He filled his rucksack with warm drink cans, leaving too much money in the till, and tramped back the hours to the hotel. When he got back, Lucy was sitting in the dining room, uncomfortably, as if she hadn’t wanted to breathe properly until she saw him. She sprang up. She’d showered and her hair was wet down the back of her flowered dress, face red with sunburn. As he walked up he was already thinking what words to say, how to frame it so she wouldn’t get that look in her eyes again.
That night the power went off. Getting up in the dark to pee, Lucy fumbled for the dim bulb and nothing happened. ‘The light’s off,’ she said, an edge of panic in her voice as it woke him. At first he wasn’t worried.
‘It happens. Use the torch.’ But in the morning there was still nothing, and the food in the fridge smelled hot and spoiled. They ate bread, and cooked the last of the eggs on the stove, which was gas. Neither of them talked about how little food was left. The day followed a rhythm – pool, reading, lunch, pool, reading, dinner, bed. The pool wasn’t being filtered, and had taken on a warm greenish tinge. Lucy went in that day but Rob didn’t. He sought shade instead and thought how different heat became when you had to work round it, not enjoy it. Their plug-in mosquito coil no longer worked, so they spent all night slapping and cursing. It was dark as hell by the stroke of 6 p.m.
That night they heard the gunshots. Rob started awake and found a huge hot spider had him under its web. He was tangled in the mosquito net.
Lucy was out of bed, peering through the mesh windows of the canvas room.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I heard something. Shots maybe.’
‘It’s for the elephants, to scare them. Remember they told us.’
‘No … I don’t know. I can see fires.’
He swung his legs out of bed, moving gingerly across the floor in case of insects. Far away on the edge of the immense plain, the horizon was tinged with orange. For the first time he was very aware that their room, for all its expense, was a glorified tent. A pricey tent, a £200 a night tent, but still just canvas. Canvas and one steep hillside stood between them and whatever had caused all the staff to vanish in the night, taking the Jeeps and leaving the eggs to cool on the stove.
They didn’t sleep much more that night, fitful and sweaty. He had to keep a hand on a part of Lucy at all times, a bitten ankle or a sunburnt arm. His greatest fear was to wake up and find her gone too. He couldn’t take this vast African emptiness, not alone. Both were up with first light, sensing some kind of movement on the site, and they ran up the stone steps in their sandals, reaching the dining room and pool. Ahead of him, Lucy froze. The hem of her khaki shorts had ridden up, showing the red rash of her thighs.
‘What is it?’
She reached round, fumbling into him. He craned his head. What he saw made a sudden and terrible sense – of course, they’d come to drink.
The animals were gathered at the pool. The lion was on its haunches, tongue lapping at the scummy green surface like the cat Rob had loved as a little boy in Taunton. The elephant and its calf were on the other side, frantically ignoring the lion, their skin grey and crusted. Rob saw behind that the fence had been trampled down. Several large birds had also come – marabous? There was a rustle in the bushes and he seized Lucy’s arm. ‘Go back. Slowly. Don’t make eye contact.’
After that Lucy wouldn’t leave the room at all. The water in the pipes had slowed to a trickle, so they conserved it in plastic bottles, brown and sluggish. They no longer bothered with showers and the room began to smell.
‘We shouldn’t flush the toilet,’ he said to her on what was maybe the sixth day. He waited for her to protest; she hated to be dirty, hated the latrines they’d had to use on this trip, but she just nodded, not meeting his eyes. When the sun was at its highest point, Rob would tramp round the grounds, looking for what, he didn’t know. He moved all the packet food down to their room, and they ate biscuits and bread rolls. Neither was hungry.
He wasn’t sure when he realized Lucy had been drinking the water. She knew not to, of course. He’d lectured her before they got on the flight, no ice, no juice, no soup, no stew, bottled water for brushing teeth. But on one of the last days he found himself coming to on the bed. That happened a lot during those days. It wasn’t like sleeping. It was more like the boundaries of the world were creeping and blurred, like he wasn’t sure when he was actually awake or when he was asleep.
In whatever this was, Lucy was in the bathroom. She had taken off her pyjamas and was naked, crouching at the bath like an animal. Her breasts hung down over her stomach. She was craning her neck to lap water from the tap, the last dirty drops that clung in the pipes. There’d been nothing for days, though they left all the taps fully on, and they’d grown used to the continuous grinding noise as the system slowly failed. He remembered how they’d filled the rolltop bath to the brim that first night, after the bloody sun went down on the plain below. Poured it all away, all that water.
Lucy, he said, but no sound came out. ‘Lucy.’
She didn’t move.
‘Don’t drink that. You’ll get sick.’
Lucy came back in, walking with a jerky gait. He could see the whites of her eyes and the sweat on her face. She passed a yellow tongue over cracked lips and curled herself into a ball on the bed, where she seemed to sleep immediately. He wasn’t sure on those days if either of them ever slept, or woke. He tried to make himself eat the remaining biscuits when he woke, or drink from a sticky can of Coke by the bed, until he came to one time and found it hiving with ants. He tried to make Lucy eat but she shook her head, moaning.
‘Lucy. Please.’
