“Don’t throw your money away. What thoughts?”
“Two thoughts. Two kinds of thoughts. All the thoughts you’re having about all the things you’re not telling me and all the guilty thoughts you’re having about not telling me them.”
“It’s like a rule of nature,” I said. “Some people are always more liable to have injustices done to them than others.”
“So you’ve told me all your thoughts?”
“No. But the ones I haven’t told aren’t worth the telling. Now, if I had some facts–“
“So you admit something is pretty far wrong?”
“Of course.”
“And you’ve told me everything you know, just not everything you think?”
“Of course.”
“I speak in sorrow,” Smithy said, “for my lost illusions about the medical profession.” He reached up under the hood of my parka, pulled down the scarf around my neck and stared at what was by now the great multicoloured and blood-encrusted weal on my neck. “Jesus! That is something. What happened to you?”
“I fell.”
“The Marlowes of this world don’t fall. They’re pushed. Where did you fall?” I didn’t much care for the all but imperceptible accent on the word “fall.”
“Upper deck. Port side. I struck my neck on the storm sill of the saloon door.”
“Did you now? I would say that this was caused by what the criminologists call a solid object. A very solid object about half-an-inch wide and sharp-edged. The saloon door sill is three inches wide and made of sorborubber. All the storm doors on the Morning Rose are–it’s to make them totally windproof and waterproof. Or perhaps you hadn’t noticed? The way you perhaps haven’t noticed that John Halliday, the unit’s still photographer, is missing?”
“How do you know?” He’d shaken me this time, not just a little, or my face would have shown it, but so much that I knew my features stayed rigidly fixed in the same expression.
“You don’t deny it?”
I don’t know. How do you?”
“I went down to see the props man, this elderly lad they call Sandy. I’d heard he was sick and-”
“Why did you go?”
“If it matters, because be’s not the sort of person that people visit very much. He doesn’t seem liked. Seems a bit hard to be sick and unpopular at the same time.” I nodded, this would be in character with Smithy. I asked him where his roommate Halliday was as I hadn’t seen him at breakfast. Sandy said he’d gone for breakfast. I didn’t say anything to Sandy but this made me a bit curious so I had a look in the recreation room. He wasn’t there either, so I got curiouser and curiouser until I’d searched the Morning Rose twice from end to end. I think I covered every nook and cranny in the vessel where even a stray seagull could be hiding and you can take my word for it, Halliday’s not in the Morning Rose.”
“Reported this to the captain?”
“Well, well, what an awful lot of reaction. No, I haven’t reported it to the captain.”
“Why not?”
“Same reason as you haven’t. If I know my Captain Imrie, he’d at once declare that there was no clause in that agreement you signed that was binding on this particular case, that saying that foul play wasn’t involved in this case also would be altogether too much of a good thing and turn the Morning Rose straight for Hammerfest!” Smithy looked at me deadpan over the rim of his glass. “I’m rather curious to see what does happen when we get to Bear Island.”
“It might be interesting.”
“Very noncommittal. It might, says he thoughtfully, be equally interesting to provoke some kind of reaction in Dr. Marlowe. just once. Just for the record-my own private record. I wonder if I could do it. Do you remember I said on the bridge in the very early hours of this morning that we might just possibly have to call for help and that if we had to we had a transmitter here that could reach almost anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Not, perhaps, my exact words, but the gist is accurate!’
“The gist is accurate.” Even to myself the repetition of the words sounded mechanical and I had to make a conscious effort not to shiver as an ice-shod centipede started up a fandango between my shoulder blades.
“Well, we can call for help till we’re blue in the face, this transmitter here can no longer reach as far as the galley.” For once, almost unbelievably, Smithy’s face was registering an emotion other than amusement. His face tight with anger, he produced a screwdriver from his pocket and turned to the big steel-blue receiver-transmitter on the inner bulkhead.
“Do you always carry a screwdriver about with you?” The sheer banality of the question made it apposite in the circumstances.
