Authors: Alistair MacLean
"No night for an honest citizen to be taking a constitutional," Smithy said in my ear. "But how about bumping into one of the less honest ones.
"Too soon for him or them to be stirring abroad," I said. "For the moment the flame of suspicion burns too high for anyone even to clear his throat at the wrong moment. Later, perhaps. But not now."
We went directly to the provisions store, closed the door behind us and, since the hut was windowless, switched on both our torches. We searched through all the bags, crates, cartons, and packages of food and found nothing untoward.
"What are we supposed to be looking for?" Smithy asked.
"I've no idea. Anything, shall we say, that shouldn't be here.”
“A gun? A big black ribbed bottle marked "Deadly Poison?'
"Something like that." I lifted a bottle of Haig from a crate and stuck it in my parka pocket. "Medicinal use only," I explained.
"Of course." Smithy made a farewell sweep of his torch beam round the walls of the hut: the beam steadied on three small highly varnished boxes on an upper shelf.
"Must be very high grade food in those," Smithy said. "Caviar for Otto, maybe?”
“Spare medical equipment for me. Mainly instruments. No poisons. Guaranteed." I made for the door. "Come on.”
“Not checking?”
“No point. Be a bit difficult to hide a submachine gun in one of those." The boxes were about ten inches by eight.
"OK to have a look, all the same.”
“All right." I was a bit impatient. "Hurry it up, though."
Smithy opened the lids of the first two boxes, glanced cursorily at the contents and closed them again. He opened the third box and said: "Broken into your reserves already, I see."
“I have not.”
“Then somebody has." He handed over the box and I saw the two vacant moulds in the blue felt.
"Somebody has indeed," I said. "A hypodermic and a tube of needles."
Smithy looked at me in silence, took the box, closed the lid and replaced it. He said: I don't think I like this very much.”
“Twenty-two days could be a very long time," I said. "Now, if we could only find the stuff that's going to go inside this syringe."
“If. You don't think somebody may have borrowed it for his own private use? Somebody on the hard stuff who's bent his own plunger? One of the Three Apostles, for instance? Right background, after all-pop world, film world, just kids.”
“No, I don't think that.”
“I don't think so either. I wish I did."
We went from there to the fuel hut. Two minutes was sufficient to discover that the fuel hut had nothing to offer us. Neither had the equipment hut although it afforded me two items I wanted, a screwdriver from the toolbox Eddie had used when he was connecting up the generator and a packet of screws. Smithy said: "What do you want those for?”
“For the screwing up of windows," I said. "A door is not the only way you can enter the cubicle of a sleeping man.”
“You don't trust an awful lot of people, do you?"
“I weep for my lost innocence."
There was no temptation to linger in the tractor shed, not with Stryker lying there, his face ghastly in the reflected wash from the torches, his glazed eyes staring unseeingly at the ceiling. We rummaged through toolboxes, examined metal panniers, even went to the length of probing fuel tanks, oil tanks, and radiators: we found nothing.
We made our way down to the jetty. From the main cabin it was a distance of just over twenty yards and it took us five minutes to find it. We did not dare use our torches and with that heavy and driving snow reducing visibility to virtually arm's length, we were blind people moving in a blind world. We edged our way very gingerly out to the end of the jetty-the snow had covered up the gaps in the crumbling limestone and, heavily clad as we were, the chances of surviving a tumble into the freezing waters of the Sor-Hamna were not high--located the workboat in the sheltered northwest angle of the jetty and climbed down into it by means of a vertical iron ladder that was so ancient and rusty that the outboard ends of some of the rungs were scarcely more than a quarter of an inch in diameter.
On a dark night the glow from a torch can be seen from a considerable distance even through the most heavily falling snow but now that we were below the level of the jetty wall we switched our torches on again, though still careful to keep them hooded. A quick search of the workboat revealed nothing. We clambered into the fourteen-footer lying alongside and had the same lack of success. From here we transferred ourselves to the mock-up submarine-an iron ladder had been welded both to its side and the conning tower.
