The Land God Gave to Cain

by Innes, Hammond;

  “What have you done with it, Mother?” I shook her gently. “He received some sort of a message. Something to do with Labrador.”

  “Labrador!” The word seemed to explode out of her mouth. Her eyes widened and she was staring at me. “Not you, too, Ian. Please God. Not you. All my life …” Her voice trailed away. “Now come down and have your tea, there’s a good boy. I can’t take any more—not to-day.”

  I can remember the weariness in her voice, the note of pleading—and how cruel I was. “You never understood him, did you, Mother?” I said that to her, and I believed it. “If you’d understood him, you’d know there was only one thing would drive him to call out, struggling to his feet and reaching out for the map. It was the map he was reaching out to, wasn’t it?” And I shook her gently whilst she just stared at me with a sort of fascination. I told her then about the planes searching for a geological party lost in Labrador. “Whatever Dad may have been during these last few years, he was still a first-class radio operator. If he picked up some sort of a message from them …” I had to make her see it my way—how important it could be. “Those men’s lives might depend on it,” I said.

  She shook her head slowly. “You don’t know,” she murbured. “You can’t know.” And she added, “It was all in his imagination.”

  “Then he did pick up a message?”

  “He imagined things. You’ve been away so much … you don’t know what went on in his mind.”

  “He didn’t imagine this,” I said. “It made him suddenly find his voice. It forced him to his feet and the effort killed him.” I was being intentionally brutal. If my father had killed himself in an effort to save other men’s lives, then I wasn’t going to have his effort go for nothing, whatever my mother’s reason for concealing it. “Look—I’m sorry,” I said, “but I must have that log book.” And when she only stared at me with a sort of dumb misery in her eyes, I said, “He wrote the message down in it, didn’t he? Didn’t he, Mother?” I was exasperated by her attitude. “For God’s sake! Where is it! Please, Mother—you must let me see it!”

  A defeated look showed in her face and she gave a tired little sigh. “Very well, Ian. If you must have it …” She turned then and went slowly out of the room. “I’ll get it for you.”

  I went with her because I had an instinctive feeling that if I didn’t she might destroy it. I couldn’t understand her attitude at all. I could literally feel her reluctance as I followed her down the stairs.

  She had hidden it under the table linen in one of the drawers of the sideboard, and as she handed it to me, she said, “You won’t do anything foolish now, will you?”

  But I didn’t answer her. I had seized hold of the exercise book and was already seated at the table, leafing through the pages. It was much the same as the others, except that the entries were more factual with fewer doodles and the word search caught my eye several times.

  And then I was staring at the last entry on a page clear of all other jottings: CQ—CQ—CQ—Any 75-metre phone station—Any 75-metre phone station—Come in someone please—Come in someone please—K.

  There it was in my father’s laboured hand, and the desperation of that cry called to me through the shaky pencilled words in that tattered child’s exercise book. And underneath he had written BRIFFE—It must be. And the date and the time—September 29, 1355—voice very faint. Voice very faint! And below that, with the time given as 1405—Calling again. CQ—CQ—CQ, etc. Still no reply. Then the final entry: Calling VO6AZ now. Position not known but within 30 miles radius C2—situation desperate—injured and no fire—Baird very bad—Laroche gone—CQ—CQ—CQ—Can hardly hear him—Search for narrow lake (obliterated)—Repeating … narrow lake with rock shaped like … The message ended there in a straggling pencil line as though the point of it had slipped as he made the effort to stand.

  Injured and no fire! I sat there, staring at the pencilled words, a vivid picture in my mind of a narrow desolate lake and an injured man crouched over a radio set. Situation desperate. I could imagine it. The nights would be bitter and in the daytime they’d be plagued with a million flies. I’d read about it in those books of my father’s. And the vital part was missing—the bit that had brought my father to his feet.

  “What are you going to do?” My mother’s voice sounded nervous, almost frightened.

  “Do?” I hadn’t thought about it. I was still wondering what it was that had so galvanised my father. “Mum. Do you know why Dad was so interested in Labrador?”

  “No.”

  The denial was so quick, so determined, that I looked up at her. Her face was very pale, a little haggard in the gathering dusk. “When did it start?” I asked.

  “Oh, a long time ago. Before the war.”

  “So it wasn’t anything to do with his being shot up?” I got up from the chair I had been sitting in. “Surely you must know the reason for it? In all these years he must have told you why—”

  But she had turned away. “I’m going to get supper,” she said, and I watched her go out through the door, puzzled by her attitude.

  Alone, I began thinking again about those men lost in Labrador. Briffe—that was the name Farrow had talked about in the Airport Bar. Briffe was the leader of some sort of geological expedition, and I wondered what one did in a case like this. Suppose nobody but my father had picked up that message? But then they were bound to have heard it in Canada. If Dad had picked it up at a distance of over two thousand miles.… But, according to Dad, Goose Bay hadn’t replied. And if by some queer chance he had been the only radio operator in the world to pick that message up, then I was the thread on which those men’s lives hung.