‘Nooo. Leave me.’
He thought they had a fever. He thought she would die, or they would both die. He gave her aspirin from the medical kit until each silver blister was empty, and he thought: I never should have brought you here. And then, later, in the honest bottom of the night: I never wanted to bring you here.
Days slid into one, until the last.
‘Is it Friday?’ said Lucy, on waking, however many days it was into the time.
Friday had long been and gone, but he heard it too. The unmistakable rumble of engines. ‘Come on.’ He threw back the mosquito net.
Lucy stood, still naked. She hadn’t been dressed for days, he thought. ‘But what – what is it?’
He was at the door already, shuffling his feet into sandals. When he stepped outside he felt weak, as if he might fall. He blinked as he came up the steps and it was a like a stranger appearing in your front room. The dining room was full of soldiers, poking into the fridges, feet on the tables, rifles propped up. They sounded loud and cheerful and their dark skin shone with sweat. They fell silent as he approached, and a man came forward. Shorter than the rest, with badges on his ragged uniform, he gave off a strong stink of bodies.
Rob licked dry lips. ‘Hi,’ he managed. ‘Is something wrong?’
The man looked him up and down. ‘American?’
‘English. Er, British. I’m on holiday.’
The man stared.
‘Um – the staff went away. We’ve been here all this time. We didn’t know what happened. Did something happen?’
He saw the man’s gaze move, and followed it; Lucy was at the bottom of the steps. She hugged her arms over her chest. She hadn’t put any clothes on and her sunburn patches outlined all the white places on her, all the soft vulnerable flesh. Rob shouldered the weight of the men staring at her.
The leader shifted his gun, black, heavy. Rob had never seen one in real life before. ‘The others?’
‘The others?’
‘Yes. Others. Where?’
‘Oh.’ He couldn’t explain. ‘There are no others. They all went.’ He could see the man still not moving, and down the steps, Lucy standing frozen, her burnt English skin on display. He tried again. ‘You see – there isn’t anyone else at all. We’re the last.’
THE POLAR BEAR KILLING
Michael Ridpath
This was going to be the most important day of his life. He knew it. He could feel it. This would be the day when he left his mark on the world.
Constable Halldór’s fingers tightened on the wheel of his police 4×4 as it hurtled through the fog towards the farm by the river where the polar bear had been sighted. The professional hunters in their souped-up Super Jeep were at least five kilometres away. He would get there first. He would have only a few minutes to make the shot.
The polar bear had been spotted on a beach six hours before by some fishermen who had immediately called the coastguard. Polar bears were not native to Iceland, but once every couple of years one would pop up along the northern coastline, usually having ridden sea ice that had drifted westwards from Greenland. Often they swam the last few miles to shore. By the time they reached Iceland, they were tired and hungry. And dangerous.
The fishermen had only caught a brief glimpse because of the poor visibility. But it had been enough for Halldór to organise a couple of parties to scout for the bear, including the two professional hunters armed with the kind of rifle that could kill a reindeer at a thousand metres. Halldór had been following on behind when he had been alerted by the call from a young girl, a farmer’s daughter, who had said she had seen the bear. Her mother was shopping in the village, and her father was out with the other scouts.
The girl was alone with her little brother on the farm, and Halldór was closest to her. In the back of the police car was his .22 rifle. It was much too small a calibre to kill a big bear under normal circumstances. But many years before Halldór had read the story of some hikers in the West Fjords in the 1970s who had come upon a polar bear, carrying only a .22. One of them had waited until the bear had approached really close and shot it through the eye. That had taken real nerve. And marksmanship.
Halldór had nerve. And he was one of the best shots in Iceland. As a policeman in Reykjavík he had applied twice for the Viking Squad, the Icelandic SWAT team, and been turned down each time. The problem wasn’t his ability to handle firearms, but his physical fitness. And now, aged forty-nine, and after seven years driving his car round and round the village of Raufarhöfn in north east Iceland, his girth had grown even greater. But he still knew how to shoot. And he still had nerve.
After a lull of several years, there had been a spate of polar bear invasions from the sea. Each time the bears had been shot, and there had been an outcry from urban do-gooders, people like his daughter Gudrún, for a national polar bear policy. Anaesthetic darts had been stockpiled, and experts flown in from Denmark. But even then, when the next polar bear had shown up, it too had had to be shot before it harmed any of the sightseers who had driven out to gawk at it. And so the new polar bear policy had been determined: shoot on sight. It was too expensive and too dangerous to do anything else.
The road sloped downward, and the police car emerged from the fog into a shallow valley with a fast river tumbling down its middle. A cluster of prosperous farm buildings with white concrete walls and red corrugated metal roofs appeared. The farmer made a little money from sheep and quite a lot from leasing salmon fishing rights on the river.
Halldór scanned the fields and pasture surrounding the farm. A flock of sheep were scattering in all directions: something had spooked them. And then he saw it. A dirty white bear loping along towards the farmhouse. And in front of it a little girl standing still staring at it.
Jesus!
Halldór leaned on his horn, swerved off the road and on to the grass and accelerated towards the girl. The bear stopped to look at the new arrival. The girl, too, turned towards him.
