Bear Island

by Alistair MacLean

  I refrained from doing what I felt like doing, which was to let loose with a few choice and uninhibited phrases, turned and looked up to find Otto’s massively pear-shaped bulk looming massively above me. His fists were clenched, his puce complexion had darkened dangerously, his eyes were glaring and his lips were clamped in a thin line that threatened to disappear at any moment.

  ‘You look upset, Mr Gerran,’ I said. ‘In point of fact, I was eavesdropping.’ I pushed myself to my feet, dusted off the knees of my trousers, straightened and dusted off my hands. ‘I can explain everything.’

  ‘I’m waiting for your explanation.’ He was fractionally more livid than ever. ‘It should be interesting, Dr Marlowe.’

  ‘I only said I can explain everything. Can, Mr Gerran. That doesn’t mean I’ve got any intention of explaining anything. Come to that, what are you doing here?’

  ‘What am I—what am I—?’ He spluttered into outraged speechlessness, the year’s top candidate for an instant coronary. ‘God damn your impudence, sir! I’m about to go on watch! What are you doing at my daughter’s door? I’m surprised you’re not looking through that keyhole, Marlowe, instead of listening at it!’

  ‘I don’t have to look through keyholes,’ I said reasonably. ‘Miss Haynes is my patient and I’m a doctor. If I want to see her I just open the door and walk in. Well, then, now that you’re on watch, I’ll be on my way. Bed. I’m tired.’

  ‘Bed! Bed! By God, I swear this, Marlowe, you’ll regret—who’s in there with her?’

  ‘Lonnie Gilbert.’

  ‘Lonnie Gilbert! What in the name of hell—stand aside, sir! Let me pass!’

  I barred his way—physically. It was like stopping a small tank upholstered in Dunlopillo, but I had the advantage of having my back to the wall and he brought up a foot short of the door. ‘I wouldn’t, if I were you. They’re having a rather painful moment in there. Lost, one might say, in the far from sweet remembrance of things past.’

  ‘What the devil do you mean? What are you trying to tell me, you—you eavesdropper?’

  ‘I’m not trying to tell you anything. Maybe, though, you’d tell me something? Maybe you would like to tell me something about that car crash—I assume that it must have been in California—in which Lonnie Gilbert’s wife and two children were killed a long long time ago?’

  He stopped being livid. He even stopped being his normal puce. Colour drained from his face to leave it ugly and mottled and stained with grey. ‘Car crash?’ He’d a much better control over his voice than he had over his complexion. ‘What do you mean, “car crash”, sir?’

  ‘I don’t know what I mean. That’s why I’m asking you. I heard Lonnie, just snippets, talking about his family’s fatal car crash, and as your daughter seemed to know something about it I assumed you would too.’

  ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about. Nor you.’ Otto, who seemed suddenly to have lost all his inquisitorial predilections, wheeled and walked up the passage to the centre of the cabin. I followed and walked to the outer door. Smithy was in for a hike, I thought, no doubt about it now. Although the cold was as intense as ever, the snow had stopped, the west wind dropped away to no more than an icily gentle breeze—the fact that we were now in the lee of the Antarcticfjell might have accounted for that—and there were quite large patches of star-studded sky all around. There was a curious lightness, a luminescence in the atmosphere, too much to be accounted for by the presence of stars alone. I walked out a few paces until I was clear of the main cabin, and low to the south I could see a three-quarter moon riding in an empty sky.

  I went back inside and as I closed the door I saw Lonnie crossing the main living area, heading, I assumed, for his cubicle. He walked uncertainly, like a man not seeing too well, and as he went by close to me I could see that his eyes were masked in tears: I would have given a lot to know just what it was that had been responsible for those tears. It was a mark of Lonnie’s emotional upset that he did not so much as glance at the still three-quarter- full bottle of scotch on the small table by which Otto was sitting. He didn’t even so much as look at Otto: more extraordinarily still, Otto didn’t even look up at Lonnie’s passing. In the mood he’d been in when he’d accosted me outside his daughter’s door I’d have expected him to question Lonnie pretty closely, probably with both hands around the old man’s neck: but Otto’s mood, clearly, had undergone a considerable sea-change.

