Understrike

by James Barrington

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Like I said, it’s a straight cut. If the guy had still been alive when the knife went in, he’d have been wriggling all over the place. I reckon this was done after he was dead and he was lying right here.’

  ‘Why?’ Mason asked again.

  Barber gestured at the empty wilderness that surrounded them.

  ‘There’s only one reason why anyone would drag a corpse all the way out to a place like this. Whoever did this wanted him to disappear. Just dumping him in the snow wouldn’t have been enough. They wanted him gone forever, and that’s why they gutted him, to get the smell of his body into the air, so that the bears and the foxes would come along and take care of him. If they’d just dumped him, the body would have frozen stiff in a few hours, and it would probably have taken a lot longer for scavengers to find him.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Mason said. ‘What’s the other thing?’

  ‘Snow scooter tracks,’ Barber replied, pointing at the snow-covered ice around the corpse. ‘It snowed here the last two nights, but they weren’t real big falls, like they were forecast to be, and we could still see the tracks in places and followed them. That’s how we got right out here.’ He gestured around the barren whiteness of the ice field. ‘No scooter. So unless this guy drove it out here and then buried it or ate it or something, before he cut himself open, that means someone else drove out here with his body, dumped it and then legged it.’

  Mason turned around in a complete circle, the muzzle of his rifle pointing safely downwards, then resumed his scrutiny of the terrain to the north.

  ‘No tracks here, though,’ he said. ‘Apart from the ones we made, I mean.’

  Barber studied the ground in the vicinity of the corpse, then walked a few feet to one side and bent down. He took off his left glove and used it to brush away the fresh snow that had fallen overnight. Immediately he did so, both men could see the unmistakable marks left by a snowmobile.

  All snowmobiles create a very distinctive track, a central section formed by the wide and flexible drive belt of the vehicle, a broad stripe in the snow crossed by perpendicular lines, the marks left by the studded projections that enabled the Kevlar belt to grip the snow and ice. Different types of belt are studded differently, for different purposes: bigger projections for travelling in deeper snow, smaller ones for high speed on ice or grass, that kind of thing. On either side of that are two parallel marks made by the skis at the front of the vehicle that allow the driver to steer the snowmobile.

  Barber cleared more of the fallen snow out of the way, until they could both see enough of the tracks to work out what had happened.

  ‘You’re right,’ Mason said, pointing with his free hand. ‘A single snowmobile came out here, and over there, that’s where the driver turned it around in a circle and headed back towards town, following pretty much the same route. And he was pulling a sled. You can see the marks where he turned that around as well, those two real narrow tracks in the snow either side of the drive track. I guess the body was on the sled, covered with something to hide it and hold it down.’

  Barber roughly measured the distance between the sled’s tracks with his feet.

  ‘About two and a half feet,’ he said, ‘and I guess with steel skis bonded in along the sides of the sled, so it was a heavy-duty number. Ideal for hauling a stiff. Pretty much like the ones we’re towing. OK, let’s load him up.’

  Barber took out a mobile phone and took about a dozen pictures of the corpse in situ, then another few of the surrounding area, then walked across to the sled hitched behind his snowmobile and picked up a green tarpaulin. He stepped back beside the body, unfolded the tarpaulin next to it and rolled the corpse onto it. There was clearly no point in trying to preserve the scene, but he’d done his best with the photographs. Then he wrapped the material around the dead man, holding it in place with elasticated straps, and picked up and carried the corpse over to his sled.

  Mason didn’t attempt to help him, and Barber would have refused him if he’d tried, because watching out for the bear they’d disturbed, or another one attracted by the smell of the corpse, was far more important to them both.

  Two minutes later, both men climbed back on board their snowmobiles, steered them around in a circle and headed back the way they’d come, travelling at a slow but steady speed. Barber led the way, Mason a few yards behind and following in his tracks, and watching the sled in front of him to make sure that the dead body didn’t get bounced out of it on the uneven terrain.

  Longyearbyen lay almost 20 miles to the west and it was already late afternoon, the sun low down near the horizon, but now they were in no hurry. They’d recovered the body, and when he thought they were within range of the cell tower, Barber would try and get a signal on his mobile so that the necessary preparations could be made to receive the mangled corpse when they got back.

  But whatever time they made it back to the settlement, both men knew it was a lifetime too late for Walter Burdiss.

  Chapter 4

  Tuesday

  Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen, Svalbard Archipelago

  With a population of under 3,000 people, Svalbard didn’t run to a pathologist, but because of its isolation Longyearbyen obviously needed a doctor, and in fact it had two. A husband-and-wife team – he was a trauma surgeon and she was an orthopaedic specialist – had been resident in the town for a couple of years, and had relished the peace and tranquillity of the far north as a startling contrast from the constant bustle of Brooklyn, where they had both previously worked, and where they had met and married.

