by John Moralee
I could probably have quashed my feelings if not for the fact that I knew Allison was not in a happy marriage. It wasn’t easy for her being married to Mr Always Right.
To celebrate the healing of her ankle, I brought a bottle of cheap champagne to her room. She invited me in to share it. She was soon quite drunk.
“Peter, I have a confession. I’m glad to get a break from my husband. I don’t miss him at all.”
“You don’t?”
She shook her head drunkenly. “I have something else to tell you. I wish I’d met you before I met Laurence.”
My heart thudded. “You do?”
“Yes,” she said vehemently. “I’m want you. Do you feel the same about me?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “Yes, I do.”
Suddenly Allison began crying. She told me how she wished she had not married Laurence, especially now, because of the way she felt about me. We started kissing and pulling off our clothes, but we stopped before going further. Neither of us wanted to start an affair under the circumstances. Allison didn’t want to cheat on her husband. I didn’t want her to either. I wanted her to leave him first. We talked about it, but she needed time to think. She couldn’t leave him immediately – not as long as we were in Antarctica. We had signed contracts that couldn’t be revoked without letting down a lot of good people. A scandal could ruin our careers.
“You should leave my room before someone starts rumours,” she said. “Laurence returns tomorrow. Please give me time to figure out the right thing, okay?”
*
The next day I was there when Laurence returned. The first thing he did was hug and kiss his wife. Jealousy spiked through me, but I did nothing. There was nothing I could do.
Later, someone knocked on the door of my office.
“Come in,” I said.
Laurence strode in like he owned the place. My first thought was that Allison had told him about us.
“Just come to thank you for treating my wife’s ankle. I appreciate the support you’ve given her.” He sat down. “Allie’s been talking about you. She’s explained the problem.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “The problem? What problem?”
“That you haven’t been out of the base yet, which seems an awful waste of your training. Next time, we’re searching for meteorites preserved in the blue ice-sheets. It’s important science for NASA. Are you interested in joining the team?”
It was the last thing I wanted, but I could not think of an excuse. Everyone knew I had been dying to go out since my arrival. To refuse now would be suspicious.
“I’m very interested,” I lied.
“Great! I’ll convince Stephen into letting you come.” He slapped me heartily on the shoulder. “I’ll tell Allie the good news right now. We’re going to be a great team, buddy!”
*
That night Allison sneaked to my room after her husband had gone to sleep. “Can’t stay. Just had to explain why I mentioned you to my husband. He would have being suspicious if I hadn’t said something.”
“Are you going to leave him?”
She hesitated.
“Are you going to leave him?” I repeated.
“Yes,” she said. “But not now.”
“When?” I wanted to know.
“After the expedition,” she promised.
I hated waiting, but I had no choice. Allison and I continued seeing each other whenever possible, but we didn’t consummate out affair, despite the temptation.
The expedition involved travelling across a thousand miles of ice in a convoy of heavily equipped snowmobiles. The team consisted of Allison, her husband, Stephen and Tom. We reached our destination without incident, setting up a camp in the centre of an interesting region rich in meteorites.
The Antarctic landscape was starkly beautiful, filling me with awe. There were places where the ice under my feet was miles thick, but there were also dry valleys that had not changed for thousands of years.
We began our work the day after we erected the tents. That involved searching for rock samples. We went off by ourselves for hours at a time, but kept in regular contact using radios set to different frequencies. The system worked well, making sure nobody got lost.
But on the third day, Laurence did not answer on his radio.
Tom went looking for him. He called in his location an hour later. He had tracked Laurence’s trail to a blue-ice field ten miles south of where he was supposed to be.
“You’d better come here now,” he told us all on the common frequency - without giving a reason. The urgency in his tone was enough to make me race to his location. Stephen and Allison arrived just a few minutes later. Tom had stopped his snowmobile where Laurence’s trail ended abruptly at the edge of a long, snaking crevasse.
Looking over the edge, down into the crevasse, I could see nothing. The blue-white walls of ice sheered at an angle, making it impossible to see the bottom, where Laurence must have fallen.
“Laurence?” I called out and listened. There was no reply. He was either dead or badly injured. I walked back to the others, who were holding back the hysterical Allison. Tom and Stephen looked at me, but I could not read their eyes behind their mirrored visors.
“Let me go!” Allison demanded. She was smaller than the men, but she had the strength to break free. Following the tracks left by Laurence’s snowmobile, she ran to the edge and stopped barely in time. There she stared into the crevasse, calling her husband’s name over and over until she collapsed, sobbing.
Luckily, she was too far away to hear what the rest of us were saying.
“I think he’s dead,” Stephen said. “It’s foolish to risk more lives going down. For all we know, the crevasse could be unstable. We should wait for a rescue team.”
“How long will that take?” I wanted to know. We had travelled for eight days across the ice-sheet to get where we were. “Tom?”
“I’ve been on the radio to the base,” he replied. “They’re experiencing bad weather. They can’t send a helicopter for days. We’re on our own.”
