Cold, Cold Heart

by Christine Poulson

  “I can’t see where. Everyone else is accounted for. See for yourself.” He turned the grid around and Katie and Justin looked at it.

  It was just as Graeme had said.

  Katie said. “Someone’s made a mistake about the time – or else two of them were in it together – unlikely as it seems.”

  “And not necessarily Craig and Nick,” Graeme said. “Adam and Alex were also alone together for a long stretch of time with no one else to vouch for them.”

  “Frankly that seems even more unlikely than Craig and Nick.”

  Justin was still bending thoughtfully over the grid. He looked up and said, “There’s another possibility. We’ve been thinking that it couldn’t be done in under about forty minutes – that it would take that long to kill Sara and get her body off the platform. Maybe that’s where we made our mistake.”

  “We timed it,” Katie pointed out. “It must have taken at least that.”

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps it would have been possible to shave that down to half an hour. But let’s go on saying half an hour. My question is this: did it have to be a continuous half-hour? I mean, did it have to happen all at once?”

  “How do you mean?” Graeme asked.

  “Well, what if the killer went along to the surgery and killed Sara and hid the body and then went back to establish his alibi? He could have gone back later to take the body outside.”

  Katie said, “But that would be even riskier than if he did it all at once. I mean what if someone had come looking for Sara? We might easily have realized that she was missing earlier than we did. If we’d started a search earlier, we would have found the body, if it was still on the base.”

  “Was it likely though, that anyone would go looking?” Justin asked. “If you had gone to look for her in the surgery, what would you have thought if you hadn’t found her?”

  Katie thought it over. “I’d have probably thought she was having a nap in her pit-room,” she admitted. “I wouldn’t have wanted to disturb her.”

  “Exactly. That’s what anyone would have thought. It’s natural for someone to want a bit of privacy now and again and the rest of us respect that. It was only because she’d arranged to meet Adam at six that we discovered then that she was missing. Otherwise we wouldn’t have realized until she didn’t show up at supper time.”

  Graeme said, “So what are you saying? That he could have split it up into two tasks? – for want of a better word.”

  “Maybe even three. One: there’s the actual murder. We’re agreed that he probably went straight in and stabbed her. He’d have to hide the body. Maybe in the generator room? He could do that in ten minutes, maybe less. Two: he goes back to dress her in her outdoor clothes. Later he goes back a third time and takes the body outside and hides it. That’s the most time-consuming bit. What if he’d prepared a hiding place earlier that day? But even if he hadn’t, it could be done in less than half an hour.”

  Graeme said, “And between times he’s establishing his presence, dropping into the kitchen for a chat with Ernesto or exchanging a bit of banter at the Scrabble table. He’d have to have nerves of steel, but I think you may be onto something, Justin. Let’s have another look at this grid.”

  Katie felt cold. It was a nightmarish thought. It was bad enough to think of someone murdering Sara on the spur of the moment and hurrying to cover it up, but to imagine this level of cold-blooded planning and premeditation was chilling. She thought again of that perfectly placed wound…

  Wound! How could she have forgotten! She looked at her watch. She should have dressed Adam’s wound half an hour ago. The poor guy would be waiting in her surgery. She got up to go. Graeme and Justin looked up from where they were poring over the grid.

  She said, “I’d forgotten about my appointment with Adam.”

  “Justin will go with you,” Graeme said.

  She was about to protest, but then thought better of it.

  Justin said, “Can you take a look at my hand, while you’re at it? It’s been a while.”

  They walked down the corridor past the dining room. It was smoko time and Ernesto was doggedly sticking to the routine. Coffee and cake were set out on the table. But no one was gathering convivially any more. People came and took their coffee and cake away.

  Adam was not after all waiting at the surgery. Katie took advantage of his not being there to examine Justin’s hand. It had healed well. “You can keep these bandages off now,” she said.

  “Thank goodness for that.”

  Katie checked the time again. “I wonder what’s happened to Adam.”

  Her eyes met Justin’s and they exchanged uneasy glances.