  The endless night of the winter, and the endless day of the summer, had taken some getting used to, and for the first few months their sleep patterns had been disrupted far more than either of them had expected, but Keith and Helen Novak were now more or less fixtures in the town, and their workload was comparatively light. Longyearbyen’s population was predominantly young and predominantly healthy, and most of the time they treated people who’d had some kind of an accident, which they were both well-qualified to handle, or the usual colds and fevers. About the only time anyone over the age of 50 walked the streets was on those infrequent occasions when a cruise ship docked and a few hundred mainly elderly passengers wandered ashore to spend the day exploring the strange environment that was Spitsbergen. Then they filled the bars and restaurants, bringing a welcome injection of hard cash and fresh faces as they revelled in the surprising sophistication and development of Longyearbyen, which offered a stark contrast to the other major tourist destination on the archipelago, the abandoned Russian coal mining town of Pyramiden.

  That was a popular but very different attraction, a ghost town with almost no permanent residents that only came alive as a cruise ship drew near. Unlike Longyearbyen, where visitors could just wander about, in Pyramiden visitors were herded into small groups and taken from one peculiarly Russian attraction – the world’s most northerly bust of Lenin, the world’s most northerly grand piano, the world’s most northerly abandoned swimming pool and so on – to another, and surrounded at all times by armed guards, just in case a polar bear came around looking for a snack.

  Most of the buildings – and it had been quite a large settlement in its heyday, with a population of over 1,000 people – were locked and off-limits to tourists because of the large-scale thefts of souvenirs that had taken place in the days when the buildings hadn’t been locked. Bought by the Soviet Union from Sweden in 1927, the place was essentially a time capsule, still in the state it had been in March 1998, when the final load of coal had been extracted from the pyramid-shaped mountain that had given the settlement its name. In October of the same year, the last of the Russian population of miners and administrators had packed their bags and walked away to board a ship to take them back to Rodina, the motherland.

  Tours of the settlement arranged for cruise ship passengers always ended in the hotel, once abandoned like the rest of Pyramiden but now slowly coming back to life, with a welcome hot d
rink and selection of snacks; for many of the visitors that was the closest they would ever get to Russia. And at the end of the day, the tourists would leave with their memories and dozens or hundreds of photographs – ‘This is me and Marcy with Lenin,’ that kind of thing – and stories about Pyramiden in its prime. Like the tale that the patch of grass outside the hotel was strictly speaking a part of the Ukraine, because the Russians had shipped in both the soil and the grass seed from that region. Or the stories of the illicit meetings that had taken place in the hotel when it had been used as short-term accommodation for the younger miners and other workers. One end of the building had been used for male accommodation, known as ‘London’ or England’ – accounts varied with the telling – and the opposite end used for females, and referred to as either ‘Paris’ or ‘France’. The corridor that linked the two halves, perhaps predictably, had been known as the ‘English Channel.’

  But Longyearbyen was the exact opposite of a ghost town, a vibrant and bustling settlement with a multinational population, because Spitsbergen is peculiar in that way as well. Although the archipelago is owned by Norway, the ‘Treaty Recognizing the Sovereignty of Norway over the Archipelago of Spitsbergen,’ more commonly known as the Spitsbergen Treaty or the Svalbard Treaty, signed in February 1920 and so far ratified by 46 nations, allows citizens of all those countries to engage in commercial activities there. They don’t even need a visa, because the treaty specifies that no visa or residence permit is required, so anyone can both live and work on Svalbard indefinitely regardless of their citizenship.

  The trick is getting there, because the obvious route to the archipelago is via Norway, and although that country is a part of the Schengen Area, Svalbard isn’t – so in practical terms any non-EU resident who wants to travel to the archipelago from Norway needs a Schengen visa. But getting there by ship, or from certain other locations, means no visa is required, and dozens of people of a variety of different nationalities have made the journey to the far north to open businesses in Longyearbyen or to become residents; there are even families from Thailand, of all places, who now call it home. Something of a contrast for them in all respects.

  When Barber and Mason had steered their snow scooters into the town the previous evening, Keith Novak had been waiting to take charge of the corpse. The three men had deposited it, still wrapped in the tarpaulin, in the unheated lean-to shed at the rear of Novak’s surgery, which was itself a single room in his rented property. It wasn’t a mortuary, but he had used it infrequently in the past when someone’s injuries had proved to be beyond his or his wife’s capabilities to fix. There was no cooling system, but on Svalbard keeping things cold was almost never a problem, though warming them up sometimes was.

  Barber had shown Novak a document that identified him as an American police officer, and had asked to be present when the doctor examined the body, on the grounds that Walter Burdiss had been an American citizen, and Barber had been instrumental in finding and recovering his body. Novak had agreed without a second thought. There were laws and rules that applied on Svalbard just like everywhere else, but compared to almost any other country, they were pretty relaxed and flexible, and in a case like this the concept of jurisdiction didn’t really apply. So he’d just nodded and told Barber that he’d be starting at ten the following morning.

  Barber arrived at the surgery a few minutes early with Mason in tow, along with a pretty, dark-haired woman. Novak looked at her enquiringly, and then glanced at Barber.

  ‘She’s just here to observe, doc,’ he said.

  Novak shrugged, and picked up a small steel tray on which were a selection of medical instruments – forceps, retractors and the like – and a box of surgical gloves.

