Bear Island (7 page)

    I produced his cabin key. "He didn't lock the door from the inside. I did from the outside." The Count looked at me for an uncomprehending moment, then mechanically reached for his flask as shocked understanding showed in his face. Not too much shock, just a little, but I was sure that what little there was, was genuine. He tilted the flask and two or three drops trickled into his glass. He reached for the Black Label, helped himself with a steady but generous hand and drank deeply.

    "He couldn't hear me? He-is beyond hearing?”

    “I'm sorry. Something he ate, I can't think what else, some killer toxin, some powerful, quick-acting and deadly poison.”

    “Quite dead?" I nodded. "Quite dead," he repeated. "And I told him to stop making such a grand opera Latin fuss and walked away and left a dying man." He drank some more Scotch and grimaced, an expression that was no reflection on Johnnie Walker. "There are advantages in being a lapsed Catholic, Dr. Marlowe.”

    “Rubbish. Sackcloth and ashes not only don't help, they're simply just not called for here. All right, so you didn't suspect there was anything wrong with him. I saw him at table and I wasn't any cleverer and I'm supposed to be a doctor. And when you left him in the cabin it was too late anyway: he was dying then." I helped him to some more Scotch but left my own glass untouched: even one relatively sober mind around might prove to be of some help although just how I couldn't quite see at that moment. "You sat beside him at dinner. Can you remember what he ate?”

    “The usual." The Count, it was clear, was more shaken than his aristocratic nature would allow him to admit. "Mather, he didn't cat the usual.”

    “I'm not in the right frame of mind for riddles, Tadeusz.”

    “Grapefruit and sunflower seeds. That was about what he lived on. One of those vegetarian nuts.”

    “Walk softly, Tadeusz. Those nuts may yet be your pallbearers."

    The Count grimaced again. "A singularly ill-chosen remark. Antonio never ate meat. And he'd a thing against potatoes. So all he had were the sprouts and horse-radish. I remember particularly well because Cecil and I gave him our horse-radish, to which, it seems, he was particularly partial." The Count shuddered. "A barbarian food, fit only for ignorant Anglo-Saxon palates. Even young Cecil has the grace to detest that offal." It was noteworthy that the Count was the only person in the film unit who did not refer to Cecil Golightly as the Duke: perhaps he thought he was being upstaged in the title stakes but, more probably, as a dyed-in-the wool. aristocrat himself, he objected to people taking frivolous liberties with titles.

    "He had fruit juices?”

    “Antonio had his own homemade barley water." The Count smiled faintly. It was his contention that everything that came out of a can had been adulterated before it went into that can. Very strict on those matters, was Antonio.”

    “Soup? Any of that?"

    "Oxtail.”

    “Of course. Anything else? That he ate, I mean.”

    “He didn't even finish his main course-well, his sprouts and radish. You may recall that he left very hurriedly.”

    “I recall. Was he liable to seasickness?"

    “I don't know. Don't forget, I've known him no longer than yourself. He's been a bit off-colour for the past two days. But, then, who hasn't?"

    I was trying to think up another penetrating question when John Cummings Goin entered. His unusual surname he'd inherited from a French grandfather in the High Savoy, where, apparently, this was not an altogether uncommon name. The film crew, inevitably, referred to him as Comin" and Goin', but Goin was probably wholly unaware of this: he was not the sort of man with whom one took liberties.

    Any other person entering the dining saloon from the main deck on a night like that would have presented an appearance that would have varied from the wind-blown to the dishevelled. Not one hair of Goin's black, smooth, centre-parted, brushed-back hair was out of place: had I been told that he eschewed the standard proprietary hairdressing creams in favour of cowhide glue, I would have seen no reason to doubt it. And the hair style was typical of the man-everything smooth, calm, unruffled, and totally under control. In one area only did the comparison fall down. The hair style was slick, but Goin wasn't: he was just plain clever. He was of medium height, plump without being fat, with a smooth, unlined face. He was the only man I'd ever seen wearing pince-nez, and that only for the finest of fine print which, in Goin's line of business, came his way quite often: the pince-nez looked so inevitable that it was unthinkable that he should ever wear any other type of reading aid. He was, above all, a civilised man and urbane in the best sense of the word.

