Читать книгу Alistair MacLean Arctic Chillers 4-Book Collection: Night Without End, Ice Station Zebra, Bear Island, Athabasca - Alistair MacLean, Alistair MacLean, John Denis - Страница 13

Jackstraw and the others had just completed the assembly of the tractor body when we arrived back at the cabin, and some of the men were already going below. I didn’t bother to check the tractor: when Jackstraw made anything, he made a perfect job of it.

I knew he must have missed me in the past hour, but I knew, too, that he wasn’t the man to question me while the others were around. I waited till the last of these had gone below, then took him by the arm and walked out into the darkness, far enough to talk in complete privacy, but not so far as to lose sight of the yellow glow from our skylights – twice lost in the one night was twice too many.

He heard me out in silence, and at the end he said: ‘What are we going to do, Dr Mason?’

‘Depends. Spoken to Joss recently?’

‘Fifteen minutes ago. In the tunnel.’

‘How about the radio?’

‘I’m afraid not, Dr Mason. He’s missing some condensers and spare valves. He’s looked for them, everywhere – says they’ve been stolen.’

‘Maybe they’ll turn up?’ I didn’t believe it myself.

‘Two of the valves already have. Crushed little bits of glass lying in the bottom of the snow tunnel.’

‘Our little friends think of everything.’ I swore softly. ‘That settles it, Jackstraw. We can’t wait any longer, we’ll leave as soon as possible. But first a night’s sleep – that we must have.’

‘Uplavnik?’ That was our expedition base, near the mouth of the Strömsund glacier. ‘Do you think we will ever get there?’

He wasn’t thinking, just as I wasn’t, about the rigours and dangers of arctic winter travel, daunting enough though these were when they had to be faced with a superannuated tractor like the Citroën, but of the company we would be keeping en route. If any fact was ever so glaringly obvious that it didn’t need mention, it was that the killers, whoever they were, could only escape justice, or, at least, the mass arrest and interrogation of all the passengers, by ensuring that they were the only ones to emerge alive from the icecap.

‘I wouldn’t like to bet on it,’ I said dryly. ‘But I’d bet even less on our chances if we stay here. Death by starvation is kind of final.’

‘Yes, indeed.’ He paused for a moment, then switched to a fresh line of thought. ‘You say they tried to kill you tonight. Is that not surprising? I would have thought that you and I would have been very safe, for a few days at least.’

I knew what he meant. Apart from Jackstraw and myself, there probably wasn’t a handful of people in all Greenland who could start that damned Citroën, far less drive it, only Jackstraw could handle the dogs, and it was long odds indeed against any of the passengers knowing anything at all about astral or magnetic compass navigation – the latter very tricky indeed in these high latitudes. These special skills should have been guarantee enough of our immediate survival.

‘True enough,’ I agreed. ‘But I suspect they haven’t given any thought to these things simply because they haven’t realised the importance of them. We’ll make it our business to point out that importance very plainly. Then we’re both insured. Meantime, we’ll have one last effort to clear this business up before we get started. It’s not going to make us very popular, but we can’t help that.’ I explained what I had in mind, and he nodded thoughtful agreement.

After he had gone below, I waited a couple of minutes and then followed him. All nine of the passengers were sitting in the cabin now – eight, rather, watching Marie LeGarde presiding over a soup pan – and I took a long, long look at all of them. It was the first time I had ever examined a group of my fellow-men with the object of trying to decide which among them were murderers, and found it a strange and unsettling experience.

In the first place, every one of them looked to me like a potential or actual murderer – or murderess – but even with that thought came the realisation that this was purely because I associated murder with abnormality, and in these wildly unlikely surroundings, clad in the layered bulkiness of these wildly unlikely clothes, every one of them seemed far removed from normality. But on a second and closer look, when one ignored the irrelevancies of surroundings and clothes, there remained only a group of shivering, feet-stamping, miserable and very ordinary people indeed.

Or were they so ordinary? Zagero, for instance, was he ordinary? He had the build, the strength and, no doubt, also the speed and temperament for a top-ranking heavyweight, but he was the most unlikely looking boxer I had ever seen. It wasn’t just that he was obviously a well-educated and cultured man – there had been such boxers before: it was chiefly because his face was absolutely unmarked, without even that almost invariable thickening of skin above the eyes. Moreover, I had never heard of him, although that, admittedly, didn’t go for much: as a doctor, I took a poor view of homo sapiens wreaking gratuitous physical and mental injury on homo sapiens, and took little interest in the sport.