  Together the two men lifted the stiff corpse – the state caused by the temperature in the room rather than rigor mortis – from the floor and, following Novak’s instructions, placed it on a steel-topped examination table in the lean-to. The three men and the woman were all wearing heavy outdoor clothing because according to the wall mounted thermometer the temperature inside the room was about three degrees below freezing on the centigrade scale. Above them a couple of fluorescent tubes flickered and buzzed into life, casting a bright, clean light over the proceedings.

  The tarpaulin was stiff with the cold and cracked and split in a couple of places when they unwrapped the body. The corpse was the stuff of nightmares, the gaping wound down the front of the torso having almost bisected him, savaged organs clearly visible through the opening, bordered by the ripped and torn flesh where the polar bear had bitten into the body.

  ‘Well, I can tell you that he’s definitely dead,’ Novak said, a weak attempt at black humour. The surgeon was a thick-set man of middling height, maybe five-eight or five-nine, his craggy face topped with a thatch of thick black hair over eyes so dark that the pupils and the corneas appeared almost as one. He stared at the ravaged corpse as he pulled on a pair of latex gloves to begin his examination.

  ‘I guess we all know that, doc,’ Barber replied. ‘What we really want to know is what killed him, ‘cause it sure as hell wasn’t no polar bear.’

  ‘You got that right. That cut looks like part of the kind of Y-incision a pathologist makes when he does a post. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that wound that killed him.’

  ‘No?’ Mason asked.

  ‘No. The straight edges mean he was probably already dead before he got opened up, and there are a couple of other things that kind of confirm that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll get to them in a minute.’

  Novak brought his hands together and interlaced his fingers to tighten the gloves, then leaned forward over the makeshift mortuary table. He touched the back of his hand to the exposed flesh of the dead man’s ribcage and shook his head.

  ‘There’s nothing I can tell you about the time of death,’ he said. ‘At least, not based on body temperature, because he’s pretty much frozen solid. But from the amount of predation and the damage to the body caused by scavengers, my guess is he wasn’t left out in the open for more than about twelve hours before you found him. If he’d been out there for twenty-four hours or longer, the bears would have got to him and my guess is about all you’d have found would’ve been a few scraps of clothing.’

  ‘So probably sometime yesterday morning?’ Mason suggested. ‘Or late the evening before.’

  ‘Most likely, yes. And he might have been killed hours before that.’

  Barber stared across the table at Novak.

  ‘There was pretty much no blood on the snow where we found him,’ he said, ‘just a few patches where the bear and maybe some arctic foxes had been lunchin’ on him. So do you reckon whoever killed him cut him open out there?’

  Novak shrugged.

  ‘I guess so,’ he replied, then he stopped and looked over at Barber. ‘OK, I see where you’re going with that. You mean was he killed here in the town and then the guy with the knife did his number on him, or did he haul him out into the bundu and slice him up out there?’

  Barber nodded.

  Novak looked back at the corpse and shook his head again.

  ‘There’s no easy way of telling,’ he said. ‘He had to be dead before the cutting started because that cut is long and straight, and there are no defensive wounds that I can see, or any evidence that this man was still alive when the knife went in. Once the heart stops pumping, the blood stops moving, and afterwards there wouldn’t be that much bleeding whenever and wherever the cutting happened. But I can’t think of a good reason why the killer would open him up and then strap him into a sled. Be a lot less messy to do the job outside the town. Or do you know something I don’t?’

  ‘No. It was just a question, doc, that’s all.’

  Novak’s gaze flicked between the two men and the woman standing on the other side of the table, then returned to the corpse. He picked up a mid-sized digital camera from the table behind him, snapped off the lens cover and then leaned slightly cl
oser to the corpse. He took a series of shots showing the entire body, then took several others to record the extent of the injuries to the torso, the silent explosion of the camera’s built-in flash gun augmenting the overhead lighting.

  Novak studied the screen on the back of the camera for a minute or so, running through the pictures he’d taken to make sure they were clear enough and showed what he wanted. Then he replaced the camera and bent over the body.

  ‘The cut down the abdomen is straight and deep,’ he said after a few moments. ‘It looks like one single cut from a really sharp knife. There seems to have been no hesitation in the incision, just straight in with the end of the blade and then straight down. Whoever did this, in my opinion, had definitely done it before.’

  ‘You mean he’s a doc, doc?’ Mason asked.

  ‘I really hope not,’ Novak replied. ‘I don’t think this was the first body he’d cut up, but what I meant was that maybe he’s a hunter, used to dressing deer or something like that. OK, I’ll do a full physical check and then we’ll see if we can find out how he died. The why he died,’ he added, looking at Barber, ‘is not part of my job, but I’m guessing it might be part of yours.’

  He cut away what was left of the clothing from the corpse, using a large pair of scissors to slice through the material, and then pulling it out from under the body. For a few minutes, Novak examined the entire corpse, starting at the head and working his way down to the soles of the feet, then bent forward and examined the external damage to the torso and the soft tissues inside it. Then he stood up again and focused his attention on Steve Barber.

  ‘This might not be what you want to hear,’ Novak said, ‘and I’m not a pathologist, so this is just my educated opinion as a doctor and a surgeon based on what I can see in front of me, but I think this man probably did die of natural causes.’