    He picked up a glass from a rack, timed the wild staggering of the Morning Rose to walk quickly and surely to the scat on my right, picked up the Black Label and said: "May l?"

    "Easy come, easy go," I said. "I've just stolen it from Mr. Gerran's private supply."

    "Confession noted." He helped himself. "This makes me an accessory. Cheers."

    “I assume you've just come from Mr. Gerran," I said.

    "Yes. He's most upset. Sad, sad, about that poor young boy. An unfortunate business." That,-,as  something else about Goin, he always got his priorities right: the average company accountant, confronted with the news of the death of a member of a team, would immediately have wondered how the death would affect the project as a whole: Goin saw the human side of it first. Or, I thought, he spoke of it first: I knew I was being unfair to him. He went on: I understand you've so far been unable to establish the cause of death." Diplomacy, inevitably, was second nature to Goin: he could so easily and truthfully have said that I just hadn't a clue.

    So I said it for him. I haven't a clue."

    "You'll never get to Harley Street talking that way."

    "Poison, that's certain. But that's all that's certain. I carry the usual seagoing medical library around with me, but that isn't much help. To identify a poison you must be able either to carry out a chemical analysis or observe the poison at work on the victim-most of the major poisons have symptoms peculiar to themselves and follow their own highly idiosyncratic courses. But Antonio was dead before I got to him and I lack the facilities to do any pathological work, assuming I could do it in the first place."

    "You're destroying all my faith in the medical profession. Cyanide?"

    “Impossible. Antonio took time to die. A couple of drops of hydrocyanic -prussic acid-or even a tiny quantity of pharmacopocial acid, and that's only two percent of anhydrous prussic acid-and you're dead before your glass hits the floor. And cyanide makes it murder, it always makes it murder. There's no way I know of it can be administered by accident. Antonio's death, I'm certain, was an accident."

    Goin helped himself to some more Scotch. "What makes you so certain it was an accident?”

    “What makes me so certain?" That was a difficult one to answer off the cuff owing to the fact that I was convinced it was no accident at all. "First, there was no opportunity for the administering of poison. We know that Antonio was alone in his cabin all afternoon right until dinnertime." I looked at the Count. "Did Antonio have any private food supplies with him in his cabin?”

    “How did you guess?" The Count looked surprised.

    "I'm not guessing. I'm eliminating. He had?”

    “Two hampers. Full of glass jars-I think I mentioned that Antonio would never eat anything out of a tin-with all sorts of weird vegetable products inside, including dozens of baby food jars with all sorts of purees in them. A very finicky eater, was poor Antonio.”

    “So I'm beginning to gather. I think our answer will lie there. I'll have Captain Imrie impound his supplies and have them analysed on our return. To get back to the opportunity factor. Antonio came up to the dining saloon here, had the same as the rest of us~?'

    "No fruit juices, no soup, no lamb chops, no potatoes," the Count said.

    "None of those. But what he did have we all had. Then straight back to his cabin. In the second place, who would want to kill a harmless person like that-especially as Antonio was a total stranger to all of us and only joined us at Wick for the first time? And who but a madman would administer a deadly poison in a closed community like this knowing that he couldn't escape and that Scotland Yard would be leaning over the quay walls in Wick, just waiting for our return?”

    “Maybe that's the way a madman would figure a sane person would Figure," Goin said.

    "What English king was it who died of a surfeit of lampreys?" the Count said. If you ask me, our unfortunate Antonio may well have perished from a surfeit of horse-radish.”

    “Like enough." I pushed back my chair and made to rise. But I didn't get up immediately. Way back in the dim and lost recesses of my mind the Count had triggered off a tiny bell, an infinitesimal tinkle so distant and remote that if I hadn't been listening with all my ears I'd have missed it completely: but I had been listening, the way people always listen when they know, without knowing why, that the old man with the scythe is standing there in the wings, winding up for the back stroke. I knew both men were watching me. I sighed. "Decisions, decisions. Antonio has to be attended to--”

    “With canvas?" Goin said.

    "With canvas. Count's cabin cleaned up. Death has to be logged. Death certificate. And Mr. Smith will have to make the funeral arrangements.”

    “Mr. Smith?" The Count was vaguely surprised. "Not our worthy commanding officer.”

    “Captain Imrie is in the arms of Morpheus," I said. "I've tried.”