  I was walking towards Luke, bent on rousing the faithful watchdog from his slumbers, when Otto suddenly heaved his bulk upright and made his way down the passage towards his daughter’s cubicle. I didn’t even hesitate, in for a penny, in for a pound. I followed him and took up my by now accustomed station outside Judith Haynes’s door, although this time I didn’t have to have resource to the keyhole again as Otto, in what was presumably his agitation, had left the door considerately ajar. Otto was addressing his daughter in a low harsh voice that was noticeably lacking in filial affection.

  ‘What have you been saying, you young she- devil? What have you been saying? Car crash? Car crash? What lies have you been telling Gilbert, you blackmailing little bitch?’

  ‘Get out of here!’ Judith Haynes had abandoned the use of her dull and expressionless voice, although probably involuntarily. ‘Leave me, you horrible, evil, old man. Get out, get out, get out!’

  I leaned more closely to the crack between door and jamb. It wasn’t every day one had the opportunity to listen to those family tête-à-têtes.

  ‘By God, and I’ll not have my own daughter cross me.’ Otto had forgotten the need to talk in a low voice. ‘I’ve put up with more than enough from you and that other idle worthless bastard of a blackmailer. What you did—’

  ‘You dare to talk of Michael like that?’ Her voice had gone very quiet and I shivered involuntarily at the sound of it. ‘You talk of him like that and he’s lying dead. Murdered. My husband. Well, Father dear, can I tell you about something you don’t know that I know he was blackmailing you with? Shall I, Father dear? And shall I tell it to Johann Heissman too?’

  There was a silence, then Otto said: ‘You venomous little bitch!’ He sounded as if he was trying to choke himself.

  ‘Venomous! Venomous!’ She laughed, a cracked and chilling sound. ‘Coming from you, that’s rich. Come now, Daddy dear, surely you remember 1938—why, even I can remember it. Poor old Johann, he ran, and ran, and ran, and all the time he ran the wrong way. Poor Uncle Johann. That’s what you taught me to call him then, wasn’t it, Daddy dear? Uncle Johann.’

  I left, not because I had heard all that I wanted to hear but because I thought that this was a conversation that was not going to last very long and I could foresee a degree of awkwardness arising if Otto caught me outside his daughter’s door a second time. Besides—I checked the time—Jungbeck, Otto’s watch-mate, was due to make his appearance just at that moment and I didn’t want him to find me where I was and, very likely, lose no time in telling his boss about it. So I returned to Luke, decided that there was no point in awakening him only to tell him to go to sleep again, poured myself a sort of morning nightcap and was about to savour it when I heard a feminine voice scream ‘Get out, get out, get out’, and saw Otto emerging hurriedly from his daughter’s cubicle and as hurriedly close the door behind him. He waddled swiftly into the middle of the cabin, seized the whisky bottle without as much as by-your-leave—true, it was his own, but he didn’t know that—poured himself a brimming measure and downed half of it at a gulp, his shaking hand spilling a fair proportion of it on the way up to his mouth.

  ‘That was very thoughtless of you, Mr Gerran,’ I said reproachfully. ‘Upsetting your daughter like that. She’s really a very sick girl and what she needs is tender affection, a measure of loving care.’

  ‘Tender affection!’ He was on the second half of his glass now and he spluttered much of it over his shirt front. ‘Loving care! Jesus!’ He splashed some more scotch into his glass and gradually subsided a little. By and by he beca
me calm, almost thoughtful: when he spoke no one would have thought that only a few minutes previously his greatest yearning in life would have seemed to be to disembowel me. ‘Maybe I wasn’t as thoughtful as I ought to have been. But a hysterical girl, very hysterical. This actress temperament, you know. I’m afraid your sedatives aren’t very effective, Dr Marlowe.’

  ‘People’s reactions to sedatives vary greatly, Mr Gerran. And unpredictably.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you, not blaming you,’ he said irritatedly. ‘Care and attention. Yes, yes. But some rest, a damned good sleep is more important, if you ask me. How about another sedative—a more effective one this time? No danger in that, is there?’

