The Perfect Corpse

by Giles Milton

  He turned to the X-rays and tomographic scans of the skull and brain. There were six in the file, yet none revealed any imperfections whatsoever. The most plausible explanation for the lack of internal damage was that Ferris Clark had fallen into water. Tammy had said he’d been found entombed in clear ice. That suggested water had frozen around him, something that could only happen in a glacial crevasse.

  Minus forty-seven was the lowest temperature ever recorded inside a crevasse, he knew that from the Forni case. Water wells up from the depths of the glacier but is prevented from freezing by the pressurized currents far below. Fall into water that cold and you’re in big trouble. Hypothermic shock as your head tips under. Hyperventilation as you resurface, your heart pumping in your throat. A dramatic loss of dexterity and your brain jack-knifing out of control as you’re plunged through intense physiological stress. How long would it take to die? Two minutes, maybe three? You’d be unlikely to survive any longer.

  During one of their Everest training weekends, Steve had fallen into a glacial crevasse. He’d later told them how he’d been jerked upside down, wedged between the icy jaws. ‘Mind-shit cold.’ Each time he had tried to extricate himself, he’d slipped deeper inside.

  They hadn’t heard his cries at first. Ice deadens the sound of screaming. He had been lucky to escape with a broken rib.

  Jack reached for the beige envelope inside the file and pulled out the scans of Ferris Clark’s lungs. They contained no water. At least, they contained no water that had later frozen. And that strongly suggested that he was dead before he hit the water. He had not asphyxiated from drowning.

  The Mallory business had shown him it was possible to reconstruct the final moments of someone’s life with considerable precision. A dislocated elbow, a frayed rope, a shattered rib: bone by broken bone he had mapped out the 1924 disaster. Mallory had slipped in the darkness and spun into the rock-face. The rope had snapped and he’d fallen on his leg. He’d slid down the scree, shredding his skin. Dead in less than five minutes.

  He flicked through the other scans, paying particular attention to the magnified prints of the blood cells. Tammy was right. They were perfect. So perfect, in fact, that they looked like they’d been preserved with cryo-protectant.

  He recalled a paper he’d read about the Arctic frog. It had developed a unique system to protect itself in winter, storing masses of glucose in its liver. When the temperature dipped below freezing it released the stuff back into its body. It stopped breathing, its blood stopped flowing and its legs froze solid. But the core cells were protected by the glucose, like antifreeze in a car. And when spring came round, its organs would kick-start themselves into action.

  He sat back in his chair, deep in thought. Even if something similar had happened to Ferris Clark – somehow - his body would still have had to flash-freeze, and that was impossible without liquid nitrogen.

  He switched on his iPad and checked through the notes he had made after the autopsy. Clark’s body mass was not far short of ninety kilograms. His core temperature at the time of death would have been around thirty-six degrees. And his body would have contained a minimum of fifty-five kilograms of liquid.

  He stopped typing for a moment. Fifty-five kilos of liquid doesn’t freeze in an instant. In fact – he jotted down some more figures - Ferris Clark would have had to shed 8,500 kilojoules of heat energy for his blood to drop to minus two Celsius, the temperature at which it would start to freeze. It would have taken a minimum of seven hours for him to freeze solid.

  *

  The more he looked through the information, the more he realised that Tom Lawyer had only ever viewed the Ferris Clark case through the eyes of a scientist, as a set of neuro-reports and thermo-optic scans. There was nothing in the file about Ferris Clark’s life and very little about his weeks in Greenland.

  Tom had said he was a conscript, drafted into the US Army Corps of Engineers. Drafted in January. Sent to Greenland in March. That meant he’d received just two months training, very little for someone being sent into such harsh terrain.

  Jack opened a new file on his iPad and began noting down possible lines of enquiry.

  + Ferris Clark’s army conscription record.

  + US Army archives.

  + Medical certificate (unlikely to be in the public domain).

  + Birth certificate.

  + Local county records.

  + The 1940 census.