Or take his manager, Solly Levin, or, for that matter, the Rev Joseph Smallwood. Solly wasn’t a New York boxing manager, he was a caricature of all I had ever heard or read about these Runyonesque characters, and he was just too good to be true: so, also, was the Rev Smallwood, who was so exactly the meek, mild, slightly nervous, slightly anæmic man of God that preachers are so frequently represented to be – and almost invariably never are – that his movements, reactions, comments and opinions were predictable to the nth degree. But, against that, I had to set the fact that the killers were clever calculating men who would have carefully avoided assuming the guise of any character so patently cut from cardboard: on the other hand, they might have been astute enough to do just that.

There was a question mark, too, about Corazzini. America specialised in producing shrewd, intelligent, tough business leaders and executives, and Corazzini was undoubtedly one such. But the toughness of the average business man was purely mental: Corazzini had physical toughness as well, a ruthlessness I felt he wouldn’t hesitate to apply to matters lying far outside the immediate sphere of business. And then I realised, wryly, that I was prepared to suspect Corazzini for reasons diametrically opposed to those for which I was prepared to suspect Levin and the Rev Smallwood: Corazzini didn’t fit into any pattern, any prefabricated mental image of the American business man.

Of the two remaining men, Theodore Mahler, the little Jew, and Senator Brewster, I would have taken the former any time as the more likely suspect. But when I asked myself why, I could adduce no more damaging reasons than that he was thin, dark, rather embittered looking and had told us absolutely nothing about himself: and if that weren’t prejudice on my part, I couldn’t guess what was. As for Senator Brewster, he was surely above suspicion: and then the startling thought struck me that if one wished to be above suspicion surely there were no better means of achieving that than by assuming the identity of someone who was above suspicion. How did I know he was Senator Brewster? A couple of forged papers, a white moustache and white hair on top of a naturally florid complexion and anyone could have been Senator Brewster. True, it would be an impersonation impossible to sustain indefinitely: but the whole point was that any such impersonation didn’t have to be sustained indefinitely.

I was getting nowhere and I knew it: I was more confused, more uncertain, and infinitely more suspicious than ever. I was even suspicious of the women. The young German girl, Helene – Munich was her home town, near enough Central Europe and the skulduggery that went on in the neighbourhood of the iron curtain for anything to be possible: but on the other hand the idea of a seventeen-year-old master criminal – we certainly weren’t dealing with apprentices – was ridiculously far-fetched, and the fact that she had fractured her collar-bone, almost sure proof that the crash had been unexpected, was a strong point in her favour. Mrs Dansby-Gregg? She belonged to a world I knew little about, except for what slight information I had gleaned from my psychiatric brethren, who found rich fishing in the troubled waters of what passed for the younger London society: but instability and neuroses – not to mention the more than occasional financial embarrassment – were not criminal in themselves, and, in particular, that world lacked what people like Zagero and Corazzini had in full measure – the physical and mental toughness required for a job like this. But particularising from the general could be every bit as dangerous and misleading as generalising from the particular: of Mrs Dansby-Gregg, as a person, I knew nothing.

That left only Marie LeGarde. She was the touchstone, the one rock I could cling to in this sea of uncertainty, and if I were wrong about her so too had been a million others. There are some things that cannot be because they are unthinkable, and this was one of them. It was as simple as that. Marie LeGarde was above suspicion.

I became gradually aware of the muted clack of the anemometer cups turning sluggishly in the dying wind above and that the hiss of the Colman lamp had become abnormally loud: a total silence had fallen over the cabin and everyone was staring at me with mingled puzzlement and curiosity. So much for my impassive features, my casual negligent ease: so clearly had I betrayed the fact that something was far wrong that not one of the nine had missed it. But to be the centre of attraction at the moment suited me well enough: Jackstraw had just made his entry unobserved, a Winchester repeater cradled under his arm, his finger ready through the trigger guard.