The conning tower had a platform welded across its circumference at a distance of about four feet from the top. A hatch in this led to a semicircular platform about eighteen inches below the flange to which the conning tower was secured: from here a short ladder led to the deck of the submarine. We went down and shone our torches around.
“Give me subs any time," Smithy said. "At least they keep the snow out. That apart, I don't think I'd care to settle down here."
The narrow and cramped interior was indeed a bleak and cheerless place. The deck consisted of transverse spaced wooden planks held in position at either side by large butterfly nuts. Beneath the planks we could see, firmly held in position, rows of long narrow grey-painted bars-the four tons of cast-iron that served as ballast. Four square ballast tanks were arranged along either side of the shell-those could be filled to give negative buoyancy-and at one end of the shell stood a small diesel, its exhaust passing through the deckhead as far as the top of the conning tower, to which it was bolted: this engine was coupled to a compressor unit for emptying the ballast tanks. And that, structurally, was all that there was to it: I had been told that the entire mock-up had cost fifteen thousand pounds and could only conclude that Otto had been engaged in the producers’ favourite pastime of cooking the books.
There were several other disparate items of equipment. In a locker in what I took to be the after end of this central mock-up were four small mushroom anchors with chains, together with a small portable windlass: immediately above these was a hatch in the deckhead which gave access to the upper deck: the anchors could only be for mooring the model securely in any desired position. Opposite this locker, securely lashed against a bulkhead, was a lightweight plastic reconstruction of a periscope that appeared to be capable of operating in a sufficiently realistic fashion. Close by were three other plastic models, a dummy three-inch gun presumably for mounting on the deck and two model machine guns which would be fitted, I imagined, somewhere in the conning tower. In the foreword end of the craft were two more lockers: one held a number of cork life jackets, the other six cans of paint and some paint brushes. The cans were marked “Instant Grey.”
“And what does that mean?" Smithy asked.
"Some sort of quick-drying paint, I should imagine.”
“Everything shipshape and Bristol fashion," Smithy said. "I wouldn't have given Otto the credit." He shivered. "Maybe it isn't snowing in here but I'd have you know that I'm very cold indeed. This place reminds me of an iron tomb."
“It isn't very cosy. Up and away.”
“A fruitless search, you might say?”
“You might. I didn't have many hopes anyway."
“Is that why you changed your mind about their getting on with the making of the film? One minute indifference, the next advising them to press on? So that you could, perhaps, examine their quarters and their possessions when they're out?”
“Whatever put such a thought in your mind, Smithy?”
“There are a thousand snowdrifts where a person could hide anything.”
“That's a thought that's also in my mind."
We made the trip from the jetty to the main cabin with much greater ease than we had the other way for this time we had the faint and diffuse glow of light from the Colemans to guide us. We scrambled back inside our cubicle without too much difficulty, brushed the snow from our boots and upper clothing and hung the latter up: compared to the interior of the submarine shell the warmth inside the cubicle was positively genial. I took screwdriver and screws and started to secure the window while Smithy, after some references to the low state of his health, retrieved the bottle I'd taken from the provisions shed and took two small beakers from my medical box. He watched me until I had finished.
"Well," he said, "that's us safe for the night. How about the others?"
“I don't think most of the others are in any danger because they don't offer any danger to the plans of our friend or friends.”
“Most of the others?"
“I think I'll screw up Judith Haynes's window too.”
“Judith Haynes?"
“I have a feeling that she is in danger. Whether it's grave danger or imminent danger I have no idea. Maybe I'm just fey."
“I shouldn't wonder," Smithy said ambiguously. He drank some Scotch absently. "I've just been thinking myself, but along rather different lines. When, do you think, is it going to occur to our directorial board to call some law in or some outside help or, at least, to let the world know that the employees of Olympus Productions are dying off like flies and not from natural causes, either?”
“That's the decision you would arrive at?"
“If I wasn't a criminal, or, in this case, the criminal, and had very powerful reasons for not wanting the law around, yes, I would.”