He pulled up between the girl and the bear, which was only about a hundred metres away. He lowered the window. ‘Jump in, Anna!’
The girl opened the passenger door and climbed in.
‘What do you think you were doing?’ Halldór said.
‘I wanted to speak to the polar bear,’ she said.
‘Those animals are dangerous!’ Halldór said. ‘He’s come a long way and he’s hungry.’
‘He’s not dangerous. Egill told me about polar bears. They are friendly. They help people.’
Egill was the old man who lived in the rundown farm barely visible at the base of the cloud on the slope on the other side of the river. He was about eighty and had long ago lost his marbles. ‘They are not friendly, Anna, they attack people, believe me. Now where is your brother?’
‘Back in the farmhouse,’ said the little girl.
‘Good.’ Halldór looked at the bear, which was staring at the vehicle. ‘OK, sit tight, Anna.’
Slowly he climbed out of the car and went around to the back to take out his rifle. The bear watched, but the girl couldn’t see him. Once the gun was loaded Halldór made his way around the car, rested his elbows on the bonnet and aimed at the bear.
It was smaller than he had imagined it would be, and thinner: he could see its ribs. But it was still a magnificent animal.
It was also a hundred metres away, and had turned its rump towards Halldór.
A .22 bullet in the arse would do nothing to a polar bear apart from make it really angry.
‘You’re not going to shoot it!’ shouted the girl.
‘This is a dart gun,’ said Halldór. ‘I’m going to put it to sleep.’
‘It’s not a dart gun,’ the girl said. ‘My dad has a gun like that he uses to shoot foxes. I’m not going to let you kill the lovely bear.’
What happened next would be etched in Halldór’s brain for the little time that remained of his life.
The girl jumped out of the car and ran towards the bear, shouting, ‘Look out, polar bear!’
The bear turned, and after a second’s thought ambled towards the girl.
Halldór’s instinct was to run after the girl and pull her back. But if he did that, the bear would escape, run off into the mist. Sure it would be shot eventually, by one of the professional hunters. But not by him.
The girl stopped, suddenly aware that a very large animal with teeth and claws was approaching her. She was only a few metres from the police car, there was still time for her to turn and run, there was even time for Halldór to drag her back, but she froze.
Halldór took careful aim. The bear was coming directly towards him, its eyes two round black holes staring straight ahead.
At last the girl screamed and turned. The bear was nearly on her, only twenty metres away.
Halldór took his time. He could make this shot ten times out of ten as long as he kept his nerve. He inhaled, then exhaled slowly and squeezed the trigger. The bear dropped to the ground, as the bullet tore through its eye and into its brain.
The two young men, a German and an Icelander, breathed heavily as they climbed the hill. The sky was a pale blue, and there was no sign of the thick low cloud that had settled over the area for the previous five days.
The Icelander paused, and raised the binoculars that were hanging around his neck to scan the ponds and marshes of the Melrakkasléttarnes, the fox plain, that stretched out to the north of the village. ‘Nothing.’
‘She must have drowned,’ said the German in English.
The bear that had been shot four days before was not yet fully grown, and the theory was that its mother might have landed as well. But now that the weather had cleared up and it was possible to see more than a couple of hundred metres, that was looking increasingly unlikely.
‘I’m afraid you have wasted your trip, Martin,’ the Icelander said, turning back up the hill.
‘Yeah,’ said Martin. ‘It would have been cool actually to see a polar bear. And to stop t
hose bastards shooting it.’
‘Here it is,’ said the Icelander, whose name was Alex. ‘The “Arctic Henge”.’
On the crest of the hill above them lay a giant stone circle, recently built in the manner of Stonehenge, with four tall stone gates at each point of the compass rising to a point. The low sun painted geometric shadows down the eastern slope of the hill.
‘Cool,’ said Martin again. It was his favourite English word. ‘You say it acts like some kind of sundial?’
‘Apparently.’
They walked around the site, trying to figure out what it all meant. Alex thought that the layout was based on an ancient Icelandic poem, but he was confused about what signified what, and Martin’s questions were just confusing him more.
‘Well, let’s ask that guy,’ Martin said.
‘What guy?’
Martin pointed to a black-clad leg sticking out from behind one of the stone pillars of a gate.
As the two men approached the gate, more of the figure came into view.
‘Mein Gott!’
It was a man. He was wearing a black police uniform. He was slumped against the stone pillar. And where his right eye should have been there was a bloody mess.
It was a long journey from Reykjavík to Raufarhöfn. Detective Sergeant Magnús Ragnarsson flew half the distance to Akureyri, and then took one of the local police cars for the remaining three-hour drive. Raufarhöfn was in the far north east of the country, and the road there hugged the north coast to a point only a couple of miles south of the Arctic Circle. To his left the sea was a ruffled greyish blue, to his right the land was a ruffled brownish green. Farms were few and far between. The landscape was wet, dotted with ponds, marshes, lakes and rivers. It was a fine day: the sun shone a weak yellow in the pale blue sky on to the eerie remoteness of the Melrakkasléttarnes.
Deadly Pleasures Page 18