“Only when I call up the radio station at Tunheim in northeast Bear Island and get no reply. And that’s no ordinary radio station, it’s an official Norwegian Government base.” Smithy set to work on the faceplate screws. “I’ve already had this damned thing off about an hour ago. You’ll see in a jiffy why I put it back on again.”
While I was waiting for this jiffy to pass I recalled our conversation on the bridge in the very early hours of the morning, the time he’d referred to the radio and the relative closeness-and, by inference, the availability -of the NATO Atlantic forces. It had been immediately afterwards that I’d looked through the starboard screen door and seen the sharp fresh footprints in the snow, footprints, I’d been immediately certain, that had been made by an eavesdropper, a preposterous idea I’d almost as quickly put out of my mind when I’d appreciated that there had been only one set of footprints there, those which I’d made myself. For some now inexplicable reason it had never occurred to me that any person clever enough to have been responsible for the series of undetected crimes that had taken place aboard the Morning Rose would have been far too clever to have overlooked the blinding obviousness of the advantage that lay in using footsteps already there. The footsteps had, indeed, been newly made, our ubiquitous friend had been abroad again.
Smithy removed the last of the screws and, not without some effort, removed the face-plate. I looked at the revealed interior for about ten seconds then said: I see now why you put the face-plate back on. The only thing that puzzles me is that that cabinet looks a bit small for a man to get inside it with a fourteen-pound sledgehammer.”
“Looks just like it, doesn’t it?” The tangled mess of wreckage inside was, literally, indescribable, the vandal who had been at work had seen to it that, irrespective of how vast a range of spares were carried, the receiver-transmitter could never be made operable again. “You’ve seen enough?”
“I think so.” He started to replace the cover and I said: `You’ve radios in the lifeboats?”
“Yes. Hand-cranked. They’ll reach farther than the galley but a megaphone would be about as good.”
“You’ll have to report this to the captain, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Then it’s heigh-ho for Hammerfest?”
“Twenty-four hours from now and he can heigh-ho for Tahiti as far as I’m concerned.” Smithy tightened the last screw. “That’s when I’m going to tell him. Twenty-four hours from now. Maybe twenty-six.”
“Your outside limit for dropping anchor in Sor-Hamna?”
“Tying up. Yes.”
“You’re a very deceitful man, Smithy.”
“It’s the company I keep. And the life I lead.”
“You’re not to blame yourself, Smithy,” I said kindly. “We live in vexed and troubled times.”
7
When the Norwegian compilers of the report on Bear Island had spoken of it as possessing perhaps the most inhospitably bleak coastline in the world, they had been speaking with the measured understatement of true professional geographers. As we approached it in the first light of dawn which in those latitudes, at that time of year, and under grey and lowering skies which were not only full of snow but getting rid of it as fast as they could, was as near midforenoon as made no difference-it presented the most awesome, awe-inspiring and, in the true sense of the word, awful spectacle of nature it had ever been my misfortune to behold. A frightening desolation, it was a weird combination of the wickedly repellent and unwillingly fascinating, an evil and dreadful and sinister place, a place full of the terrifying intimation of mortality, the culmination of all the terrors for our long lost Nordic ancestors for whom hell was the land of eternal cold and for whom this would be the eternally frozen purgatory to be visited only in their dying nightmares.
Bear Island was black. That was the shocking, the almost frightful thing about it. Bear Island was black, black as a widow’s weeds. Here’s in the regions of year-long snow and ice, where, in winter, even the waters of the Barents Sea ran a milky white, to find this ebony mass towering fifteen hundred vertical feet up into the grey overcast evoked the same feeling of total disbelief, the same numbing impact, although here magnified a hundredfold, as does the first glimpse of the black cliff of the north face of the Eiger rearing up its appalling grandeur among the snows of the Bernese Oberland: this benumbment of the senses stemmed from a dichotomous struggle to accept the evidence before the eyes for while reason said that it had to be so that primeval part of the mind that existed long before man knew what reason was just flatly refused to accept it.