“I'm not a criminal but I've very powerful reasons for not wanting the law around either. The moment the law officially steps into the picture every criminal thought, intent, and potential action will go into deep freeze and we'll be left with five unresolved deaths on our hands and that'll be the end of it for there's nothing surer than that we haven't got a thing to hang on anyone yet. There's only one way and that's by giving out enough rope for a hanging job.”
“What if you give out too much rope and our friend, instead of hanging himself, hangs one of us instead? What if there's murder?"
“In that case we'd have to call in the law. I'm here to do a job in the best way I can but that doesn't mean by any means I can: I can't use the innocent as sacrificial pawns.”
“Well, that's some relief. But if the thought does occur to them?”
“Then obviously we'll have to try to contact Tunheim-there's a Meteorological Office radio there that should just about reach the moon. Or we'll have to offer to try to contact Tunheim. It's less than ten miles away but in weather conditions like those it might as well be on the far side of Siberia. If the weather cases, it might be possible. The wind's veering round to the west now and if it stayed in that quarter a trip by boat up the coast might be possible-pretty unpleasant, but just possible. If it goes much north of west, it wouldn't-those are only open workboats and would be swamped in any kind of sea. By land-if the snow stopped-well, I just don't know. In the first place, the terrain is so broken and mountainous that you couldn't possibly use the little Sno-Cat-you'd have to make it on foot. You'd have to go well inland, to the west, to avoid the Misery Fell complex for that ends in cliffs on the east coast. There are hundreds of little lakes lying in that region and I've no idea how heavily they may be frozen over, maybe some of them not very much, maybe just enough to support a covering of snow and not a man-and I believe some of those lakes are over a hundred feet deep. You might be ankle-deep, knee-deep, thigh-deep, waist-deep in snow. And apart from being bogged-down or drowned, we're not equipped for winter travel, we haven't even got a tent for an overnight stop-there isn't a hope of you making it in one day-and if the snow started falling again and kept on falling I bet Olympus Productions haven't even as much as a hand compass to prevent you from walking in circles until you drop dead from cold or hunger or just plain old exhaustion.”
“You, you, you'," Smithy said. "You're always talking about me. How about you going instead?" He grinned. "Of course, I could always set off for there, search around till I found some convenient cave or shelter, hole up there for the night, and return the next day announcing mission impossible."
"We'll see how the cards fall." I finished my drink and picked up screwdriver and screws. "Let's go and see how Miss Haynes is."
Miss Haynes seemed to be in reasonable health. No fever, normal pulse, breathing deeply and evenly: how she would feel when she woke was another matter altogether. I screwed up her window until nobody could have entered her room from the outside without smashing their way in and breaking through two sheets of plate glass would cause enough racket to wake up half the occupants of the cabin. Then we went into the living area of the cabin.
It was surprisingly empty. At least ten people I would have expected to be there were absent, but a quick mental count of the missing heads convinced me that there was no likely cause for alarm in this. Otto, the Count, Heissman, and Goin, conspicuously absent, were probably in secret conclave in one of their cubicles discussing weighty matters which they didn't wish their underlings to hear. Lonnie had almost certainly betaken himself again in his quest for fresh air and I hoped that he hadn't managed to lose himself between the cabin and the provisions hut. Allen, almost certainly, had gone to lie down again and I presumed that Mary Darling, who appeared to have overcome a great number of her earlier inhibitions, had returned to her dutiful handholding. I couldn't imagine where the Three Apostles had got to nor was I particularly worried: I was sure that there was nothing to fear from them other than permanent damage to the eardrums.
I crossed to where Conrad was presiding over a three-burner oil cooker mounted on top of a stove. He had two large pans and a large pot all bubbling away at once, stew, beans and coffee, and he seemed to be enjoying his role of chef not least, I guessed, because he had Mary Stuart as his assistant. In another man I would have looked for a less than altruistic motive in this cheerful willingness, the hail-fellow-well-met leading man playing the democrat to an admiring gallery, but I knew enough of Conrad now to realise that this formed no part of his nature at all: he was just a naturally helpful character who never thought to place himself above his fellow actors. Conrad, I thought, must be a very rara avis indeed in the cinema world.