The Blue Ice

by Innes, Hammond;

  ‘Where’s Dahler?’ I asked.

  ‘In his cabin. I’ve given him the single one for’ard of the saloon on the starb’d side. The girl’s got the port one. Jorgensen’s in with you and Curtis Wright’s sharing with me.’ He produced a sheaf of papers. ‘Shall I send these off right away?’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Messages for transmission.’

  ‘Leave ’em in the chartroom,’ I told him.

  ‘They’re quite straightforward,’ he said. ‘Three from Jorgensen, one from Dahler and one from the girl.’

  ‘I’d still like to look them over,’ I replied. ‘And get below again, will you, Dick. I don’t want them left on their own till we’re at sea.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and went below.

  It was cold, sitting there at the wheel, and the time passed slowly. I was impatient to be out of the river. Gradually the lights of the docks and warehouses on either side thinned out until black areas of darkness marked open countryside and mudflats. We passed a big freighter moving slowly upstream. Her deck lights slid quickly by and in a few minutes she was swallowed up by the night. At full ahead we made a good eight knots. Add to that a four knot tide and we were going downstream at a fair rate. At a call from Dick, Wilson went below and returned with mugs of steaming coffee and sandwiches for Carter and myself. By eight we were running past Tilbury and Gravesend and half an hour later we could see the lights of Southend. We were out in the estuary now and the ship was beginning to show a bit of movement. The wind was south-east and piling up a short, steep sea that hissed angrily in the darkness as it broke against our sides.

  Dick joined me just as I picked up the Nore light, blinking steadily far ahead. ‘Dirty looking night,’ he said. ‘When are you getting the sails on her?’

  ‘We’ll run out to the Nore,’ I answered. ‘Then we’ll be able to steer our course with a good reaching wind. How’s everything below?’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Dahler went straight to bed. Said he’s a bad sailor. Wright and Jorgensen are talking skiing over a bottle of Scotch. And the girl’s changing her clothes. What about tonight – are we splitting into watches? Wright’s done some sailing and Jorgensen says he can handle small boats.’

  That was better than I’d hoped. The boat was an easy one to handle, and the four of us could have managed her quite comfortably. But if there were much sail changing to do, we’d soon tire ourselves out and then we’d have to heave-to for sleep. And I was anxious to get across to Norway as quickly as possible. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘We’ll split into watches. You take the starboard watch, Dick, with Carter, Wright and Jorgensen. For the port watch I’ll have Wilson and the girl.’

  That choice of watches was made without thought. Yet it was of vital importance to what followed. Almost any other split up would have made the difference. It would have put Jorgensen in my watch. But how was I to know then the violence that would be bred in the close confines of the ship.

  I handed the wheel over to Dick and went into the chartroom to work out our course. I read the messages through and transmitted them. They were simple notifications of departure to Norway – Jill Somers to her father, Dahler to his hotel and Jorgensen to the London and Oslo offices of Det Norske Staalselskab. When I emerged I found Wright, Jorgensen and the girl all sitting in the cockpit. They were talking about sailing. The Nore Tower was quite close now, illuminating the ship each time the powerful beams swept over us.

  ‘Take over the wheel, will you, Miss Somers,’ I said. ‘Keep her head to the wind.’

  As soon as she had relieved Dick I called to Carter and we got the mainsail up. The canvas cracked as the boom slatted to and fro in the weird red and green glow of the navigation lights on either side of the chartroom. As soon as peak and throat purchases were made fast and the weather back-stay set up I had the engine stopped and I ordered Jill Somers to steer up Barrow Deep on course north fifty-two east. The mainsail filled as the ship heeled and swung away. In an instant we had picked up way and the water was seething past the lee rail. By the time we had set jib, stays’l and mizzen the old boat was going like a train, rocking violently as she took the steep seas in a corkscrew movement that brought the water gurgling in the scuppers at each plunge.

  I sent Dick and his watch below. They were due on at midnight. Wilson was stowing gear down below. I was left alone with the girl. Her hand was steady on the wheel and she eased the boat over each wave with a sure touch, keeping steadily to her course. The light from the binnacle was just sufficient to show her features in silhouette against the howling darkness of the sea. Her fair hair blew free about her head. She was wearing a polo-necked sweater under a rainproof wind-breaker. ‘You’re quite at home on a ship,’ I said.