  It was an appalling thought and I worried about it all through supper—far more I think than about my father’s death, for I couldn’t do anything about that. When we had finished the meal I said to my mother, “I think I’ll just walk as far as the call box.”

  “Who are you going to phone?”

  “I don’t know.” Who did one ring? There was Canada House. They were really the people to tell, but they’d be closed now. “The police, I suppose.”

  “Do you have to do anything about it?” She was standing there, wringing her hands.

  “Well, yes,” I said. “I think somebody ought to know.” And then, because I still didn’t understand her attitude, I asked her why she’d tried to hide the message from me.

  “I didn’t know if you …” She hesitated, and then said quickly, “I didn’t want your father laughed at.”

  “Laughed at? Really, Mother! Suppose nobody else picked up this transmission? If these men died, then you’d have been responsible.”

  Her face went blank. “I didn’t want them laughing at him,” she repeated obstinately. “You know what people are in a street like this.”

  “This is more important than what people think.” My tone was impatient. And then, because I knew she was upset and tired, I kissed her. “We shan’t be bothered about it,” I reassured her. “It’s just that I feel that I must report it. It wouldn’t be the first time he picked up a transmission that no other operator received,” I added, and I went out of the house and back along the street to the Underground.

  I had no idea who I should get on to at Scotland Yard, so in the end I dialled 999. It seemed odd to be making an emergency police call when we hadn’t been burgled or anything. And when I got through to them I found it wasn’t easy to explain what it was all about. It meant telling them about my father and the “ham” radio station he operated. The fact that he had just died because of his excitement over the message only made it more confusing.

  However, in the end they said they had got it all clear and would contact the Canadian authorities, and I left the call box feeling that a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It was their responsibility now. I needn’t worry about it any more. And when I got back to the house, I put the log book away in my suitcase and went through into the kitchen, where my mother was quietly getting a meal. Now tha
t the matter of the message was cleared up and the authorities notified, I began to see it from her point of view. After all, why should she worry about two men in a distant part of the world when my father was lying dead upstairs?

  That night my mother had the little bedroom and I slept on the couch in the parlour. And in the morning I woke to the realisation that there was a lot to be done—the funeral to arrange, all his things to go through and the pension people to be notified. I hadn’t realised before that death didn’t end with sorrow.

  After breakfast I sent a wire to Mr. Meadows and then went on to arrange things with the undertaker. When I got back it was almost eleven and Mrs. Wright was in from next door having tea with my mother. It was Mrs. Wright who heard the car draw up and went to the window to see. “Why, it’s a police car,” she said, and then added, “I do believe they’re coming here.”

  It was a Police Inspector and a Flight Lieutenant Mathers of the Canadian Air Force. They wanted to see the log book, and when I’d got it from my suitcase and had handed it to the inspector, I found myself apologising for the writing. “I’m afraid it’s not very good. You see my father was paralysed and—”

  “Yes, we know all about that,” the Inspector said. “We’ve made inquiries, naturally.” He was no longer looking at the page on which the message had been written, but was leafing back through the log book, the Flight Lieutenant peering over his shoulder. I began to feel uncomfortable then. The pages were such a muddle and in the Inspector’s hands the log looked exactly what it was, a child’s exercise book. I remembered my mother’s words—I didn’t want your father laughed at.

  When he had examined every page, the Inspector turned back to the one on which the message was written. “I think you said that your father died immediately after writing this?”

  I explained to him what had happened—how my mother thought she heard him call out to her and went up to find he had somehow struggled to his feet. And when I had finished, he said, “But you weren’t here at the time?”

  “No. My job is near Bristol. I wasn’t here.”

  “Who was here? Just your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “Well, I’m afraid I’ll have to have a word with her. But first we’d like to have a look at the room where your father had his radio.”

  I took them up and the Flight Lieutenant had a look at the radio whilst the Inspector prowled round, looking at the books and the map hanging on the wall. “Well, it’s all in working order,” the Flight Lieutenant said. He had switched on the receiver and he had the earphones over his head whilst his fingers played with the tuning dial. But by then the Inspector had found the old log books in the drawer and was glancing through them.

  At length he turned to me. “I’m sorry to have to ask you this; Mr. Ferguson, but we’ve been on to the doctor and I understand your father had a stroke some three months ago. You were down here then?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But only for a few days. He made a very quick recovery.”

  “Have you been here since?”

  “No,” I told him. “We’re on airfield construction at the moment. It’s a rush job and I haven’t had another chance—”

  “What I’m getting at is this … can you vouch for your father’s mental state? Could he have imagined this?”

  “No. Certainly not.” I felt suddenly angry. “If you’re suggesting that my father …” I stopped then, because I realised what must have prompted the question. “Do you mean to say nobody else picked up that transmission?”

  “Not as far as we know.” He turned to the Flight Lieutenant. “However, there’s no doubt he was following the progress of this expedition,” he said. “There are dozens of references to it in these notebooks, but …” He hesitated, and then gave a little shrug. “Well, take a look for yourself.” He passed the books across to the Canadian. I might not have been there as the Air Force officer bent down to examine them and the Inspector watched him, waiting for his reaction.

  At length I could stand it no longer. “What’s wrong with the message?” I asked.