‘Sorry,’ I apologised. ‘Rude to stare, I know. However, now it’s your turn.’ I nodded in Jackstraw’s direction. ‘Every expedition carries a gun or two – for coast use against prowling bears and wolves and to get seal meat for the dogs. I never thought that it would come in so handy right in the middle of the ice-cap – and against far more dangerous game than we ever find on the coast. Mr Nielsen is a remarkably accurate shot. Don’t try anything – just clasp your hands above your heads. All of you.’

As if controlled by a master switch, all the eyes had now swivelled back to me. I’d had time to spare to pull out the automatic – a 9 mm butt-loading Beretta – that I’d taken off Colonel Harrison: and this time I didn’t forget to slide off the safety-catch. The click was abnormally loud in the frozen silence of the room. But the silence didn’t last long.

‘What damnable outrage is this?’ Senator Brewster shouted out the words, his face purpling in rage. He leapt to his feet, started to move forwards towards me then stopped as if he had run into a brick wall. The crash of Jackstraw’s Winchester was a deafening, eardrum shattering thunderclap of sound in that confined space: and when the last reverberations of the rifle-shot had faded and the smoke cleared away, Senator Brewster was staring down whitely at the splintered hole in the floor boards, almost literally beneath his feet: Jackstraw must have miscalculated the Senator’s rate of movement, for the bullet had sliced through the edge of the sole of Brewster’s boot. However it was, the effect couldn’t have been bettered: the Senator reached back blindly for the support of the bunk behind him and lowered himself shakily to his seat, so terrified that he even forgot to clasp his hands above his head. But I didn’t care about that: there would be no more trouble from the Senator.

‘Ok, so you mean business. Now we’re convinced.’ It was Zagero who drawled out the words, but his hands were tightly enough clasped above his head. ‘We know you wouldn’t do this for nothin’, Doc. What gives?’

‘This gives,’ I said tightly. ‘Two of you people are murderers – or a murderer and murderess. Both have guns. I want those guns.’

‘Succinctly put, dear boy,’ Marie LeGarde said slowly. ‘Very concise. Have you gone crazy?’

‘Unclasp your hands, Miss LeGarde, you’re not included in this little lot. No, I’m not crazy. I’m as sane as you are, and if you want evidence of my sanity you’ll find it out on the plane there – or buried out on the ice-cap: the captain of the plane with a bullet through his spine, the passenger in the rear with a bullet through his heart and the second officer smothered to death. Yes, smothered. Not cerebral hæmorrhage, as I said: he was murdered in his sleep. Believe me, Miss LeGarde? Or would it take a personal tour of the plane to convince you?’

She didn’t speak at once. Nobody spoke. Everyone was too stunned, too busy fighting incredulity and trying to assimilate the meaning of the shocking news I’d given them – everyone, that is, except two. But though I scanned eight faces with an intensity with which I had never before examined people I saw nothing – not the slightest off-beat gesture, the tiniest guilty reaction. As for what I’d secretly hoped for – a guilty interchange of glances – well, the idea now seemed hopelessly, laughably improbable. Whoever the killers were, they were in perfect control of themselves. I felt despair touch me, a sure knowledge of defeat.

‘I must believe you.’ Marie LeGarde spoke as slowly as before, but her voice was unsteady and her face drained of colour. She looked at Margaret Ross. ‘You knew of this, my dear?’

‘Half an hour ago, Miss LeGarde. Dr Mason thought I had done it.’

‘Good God! How – how utterly ghastly! How horrible! Two of us murderers.’ From her position by the stove, Marie LeGarde glanced round the eight seated people, then looked quickly away. ‘Suppose – suppose you tell us everything, Dr Mason.’

I told them everything. On the way back from the plane with Miss Ross I had debated this with myself – the question of secrecy or not. The no secrecy decision had won hands down: keeping quiet wouldn’t fool the killers – they knew I knew: no secrecy would mean each and every one of the passengers watching the others like hawks, making my task of constant vigilance all that much easier, the killers’ chance of making mischief all that more difficult.

‘You will stand up one at a time,’ I said when I’d finished. ‘Mr London will search you for your guns. And please don’t forget – I know I’m dealing with desperate men. I’m prepared to act accordingly. When your turn comes stand very still indeed and make no suspicious move, not the slightest. I’m not very good with a pistol, and I shall have to aim at the middle of your bodies to make certain.’

‘I believe you would at that,’ Corazzini said thoughtfully.

‘It doesn’t matter what you believe,’ I said coldly. ‘Just don’t be the one to find out.’