  He felt sure that if he was ever going to discover the truth of how Ferris Clark died, then he needed to know how Ferris Clark lived. Who was Ferris Clark?

  ‘Not exactly the Eastern Front.’ That’s what Tom had said about the war in the Arctic. Yet it had clearly been important enough to warrant an American base served by a rotating group of conscripts.

  Jack turned back to his iPad and clicked onto Google, typing ‘greenland, 2ww, american base.’ The information appeared on screen immediately. The base had been operational for almost three years and situated at a place called Cape Hvitfeldt.

  Cape Hvitfeldt. He searched for it on Google Earth. It was on the exposed south east coast of Greenland, a bullet-shaped peninsula some three miles in length that pointed due east into the ocean. So that was Ferris Clark’s home for the final few weeks of his life.

  He zoomed closer onto the map. There was a long inlet to the north of the peninsula, not much wider than a football pitch, and another, twice as long, to the south. The base itself, which had been known as Camp Eggen, was situated at the very tip.

  Jack changed to an image map and zoomed in so close that the picture was reduced to a blur. He could just about make out an embracing cliff that looked to be some twenty metres in height. That must have been why it was chosen, as a natural buffer against the Arctic wind.

  He typed in Camp Eggen and found a few more references. Established by the Americans in early 1943, the year of Soviet victory at Stalingrad. Jack counted up the months. That meant it had been operational for almost a year by the time Ferris Clark pitched up.

  Camp Eggen never served as anything more than a refuelling depot. Planes and sea-going cargo vessels broke their journey here before continuing across the Atlantic. It was at its busiest in the summer of 1943 and the spring of 1944, when as many as twenty planes landed here each day, most of them Douglas Skytrains and Curtiss Commandoes.

  The website suggested it was nothing more than a temporary wartime base: a few metal huts and a petrol station in the snow. There were storehouses, living quarters and vast petrol tanks. Camp Eggen was essentially a refuelling stop for planes on route to Iceland, Scotland and the north of England.

  Yet the importance of the place was clear simply by looking at its position on the map. And Camp Eggen had started to receive regular visits from destroyers, cargo ships and planes within weeks of being established. This landing strip in the snow was their lifeline.

  Not exactly the Eastern Front. But Jack had enough experience of working in sub-zero temperatures to know that it would have been no picnic either. The summer months would have been bearable. Ferris Clark and his comrades would have been able to supplement their supplies by plucking lobsters and shellfish from the rock-pools. Southeast Greenland had a mean June temperature of thirteen degrees. They might even have grown vegetables in the more sheltered spots of land.

  But the rest of the year would have tested their endurance to the limit. The climate spoke for itself. Far below freezing, even in spring. The highest precipitation in Greenland. And at that latitude, Camp Eggen must have been in darkness from November to February. Daylight would have been gradually returning by the time Ferris Clark pitched up in March. But even so, acclimatizing to the isolation would have tested the mettle of even the sanest person.

  Did they drink? Fight? And who was the group leader? In the Antarctic polar research stations, leadership had always been of paramount importance. Minor grouches could lead to tensions. Tensions could lead to hostility. And hostility could - perhaps - lead to murder.

&n
bsp; *

  There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Come in.’

  The door opened slowly with the clatter of a tray against the handle.

  ‘Room service.’

  It had taken so long that Jack had forgotten he had ordered it. The waitress entered all smiles. Her red and white apron made her look like she’d just stepped out of a TV soap. She placed the tray on the table by the door.

  ‘Here you go, Club sandwich and Coke.’

  The sandwich was cut into a neat triangle and pinned together with a blue-parasol cocktail stick. It sat on a sea of crisps, which gave it the air of a shipwrecked yacht. The bottle of Coke, still frosted, lay on its side next to the plate.

  ‘Stayin’ long?’ she asked with a friendly smile.

