“Maybe you’re right,” I said slowly. “On the other hand, if I were one of the killers and did have a gun in my case – well, that’s exactly the way I’d talk too.”
“As you said to Miss LeGarde just now, don’t be so damned silly!” He jumped to his feet, walked over to a corner of the cabin under the watchful eyes of Jackstraw and myself, picked up a handful of small cases and dumped them on the floor before me, his own nearest me. “Where are you going to start? There’s mine, that’s the Reverend’s robe case, this” – he picked it up and looked at the initials – ‘this is the Senator’s brief-case. I don’t know whose the last is.”
“Mine,” Mrs Dansby-Gregg said coldly.
Corazzini grinned. “Ah, the Balenciaga. Well, Doc, who-” He broke off, straightened slowly, and gazed up through the skylight. “What – what the devil is happening up there?”
“Don’t try to pull any fast stuff, Corazzini,” I said quickly. “Jackstraw’s gun-”
“The hell with Jackstraw’s gun!” he snapped impatiently. “Have a look for yourself.”
I motioned him out of the way and had a look. Two seconds later I had thrust my automatic into Joss’s hand and was on my way up top.
The airliner was a blazing torch in the darkness of the night. Even at that distance of half a mile and against the light wind, I could clearly hear the fierce roaring and crackling of the flames -not flames, rather, but one great solid column of fire that seemed to spring from the wings and centre of the fuselage and reach up clear and smokeless and sparkless two hundred feet into the night sky, brushing its blood-red stain across the snow for hundreds of yards around, transforming the rest of the still ice-sheathed fuselage into a vast effulgent diamond, a million constantly shifting points of refracted white and red and blue and green that glittered and gleamed with an eye-dazzling scintillating brilliance that no jewels on earth could have matched. It was a fantastically beautiful spectacle, but I’d had time to watch it for barely ten seconds when the dazzling coloured irradiation turned into a blaze of white, the central flame leapt up to twice, almost three times its original height and, two or three seconds later, the roar of the exploding petrol tanks came at me across the frozen stillness of the ice-cap.
Almost at once the flames seemed to collapse in upon themselves and the perimeter of the blood-red circle of snow shrank almost to vanishing point, but I waited to see no more. I dropped down into the cabin, pulling the hatch shut behind me, and looked at Jackstraw.
“Any chance at all of accounting for the presence of our various friends here during the past half-hour?”
“I’m afraid not, Dr Mason. Everyone was on the move all the time, finishing off the tractor body or bringing up the stores and petrol drums and lashing them on the sledge.” He glanced up through the skylight. “The plane, wasn’t it?”
” ‘Was’ is right.” I glanced at the stewardess. “My apologies, Miss Ross. You did hear somebody out there.”
“You mean – you mean it wasn’t an accident?” Zagero asked.
There’s a fair chance that you know damned well that it wasn’t, I thought. Aloud, I said: “It was no accident.”
“So there goes your evidence, eh?” Corazzini asked. “The pilot and Colonel Harrison, I mean.”
“No. The nose and tail of the plane are still intact. I don’t know what the reason could be – but I’m sure there’s a damned good one. And you can put these bags away, Mr Corazzini. We’re not, as you say, playing with children or amateurs.”
There was silence while Corazzini returned the bags, then Joss looked at me quizzically.
“Well, that explains one thing at least.”
“The messed-up explosives?” I remembered with chagrin how I had listened to the abnormally loud hissing out by the plane, but had ignored it. Someone who had known very clearly what he was doing had led a fuse into petrol lines or tanks or carburettors. “It certainly does.”
“What’s all this about explosives and fuses?” Senator Brewster demanded. It was the first word he had spoken since Jackstraw had scared the wits out of him, and even yet the colour wasn’t all back in his face.
“Somebody stole the fuses to set fire to the plane. For all I know it may have been you.” I held up my hand to still his outraged spluttering and went on wearily: “It may equally well have been one of the other seven of you. I don’t know. All I know is that the person or persons responsible for the murders were responsible for the theft of the fuses. And for the smashing of the radio valves. And for the theft of the condensers.”
“And for the theft of the sugar,” Joss put in. “Though heaven only knows why they should want to steal that.”
“Sugar!” I exclaimed, and then the question died in my throat. I happened to be looking straight at the little Jew, Theodore Mahler, and the nervous start he gave, the quick flicker of his eyes in Joss’s direction, was unmistakable. I knew I couldn’t have imagined it. But I looked away quickly, before he could see my face.
“Our last bag,” Joss explained. “Maybe thirty pounds. It’s gone. I found what little was left of it – just a handful lying on the floor of the tunnel – mixed up with the smashed valves.”
I shook my head and said nothing. The reason for this last theft I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
Supper that night was a sketchy affair – soup, coffee and a couple of biscuits each as the only solids. The soup was thin, the biscuits no more than a bite and the coffee, for me at any rate, all but undrinkable without sugar.
And the meal was as silent as it was miserable, conversation being limited to what was absolutely necessary. Time and again I would see someone turn to his neighbour and make to say something, then his lips would clamp tightly shut, the expression drain out of his face as he turned away without a word: with almost everyone thinking that his or her neighbour might be a murderer, or, what was almost as bad, that his or her neighbour might be thinking that he was a murderer, the meal was by all odds the most awkward and uncomfortable that I’d ever had. Or, that is, the first part of it was: but by and by I came to the conclusion that I’d a great deal more to worry about than the niceties of social intercourse.
After the meal I rose, pulled on parka and gloves, picked up the searchlight; told Jackstraw and Joss to come with me and headed for the trap-door. Zagero’s voice stopped me.
“Where you goin’, Doc?”
“That’s no concern of yours. Well, Mrs Dansby-Gregg?”
“Shouldn’t you – shouldn’t you take the rifle with you?”
“Don’t worry.” I smiled thinly. “With everyone watching everyone else like hawks, that rifle’s as safe as houses.”
“But – but someone could jump for it,” she said nervously. “They could get you when you’re coming down the hatch-”
“Mr Nielsen and I are the last two persons they’d ever shoot. Without us, they couldn’t get a mile from here. The most likely candidates for the next bullet are some of yourselves. You’re absolutely inessential and, as far as the killers are concerned, represent nothing more than a waste of priceless rations.” With this comforting thought I left them, each person trying to watch all the others at one and the same time, while doing his level best to give the appearance of watching no one.
The wind was so slight now that the anemometer cups had stopped turning. The dying embers of the burnt-out plane were a dull smouldering glow to the north-east. The snow had gone completely and the first faint stars were beginning to show through the thinning cloud above. It was typically Greenland, this swift change in the weather, and so, too, was the temperature inversion that would surely follow in the morning, or before morning. Twelve hours from now it was going to be very cold indeed.
With searchlight and torches we examined every inch of the tractor and sledges, above and below, and if there had been a pin there I would have sworn that we couldn’t have missed it, far less anything so large as a couple of guns. We found nothing.
I straightened, and turned to look at the glow that was lightening the sky to the east, and even as I stood there with Joss and Jackstraw by my side the moon, preternaturally large and rather more than half full, heaved itself above the distant horizon and flooded the ice-cap with its pale and ghostly light, laying down between itself and our feet a bar-straight path of glittering silver grey. We watched in silence for a full minute, then Jackstraw stirred. Even before he spoke, I knew what was in his mind.