    “You have your deities mixed up," Goin said. "Bacchus is the one you're after."

    “I suppose it is. Excuse me, gentlemen."

    I went directly to my cabin but not to write out any death certificate. As I'd told Goin, I did carry a medical library of sorts around with me and it was of a fair size. I selected several books, including Glaisters's Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology, 9th edition (Edinburgh, 1950), Dewar's Textbook of Forensic Pharmacy (London, 1946) and Gonzales's, Vance's and Helpern's Legal Medicine and Toxicology, which seemed to be a prewar book. I started consulting indices and within five minutes I had it.

    The entry was listed under "Systemic Poisons" and was headed Aconite. "Bot. A poisonous plant of the order Ranunculaccae. Particular reference Monk's-hood and Wolf's-bane. Phar. Aconitum napellus. This, and aconitine, an alkaloid extract of the former, is commonly regarded as the most lethal of all poisons yet identified: a dose of not more than 0.004 gm. is deadly to man. Aconite and its alkaloid produce a burning and peculiar tingling and numbing effect where applied. Later, especially with larger doses, violent vomiting results, followed by paralysis of motion, paralysis of sensation and great depression of the heart, followed by death from syncope.

    "Treatment. To be successful must be immediate as possible. Gastric lavage, iz gm. of tannic acid in two gallons of warm water, followed by 1.2 gm. tannic acid in 18o ml. tepid water: this should be followed by animal charcoal suspended in water. Cardiac and respiratory stimulants, artificial respiration and oxygen will be necessary as indicated.

    "N.B. The root of aconite has frequently been eaten in mistake for that of horse-radish."

    3

    I was still looking at, but no longer really reading the article on aconite when it was gradually borne in upon my preoccupation that there was something very far amiss with the Morning Rose. She was still under way, her elderly oil-fired steam engines throbbing along as dependably as ever, but her motion had changed. Her rolling factor had increased till she was swinging wickedly and dismayingly through an angle of close on seventy degrees: the pitching factor had correspondingly decreased and the thudding jarring vibration of the bluff bows smashing into the quartering seas had fallen away to a fraction of what it had previously been.

    I marked the article, closed the book then lurched and stumbled-I could not be said to have run for it was physically impossible-along the passageway, up the companionway, through the lounge and out on to the upper deck. It was dark but not so dark as to prevent me from gauging direction by the feel of the gale wind, by the spume blowing off the top of the confused seas. I shrank back and tightened my grip on a convenient handrail as a great wall of water, black and veined and evil, reared up on the port side, just foreword of the beam: it was at least ten feet higher than my head. I was certain that the wave, with the hundreds of tons of water it contained, was going to crash down square on the foredeck of the trawler, I couldn't see how it could fail to, but fail it did: as the wave bore down on us, the trough to starboard deepened and the Morning Rose, rolling over to almost forty degrees, simply fell into it, pressed down by the great weight of water on its exposed port side. There came the familiar flat explosive thunderclap of sound, the Morning Rose vibrated and groaned as overstressed plates and rivets adjusted to cope with the sudden shearing strain, white, icily cold water foamed over the starboard side and swirled around my ankles and then it was gone, gurgling through the scuppers as the Morning Rose rig" righted herself and rolled far over on its other side. There was no worry about any of this, no threat to safety and life, this was what Arctic trawlers had been built for and the Morning Rose could continue to absorb this punishment indefinitely. But there was cause for worry, if such a word can be used to express a desperately acute anxiety: that massive wave, which had caught the trawler on her port now, had knocked her almost twenty degrees off course. She was still twenty degrees off course, and twenty degrees off course she remained: nobody was making any attempt to bring her round. Another, and a smaller sea, and then she was lying five more degrees over to the cast and here, too, she remained. I ran for the bridge ladder.

    I bumped into and almost knocked down a person at the precise spot where I'd bumped into Mary dear an hour ago. Contact this time was much more solid and the person said "Oof!" or something of that sort. The kind of gasp a winded lady makes is quite different from a man's and instinct and a kind of instantaneous reasoning told me that I had bumped into the same person again: Judith Haynes would be in bed with her spaniels and Nary Darling was either with Allen or in bed dreaming about him: neither, anyway, was the outdoor type.