  Jack shook his head. ‘Nope. Flying visit. I’m off tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re from England.’ She said it as fact, rather than a question.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t get many from England. ZAKRON isn’t it? I was talking about it with Destinee. She was on shift yesterday, at lunchtime. She doesn’t like the idea but I think it’s cool. Cryonics, that’s what they call it. Just imagine, you get woken up a hundred years from now and find yourself in a whole new world.’

  ‘Could be confusing,’ said Jack.

  ‘Yeah, well, cars that fly, robots doin’ the cleaning. No sickness. That’d be the best. But you’d have no friends, I guess.’

  She smiled, glanced at the tip he’d given her and thanked him.

  ‘Anything else – ?’

  She left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Jack got up, picked up the tray and placed it on the desk next to the window. Then he looked blankly into the room. It was so functional that there weren’t even any pictures on the walls. One double bed, one laminate desk and a TV and DVD player. That’s what you got for sixty-two dollars a night in Hanford Gap, Nevada.

  Karin would have hated it.

  *

  He snapped the lid off the Coke and took a swig, wincing slightly as the ice-cold liquid hit a nerve on his tooth. He ate one half of the Club sandwich, wiped his hands on the paper napkin and then turned back to his iPad and ran an image search on Cape Eggen.

  A dozen or so photographs of the base flashed onto the screen, along with a dozen more of glamour girl Vicki Eggen from Vegas, topless and with her legs wrapped round a pole. ‘Glamour girl Vicki bares all.’ She was goofy, permed and looked like she was still at high school.

  The photographs of Camp Eggen showed four small huts, probably the men’s living quarters, and two oil-tanks that were twice as long as the biggest hut. They had pipes and valves sticking out of one side and oil had leached into the snow, leaving a dirty black stain extending halfway down the slope. Behind the tanks was a cliff of ice, split through the vertical with a giant fissure.

  There was one picture that arrested his eye. It showed some of the men from the base, conscripts-turned-soldiers-turned-Arctic-explorers. Woolly hats, pipes fuming like bonfires, cheery faces. Too cheery, in fact. They looked like they were faking it for the camera.

  He studied each of them in turn, looking to see if any of them matched Ferris Clark. But none of the men looked remotely like the corpse at ZAKRON.

  *

  He reached for his notebook and started jotting down some facts. ‘Camp Eggen. Established June, 1943.’ That meant it was fully functioning by the time Ferris Clark arrived. ‘Permanent staff: 8 men.’ He made a note to track down the others.

  ‘Rotating length of service: 7 months.’ If Ferris Clark had arrived in March, 1944, as Tom had suggested, then he wouldn’t have been relieved until the beginning of November. He’d have left on the last icebreaker to call at the base before the waters finally froze. Except that by the time the ship pulled into harbour, Ferris Clark had been dead for at least four months.

  He changed screen, looked at the map once again. The information about Camp Eggen added nothing. Ferris Clark’s body had been found in the middle of nowhere, miles from the American base. Tom Lawyer said it was suicide. Jack was not convinced. An accident also seemed unlikely, given the fact that he was naked.

  That left murder. He’d been stripped, killed and dumped in the middle of nowhere. It had happened many times during the war, notably at Stalingrad. Jack remembered reading how the Russians had taken German prisoners from ‘the pocket’, forced them to strip and watched them die in temperatures as low as minus fifty.

  He ate the second half of the Club sandwich and took another swig of Coke. Then, as if playing a game of lucky dip, he typed ‘nazi greenland’ into his computer. Dozens of entries appeared on the screen, some containing historical information, some not. ‘Nazi Leaders Last-Ditch Greenland Escape Plan.’ He clicked on it and found himself on a site with links to the Fortean Times. Another click brought him to ‘Axis History: Nazi Fighting in Greenland.’

  German soldiers first landed on the east coast of Greenland in the summer of 1942. They arrived on the cruiser Admiral Scheer and initially made their base at Sabine Island, which lies at latitude 74.

  The Germans had established two meteorological stations, Weather Station Edelweiss and Weather Station Linden. Both were operational within days and both were vital to the war effort. The battle for the North Atlantic was dependent on accurate forecasting.

