Night Without End (15 page)

     I broke off abruptly. A woman's gun! Why not a woman using it? Why not even this girl by my side? It could have been her accomplice that had followed me out to the plane earlier in the evening, and it would fit in beautifully with the facts. . . . No, it wouldn't, faints couldn't be faked. But perhaps- "A woman's gun?" I might have spoken my thoughts aloud, so perfectly had she understood. "Perhaps even me - or should I say perhaps still me?" Her voice was unnaturally calm. "Goodness only knows I can't blame you. If I were you, I'd suspect everyone too." 

     She pulled the glove and mitten off her left hand, took the gleaming ring off her third finger and passed it across to me. I examined it blankly in the light of my torch, then bent forward as I caught sight of the tiny inscription on the inside of the gold band: "J. W.-M. R. Sept. 28,1958'. I looked up at her and she nodded, her face numb and stricken. 

     "Jimmy and I got engaged two months ago. This was my last flight as a stewardess - we were being married at Christmas." She snatched the ring from me, thrust it back on her finger with a shaking hand and when she turned to me again the tears were brimming over in her eyes. "Now do you trust me?" she sobbed. "Now do you trust me?" 

     For the first time in almost twenty-four hours I acted sensibly -1 closed my mouth tightly and kept it that way. I didn't even bother reviewing her strange behaviour after the crash and in the cabin, I knew instinctively that this accounted for everything: I just sat there silently watching her staring straight ahead, her fists clenched and tears rolling down her cheeks, and when she suddenly crumpled and buried her face in her hands and I reached out and pulled her towards me she made no resistance, just turned, crushed her face into the caribou fur of my parka and cried as if her heart was breaking: and I suppose it was. 

     I suppose, too, that the moment when a man hears that a girl's fiance* has died only that day is the last moment that that man should ever begin to fall in love with her, but I'm afraid that's just how it was. The emotions are no respecters of the niceties, the proprieties and decencies of this life, and, just then, I was clearly aware that mine were stirred as they hadn't been since that dreadful day, four years ago, when my wife, a bride of only three months, had been killed in a car smash and I had given up medicine, returned to my first great love, geology, completed the B.Sc. course that had been interrupted by the outbreak of World War Two and taken to wandering wherever work, new surroundings and an opportunity to forget the past had presented themselves. Why, when I gazed down at that small dark head pressed so deeply into the fur of my coat, I should have felt my heart turn over I didn't know. For all her wonderful brown eyes she had no pretensions to beauty and I knew nothing whatsoever about her. Perhaps it was just a natural reaction from my earlier antipathy: perhaps it was pity for her loss, for what I had so cruelly done to her, for having so exposed her to danger - whoever knew that I knew too much would soon know that she knew it also: or perhaps it was just because she was so defenceless and vulnerable, so ridiculously small and lost in Joss's big parka. And then I caught myself trying to work out the reasons and I gave it up: I hadn't been married long, but long enough to know that the heart has its own reasons which even the acutest mind couldn't begin to suspect. 

     By and by the sobbing subsided and she straightened, hiding from me what must have been a very badly tear-stained face. 

     "I'm sorry," she murmured. "And thank you very much." 

     "My crying shoulder." I patted it with my right hand. "For my friends. The other one's for my patients." 

     "For that, too, but I didn't mean that. Just for not saying how sorry you were for me, or patting me or saying 'Now, now' or anything like that. I -1 couldn't have stood it." She finished wiping her face with the palm of her mitten, looked up at me with brown eyes still swimming in tears and I felt my heart turn over again. "Where do we go from here, Dr Mason?" 

     "Back to the cabin." 

     "I didn't mean that." 

     "I know. What am I to say? I'm completely at a loss. A hundred questions, and never an answer to one of them." 

     "And I don't even know all the questions, yet," she murmured. "It's only five minutes since I even knew that it wasn't an accident." She shook her head incredulously. "Who ever heard of a civilian airliner being forced down at pistol point?" 

     "I did. On the radio, just over a month ago. In Cuba - some of Fidel Castro's rebels forced a Viscount to crash land. Only they picked an even worse spot than this -1 think there were only one or two survivors. Maybe that's where our friends back in the cabin got the idea from. I shouldn't be surprised." 

     She wasn't even listening, her mind was already off on another track. 

     "Why - why did they kill Colonel Harrison?" 

     I shrugged. "Maybe he had a high resistance to Mickey Finns. 

     Maybe he saw too much, or knew too much. Or both." 

     "But - but now they know you've seen too much and know too much." I wished she wouldn't look at me when she was talking, these eyes would have made even the Rev. Smallwood forget himself in the middle of his most thundering denunciations - not that I could imagine Mr Smallwood going in for thundering denunciations very much. 

     "A disquieting thought," I admitted, "and one that has occurred to me several times during the past half-hour. About five hundred times, I would say." 

     "Oh, stop it! You're probably as scared as I am." She shivered. "Let's get out of here, please. It's - it's ghastly, it's horrible. What - what was that?" Her voice finished on a sharp high note. 

     "What was what?" I tried to speak calmly, but that didn't stop me from glancing around nervously. Maybe she was right, maybe I was as scared as she was. 

     "A noise outside." Her voice was a whisper and her fingers were digging deep into the fur of my parka. "Like someone tapping the wing or the fuselage." 

     "Nonsense." My voice was rough, but I was on razor-edge. "You're beginning to-" 

     I stopped in mid-sentence. This time I could have sworn I had heard something, and it was plain that Margaret Ross had too. She twisted her head over her shoulder, looking in the direction of the noise, then slowly turned back to me, her face tense, her eyes wide and staring. 

     I pushed her hands away, reached for gun and torch, jumped up and started running. In the control cabin I checked abruptly -God, what a fool I'd been to leave that searchlight burning and lined up on the windscreens, blinding me with its glare, making me a perfect target for anyone crouching outside with a gun in hand - but the hesitation was momentary only. It was then or never - I could be trapped in there all night, or until the searchlight battery died. I dived head first through the windscreen, caught a pillar at the very last moment and was lying flat on the ground below in less time than I would have believed possible. 

     I waited five seconds, just listening, but all I could hear was the moan of the wind, the hiss of the ice spicules rustling along over the frozen snow - I'd never before heard that hissing so plainly, but then I'd never before lain with my uncovered ear on the ice-cap itself - and the thudding of my heart. And then I was on my feet, the probing torch cutting a bright swathe in the darkness before me as I ran round the plane, slipping and stumbling in my haste. Twice I made the circuit, the second time in the opposite direction, but there was no one there at all. 

     I stopped before the control cabin and called softly to Margaret Ross. She appeared at the window, and I said: "It's all right, there's no one here. We've both been imagining things. Come on down." I reached up my hands, caught her and lowered her to the ground. 

     "Why did you leave me up there, why did you leave me up there?" The words came rushing out, tumbling frantically one over the other, the anger drowned in the terror. "It was - it was horrible! The dead man. . . . Why did you leave me?" 

     "I'm sorry." There was a time and a place for comment on feminine injustice, unreasonableness and downright illogicality, but this wasn't it. In the way of grief and heartbreak, shock and ill-treatment, she had already had far more than she could stand. "I'm sorry," I repeated. "I shouldn't have done it. I just didn't stop to think." 

     She was trembling violently, so I put my arms round her and held her tightly until she had calmed down, took the searchlight and battery in one hand and her hand in my other and we walked back to the cabin together. 

   CHAPTER SIX - Monday 7 P.M. - Tuesday 7 A.M. 

     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.1'! 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 Stromsund 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 Citroen, 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 ice-cap. 

     "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 Citroen, 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.