After this we made rapid progress. By five o’clock the entire body shell was completed and with the end in sight less than a couple of hours away, everyone worked more furiously than ever.
Most of them were unskilled, ham-handed and completely unused to any physical work at all, far less work of this cruel, exacting nature, but my opinion of them was rising all the time. Corazzini and Zagero especially, were tireless, and Theodore Mahler, the silent little Jew whose entire conversational range so far had been limited to ‘Yes’, “No’, “Please’ and ‘Thank you’, was indefatigable, completely selfless and uncomplaining, driving his slight body to lengths of which I would never have believed it capable. Even the Senator, the Rev. Smallwood and Solly Levin did what they could, as best they could, trying their best to hide their misery and their pain. By this time everyone, even Jackstraw and myself, was shaking almost uncontrollably with the cold so that our hands and elbows rat-tat-tatted like machine-guns against the wooden sides of the tractor: and our hands themselves, through constant contact with metal were in a shocking state, puffed and bleeding and blistered, the mittens continuously filled with lumps and slivers of ice that never melted.
We had just installed the four collapsible bunks and were fitting the stove-pipe through its circular hole in the roof when someone called me. I jumped down and all but knocked over Marie LeGarde.
“You shouldn’t be out here,” I scolded. “It’s far too cold for you, Miss LeGarde.”
“Don’t be silly, Peter.” I could never bring myself to call her ‘Marie’, though she had asked me to several times. “I have to get used to it, don’t I? Would you come below for a moment or two, ptease?”
“Why? I’m busy.”
“But not indispensable,” she retorted. “I want you to have a look at Margaret.”
“Margaret – oh, the stewardess. What does she want?”
“Nothing. It’s I who want it. Why are you so hostile towards her?” she asked curiously. “It’s not like you – at least, I don’t think it is. She’s a fine girl.”
“What does the fine girl want?”
“What in the world’s got into you? Why – oh, forget it. I’m not going to fight with you. Her back hurts – she’s in considerable pain. Come and see it, please.”
“I offered to see it last night. If she wants me now why doesn’t she come and ask me?”
“Because she’s scared of you, that’s why,” she said angrily. She stamped a foot in the frozen snow. “Will you go or not?”
I went. Below, I stripped off my gloves, emptied the ice out of them and washed my blistered, bleeding hands in disinfectant. I saw Marie LeGarde’s eyes widen at the sight of my hands, but she said nothing: maybe she knew I wasn’t in the mood for condolences.
I rigged up a screen in the corner of the room remote from the table where the women had been gathering and dividing out the remaining food supplies, and had a look at Margaret Ross’s back. It was a mess, all right, a great ugly blue and purpling bruise from the spine to the left shoulder: in the centre, just below the shoulder blade, was a deep jagged cut, which looked as if it had been caused by a heavy blow from some triangular piece of sharp metal. Whatever had caused it had passed clean through her tunic and blouse.
“Why didn’t you show me this yesterday?” I asked coldly.
“I -1 didn’t want to bother you,” she faltered.
Didn’t want to bother me, I thought grimly. Didn’t want to give yourself away, you mean. In my mind’s eye I had a picture of the pantry where we had found her, and I was almost certain now that I could get the proof that I needed. Almost, but not quite. I’d have to go to check.
“Is it very bad?” She twisted round, and I could see there were tears in the brown eyes from the pain of the disinfectant I was rubbing on none too gently.
“Bad enough,” I said shortly. “How did you get this?”
“I’ve no idea,” she said helplessly. “I just don’t know, Dr Mason.”
“Perhaps we can find out.”
“Find out? Why? What does it matter?” She shook her head wearily. “I don’t understand, I really don’t. What have I done, Dr Mason?”
It was magnificent, I had to admit. I could have hit her, but it was magnificent.
“Nothing, Miss Ross. Just nothing at all.” By the time I had pulled on my parka, gloves, goggles and mask she was fully dressed, staring at me as I climbed up the steps and out through the hatch.
The snow was falling quite heavily now, gusting in swirling ghostly flumes through the pale beam of my torch: it seemed to vanish as it hit the ground, freezing as it touched, or scudding smoke-like over the frozen surface with a thin rustling sound. But the wind was at my back, the bamboo markers stretched out in a dead straight line ahead, never less than two of them in the beam of my torch, and I had reached the crashed plane in five or six minutes.
I jumped for the windscreen, hooked my fingers over the sill, hauled myself up with some difficulty and wriggled my way into the control cabin. A moment later I was in the stewardess’s pantry, flashing my torch around.
On the after bulkhead was a big refrigerator, with a small hinged table in front of it, and at the far end, under the window, a hinged box covered over what might have been a heating unit or sink or both. I didn’t bother investigating, I wasn’t interested. What I was interested in was the for’ard bulkhead, and I examined it carefully. It was given up entirely to the small closed doors of little metal lockers let in flush to the wall – food containers, probably – and there wasn’t a single metal projection in the entire wall, nothing that could possibly account for the wound in the stewardess’s back. And if she had been here at the moment of impact, that was the wall she must have been flung against. The inference was inescapable – she must have been elsewhere at the time of the crash. I remembered now, with chagrin, that I hadn’t even bothered to see whether or not she was conscious when we’d first found her lying on the floor.
Across the passage in the radio compartment I found what I was looking for almost immediately – I’d a pretty good idea where to look. The thin sheet metal at the top left-hand corner of the radio cabinet was bent almost half an inch out of true: and it didn’t require any microscope to locate or forensic expert to guess at the significance of the small dark stain and the fibres of navy blue cloth clinging to the corner of the smashed set. I looked inside the set itself, and now that I had time to spare it more than a fleeting glance it was abundantly clear to me that the wrenching away of the face-plate didn’t even begin to account for the damage that had been done to the set: it had been systematically and thoroughly wrecked.
If ever there was a time when my thoughts should have been racing it was then, but the plain truth is that they weren’t. It was abominably cold inside the chilled metal of that dead plane, and my mind was sluggish, but even so I knew that this time I couldn’t be wrong about what had happened. I could see now why the second officer had sent out no distress messages. I could see now why he had almost certainly been sending out his regular ‘on route – on time’ checks to base. Poor devil, he hadn’t had much option -not with the stewardess sitting there with a gun on him. It must have been a gun. It was no consolation at all that the crash had caught her unprepared.
A gun! Gradually, ever so gradually, in infuriating slow-motion process, thoughts were beginning to click into place in my numbed mind. Whoever had landed that plane, landed it so skilfully into the blinding maelstrom of last night’s blizzard, it hadn’t been a dead man. I straightened, walked forward into the control cabin and shone my torch on the dead captain of the plane. As I’d noticed when I’d first seen him, he appeared to be completely unmarked, and I don’t know whether it was some unconscious process of logical reasoning or some strange instinct that made me right away lift up the crackling ice-stiffened tunic j acket enough to see the black powder-ringed bullet hole in the middle of the spine. I had been expecting it, I had been uncannily certain that I would find such a hole, and find it just there: but my mouth was suddenly dry, dry as if I had drunk nothing for days, and my heart was thudding heavily in my chest.