  Jack looked at the map to position them. Linden was far beyond the Arctic Circle at fractured Sabine Island. Edelweiss was also on the coast, but further to the south. A few huts, some fuel tanks and an enormous radio transmitter. The on-line photos suggested that it was very much like Camp Eggen. The only difference was the red and black swastika flying from the flag-pole, almost certainly put up for the photograph. It looked like a still from a Leni Riefenstahl movie.

  If Camp Eggen was remote then these Nazi outposts were even more desolate. Few supply ships could ever have reached the men living here, making them reliant on hunting and fishing. Jack sat back in his chair for a moment. You’d have to be a diehard Nazi to volunteer for service at such northerly latitude.

  The website said that the Greenland Nazis had done work of vital importance. They’d sent weather reports back to Berlin, advance warnings of North Atlantic storms, mappings of the high and low pressure zones that swept eastwards from Greenland.

  Nazis in Greenland. Jack felt he was onto something.

  TEN

  It was almost six o’clock by the time he had finished going through all the information that was available on-line, far later than he had thought. He picked up his phone and called the agency for a hire car, hoping it was not already closed for the evening. He wanted to get himself a Chevy Corvette, sleek, fast and perfect for the four-hour trip to Vegas.

  ‘Chevy Corvette?’ said the voice at the other end. He could sense the smile in the way she said it. ‘Nothing like that here at our Hanford office. You’d need to go to Vegas.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘But let me see. What can I offer you - ?’

  There was the sound of rummaging in the background, followed by the click-clicking of a keyboard. ‘Ah. Hold on. Yeah. We took delivery of a Dodge Viper last night. That’s a cool car. Good?’

  Jack nodded into the phone. It was very good indeed.

  ‘A Dodge Viper will do just fine.’

  He gave his card details and arranged for it to be delivered to Logan’s Corner.

  ‘We’ll have it by eight,’ said the woman. ‘I’ll get Ricky to drop it off. We can leave the keys at reception if you’re not there.’

  Jack shaved, took a shower and started packing his clothes. He intended to check out in the morning and set off to Vegas for the day. He scrolled through the news channels on television before noticing the time and realising he needed to head into Hanford for dinner with Tammy. He picked up his mobile from the table and made his way down to the lobby.

  ‘Out for the evening?’ asked the receptionist.

  He nodded. ‘And tomorrow I’m checking out. Earl
y. Six-thirtyish.’

  He told her about the delivery of the hire car and then stepped out into the hot evening air, glancing at the sky as he did so. Overhead it was rich satin-blue, like it had spilled off Van Gogh’s palette, and the first few stars were starting to shine. The lights of Hanford lent a dull stain to the darkness and the lamps on the highway cut orange gashes into the sky.

  Tammy had suggested they meet at Taylor’s, a steakhouse on South Taylor Street. ‘We need to talk things through.’ That’s what she’d said. ‘Work out a plan. If Tom hears you’re staying on, I’m dead meat.’

  Jack walked into town, turning left out of the parking lot and onto the highway, following the dusty verge. A few spiked thistles clung precariously to life, their seed-heads crisp and ready to split. There were dented plastic bottles, Styrofoam boxes, a discarded condom. A neon burger did its best to tempt drivers off the highway. Burgers with ketchup. Burgers with cheese. Flame-roasted burgers. There was a queue of cars at the drive-thru.

  The taxi-ride of the previous day had contracted the distance from Logan’s Corner into Hanford. What seemed like a few hundred yards by car was in fact more than a mile. By the time he got to Taylor’s Steak House it was almost eight-thirty.

  He pushed the door and looked around, checking the place out. Tammy had yet to arrive. There were wood-panel walls and check curtains, a long bar flanked with red-leather bar stools and a chrome and glass juke-box in the corner. A lone couple sat on the far side under the stuffed head of a buffalo. The place screamed nostalgia for the days when it was rough out there on the scrubland and flies swarmed around in clouds. The sort of place Ferris Clark might have dipped into for a few beers, if only he’d made it through the war.