  She laughed. And by the way she laughed I knew she was enjoying the wind and the feel of the ship under her. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve done any sailing,’ she said. And then a shade wistfully: ‘Nearly ten years.’

  ‘Ten years? Where did you learn?’ I asked.

  ‘Norway,’ she answered. ‘My mother was Norwegian. We lived in Oslo. Daddy was a director of one of the whaling companies at Sandefjord.’

  ‘Is that where you first met Farnell?’ I asked.

  She looked up at me quickly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I told you. I met him when I was working for the Kompani Linge.’ She hesitated and then said, ‘Why do you suppose poor Mr Dahler queried George’s death?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. It was a point that had been puzzling me. ‘Why do you speak of him as – poor Mr Dahler?’

  She leaned forward, peering into the binnacle, and then shifted her grip on the wheel. ‘He has suffered so much. That arm – it quite upset me to see him like that.’

  ‘You’ve met him before?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Long, long ago – at our home.’ She looked up at me, smiling. ‘He doesn’t remember. I was a little girl in pigtails, then.’

  ‘Was he a business contact of your father’s?’

  She nodded and I asked her what sort of business he had been engaged in.

  ‘Shipping,’ she replied. ‘He owned a fleet of coastal steamers and some oil tankers. His firm supplied us with fuel. That’s why he came to see my father. Also he had an interest in one of the shore whaling stations, so they liked to talk. Father enjoyed being with anyone who was prepared to talk whaling.’

  ‘Why is Dahler scared to go back to Norway?’ I asked. ‘Why does Jorgensen say he’s liable to be arrested?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She was frowning as though trying to puzzle it out. ‘He was always such a dear. Each time he came he brought me something from South America. I remember he used to say that’s what he kept tankers for – to bring me presents.’ She laughed. ‘He took me skiing once. You wouldn’t think it now, but he was a fine skier.’

  We fell silent after that. I was trying to visualise Dahler as he had been. She, too, I think, was lost in the past. Suddenly she said, ‘Why doesn’t Major Wright deliver those messages he talked about?’ She did not seem to expect any reply for she went on, ‘All these people on board your ship going to look at his grave; it’s – somehow it’s frightening.’

  ‘Did you know him well?’ I asked.

  She looked at me. ‘George? Yes. I knew him – quite well.’

  I hesitated. Then I said, ‘Does this mean anything to you – If I should die, think only this of me?’

  I wasn’t prepared for the jolt my question gave her. She sat for a moment as though stunned. Then like a person in a trance she murmured the remaining two lines – ‘That there’s some corner of a foreign field – that is for ever England.’ She looked up at me. Her eyes were wide. ‘Where did you hear that?’ she asked. ‘How did you know—’ She stopped and concentrated on the compass. ‘Sorry. I’m off course.’ Her voice was scarcely audible in the sound of the wind and the sea. She put the wheel over to port and the ship heeled again until her lee scupper seethed with water and I could feel the weight of the wind bearing on the
canvas. ‘Why did you quote Rupert Brooke to me?’ Her voice was hard, controlled. Then she looked up at me again. ‘Was that what he said in his message?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She turned her head and gazed out into the darkness. ‘So he knew he was going to die.’ The words were a whisper thrown back to me by the wind. ‘Why did he send that message to you?’ she asked, suddenly turning to me, her eyes searching my face.

  ‘He didn’t send it to me,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know who it was sent to.’ She made no comment and I said, ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘I told you,’ she answered. ‘I met him when I was working for the Kompani Linge. Then he went on the Malöy raid. He – he didn’t come back.’

  ‘And you never saw him after that?’

  She laughed. ‘All these questions.’ Her laughter trailed away into silence. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it any more.’

  ‘You were fond of him, weren’t you?’ I persisted.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘He’s dead. Just leave it at that.’

  ‘If you wanted it left at that,’ I answered, ‘why did you come along this morning, all packed and ready to go to Norway? Was it just a sentimental desire to see the grave?’

