Bear Island

by Alistair MacLean

  I had a look at him as we sat him on a stool by an oil stove and I didn’t have to look twice or very closely to see that this hadn’t exactly been Allen’s day. Allen had been in the wars again and the damage that had been inflicted on him this time at least matched up to the injuries he’d received that morning. He had two nasty cuts above what had been up till then his undamaged eye, a bruised and scratched right cheek, and blood came from both his mouth and nose, blood already congealed in the cold but his worst injury was a very deep gash on the back of the head, the scalp laid open clear to the bone. Someone had given young Allen a very thorough going over indeed.

  ‘And what happened to you this time?’ I asked. He winced as I started to clean up his face. ‘Or should I say, do you know what happened to you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said thickly. He shook his head and drew his breath in sharply as some pain struck through either head or neck. ‘I don’t remember. I don’t remember.’

  ‘You’ve been in a fight, laddie,’ I said. ‘Again. Someone’s cut you up, and quite badly.’

  ‘I know. I can feel it. I don’t remember. Honest to God, I don’t remember. I—I just don’t know what happened.’

  ‘But you must have seen him,’ Goin said reasonably. ‘Whoever it was, you must have been face to face with him. God’s sake, boy, your shirt’s torn and there’s at least a couple of buttons missing from your coat. And he had to be standing in front of you when he did this to you. Surely you must have caught a glimpse of him at least.’

  ‘It was dark,’ Allen mumbled. ‘I didn’t see anything. I didn’t feel anything, all I knew was that I woke up kind of groggy like in the snow with the back of my head hurting. I knew I was bleeding and—please, I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘Yes you do, yes you do!’ Judith Haynes had pushed her way to the front. The transformation that had taken place in her face was as astonishing as it was ugly, and although her morning performance had partially prepared me for something of this kind, and though this expression was different from the one that had disfigured her face that time, it was still an almost frightening thing to watch. The red gash of the mouth had vanished, the lips drawn in and back over bared teeth, the green eyes were no more than slits and, as had happened that morning, the skin was stretched back over her cheekbones until it appeared far too tight for her face. She screamed at him: ‘You damned liar! Wanted your own back, didn’t you? You dirty little bastard, what have you done with my husband? Do you hear me? Do you hear me? What have you done with him, damn you? Where is he? Where did you leave him?’

  Allen looked up at her in a half-scared astonishment, then shook his head wearily. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Haynes, I don’t know what—’

  She hooked her long-nailed fingers into talons and lunged for him, but I’d been waiting for it. So had both Goin and Conrad. She struggled like a trapped wild-cat, screaming invective at Allen, then suddenly relaxed, her breath coming in harsh, rasping sobs.

  ‘Now then, now then, Judith,’ Otto said. ‘That’s no—’

  ‘Don’t you “now then” me, you silly old bastard!’ she screamed. Filial respect was clearly not Judith Haynes’s strong point, but Otto, though clearly nervous, accepted his daughter’s abuse as if it were a matter of course. ‘Why don’t you find out instead what this young swine’s done to my husband? Why don’t you? Why don’t you!’ She struggled to free her arms and as she was trying to move away we let her go. She picked up a torch and ran for the door.

  ‘Stop her,’ I said.

  Heyter and Jungbeck, big men both, blocked her flight.

  ‘Let me go, let me out!’ she shouted. Neither Heyter nor Jungbeck moved and she whirled round on me. ‘Who the hell are you to—I want to go out and find Michael!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Haynes,’ I said. ‘You’re in no condition to go to look for anyone. You’d just run wild, no trace of where you’d been, and in five minutes’ time you’d be lost too and perhaps lost for good. We’re leaving in just a moment.’

  She took three quick steps towards Otto, her fists clenched, her teeth showing again.

  ‘You let him push me around like this?’ This with an incinerating glare in my direction. ‘Spineless, that’s you, absolutely spineless! Anybody can walk over you!’ Otto blinked nervously at this latest tirade but said nothing. ‘Aren’t I supposed to be your bloody daughter? Aren’t you supposed to be the bloody boss? God’s sake, who gives the orders about here? You or Marlowe?’

