Authors: Alistair MacLean
“Provision shed? Why would they be there?”
“Because that's where Otto keeps his Scotch."
She left. I put the gin bottle and barbiturate bottle to one side, then I lifted Judith Haynes onto the bed for no better reason than that it seemed cruel to leave her lying on the wooden floor. I looked quickly around the cubicle, but I could see nothing that could be regarded as untoward or amiss. The window was still screwed in its closed position, the few clothes that she had unpacked neatly folded on a small chair. My eye kept returning to the gin bottle. Stryker had told me and I'd overheard her telling Lonnie that she never drank, had not drunk alcohol for many years: an abstainer does not habitually carry around a bottle of gin just on the offchance that he or she may just suddenly feel thirsty.
Lonnie, Eddie, and Sandy came in, trailing with them the redolence of a Highland distillery, but that was the only evidence of their sojourn in the provision shed, whatever they'd been like when Mary had found them, they were shocked cold sober now. They just stood there, staring at the dead woman and saying nothing: understandably, I suppose, they thought there was nothing they could usefully say.
I said: "Mr. Gerran must be informed that his daughter is dead. He's gone north to the next bay. He'll be easy to find-you've only got to follow the Sno~Cat's tracks. I think you should go together.”
“God love us all." Lonnie spoke in a hushed and anguished reverence. "The poor girl. The poor poor lassie. First her man-and now this. Where's it all going to end, Doctor?"
“I don't know, Lonnie. Life's not always so kind, is it? No need to kill yourselves looking for Mr. Gerran. A heart attack on top of this we can do without.”
“Poor little Judith," Lonnie said. "And what do we tell Otto she died of? Alcohol and sleeping tablets-it's a pretty lethal combination, isn't it?”
“Frequently."
They looked at each other uncertainly, then turned and left. Mary Stuart said: "What can I do?”
“Stay there." The harshness in my voice surprised me almost as much as it clearly surprised her. I want to talk to you."
I found a towel and a handkerchief, wrapped the gin bottle in the former and the barbiturate bottle in the latter. I had a glimpse of Mary watching me, wide-eyed, in what could have been wonder or fear or both, then crossed to examine the dead woman, to see whether there were any visible marks on her. There wasn't much to examine-although she'd been in bed with blankets over her, she'd been fully clothed in parka and some kind of fur trousers. I didn't have to look long. I beckoned Mary across and pointed to a tiny puncture exposed by pushing back the hair on Judith Haynes's neck. Mary ran the tip of her tongue across dry lips and looked at me with sick eyes.
"Yes," I said. "Murdered. How do you feel about that, Mary dear?" The term was affectionate, the tone not.
"Murdered!" she whispered. "Murdered!" She looked at the wrapped bottles, licked her lips again, made as if to speak and seemingly couldn't.
"There may be some gin inside her," I conceded. Possibly even some barbiturate. I'd doubt it, though-it's very hard to make people swallow anything when they're unconscious. Maybe there are no other fingerprints on the bottles-they could have been wiped off. But if we find only her forefinger and thumb round the neck-well, you don't drink three-quarters of a bottle of gin holding it by the finger and thumb." She stared in fascinated horror at the pinprick in the neck and then I let the hair fall back. I don't know, but I think an injection of an overdose of morphine killed her. How do you feel about it, Mary dear?"
She looked at me pitifully but I wasn't wasting my pity on the living. She said: "That's the second time you said that. Why did you say that?”
“Because it's partly your fault-and it may be a very large part-that she's dead. Oh, and very cleverly dead, I assure you. I'm very good at finding those things out-when it's too damn late. Rigged for suicide-only, I know she never drank. Well?"
“I didn't kill her! Oh, God, I didn't kill her! I didn't, I didn't, I didn't!”
“And I hope to God you're not responsible for killing Smithy, too," I said savagely. "If he doesn't come back, you're first in line as accessory. After murder.”
“Mr. Smith!" Her bewilderment was total and totally pathetic. And I was totally unmoved. She said: "Before God, I don't know what you're talking about.”
