did you find them? His coat, boots and gloves, I mean?’
‘Nah, never did. But his gear would’ve been buried in the storm.’
‘How did he manage to get half a mile from camp?’
‘No idea.’
Wolfe scratches her head. ‘Did he use the snowmobile?’
‘Nah, we checked.’
‘Who noticed him missing?’
‘Vitaly. I’m told he was talking to Michael, so he didn’t get to the boiler for about five minutes. When he got there - no Kev. He searched the obvious places, then sounded the alarm.’
‘And how long was Vitaly out searching, before he reported Kev missing?’
Rundle glances at her. ‘You sound like Agatha Christie or something.’ She smiles and waits. ‘Jesus, you’ve got amazing eyes.’
Wolfe ignores his deflection from the topic. ‘So was Vitaly gone long?’
‘Dunno. I was in the workshop. Knew nothing until Toby came to get me.’
‘Dr Toby Sinclair, the environmental microbiologist?’
‘Yup, that’s him. You’ve done your homework.’ He nods at the windscreen. ‘Weather’s clearing. Knew it would once we got into the valley.’
Even though the tractor still grunts and grinds, it’s quieter outside. The wind has slowed and visibility has improved. Wolfe stares ahead at what looks like a sea of frozen waves.
‘What causes that rippling effect?’
‘Sastrugi,’ Rundle says. ‘It’s the wind that does it. Beneath the ice is a long and narrow lake, approximately twenty-nine square kilometres. About the size of Lake Windermere.’
Wolfe can’t help looking down at the tractor floor, imagining the subglacial lake beneath them. ‘How thick’s the ice?’
‘We think three kilometres. But I guess we’re about to find out.’
‘Thick enough to support this, then.’ She sounds relieved.
‘Thick enough to make drilling, without using antifreeze, about as difficult as it’s possible to get. As fast as we drill, the bore hole freezes up, unless we keep shooting boiling water down it.’
‘Is that what happened at Vostok?’
‘Yup, Trankov’s team used antifreeze to keep the hole open and then the kerosene drilling fluid leaked into the lake. They’re out to win at any cost, but it backfired on them, didn’t it?’
‘They contaminated their samples?’
‘Sure did.’
‘And you think Lake Ellsworth is liquid?’
‘Yes, warmed by geothermal heat from the Earth’s interior.’
Ahead is nothing but windswept waves of ice. No colour. No penguins or birds in the sky. No life. It’s as if even Mother Nature has abandoned such an inhospitable place. The jagged white peaks of the semi-circular Ellsworth Mountains curve around the ice-covered valley. The sky above them is a soft pink and the mountains cast sharp shadows. She has no idea what time it is at Camp Ellsworth, just that it’s evening. Rundle has warned her about the permanent daylight of summer in Antarctica and how difficult it can be to sleep. Wolfe leans forward. In the distance she thinks she sees red pyramids and some dark rectangular shapes protruding out of the whiteness, and something colourful, raised high and flapping in the wind.
‘Over there. Is that the site?’
‘Sure is.’
Soon Wolfe sees a huge Union Jack. It seems to dwarf everything else beneath it, as if the flag somehow protects the people below. As they approach the camp, Wolfe makes out red marker flags and several dark blue boxes she guesses are the converted shipping containers. Rundle explains that one is a laboratory, another is the drilling operations centre and communications room, and the last container stores vehicles and equipment. At the centre of the camp is a long red tent known as a Weatherhaven, shaped like a cylinder cut in half, which faces two rows of red pyramid tents - the sleeping quarters - and, behind them, three large circular pools of steaming water, contained by what look like yellow, oversized children’s paddling pools. The onion tanks.
Rundle blows the tractor h
orn. Three orange figures are huddled around a small crane and what looks like a six-foot-high yellow cotton reel lying on its side. They wave in response.
‘What’s that yellow spool?’
‘The hose. Kevlar reinforced. Three point four kilometres of it, so we should have enough.’ He grins. ‘See the crane? It keeps the hose centred above the bore hole and feeds it down.’
He cuts the engine near one of the container sheds.
‘Time to see history being made,’ Rundle says, clearly happy to be back in the action. He pulls on his black windproof parka and woollen hat, then pauses.
‘Don’t be surprised if they ask about your face.’ His gaze moves to her now purple and yellow-green bruise. ‘See you later.’
Wolfe watches him jump down from the cabin and race off. Grabbing her backpack from the seat next to her, she opens the door and jumps, landing with a crunch on the ice. It’s a relatively mild minus twenty-two degrees Celsius. She’s wearing one of the Lake Ellsworth branded parkas. It’s a man’s small size, which is big for her, but she has a fleece and thermal vest underneath. She looks around and sees the three men handling the hose are wearing orange coveralls and hard hats over black beanies. The noise from the crane supporting the giant hose jars like a digger scraping the asphalt off a road. Someone steps out of the middle shipping container, then strides in her direction.
‘Olivia! Welcome to our humble camp. Michael Heatherton.’
Neat and clean-shaven, he gives the impression he has everything under control, except for his mop of grey wiry hair that springs out from beneath his beanie, threatening to dislodge it. He is about to extend his hand when he notices her bruise.
‘Got punched in Afghanistan. Guess he didn’t like my story,’ she jokes.
Heatherton’s eyes open wide. He recovers himself and offers his hand. His grip is strong, as if he is trying to assert his dominance.
‘Perfect timing,’ he says, beaming at her. ‘We’re still drilling. Come with me.’