We turned to look at Allison.
“Someone’s got to go down,” I said. “I volunteer. Send me down on a line, Tom.”
“Why you?” he asked, not unreasonably, because he was the best climber. He was an experienced mountaineer.
“I’m the only one here qualified to assess his injuries,” I said. “Besides which, I need you up here to help me back up.”
“He’s right,” Stephen said. I noticed he didn’t volunteer himself. “Peter should go down – if anyone. He’s the only doctor.”
Tom was silent for some time. “Okay – you can do it. Remember your training?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’d better tell Allison what we’re doing.”
I walked over to her, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder. She turned around to look at me. I helped her to her feet. We both stared down the crevasse. The bottom was hidden in darkness.
“What are we going to do?” she said.
“I’m going down.”
“You?”
I nodded. “I’m the doctor.”
“I don’t want you do it, Peter. It’s too dangerous. You could die.”
“I’ll be careful,” I promised. “Tom will make sure it’s safe.”
She sighed and lowered her voice to a whisper. “There’s something I’ve been thinking. What if it wasn’t an accident?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at the snowmobile’s tracks, Peter. They go straight towards the crevasse, like he was aiming for it. There’s no way he didn’t see it from miles away.”
I could see what she meant. He could have easily changed his direction to avoid it.
“Do you think he knew about us?” she said.
I didn’t answer. I just stared down at the hole. I had last spoken to Laurence about six hours earlier when the team were getting ready to go out of the camp. He had seemed cheerful, looking forward to the day’s work. It cou
ld have been an act, but I didn’t think so.
“Tom’s waiting for me,” I said. “The sooner I start ...”
*
After abseiling down the ice wall, I shone my torch around the darkness until I found the snowmobile. It was smashed to pieces. Laurence had been thrown clear, but he was not conscious. His face was a bloody mess. I examined him and radioed Tom, telling him Laurence was dead.
I was glad I wasn’t there when he told Allison.
We couldn’t leave Laurence’s body behind, so Tom talked me through what I had to do to attach his body to a rope. When it was done, I remained below while Tom and Stephen hauled Laurence up to the surface. I climbed up afterwards wearing Laurence’s backpack because there was no point in leaving his possessions with the snowmobile. The extra weight made the climb much harder. I reached the top exhausted. Tom leant over me saying something. My tired brain made no sense of it.
“What?”
“Give me your hand.” He pulled me to my feet and unbuckled the climbing equipment.
“Thanks,” I gasped.
Stephen was with Tom, but Allison wasn’t. “Where’s Allison?”
Tom answered. “I asked her to go to the camp. It wasn’t doing her any good being here. She was just getting in the way. She didn’t need to see us bring up his body. I’ve put it in a sleeping bag tied to my snowmobile.”
As I walked that direction, Stephen followed alongside aiming a digital camcorder at my face like he was making a documentary.
“What the hell are you doing?”
He lowered the camcorder but didn’t switch it off. “I need everything on record. There’s going to be an inquiry about the accident. The Yanks are not going to be pleased. Laurence was their top geologist. I don’t want anyone blaming us. Think of the lawsuits.”
“I don’t care about lawsuits,” I snapped. “A man is dead. Stop filming me, for God’s sake.”
Nobody mentioned the body on the way to the camp. There was nothing to say. I felt numb in body and spirit, barely aware of the sterile beauty of the endless ice-sheet. We had located the camp about twenty kilometres away. Allison must have heard us coming because she emerged from her tent as we arrived.
“I want to see him,” she said, walking up the sleeping bag. She reached for the zip, but I intervened.
“Don’t. It’s not a good idea. His face is -”
“I want to see him. Don’t try stopping me.”
“Okay,” I said. I stepped back, looking at the others. Tom stared back, but Stephen looked uncomfortable. His boots suddenly became the focus of his attention.
“I’ll – uh - make some tea,” he said, rushing off.
Allison unzipped the sleeping bag and stared blankly at her husband’s battered features. The skin on his face had been friction-burned off to the bone as he collided at speed with the ice-wall and plummeted down hundreds of metres. He also had a skull fracture. His injuries puzzled me. Why hadn’t he raised his hands to protect himself? After a minute or two, Allison closed the bag and walked back to her tent. I desperately wanted to follow her, to comfort her, but I couldn’t do it in front of Tom.
“What should we do with the body?” he asked.
“Uh - we don’t want the sunlight decomposing him before a post-mortem.” There was only one way to keep the body fresh. “We’ll have to temporarily bury him in ice.”
“Like meat in a freezer?”
“Yes.”
“There’s another problem,” Tom said. “It’s calm weather now – but we’re going to be hit by one hell of a blizzard tonight. The tents won’t last five minutes. We have to build shelter.”
*
There was no time to grieve for Laurence. After he was buried, I started cutting ice blocks which Tom and Stephen used for making an igloo. Our lives depended on completing it before the blizzard hit. Allison helped me with the ice, but barely said a word.
We were like strangers.