  ‘I don’t want to see the grave,’ she said with sudden heat. ‘I don’t want ever to see his grave.’

  ‘Then why did you come?’ I insisted.

  She was about to make some angry retort. But suddenly she changed her mind and looked away from me. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She spoke so softly that the wind whipped her words away into the night before I could be sure of what she said. Then she suddenly said, ‘Will you take the wheel now, please. I’m going below for a moment.’ And that was the end of our conversation. And when she came up on deck again she stood out in the wind by the port navigation light, a tall, graceful figure, even in a duffel coat, moving rhythmically to the dip and climb of the ship. And I sat on at the wheel, talking to Wilson who had sat himself down in the cockpit and wondering how much she knew and what Farnell had meant to her.

  We were near the Sunk Lightship now. I altered course for Smith’s Knoll Lightship. An hour later we called the starboard watch and I took the log reading and marked up our course on the chart. Since setting sail we’d made a steady eight and a half knots. ‘Course is north thirty-six east,’ I told Dick as I handed the wheel over to him.

  He nodded vaguely. He was always like that first day out. In the six years he’d been in the Navy he’d never been able to conquer sea-sickness. Wright was feeling bad, too. His face looked green and sweaty and in contrast his hair flamed brighter red in the glare of the chartroom light. Jorgensen, on the other hand, attired in borrowed sweaters and oilskins, was as unaffected by the movement of the ship as Carter, who’d acclimatised himself by many years in the stokeholes and engine-rooms of aged freighters.

  My watch was called again at four in the morning. The wind had strengthened to about Force 5, but the ship was riding easier. They had taken a tuck in the sails. Nevertheless, the movement was considerable. The sea had increased and Diviner was plunging her bowsprit like a matador’s espada into the backs of the waves. All that day the wind held from the south-east, a strong, reaching wind that sent us plunging on our course across the North Sea at a steady seven to eight knots. By dust we were 155 miles on our way to Norway. Watch and watch about, and with every bit of sail we could carry, it was like real ocean racing. I almost forgot about the reason for the trip to Norway in the sheer exhilaration of sailing. The weather forecasts were full of gale warnings and shortly before midnight we had to shorten sail again. But the next day the wind lessened slightly and backed to the north-east. We shook out one of our reefs and, close hauled, were still able to steer our course.

  During those two days I got to know Jill Somers pretty well. She was twenty-six – tall and active, and very calm in a crisis. She wasn’t beautiful in the accepted sense of the word, but her boyish ease of movement and her zest for life gave her a beauty of her own. Her charm was in her manner and in the way her rather wide mouth spread into a smile that was slightly crooked. And when she smiled her eyes smiled too. She loved sailing and in the excitement of the wind’s driving force we forgot about George Farnell. Only once was his name mentioned. She was telling me about how she and her father had got out of Norway just before the German invasion and how after some months in England she had got in touch with the Kompani Linge through the Norwegian military authorities in London and arranged to work for them. ‘I just had to do something,’ she said. ‘I wanted to be in it with everybody else. Daddy wangled it. He was in the Norwegian Shipping and Trade Mission in London. I went up to Scotland and began work right away at their headquarters – I and five other girls kept a twenty-four-hour radio watch. That was how I met Bernt Olsen.’

  ‘Did you know his real name was George Farnell?’ I asked.

  ‘Not then. But he was dark and short and one day I asked him if he was really Norwegian. He told me his real name then.’

  ‘Did he also tell you he was an escaped convict?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, smiling quietly to herself. ‘He told me everything there was to tell me about himself then.’

  ‘And it made no difference to you?’ I inquired.

  ‘Of course not,’ she answered. ‘We were at war. And he was training for one of the first and most desperate raids into what was by then enemy territory. Three months later he went into Norway on the Malöy raid.’

  ‘He meant a lot to you, didn’t he, Jill?’ I asked.

  She nodded. She didn’t speak for a moment and then she said, ‘Yes – he meant a lot to me. He was different from the others – more serious, more reserved. As though he had a mission in life. You know how I mean? He was in uniform and training hard for a desperate job – and yet he wasn’t a part of it all. He lived – mentally – outside it.’