  ‘No. No harm in it. She did sound a bit—what shall we say?—worked up. But she’s rather a self-willed person. If she refuses—’

  ‘Ha! Self-willed! Try, anyway.’ He seemed to lose interest in the subject and gazed moodily at the floor. He looked up without any enthusiasm as Jungbeck made a sleepy entrance, turned and shook Luke roughly by the shoulder. ‘Wake up, man.’ Luke stirred and opened bleary eyes. ‘Bloody fine guard you are. Your watch is over. Go to bed.’ Luke mumbled some sort of apology, rose stiffly and moved off.

  ‘You might have let him be,’ I said. ‘He’ll have to get up for the day inside a few hours anyway.’

  ‘Too late now. Besides,’ Otto added inconsequentially, ‘I’m going to have the lot of them up inside two hours. Weather’s cleared, there’s a moon to travel by, we can all be where we want to be and ready to shoot as soon as there’s enough light in the sky.’ He glanced along the corridor where his daughter’s cubicle was. ‘Well, aren’t you going to try?’

  I nodded and left. Ten minutes’ time—in the right circumstances which in this case were the wrong ones—can bring about a change in a person’s features which just lies within the bounds of credibility. The face that had looked merely drawn so very recently, now looked haggard: she looked her real age and then ten hard and bitter years after that. She wept in a sore and aching silence and the tears flowed steadily down her temples and past the earlobes, the damp marks spreading on the grey rough linen of her pillow. I would not have thought it possible that I could ever feel such deep pity for this person and wish to comfort her: but that was how it was. I said: ‘I think you should sleep now.’

  ‘Why?’ Her hands were clenched so tightly that the ivory of the knuckles showed. ‘What does it matter? I’ll have to wake up, won’t I?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ It was the sort of situation where, no matter what I said, the words would sound banal. ‘But the sleep would do you good, Miss Haynes.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said. It was hard for her to speak through the quiet tears. ‘All right. Make it a long sleep.’

  So, like a fool, I made it a long sleep. Like an even greater fool I went to my cubicle and lay down. And, like the greatest fool of all, I went to sleep myself.

  I slept for over four hours and awoke to an almost deserted cabin. Otto had indeed been as good as his word and had had everyone up and around at what they must have regarded as the most unreasonable crack of dawn. Understandably enough, neither he nor anyone else had seen fit to wake me: I was one of the few who had no functions to perform that day.

  Otto and Conrad were the only two people in the main quarter of the cabin. Both were drinking coffee, but as both were heavily muffled they were clearly on the point of departure. Conrad said a civil good morning. Otto didn’t bother. He informed me that the Count, Neal Divine, Allen, Cecil and Mary Darling had taken off with the Sno-Cat and cameras along Lerner’s Way and that he and Conrad were following immediately. Hendriks and the Three Apostles were abroad with their sound-recording equipment. Smithy and Heyter had left over an hour previously for Tunheim. Initially, I found this vaguely disturbing, I would have thought that Smithy would have at least woken and spoken to me before leaving. On reflection, however, I found this omission less than disturbing: it was a measure of Smithy’s confidence in himself and, by implication, my unspoken confidence in himself, that he had not thought it necessary to seek either advice or reassurance before his departure. Finally, Otto told me, Heissman and his hand-held camera, along with Jungbeck, had taken off on his location reconnaissance in the sixteen-foot work- boat: they had been accompanied by Goin, who had volunteered to stand in for the now absent Heyter.

  Otto stood up, drained his cup and said: ‘About my daughter, Dr Marlowe.’

  ‘She’ll be all right.’ She would never again be all right.

  ‘I’d like to talk to her before I go.’ I couldn’t begin to imagine a reason why he should wish to talk to her or she to him, but I refrained from comment. He went on: ‘You have no objections? Medical ones, I mean?’

  ‘No. Just straightforward commonsense ones. She’s under heavy sedation. You couldn’t even shake her awake.’

  ‘But surely—’

  ‘Two or three hours at the very least. If you don’t want my advice, Mr Gerran, why ask for it?’

  ‘Fair enough, fair enough. Leave her be.’ He headed towards the outer door. ‘Your plans for the day, Dr Marlowe?’

  ‘Who’s left here?’ I said. ‘Apart from your daughter and myself?’