  “We’d better go and look for him,” Justin said.

  They walked back through the dining room and poked their heads into the kitchen where Ernesto was rolling dough for homemade ravioli. He said that he hadn’t seen Adam since breakfast. They opened the doors to the TV room and the music room and gym – though he was hardly likely to be there. There was no one around except for Craig in the Communications room. Everyone else was no doubt at work in the labs on the floor above.

  Adam had probably fallen asleep in his pit-room. But when they knocked on the door there was no answer. Justin pushed the door open and they looked in. There were dirty socks balled and scattered on the floor and Katie doubted if he’d changed the bed since he’d arrived in Antarctica. The man himself wasn’t there.

  By now Katie had butterflies in her stomach. Where could he be? They were still standing in the corridor outside his room, when Justin laid a hand on her arm and said, “What’s that noise?” There was a kind of rhythmic rumbling coming from somewhere. They went on down the corridor to where the door to the library and quiet room stood ajar.

  They went in. Adam was there, sprawled out on a sofa, a book about Sheffield Wednesday lying open on his chest. He was snoring loudly.

  “Sounds like someone rolling potatoes down a corrugated iron roof,” Justin said. He leaned over and shook Adam’s shoulder.

  Adam woke with a start. When he saw them gazing down at him, there was a flicker of panic in his eyes. “What? What’s happened?”

  “Nothing’s happened,” Katie said. “It’s fine. Except that you were supposed to be in the surgery almost an hour ago to have your wound dressed.”

  He blinked and rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”

  She looked at her watch. “Half eleven.”

  “At night? Or in the morning?”

  “In the morning!”

  “Oh sorry – I’m always losing track –”

  And he didn’t have a watch, Katie had noticed. Even though he wasn’t that much younger than her, it was a generational thing. He had always relied on his mobile phone to tell him the time, so he’d never bothered with a wristwatch.

  “You really shouldn’t be sleeping during the day,” she chided him gently. “I know that Graeme’s spoken to you about the dangers of disrupting your sleep pattern.”

  “I know.” Gingerly, anxious not to pull on his stitches, he swung his legs off the sofa. Justin stuck a hand under his elbow and helped him to his feet.

  * * *

  All the time that Katie was examining Adam something was nagging away at her. The wound had healed beautifully. She couldn’t help feeling proud of her handiwork. “You’ll do,” she said. “Normal activity will be fine now, but no heavy lifting for a couple of weeks more at least.”

  And yet still something was bothering her. It wasn’t until Adam had left and she and Justin were walking back to Graeme’s office that the penny dropped. She stood stock-still. Justin walked on without realizing that she had stopped. When he saw that she wasn’t with him, he turned to look at her.

  “Hey, what’s up?” He looked at her more closely. “Katie, you’ve gone as white as a sheet.”

  She couldn’t speak for a few moments. Could it really be? Had she discovered how the trick had been worked? She realized now that she hadn’t completely accepted that
someone on the base was a murderer. Some small part of her had clung to the thought that there must be some mistake and the interviews had allowed her to go on thinking that. If no one could have killed Sara, perhaps no one had.

  She raised her eyes to Justin’s. How tired he looked. The laughter lines around his eyes seemed to have deepened just in the last few days.

  He came up and put his hand on her arm. “Katie? Katie, love! What is it?”

  “I think I know how he did it,” she said.

  * * *

  “Have I done something wrong?” Adam quavered. They had called him back into the office.

  Katie was happy to leave the questioning to Graeme.

  His voice was kind, reassuring.

  “Just one or two details we need to go over.” He glanced down at the grid. “You spent most of the afternoon with Alex watching Game of Thrones. How long are the episodes?”

  Adam’s face registered relief. He could answer that. “Around fifty-five or sixty minutes.”

  “How many episodes of Game of Thrones did you watch that afternoon, Adam?”

  “Three.”

  “Whole episodes?”

  “Well, no. I remember feeling a bit narked, like, because I hadn’t finished the last one and it were time to go and meet Sara for our game of ping-pong.”

  “How much was there still to go?”