  “Nothing, nothing—except …” The Inspector hesitated.

  The Flight Lieutenant looked up from the log books. “We’re not doubting he was in touch with Ledder, you know.” His voice held a note of reservation, and as though conscious of this he added, “I checked with our people at Goose right away. Simon Ledder and his wife are both registered hams operating their own station under the call sign VO6AZ. They take on outside work and in this case they were acting as base station for the McGovern Mining and Exploration Company, receiving Briffe’s reports by R/T and transmitting them to the Company’s offices in Montreal.”

  “Well, then?” I didn’t understand why they were still so doubtful about it. “The fact that nobody else picked up the transmission—”

  “It’s not that,” he said quickly. And he looked across at the Inspector, who said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Ferguson. All this must be very trying for you.” He sounded apologetic. “But the fact is that Briffe and the man with him were reported dead—almost a week ago, didn’t you say, Mathers?” He looked across at the Canadian.

  “That’s so, Inspector.” The Flight Lieutenant nodded. “On September twenty-fifth to be exact.” He tossed the log books on to the table. “I don’t want to seem unappreciative,” he said, looking across at me. “Particularly as you say your father’s excitement at receiving the message was the cause of his death. But the fact is that Bert Laroche, the pilot of the crashed plane, trekked out on his own. He reached one of the construction camps of the Iron Ore Railway on the twenty-fifth and reported that the other two were dead when he left them. He’d been five days trekking out, so they were dead by September twentieth. Now you come along with the information that your father picked up a radio broadcast from Briffe yesterday. That’s nine whole days after Briffe was dead.” He shook his head. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “The pilot might have made a mistake,” I murmured.

  He stared at me with a sort of shocked look. “I guess you don’t understand the Canadian North, Mr. Ferguson. Men just don’t make that sort of mistake. Certainly not experienced fliers like Bert Laroche.” And he added, “He crashed his Beaver floatplane into a rock trying to land on a lake in a snow storm. Briffe and Baird were injured. He got them ashore and the plane sank. That was on September the fourteenth. Baird died almost immediately, Briffe a few days later, and then he started to trek out.”

  “But the message,” I cried. “How else could my father have known—”

  “It was all in the news-casts,” Mathers said. “The whole story—it was repeated over and over again.”

  “But not about the lake surely,” I said impatiently. “How would my father know it was a lake with a rock in it? And how would he know about Briffe and Baird being injured and the pilot gone?”

  “I tell you, Briffe and Baird were dead by then.”

  “Are you suggesting he made it all up?”

  Mathers shrugged his shoulders and reached for the last of the log books, turning the pages until he came to the message. He stared at it for a long time. “It just isn’t possible,” he murmured. “If your father picked up a transmission, why didn’t someone else?”

  “You’ve checked, have you?”

  “We’re checking now. But, believe me, if anybody in Canada had picked it up, they’d have reported it immediately. The papers were full of the search when it was on.”

  “I can’t help that,” I said. “Maybe nobody else picked it up. But my father did. The message is there in that log book to prove it.” He made no comment. He was looking back again through the old log books. “I remember once,” I added desperately, “my father picked up a message from a yacht in the Timor Sea when nobody else did. And another time he made a contact—”

  “But this is R/T. How could he possibly pick up Voice from an old set like Briffe’s?” The Flight Lieutenant was still riffling through the pages of the logs, but now he sud
denly closed them. “There’s only one explanation, I guess.” He said it to the Inspector, who nodded agreement.

  I knew what he meant and I was furious. I’d done what I thought was right and here were these two strangers trying to make out that my father was crazy. I wished to God I’d never reported the matter. My mother was right. How could I possibly make them understand that a lonely man could scribble a lot of nonsense all over those log books and yet be reliable when it came to picking up a transmission? “Surely somebody else must have picked the message up,” I said helplessly. And then, because they didn’t say anything, but stood there looking uncomfortable, I let my feelings run away with me. “You think my father made it all up, don’t you? Just because he had a head wound and was paralysed and drew little pictures in those books, you think he isn’t to be relied on. But you’re wrong. My father was a first-class radio operator. Whatever the doctors or anybody else may say, he’d never make a mistake over a message like that.”

  “Maybe,” the Canadian said. “But we’re two thousand five hundred miles from Labrador and Briffe wasn’t on Key, he was on Voice transmission—in other words, radio telephone.”

  “That’s what my father implies. He says it’s Briffe’s voice he’s hearing.”

  “Sure. But I’ve already checked on this and all Briffe had was an old wartime forty-eight set. That’s the Canadian equivalent of your British Army eighteen set. It had been modified to operate on the seventy-five metre phone band, but he was still using it in conjunction with a hand generator. Even with a line aerial instead of a whip, Goose would have been just about at the limit of his range—that’s why he was reporting back to Ledder instead of direct to Montreal.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “But I do know this. See all those books up there? They’re about Labrador. My father was fascinated by the place. He knew what it would be like for those men lost out there. He knew that message was important. That’s why he suddenly found his voice and called out. That’s what forced him to his feet when he hadn’t stood—”