“Of course not. And you won't know what I'm talking about when I ask you what's going on between Gerran and Heissman. How could you, a sweet and innocent child like you? Or you wouldn't know what's going on between you and your dear lovable Uncle Johann?"
She stared at me in a dumb animal-like misery and shook her head. I struck her. Even although I was aware that the anger that was in me was directed more against myself than at her still it could not be contained and I struck her and when she looked at me the way a favourite pet would look at a person who has shot it but not quite killed it I lifted my hand again but this time when she closed her eyes and flinched away turning her head to one side I let my hand drop helplessly to my side then did what I should have done in the first place, I put my arms around her and held her tight. She didn't try to fight or struggle, just stood quite still. She had nothing left to fight with any more.
"Poor Mary dear," I said. "You've got no place left to run to, have you?" She made no answer, her eyes were still closed. "Uncle Johann is no more your uncle than I am. Your immigration papers state that your father and mother are dead. It is my belief that they are still alive and that Heissman is no more your mother's brother than he is your uncle. It is my belief that he is holding them as hostage for your good conduct and that he is holding you as hostage for theirs. I don't just think that Heissman is up to no good, I know he is, for I just don't think he's a criminal operating on an international scale, I know that too. I know that you're not Latvian but strictly of German ancestry. I know, too, that your father ranked very highly in the Berlin councils of war." I didn't know that at all, but it had become an increasingly safe guess. "And I know, too, that there's a great deal of money involved, not in hard cash but in negotiable securities. All this is true, is it not?"
There was a silence then she said dully: If you know so much, what's the good in pretending any more." She pushed back a little and looked at me through defeated eyes. "You're not a real doctor?”
“I'm real enough, but not in the ordinary way of things, for which any patients I might have had would probably feel very thankful as I haven't practised those past good few years. I'm just a civil servant working for the British Government, nothing glamorous or romantic like Intelligence or Counter-Intelligence, just the Treasury, which is why I'm here because we've been interested in Heissman's shennanigans for quite some time. I didn't expect to run into this other busload of trouble, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“Too long to explain, even if I could. I can't, yet. And I've things to do.”
“Mr. Smith?" She hesitated. "From the Treasury, too?" I nodded and she went on: "I've been thinking that." She hesitated again. "My father commanded submarine groups during the war. He was also a high Party official, very high, I think. Then he disappeared--”
“Where was his command?"
"For the last year, the north-Tromso, Trondheim, Narvik, places like that, I'm not sure." I was, all of a sudden I was, I knew it had to be true.
I said: "Then disappearance. A war criminal?" She nodded. "And now an old man?" Another nod. "And amnestied because of age”
"Yes, just over two years ago. Then he came back to us-_Mr. Heissman brought us all together, I don't know how."
I could have explained Heissman's special background qualifications for this very job, but it was hardly the moment. I said: "Your father's not only a war criminal, he's also a civil criminal-probably an embezzler on a grand scale. Yet you do all this for him?"
"For my mother."
"I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry, too. I'm sorry for all the trouble I've given you. Do you think my mother will be all right?"
I think so,," I said, which, considering my recent disastrous record in keeping people alive, was a pretty rash statement on my part.
"But what can we do? What on earth can we do with all those terrible things happening?"
"It's not what I've can do. I know what to do. It's what you are going to do."
"I'll do anything. Anything you say. I promise."
"Then do nothing. Behave exactly as you've been behaving. Especially towards Uncle Johann. But never a word of our talk to him, never a word to anyone."
"Not even to Charles?"
"Conrad? Least of all to him."
"But I thought you liked--"
"Sure I do. But not half as much as our Charles likes you. He'd just up and clobber Heissman on the spot. I haven't," I said bitterly, "been displaying very much cleverness or finesse to date. Give me this one last chance." I thought a bit about being clever, then said: "One thing you can do. Let me know if you see anyone returning here. I'm going to look around a bit."
#
Otto had almost as many locks as I had keys. As befitted the chairman of Olympus Productions, the producer of the film and the de facto leader of the expedition he carried a great number of bits and pieces of equiprnent with him. Most of the belongings were personal and most of these clothes, for although Otto, because of his spherical shape, was automatically excluded from the list of the top ten best-dressed men, his sartorial aspirations were of the most soaring, and he carried at least a dozen suits with him although what he intended to do with them on Bear Island was a matter for conjecture. More interestingly, he had two small squat brown suitcases that served merely as cover for two metal deed-boxes.