Joss started on Zagero. He searched him thoroughly – I could see the anger on Zagero’s face, but his eyes didn’t leave my gun – and found nothing. He moved on to Solly Levin.

‘Might I ask why I’m being excused?’ Marie LeGarde asked suddenly.

‘You?’ I said shortly. My eyes didn’t move from Solly. ‘Marie LeGarde? Don’t be so damned silly!’

‘The choice of words and tone of voice leave a lot to be desired.’ Her voice was soft and warm, though still shaky. ‘But I’ve never had a greater compliment. All the same, I insist on being searched: I don’t want to be the one under a cloud if the guns don’t turn up.’

And the guns didn’t turn up. Joss finished searching the men, Margaret Ross the women – Mrs Dansby-Gregg under icy protest – and neither found anything. Joss looked at me, his face empty of all expression.

‘Get their luggage,’ I said harshly. ‘The small cases they’re taking with them. We’ll try these.’

‘You’re wasting your time, Dr Mason,’ Nick Corazzini said quietly. ‘To any characters smart enough to guess that you were going to frisk them, the next move would stick out a mile. A child could guess it. You might find those guns you talk about hidden on the tractor or the sledges or buried under a couple of inches of snow, ready to be picked up whenever required, but you won’t find them in our grips. A thousand to one, in dollars, that you don’t.’

‘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.

‘Uplavnik,’ he murmured. ‘Tomorrow, we set off for Uplavnik. But first, you said, a good night’s sleep.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘A traveller’s moon.’

‘A traveller’s moon,’ he echoed.

He was right, of course. Travel in the Arctic, in winter, was regulated not by daylight but my moonlight. And tonight we had that moon – and we had a clear sky, a dying wind and no snow at all. I turned to Joss.

‘You’ll be all right alone?’

‘I have no worries,’ he said soberly. ‘Look, sir, can’t I come too?’

‘Stay here and stay healthy,’ I advised. ‘Thanks, Joss, but you know someone must remain behind. I’ll call you up on the usual schedules. You might get a kick out of the RCA yet. Miracles still happen.’

‘Not this time, they won’t.’ He turned away abruptly and went below. Jackstraw moved across to the tractor – we didn’t say another word to each other, we didn’t have to – and I followed Joss down to the cabin. No one had moved an inch, as far as I could see, but they all looked up as I came in.

‘All right,’ I said abruptly. ‘Get your stuff together and pile on every last stitch of clothes you can. We’re leaving now.’

We left, in fact, just over an hour later. The Citroën had been lying unused for the better part of a fortnight, and we had the devil’s own job getting it to start. But start it eventually did, with a roar and a thunderous clatter that had everybody jumping in startlement then looking at it in dismay. I knew the thoughts in their minds, that they’d have to live with this cacophony, this bedlam of sound assaulting their shrinking eardrums for no one knew how many days to come, but I wasted little sympathy on them: at least they would have the protection of the wooden body while I would be sitting practically on top of the engine.

We said our goodbyes to Joss. He shook hands with Jackstraw and myself, with Margaret Ross and Marie LeGarde, and, pointedly, with no one else. We left him standing there by the hatchway, a lonely figure outlined against the pale light of the steadily climbing moon, and headed west by south for Uplavnik, three hundred long and frozen miles away. I wondered, as I knew Joss was wondering, whether we would ever see each other again.

I wondered, too, what right I had in exposing Jackstraw to the dangers which must lie ahead. He was sitting beside me as I drove, but as I looked at him covertly in the moonlight, at that strong lean face that, but for the rather broad cheekbones, might have been that of any Scandinavian sea-rover, I knew I was wasting my time wondering. Although nominally under my command, he had only been lent me, as other Greenlanders had been lent as an act of courtesy by the Danish Government to several IGY stations, as a scientific officer – he had a geology degree from the University of Copenhagen and had forgotten more about the ice-cap than I would ever know – and in times of emergency, especially where his own pride, and he had plenty of that, was concerned would be extremely liable to do what he thought best, regardless of what I thought or said. I knew he wouldn’t have remained behind even if I had ordered him to – and, if I were honest with myself, I was only too damned glad to have him along, as a friend, as an ally, and as insurance policy against the disaster that can so easily overtake the careless or the inexperienced on the ice-cap. But even so, even though I quieted my conscience as best I could, it was difficult to push from my mind the picture of his dark vivacious young schoolteacher wife and little daughter, the red and white brick house in which I’d lived for two weeks as a guest in the summer. What Jackstraw thought was impossible to say. He sat immobile as if carved from stone, only his eyes alive, constantly moving, constantly shifting, as he probed for sudden dips in the ice-cap, for differences in the structure of the snow, for anything that might spell trouble. It was purely automatic, purely instinctive: the crevasse country lay, as yet, two hundred and fifty miles away, where the ice-cap started to slope sharply to the sea, and Jackstraw himself maintained that Balto, his big lead dog, had a surer instinct for crevasses than any human alive.