  “Not sure exactly, but it weren’t very near the end. If it had only been five or ten minutes, I’d have waited until it was finished. So it might have been twenty minutes or half an hour?”

  Graeme was looking at the grid and frowning. “But it says here that you were in the TV room from three thirty to six thirty. If the episodes were an hour each, even allowing for loo breaks, why couldn’t you manage to fit three in?”

  Adam stared at Graeme, nonplussed. “I hadn’t thought of that…” His face cleared as an explanation occurred to him. “We must’ve started later than I thought. Aye, that’ll be it.”

  The lights flickered and went out. They sat in darkness, waiting for the outage to be over, but nothing happened. Katie could hear Graeme fumbling in his desk and cursing and then the beam of light from a torch split the darkness.

  A moment later the lights came back on, only to flicker, and go off, and then come on again.

  Adam said, “I’d best go and see what’s up with the generator. Is that alright?”

  Graeme nodded. “That’s all I wanted to know. You can go now.”

  Adam left the room.

  They listened to his footsteps retreating down the corridor.

  “They didn’t though, did they?” Justin said, as soon as he was out of earshot. “Start later, I mean.”

  Graeme’s face was grim. “No, I don’t think they did. Can you go and find Rhys and bring him here, Justin? And then Alex.”

  * * *

  Katie was sitting against the wall, where she could watch the door. Her mouth was dry and looking around she saw her own tension mirrored in the faces of the others. Graeme was behind his desk. Justin was sitting close by, his chair angled protectively towards her. Craig was in a chair by the door, leaning forward with his hands clasped on his bare knees. He was under strict instructions not to speak.

  When Alex came in, he scanned the room and Katie thought she saw something wary in his expression when he spotted Craig. If so it was gone immediately and he was back to his genial self.

  “What’s all this?” he asked, smiling.

  “Please take a seat, Alex. I just want to verify something that Adam told us. You said earlier that you were with him solidly between three thirty and six.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He wasn’t absent for any length of time – a toilet break – or anything else that took more than a few minutes?”

  “No, I told you. He went for a pee once, I remember that, but he was gone hardly any time at all. I’m sure he’s in the clear.”

  “I think Adam is in the clear.”

  “So if that’s all…” Alex pushed his chair back, preparing to leave.

  “It’s not all,” Graeme said. “Sit down.” There was something in his voice that Katie hadn’t heard before, a steeliness and a command that had the effect of freezing Alex halfway to his feet.

  No one spoke. Katie held her breath. The room had gone very still.

  “Sit down,” Graeme repeated.

  Katie thought that Alex wasn’t going to obey him. But then he shrugged and sank back in his chair. His face was impassive. She knew what was coming next and she wondered if Alex did too. A shiver ran up her spine.

  Graeme said, “Adam is in the clear. But you are not. Alex Marsh, with the power vested in me as a magistrate, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder. I am issuing a police caution. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

  Alex’s jaw dropped. “You can’t be serious?”

  Katie thought that his surprise was genuine. It hadn’t occurred to him that he might be found out. He recovered himself and laughed. He looked around at the others as if to see whether this was a joke and they were all in on it. No one wanted to meet his eye.

  He turned back to Graeme. “When exactly am I supposed to have done this? I was watching telly all afternoon.”

  “No, you weren’t. You stole some of that time from Adam – I don’t know how much. It might have been as long as half an hour, but it was certainly over twenty minutes. You waited until he had fallen asleep. You noted where you’d got to in the episode of Game of Thrones that you were watching. When you got back from disposing of the body, you rewound the DVD and woke Adam up, giving him the impression that he’d only dropped off for a few moments. You knew he wasn’t wearing a watch and had been getting confused about time and would be unlikely to realize what had happened.”

  Alex gave a snort of laughter, but his eyes were cold. “A plan that relied on someone falling asleep in front of the TV? It’s ridiculous. Absolutely bonkers.”

  “Is it?” Katie said. “You knew that Adam was struggling with his sleep patterns. And that he’d had a large meal with beer. And then you made sure that he had more beer. Along with nachos. So plenty of beer and carbs. The chances of him dropping off were excellent; in fact, it was pretty inevitable.”