  ‘Your father does,’ Goin said. ‘Naturally. But, without any disrespect to Dr Marlowe, we don’t hire a dog just to bark ourselves. He’s a medical man and we’d be fools not to defer to him in medical matters.’

  ‘Are you suggesting I’m a medical case?’ All the colour had drained from her cheeks and she looked uglier than ever. ‘Are you? Are you, then? A mental case, perhaps?’

  Heaven knows I wouldn’t have blamed Goin if he’d said ‘yes’ straight out and left it at that, but Goin was far too balanced and diplomatic to say any such thing, and besides, he’d clearly been through this sort of crisis before. He said, quietly but not condescendingly: ‘I’m suggesting no such thing. Of course you’re distressed, of course you’re overwrought, after all it is your husband that’s missing. But I agree with Dr Marlowe that you’re not the person to go looking for him. We’ll have him back here all the quicker if you co-operate with us, Judith.’

  She hesitated, still halfway between hysteria and rage, then swung away. I taped the gash on Allen’s head and said: ‘That’ll do till I come back. Afraid I’ll have to shave off a few locks and stitch it.’ On the way to the door I stopped and said quietly to Goin: ‘Keep her away from Allen, will you?’

  Goin nodded.

  ‘And for heaven’s sake keep her away from Mary darling.’

  He looked at me in what was as close to astonishment as he was capable of achieving. ‘That kid?’

  ‘That kid. She’s next on the list for Miss Haynes’s attentions. When Miss Haynes gets around to thinking about it, that is.’

  I left with the same four as previously. Conrad, the last out, closed the door behind him and said: ‘Jesus! My charming leading lady. What a virago she is!’

  ‘She’s a little upset,’ I said mildly.

  ‘A little upset! Heaven send I’m in the next county if she ever gets really mad. What the hell do you think can have happened to Stryker?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ I said, and because it was dark I didn’t have to assume an honest expression to go with the words. I moved closer to him so that the others, already fanned out in line of search, couldn’t hear me. ‘Seeing we’re such a bunch of odd-balls anyway, I hope an odd request from another odd-ball won’t come amiss.’

  ‘You disappoint me, Doctor. I thought you and I were two of the very few halfway normal people around here.’

  ‘By the prevailing standards, any moderate odd-ball is normal. You know anything of Lonnie’s past?’

  He was silent for a moment, then said: ‘He has a past?’

  ‘We all have a past. If you think I mean a criminal past, no. Lonnie hasn’t got one. I just want to find out if he was married or had any family. That’s all.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

  ‘If I felt free to ask him myself, would I be asking you?’

  Another silence. ‘Your name really Marlowe, Doc?’

  ‘Marlowe, as ever was. Christopher Marlowe. Passport, birth certificate, driving licence—they’re all agreed on it.’

  ‘Christopher Marlowe? Just like the playwright, eh?’

  ‘My parents had literary inclinations.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ He paused again. ‘Remember what happened to your namesake—stabbed in the back by a friend before his thirtieth birthday?’

  ‘Rest easy. My thirtieth birthday is lost in the mists of time.’

  ‘And you’re really a doctor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re really something else too?’

 
; ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lonnie. Marital status. Children or no. You may rely on Conrad’s discretion.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. We moved apart. We were walking to the north for two reasons—the wind, and hence the snow, were to our backs and so progress was easier in that direction, and Allen had come stumbling from that direction. In spite of Allen’s professed total lack of recall of what had happened, it seemed likely to me that we might find Stryker also somewhere in that direction. And so it proved.

  ‘Over here! Over here!’ In spite of the muffling effects of the snow Hendriks’s shout sounded curiously high-pitched and cracked. ‘I’ve found him, I’ve found him!’