When the igloo was completed, it looked from the outside too small for everyone, but it was quite roomy – for an igloo. The wind was picking up when we crawled inside. The blizzard struck quickly, screaming like a banshee, trapping us inside. It was going to be a long night. We sat around the heater making small talk until we ran out of conversation. The absence of Laurence was palpable. Tom kept trying to contact the base. He wasn’t having much luck. Allison curled up inside her sleeping back and closed her eyes. Then Stephen went to sleep. Soon, I was the only person awake, alone with my thoughts.
I thought about Laurence’s death and the strange circumstances. Was it suicide? Had he killed himself because he had found out the truth? I decided to look at what Stephen had recorded for clues.
He had started shooting that morning when Laurence was alive. The video showed everyone getting ready inside the tent, then preparing the snowmobiles. Tom checked our radios before handing them over. It hurt to see Laurence kissing Allison and waving goodbye as he rode off. Stephen had stopped filming until he reached the area where he had been assigned. I fast-forwarded to the time we found Laurence. Stephen had filmed the snowmobile’s tracks.
I looked closely at each frame. Eventually I noticed something. Laurence’s tracks were the same depth as everyone else’s from the edge to about a two hundred metres away – but they were deeper after that, as if ... as if more weight had been on the back of his snowmobile.
What did it mean?
It meant someone else had been on the snowmobile shortly before it rode over the edge. A passenger? No – the real driver.
A cold sweat ran down my back. I was no forensic expert, but I’d seen skull fractures before. His injury wasn’t consistent with his accident. I’d need an X-ray to be absolutely certain, but I suspected his head injury had been caused by a sharp blow from an irregularly shaped object.
It was murder.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know what to do with the information.
If I accused anyone, I would look insane and turn everyone against me.
The trouble was, the best person to have a motive (except me) was Allison. She would not need an expensive divorce now. She would inherit her husband’s considerable estate. But could my girlfriend have done it? How well did I know her? Had she mentioned the possibility of suicide as a clever way of misdirecting me from the truth?
I contemplated keeping my suspicions to myself – but what kind of doctor would ignore the evidence?
In the morning the blizzard still raged outside. I quietly awoke Allison and whispered in her ear.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said. Do you think he was the suicide type?”
If she said yes, I would know she was lying. But she shook her head.
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “I looked at Stephen’s video. There was someone extra riding on Laurence’s snowmobile, but they jumped off after ensuring it would crash. Laurence was already dead. The accident was a cover-up.”
“How sure are you?”
“Eighty/ninety per cent.” My next question was the real test of her character. “I could say nothing until we get back to the base, but it could be too late to ever prove who did it then. What do you want me to do?”
Allison sighed and said, “Do it now.”
I woke Tom and Stephen and announced my suspicions. They reacted with anger and disbelief, exactly how I expected.
“That’s it?” Stephen said. “You’re basing your assumption on the depth of the tracks and a head injury? There are several reasons why the tracks were of a different depth. The sun could have melted the ice, making them deeper. That’s what happens with footprints. You don’t know the physical properties of ice like a proper geologist, Peter. Your so-called evidence means nothing. And as for the head injury, surely that could have been sustained in his fall?”
“No – he was struck from behind, hard. The fall can’t explain it. I think he was killed an hour or so before he went over the crevasse. His killer deliberately drove his snowmobile over the edge, hoping we
’d assume it was an accident. The killer jumped off at the last minute and skied back to their own machine.”
“There were no ski tracks,” Tom said.
“Yes, I know, but the killer thought of that,” I said. “The killer is smart and erased the evidence, probably by skiing in the path left by the snowmobile.”
“You actually suspect one of us?” Stephen said.
“There’s nobody else here,” I said. “But you can relax, Stephen. I know you didn’t do it. You have an alibi – the tape you recorded proves where you were all day. You’re the only person here who couldn’t have done it.”
“Well, it wasn’t me either,” Tom said. “It could be you, Peter. Or Allison.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why we have to find out the truth. The killer made sure they left no evidence at the crevasse, but I wonder if they remembered to get rid of every piece of evidence?”
“Like what?” Stephen said.
“Like Laurence’s radio. I’m betting it’s still set on the frequency of his last call, the one he made to his murderer. Stephen, I suggest you put on some gloves and examine Laurence’s radio.”
Stephen opened Laurence’s backpack and removed the radio. He switched it on and I saw the frequency readout light up. He pressed TRANSMIT. Only one radio responded to the frequency.
It was Allison’s. She looked at her radio, shaking her head. “No way! I never talked to him. Someone must have framed me when I was sleeping. Peter, you believe me, don’t you?”
I wanted to believe her ... but I needed to know the truth for myself. “Will you let us look in your backpack?”
“What for?” she said.
“For evidence.”
“There’s nothing in it but my stuff.”
“Then you won’t mind us looking?”
“I mind you not trusting me.” She glared at me with righteous indignation. “If you don’t trust me when I say I’m innocent, then go ahead – look.”