The temperature was dropping down into the minus thirties, but it was a perfect night for arctic travel – a moonlit, windless night under a still and starry sky. Visibility was phenomenal, the ice-cap was smooth and flat, the engine ran sweetly with never a falter: had it not been for the cold, the incessant roar and body-numbing vibration of the big engine, I think I would almost have enjoyed it.

With the wide tractor body blocking off the view behind, it was impossible for me to see what was happening there: but every ten minutes or so Jackstraw would jump off and stand by the side of the trail. Behind the tractor body and its shivering occupants – because of the tractor fuel tank beneath and the spare fuel drums astern the stove was never lit while we were in motion – came the sledge with all our stores: 120 gallons of fuel, provisions, bedding and sleeping-bags, tents, ropes, axes, shovels, trail flags, cooking utensils, seal meat for the dogs, four wooden bridging battens, canvas sheets, blow-lamps, lantern, medical equipment, radio-sonde balloons, magnesium flares and a score of minor items. I had hesitated over including the radio sondes, especially the relatively heavy hydrogen cylinders for these: but they were ready crated with tents, ropes, axes and shovels and – this was the deciding factor – had saved lives on at least one occasion when a trail party, lost on the plateau with defective compasses, had saved themselves by releasing several balloons in the brief daylight hours thereby enabling base to see them and send accurate radio bearings.

Behind the heavy transport sled was towed the empty dog-sled, with the dogs on loose traces running astern of it, all except Balto who always ran free, coursing tirelessly backwards and forwards all night long, one moment far ahead of us, the next ranging out to one side, the next dropping astern, like some destroyer circling a straggling convoy by night. When the last of the dogs had passed by him, Jackstraw would run forward to overtake the tractor and jump in alongside me once more. He was as tireless, as immune to fatigue, as Balto himself.

The first twenty miles were easy. On the way up from the coast, over four months previously, we had planted big marker flags at intervals of half a mile. On a night such as this, with the moonlight flooding the ice-cap, these trail flags, a bright luminous orange in colour and mounted on aluminium poles stuck in snow beacons, were visible at a great distance, with never less than two and sometimes three in sight at the same time, the long glistening frost feathers stretching out from the poles sometimes twice the length of the flags themselves. We counted twenty-eight of these flags altogether – about a dozen were missing – then, after a sudden dip in the land, completely lost them: whether they had blown away or just drifted under it was impossible to say.

‘Well, there it is, Jackstraw,’ I said resignedly. ‘This is where one of us starts getting cold. Really cold.’

‘We’ve been cold before, Dr Mason. Me first.’ He slid the magnetic compass off its brackets, started to unreel a cable from a spool under the dashboard, then jumped out, still unwinding the cable, while I followed to help. Despite the fact that the magnetic north pole is nowhere near the north pole – at that time it was almost a thousand miles south of it and lay more to the west than north of us – a magnetic compass, when proper variation allowances are made, is still useful in high latitudes: but because of the counter-acting magnetic effects of a large mass of metal, it was quite useless when mounted on the tractor itself. Our plan, therefore, was that someone should lie with the compass on the dog-sled, fifty feet behind the tractor, and, by means of a switch which operated red and green lights in the tractor dashboard, guide the driver to left or right. It wasn’t our original idea, it wasn’t even a recent idea: it had been used in the Antarctic a quarter century previously but, as far as I knew, had not been improved upon yet.

With Jackstraw established on the sledge, I walked back to the tractor and pushed aside the canvas screen at the back of the wooden body. What with the faces of the passengers, drawn and pinched and weirdly pale in the light of the tiny overhead bulb, the constant shivering, the chattering of teeth and the frozen breath drifting upwards to condense and freeze on the wooden roof, it was a picture of utter and abject misery: but I was in no mood to be moved at that moment.