  He’d found him all right. Michael Stryker was lying face down in the snow, arms and legs outspread in an almost perfectly symmetrical fashion. Both fists were clenched tight. On the snow, beside his left shoulder, lay a smooth elliptical stone which from its size—it must have weighed between sixty and seventy pounds—better qualified for the name of boulder. I stooped low over this boulder, bringing the torch close, and at once saw the few dark hairs embedded in the dark and encrusted stain. Proof if proof were required, but I hadn’t doubted anyway that this was what had been used to smash in the back of Stryker’s skull. Death would have been instantaneous.

  ‘He’s dead!’ Jungbeck said incredulously.

  ‘He’s all that,’ I said.

  ‘And murdered!’

  ‘That too.’ I tried to turn him over on his back but Conrad and Jungbeck had to lend their not inconsiderable weights before this was done. His upper lip was viciously split all the way down from the nostril, a tooth was missing and he had a peculiar red and raw-looking mark on his right temple.

  ‘By God, there must have been a fight,’ Jungbeck said huskily. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that kid Allen had had it in him.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so either,’ I said.

  ‘Allen?’ Conrad said. ‘I’d have sworn he was telling the truth. Could he—well, do you think it could have happened when he was suffering from amnesia?’

  ‘All sorts of funny things can happen when you’ve had a bump on the head,’ I said. I looked at the ground around the dead man, there were footprints there, not many, already faint and blurred from the driving snow: there was no help to be gained from that quarter. I said: ‘Let’s get him back.’

  So we carried the dead man back to the camp and it wasn’t, in spite of the uneven terrain and the snow in our faces, as difficult a task as it might have been for the same reason that I’d found it so difficult to turn him over—the limbs had already begun to stiffen, not from the onset of rigor mortis, for it was too soon for that yet, but from the effects of the intense cold. We laid him in the snow outside the main cabin. I said to Hendriks: ‘Go inside and ask Goin for a bottle of brandy—say that I sent you back for it, that we need it to keep us going.’ It was the last thing I would ever have recommended to keep anyone warm in bitter outdoor cold, but it was all I could think of on the spur of the moment. ‘Tell Goin—quietly—to come here.’

  Goin, clearly aware that there was something far amiss, walked out casually and casually shut the door behind him, but there was nothing casual about his reaction when he saw Stryker lying there, his gashed and marble-white face a death’s head in the harsh light of several torches. Goin’s own face was clear enough in the backwash of light reflected from the snow. The shocked expression on his face he could have arranged for: the draining of blood that left it almost as white as Stryker’s he couldn’t.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ he whispered. ‘Dead?’

  I said nothing, just turned the dead man over with Conrad’s and Jungbeck’s help again. This time it was more difficult. Goin made a strange noise in his throat but otherwise didn’t react at all, I suppose he’d nothing left to react with, he just stood there and stared as the driving snow whitened the dead man’s anorak and, mercifully, the fearful wound in the occiput. For what seemed quite a long time we stood there in silence, gazing down at the dead man: I was aware, almost subconsciously, that the wind, now veering beyond south, was strengthening, for the thickening snow was driving along now almost parallel to the ground: I do not know what the temperature was, but it must have been close on thirty degrees below freezing. I was dimly aware that I was shaking with the cold: looking around, I could see that the others were also. Our breaths froze as they struck the icy air, but the wind whipped them away before the vapour had time to form.

  ‘Accident?’ Goin said hoarsely. ‘It could have been an accident?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I saw the boulder that was used to crush his skull in.’ Goin made the same curious noise in his throat again, and I went on: ‘We can’t leave him here and we can’t take him inside. I suggest we leave him in the tractor shed.’

  ‘Yes, yes, the tractor shed,’ Goin said. He really didn’t know what he was saying.

  ‘And who’s going to break the news to Miss Haynes?’ I went on. God alone knew that I didn’t fancy doing it.

  ‘What?’ He was still shocked. ‘What was that?’