Those were haspbound with imposing brass padlocks that a blind and palsied pick-lock could have had opened in under a minute and it didn't take me much longer. The first contained nothing of importance, nothing of importance, that was, to anyone except Otto: they consisted of hundreds of press clippings, no doubt carefully selected for the laudatory nature of their contents, and going back for twenty-odd years, all of them unanimous in extolling Otto's cinematic genius: precisely the sort of ego-feeding nourishment that Otto would carry around with him. The second deed-box contained papers of a purely financial nature, recorded Otto's transactions, incomes and outgoes over a good number of years and would have proved, I felt certain, fascinating reading for any Inland Revenue inspector or law-abiding accountant, if there were any such around, but my interest in them was minimal: what did interest me though, and powerfully, was a collection of cancelled chequebooks and as I couldn't see that those were going to be of any use to Otto in the Arctic I pocketed them, checked that everything was as I had found it and left.
Goin, as befitted the firm's accountant, was also much given to keeping things under lock and key but, because the total of his impediments didn't come to much more than a quarter of Otto's, the search took correspondingly less time. Again as befitted an accountant, Goin's main concern was clearly with matters financial and as this Goincided with my own current interest I took with me three items that I judged likely to be handsomely rewarding of more leisured study. Those were the Olympus Productions salary lists, Goin's splendidly padded private bankbook and a morocco diary that was full of items in some sort of private code but was nonetheless clearly concerned with money for Goin hadn't bothered to construct a code for the columns of pounds and pence. There was nothing necessarily sinister about this: concern for privacy, especially other people's privacy, could be an admirable trait in an accountant.
In the next half hour I went through four cubicles. In Heissman's I found what I had expected to find, nothing. A man with his background and experience would have discovered many years ago that the only safe place to file his records was inside his head. But he did have some innocuous items-I supposed he had used them in the production of the Olympus manifesto for the film-which were of interest to me, several large-scale charts of Bear Island. One of those I took. Neal Divine's private papers revealed little of interest except a large number of unpaid bills, I0Us, and a number of letters, all of them menacing in varying degrees, from an assortment of different bankers-a form of correspondence that went well with Divine's nervous, apprehensive, and generally down-trodden mien. At the bottom of an old-fashioned Gladstone in the Count's room I found a small black automatic, loaded, but as an envelope beside it contained a current London licence for the gun this discovery might or might not have significance: the number of law-abiding people in law-abiding Britain who for divers law-abiding reasons consider it prudent to own a gun are, in their total, quite remarkable. In the cubicle shared by Jungbeck and Heyter I found nothing incriminating. But I was intrigued by a small brown paper packet, scaled, that I found in Jungbeck's case. I took this into the main cabin where Mary Stuart was moving from window to window-there were four of themkeeping watch.
"Nothing?" I said. She shook her head. "Put on a kettle, will you?"
“There's coffee there. And some food.”
“I don't want coffee. A kettle-water-half an inch will do." I handed her the packet. "Steam this open for me, will you?'
"Steam-what's in it?"
“If I knew that I wouldn't ask you to open it." I went into Lonnie's cubicle but it held nothing but Lonnie's dreamsan album full of faded photographs. With few exceptions, they were of his family-clearly Lonnie had taken them himself. The first few showed a dark attractive girl with a wavy shoulder-length I930s hairdo holding two babies who were obviously twins. Later photographs showed that the babies were girls. As the years had passed Lonnie's wife, changing hair styles apart, had changed remarkably little while the girls had grown up from page to page until eventually they had become two rather beautiful youngsters very closely resembling their mother. In the last photograph, about two-thirds of the way through the album, all three were shown in white summer dresses of an unconscionable length leaning against a dark open roadster: the two girls would then have been about eighteen. I closed the album with that guilty and uncomfortable feeling you have when you stumble, however inadvertently, across another man's private dreams.