  “And anyway,” Justin said, “You were just being careful, covering all the bases. You didn’t think you were going to need an alibi, because you thought Sara’s death would be regarded as an accident. If Adam hadn’t fallen asleep, or if he’d woken up and found that you weren’t there, you’d have made some excuse or other and Adam wouldn’t have thought anything of it. You didn’t need to be away long. Typical of you, really: belt and braces. Clever – but a bit too clever as it turned out.”

  Alex shook his head in apparent disbelief. “I killed Sara and took her body out into a blizzard and hid it? In under half an hour?”

  Graeme spoke with calm authority. “No. You killed her and hid her body, probably in the generator room, earlier in the afternoon – after you had played Scrabble and before you joined Adam in the TV room. During the time that you claimed to be having a shower.”

  Alex said, “You can’t prove that. You really don’t have any evidence for these allegations.”

  Justin said, “How did you know the body was taken out in a blizzard? That didn’t start until around four o’clock.”

  Katie saw a flicker of something in Alex’s eyes. Doubt? Fear?

  She said, “And are you absolutely certain that when the police finally get here, they won’t find forensic evidence that ties you to the murder? You do know that DNA is preserved by freezing?”

  No one spoke for what seemed an eternity. Then the silence was broken by a sound that couldn’t have been more ordinary, and yet was shocking in its incongruity. The telephone rang.

  * * *

  It could only be HQ.

  They sat and li
stened to Graeme’s side of the conversation.

  Graeme nodded. “I see, yes…” His eyes rested on Alex. “Yes, I have him here. I’m not surprised to hear that. We’d reached pretty much the same conclusion.”

  He listened some more and his eyes widened in surprise.

  “Will do.” He put down the phone.

  “We’ll be keeping you in some form of custody, Alex, until the winter is over. We’re not the only ones who have been putting two and two together. The police also want to question you about the death of Sara’s research colleague, a woman called Flora Mitchell. They say that they have evidence against you and that you’re their main suspect.”

  Alex sat back and folded his arms. He stared at Graeme defiantly. Was he going to go on denying it all, Katie wondered? And what would they do if he did? And come to that, how on earth were they going to find somewhere to lock him up for six months or more?

  The silence stretched out.

  When Alex did speak, it wasn’t what Katie was expecting.

  “I’m not sorry. They deserved what they got, both of them.”

  Katie could hardly believe her ears. “They deserved it?” she said. “Sara deserved to be stabbed to death? She was a good woman! How could you think that? You must be mad.”

  Alex’s expression didn’t change. “I don’t think it. I know. You didn’t know Kieran, you haven’t seen Kieran as he is now. Some things are worse than death. He was…” Alex groped for words, “…he was this brilliant towering intellect, always coming up with ideas for new ways of doing things. I was the down-to-earth one, the organizer, the plodder who could keep their head down and work out the details. We were a team. He had this idea for using cytochrome c to trigger apoptosis in cancer cells and between us we managed to get it to work. Kieran wrote a paper and put it forward for publication. It would have made our names. Kieran should have had his own lab by now and in the end, maybe, a Nobel Prize, why not? He really was that good. Nothing was impossible, and he’d have taken me along with him. Instead the paper was turned down and that was the end of everything. We were dead in the water. We couldn’t get research money. Kieran couldn’t get another job. It was after that that he started to get ill. And then we saw the paper that Flora Mitchell had published in Oncogene. Using our research! We couldn’t understand it – how had she got hold of the results of our experiments? She had to have had them. But we couldn’t prove that she’d even seen our research, let alone stolen it. And then it all happened so fast. Almost before we knew it, Kieran had been sectioned. I’d been a mature student when I went to university in my mid-twenties to do medicine and later research. When I couldn’t get another research post, I went back to my old trade as a mechanic. But Kieran…” He shook his head. “Well, your friend, the patent lawyer, has seen him. Kieran’s mum told me that. So he knows…”