  ‘His wife. She’ll have to be told.’ As a doctor, I supposed I was the one to do it, but the decision was taken from my hands. The cabin door was jerked abruptly open and Judith Haynes, her two dogs by her ankles, stood there framed against the light from the interior, with Otto and the Count just vaguely discernible behind her. She stood there for some little time, a hand on either door jamb, quite immobile and without any expression that I could see, then walked forward in a curiously dreamlike fashion and stooped over her husband. After a few moments she straightened, looked around as if puzzled, then turned questioning eyes on me, but only for a moment, for the questioning eyes turned up in her head and she crumpled and fell heavily across Stryker’s body before I or anyone could get to her.

  Conrad and I, with Goin following, brought her inside and laid her on the camp-cot so lately occupied by Smithy. The cocker spaniels had to be forcibly restrained from joining her. Her face was alabaster white and her breathing very shallow. I lifted up her right eyelid and there was no resistance to my thumb: it was only an automatic reaction on my part, it hadn’t even occurred to me that the faint wasn’t genuine. I became aware that Otto was standing close by, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly open, his hands clenched together until the ivory knuckles showed.

  ‘Is she all right?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘Will she—’

  ‘She’ll come to,’ I said.

  ‘Smelling salts,’ he said. ‘Perhaps—’

  ‘No.’ Smelling salts, to hasten her recovery to the bitter reality she would have to face.

  ‘And Michael? My son-in-law? He’s—I mean—’

  ‘You saw him,’ I said almost irritably. ‘He’s dead, of course he’s dead.’

  ‘But how—but how—’

  ‘He was murdered.’ There were one or two involuntary exclamations, the shocked indrawing of breath, then a silence that became intensified with the passing of seconds by the hissing of the Coleman lamps. I didn’t even bother to look up to see what the individual reactions might be for I knew by now that I’d learn nothing that way. I just looked at the unconscious woman and didn’t know what to think. Stryker, the tough, urbane, cynical Stryker had, in his own way, been terrified of this woman. Had it been because of the power she had wielded as Otto’s daughter, his knowledge that his livelihood was entirely dependent on her most wayward whim—and I could imagine few more gifted exponents of the wayward whim than Judith Haynes? Had it been because of her pathological jealousy which I knew beyond all question to exist, because of the instant bitchiness which could allegedly range from the irrational to the insane, or had she held over his head the threat of some nameless blackmail which could bring him at once to his knees? Had he, in his own way, even loved his wife and hoped against hopeless hope that she might reciprocate some of this and been prepared to suffer any humiliation, any insult, in the hope that he might achieve this or part of it? I’d never know, but the questions were academi
c anyway, Stryker no longer concerned me, I was only turning them over in my mind wondering in what way they could throw any light on Judith Haynes’s totally unexpected reaction to Stryker’s death. She had despised him, she must have despised him for his dependence upon her, his weakness, his meek acceptance of insult, the fear he had displayed before me, for the emptiness and nothingness that had lain concealed behind so impressively masculine a facade. But had she loved him at the same time, loved him for what he had been or might have been, or was she just desolated at the loss of her most cherished whipping-boy, the one sure person in the world upon whom she knew she could with impunity vent her wayward spleen whenever the fancy took her? Even without her awareness of it, he might have become an integral, an indispensable part of her existence, an insidiously woven warp in the weft of her being, always dependable, always there, always ready to hand when she most needed him even when that need was no more than to absorb the grey corrosive poison eating away steadily at the edges of her mind. Even the most tarnished cornerstone can support the most crumbling edifice: take that away and the house comes tumbling down. The traumatic reaction to Stryker’s death could, paradoxically, be the clinching manifestation of a complete and irredeemable selfishness: the as yet unrealized realization that she was the most pitiful of all creatures, a person totally alone.

  Judith Haynes stirred and her eyes fluttered open. Memory came back and she shuddered. I eased her to a sitting position and she looked dully around her.

  ‘Where is he?’ I had to strain to hear the words.

  ‘It’s all right, Miss Haynes,’ I said, and, just to compound that fatuous statement, added: ‘We’ll look after him.’