  He looked at me, his brows levelled in a frown, then said: ‘Mary Stuart. Then there’s Lonnie, Eddie and Sandy. Why?’

  ‘They’re asleep?’

  ‘As far as I know. Why?’

  ‘Someone has to bury Stryker.’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course. Stryker. I hadn’t forgotten, you know, but—yes, of course. Yes, yes. You—?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am in your debt. A ghastly business, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly. Thank you again, Dr Marlowe.’ He waddled purposefully towards the door. ‘Come, Charles, we are overdue.’

  They left. I poured myself some coffee but had nothing to eat for it wasn’t a morning for eating, went outside into the equipment shed and found myself a spade. The frozen snow was not too deep, not much more than a foot, but the permafrost had set into the ground and it cost me over an hour and a half and, what is always dangerous in those high latitudes, the loss of much sweat before I’d done what had to be done. I returned the spade and went inside quickly to change: it was a fine clear morning of bitter cold with the sun not yet in the sky, but no morning for an overheated man to linger.

  Five minutes later, a pair of binoculars slung round my neck, I closed the front door softly behind me. Despite the fact that it was now close on ten o’clock, Eddie, Sandy, Lonnie and Mary Stuart had not as yet put in an appearance. The presence of the first three would have given me no cause for concern for all were notorious for their aversion to any form of physical activity and it was extremely unlikely that any would have suggested that they accompany me on my outing: Mary Stuart might well have done so, for any number of reasons: curiosity, the wish to explore, because she’d been told to keep an eye on me, even, maybe, because she would have felt safer with me than being left behind at the cabin. But whatever her reasons might have been I most definitely didn’t want Mary Stuart keeping an eye on me when I was setting out to keep an eye on Heissman.

  But to keep an eye on Heissman I had first of all to find him, and Heissman, inconveniently and most annoyingly, was nowhere to be seen. The intention, as I had understood it, was that he, with Jungbeck and Goin, should cruise the Sor-hamna in the sixteen-footer, in search of likely background material. But there was no trace of their boat anywhere in the Sor-hamna, and from where I stood in the vicinity of the cabin I could take in the whole sweep of the bay at one glance. Against the remote possibility that the boat might have temporarily moved in behind one of the tiny islands on the east side of the bay I kept the glasses on those for a few minutes. Nothing stirred. Heissman, I was sure, had left the Sor-hamna.

  He could have moved out to the open sea to the east by way of the northern tip of the island of Makehl, but this seemed unlikely. The northerly seas were white-capped and confused, and apart from the fact that Heissman was as
far removed from the popular concept of an intrepid seaman as it was possible to imagine it seemed unlikely that he would have forgotten Smithy’s warning the previous day about the dangers inherent in taking an open-pooped boat out in such weather. Much more likely, I thought, he’d moved south out of the Sor-hamna into the sheltered waters of the next bay to the south, the Evjebukta.

  I, too, made my way south. Initially, I moved in a southwesterly direction to give the low cliffs of the bay as wide a berth as possible, not from any vertiginous fear of heights but because Hendriks and the Three Apostles were down there somewhere recording, or hoping to record, the cries of the kittiwake gulls, the fulmars, the black guillemots which were reputed to haunt those parts: I had no reason to fear anything at their hands, I just didn’t want to go around arousing too much curiosity.

  The going, diagonally upwards across a deceptively easy-looking slope, proved very laborious indeed. Mountaineering ability was not called for, which in view of my lack of expertise or anything resembling specialized equipment, was just as well: what was required was some form of in-built radar to enable me to detect the presence of hidden fissures and sudden dips in the smooth expanse of white, and in this, unfortunately, I was equally lacking, with the result that I fell abruptly and at fairly regular intervals into drifts of newly-formed snow that at times reached as high as my shoulders. There was no physical danger in this, the cushioning effect of newly-driven snow is almost absolute, but the effort of almost continuously extricating myself from those miniature ravines and struggling back up to something resembling terra firma—which even then had seldom less than twelve or fifteen inches of soft snow—was very wearing indeed. If it were so difficult for me to make progress along such relatively simple ground I wondered how Smithy and Heyter must be faring in the so much more wildly rugged mountainous terrain to the north.