  It was this description of Farnell before the Malöy action that intrigued me. Farnell’s interest in life was metals. In this respect he had been as much an artist as a painter or a musician. War and his own life were small matters in the balance against the excitement of discovering metals. Curtis Wright’s description of Bernt Olsen at the moment of going into Malöy and Jill’s account of him prior to embarkation all added up in my mind to one thing – Farnell had been after new metals in the mountains of Norway.

  Farnell wasn’t mentioned again. On watch our minds were fully occupied with the sailing of the boat, and keeping awake. Unless you have done any passage-making it is difficult to realise how completely one becomes absorbed in the operation of a ship. There is always something to concentrate on, especially for the skipper. When I wasn’t at the wheel there were log readings to take, the dead reckoning to work out, position to be fixed by shooting the stars or the sun whenever opportunity offered, radio watch to be kept at certain times, forecasts to be listened to, sails to be checked. And over everything was the dead weight of sleepiness, especially in the early watches.

  And there was little chance to get to know Jorgensen or Wright. Certainly no opportunity to discuss Farnell with them. As long as the wind held it was watch and watch about. The watch on duty went below as soon as it was relieved by the other watch. And during the day there were meals to get and the other chores to be done. And every now and then the watch below had to be called to help change sails. All I had time to notice in those first two days was that Jorgensen was a first-rate sailor and seemed to be literally enjoying the trip and that Curtis Wright settled down quickly.

  The third day out the wind veered back to sou’-sou’-east. We were able to take out our last reef, set main tops’l and yankee. The sea lessened to a steep swell. We were nearly four hundred miles on our way by then and the sun was shining. We began to sight some of the trawlers of the Aberdeen fleet. There were gulls about and occasionally a stormy petrel skimmed low over the tumbled waters like a flying fish.

  That was the morning on which things began to develop. We were able to r
elax, and think of other things besides sailing. At noon I handed the wheel over to Jorgensen. Dick had taken both watches for’ard to get the main tops’l down and replace a jammed swivel shackle. For the first time since we’d started I was alone with the Norwegian. ‘Course north twenty-five east,’ I told him as I climbed stiffly out of the wheel seat.

  He nodded and took the wheel, peering forward at the compass. Then he raised his eyes to the group busy on the halyards round the mainmast. Finally he looked up at me. ‘Just a moment, Mr Gansert,’ he said, for I was going for’ard myself to lend a hand. I stopped then and he said, ‘My health is benefiting greatly from this little trip. But I do not think my business will – unless we can come to some arrangement.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

  He leaned back, holding the wheel easily in his strong fingers. ‘I admit that I was not being honest with you when I said I was not interested in Farnell. I am – and particularly now that I know he has communicated with you recently. He told you, I suppose, that he had made important mineral discoveries in Norway?’

  There was no point in denying it. ‘His message implied that,’ I answered.

  ‘Did he tell you what metal he had discovered?’ he asked.

  I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And sent samples.’

  ‘By post, I suppose?’ His eyes were watching me narrowly.

  I smiled. ‘His method of dispatch was rather more unorthodox,’ I said. ‘However, I imagine it’s sufficient for you to know that I got the samples safely.’

  ‘And you know where the mineral is located?’ he asked.

  I saw no reason to disabuse his mind of what was a natural supposition. ‘The samples wouldn’t have been of much use to us without that information,’ I pointed out.

  He hesitated and then said, ‘I think we could come to some sort of an arrangement. Suppose we make straight for Bergen? I can then put specific proposals before you and you can get Sir Clinton—’

  His voice died away. He was gazing past me. I turned. Dahler was standing at the top of the companionway. I hadn’t seen him since we left the Thames, except once when I’d stumbled into him in the half darkness as he made his way to the afterheads. Jill had been looking after him. The sun emerged from behind a cloud and his lined face looked grey in the bright light. He had on a sweater of Dick’s that was several sizes too large for him and a pair of old grey trousers turned up twice at the bottom. He was looking at Jorgensen. Once again I was conscious of the latent enmity of these two men. Dahler weaved his way awkwardly across the pitching deck. He must have heard what Jorgensen had been saying for he said, ‘So it’s reached the stage of specific proposals, has it?’