‘Sorry for the delay,’ I said. ‘Just off again now. But I want one of you for a lookout.’

Both Zagero and Corazzini volunteered almost in the same breath, but I shook my head.

‘You two get what sleep or rest you can – I’m liable to need you very much later on. Perhaps you, Mr Mahler?’

He looked pale and ill, but he nodded silently, and Zagero said in a quiet voice: ‘Corazzini and myself too high up on the list of suspects, huh?’

‘I wouldn’t put either of you at the very foot,’ I said shortly. I waited till Mahler had climbed down then dropped the canvas and walked round to the driver’s seat.

Theodore Mahler, strangely enough, proved only too anxious to talk – and keep on talking. It was so completely out of keeping with the idea I had formed of his character that I was more than surprised. Loneliness, perhaps, I thought, or trying to forget the situation, or trying to divert my thoughts and suspicions: how wrong I was on all three counts I wasn’t to find out until later.

‘Well, Mr Mahler, it looks as if the itinerary of your European trip is going to be upset a bit.’ I had almost to shout to make my words heard above the roar of the tractor.

‘Not Europe, Dr Mason.’ I could hear the machine-gun-like chatter of his teeth. ‘Israel.’

‘You live there?’

‘Never been there in my life.’ There was a pause, and when his voice came again it was all but drowned in the sound of the engine. I thought I caught the words ‘My home’.

‘You – you’re going to start a new life there, Mr Mahler?’

‘I’m sixty-nine – tomorrow,’ he answered obliquely. ‘A new life? Let’s say, rather, that I’m going to end an old one.’

‘And you’re going to live there, make your home there – after sixty-nine years in another country?’

‘Millions of us Jews have done just that, in the past ten years. Not that I’ve lived in America all my life …’

And then he told me his story – a story of refugee oppression that I’d heard a hundred times, with a hundred variations. He was a Russian Jew, he said, one of the millions of the largest Jewry in the world that had been ‘frozen’ for over a century in the notorious Pale of Settlement, and in 1905 had been forced to flee with his father – leaving mother and two brothers behind – to escape the ruthless massacres carried out by the ‘Black Hundreds’ at the behest of the last of the Romanoff Tzars who was seeking scapegoats for his crushing defeat by the Japanese. His mother, he learned later, had just disappeared, while his two brothers had survived only to die in agony long years afterwards, one in the rising in the Bialystok ghetto, the other in the Treblinka gas chambers. He himself had found work in the clothing industry in New York, studied in night school, worked for an oil company, married and with the death of his wife that spring had set about fulfilling the agelong ambition of his race, the return to their holy land.

It was a touching story, pathetic and deeply moving, and I didn’t believe a word of it.

Every twenty minutes I changed position with Jackstraw and so the long hours of the night dragged by as the cold deepened and the stars and the moon wheeled across the black vault of the sky. And then came moonset, the blackness of the arctic night rushed across the ice-cap, I slowed the Citroën gratefully to a stop and the silence, breathless and hushed and infinitely sweet, came flooding in to take the place of the nightlong clamour of the deafening roar of the big engine, the metallic clanking of the treads.

Over our black sugarless coffee and biscuits I told our passengers that this would be only a brief three-hour halt, that they should try to get what sleep they could: most of them, myself included, were already red-eyed and drooping from exhaustion. Three hours, no more: not often did Greenland offer travel weather like this, and the chance was not to be missed.

Beside me, as I drank my coffee, was Theodore Mahler. He was for some reason restless, ill at ease, jerky and nervous, and his eyes and attention both wandered so much that it was easy enough for me to find out what I wanted.

When my cup was empty, I whispered in Mahler’s ear that there was a little matter that I wished to discuss privately with him. He looked at me in surprise, hesitated, then nodded in agreement, rising to follow me as I moved out into the darkness.

A hundred yards away I stopped, switched on my torch so that he blinked in its beam, and slid my Beretta forward until its barrel was clearly visible, sharply outlined in the harsh white glare. I heard the catch of the breath, saw the eyes widening in fear and horror.

‘Save the act for the judge, Mahler,’ I said bleakly. ‘I’m not interested in it. All I want is your gun.’