Alistair MacLean Arctic Chillers 4-Book Collection: Night Without End, Ice Station Zebra, Bear Island, Athabasca

‘Jump for it,’ I said implacably.

She turned away slowly and jumped. Her fingers didn’t come within six inches of the sill. She tried again, got no nearer, and on her third attempt I boosted her so that her hands hooked over the sill. She hung there for a moment, then pulled herself up a few inches, cried out and fell heavily to the ground. Slowly, dazedly she picked herself up and looked at me. A splendid performance.

‘I can’t do it,’ she said huskily. ‘You can see I can’t. What are you trying to do to me? What’s wrong?’ I didn’t answer, and she rushed on. ‘I – I’m not staying here. I’m going back to the cabin.’

‘Later.’ I caught her arm roughly as she made to move away. ‘Stand there where I can watch you.’ I jumped up, wriggled inside the control cabin, reached down and pulled her up after me, none too gently, and without a word I led her straight into the galley.

‘The Mickey Finn dispensary,’ I observed. ‘An ideal quiet spot it is, too.’ She had her mask off now, and I held up my hand to forestall her as she opened her mouth to speak. ‘Dope, Miss Ross. But of course you wouldn’t know what I’m talking about.’

She stared at me unblinkingly, made no answer.

‘You were sitting here when the plane crashed,’ I went on. ‘Possibly on this little stool here? Right?’

She nodded, again without speaking.

‘And, of course, were flung against this front bulkhead here. Tell me, Miss Ross, where’s the metal projection that tore this hole in your back?’

She stared at the lockers, then looked slowly back to me.

‘Is – is that why you’ve brought me here—’

‘Where is it?’ I demanded.

‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head from side to side and took a backward step. ‘What does it matter? And – and dope – what is the matter? Please.’

I took her arm without a word and led her through to the radio cabin. I trained the torch beam on to the top of the radio cabinet.

‘Blood, Miss Ross. And some navy blue fibres. The blood from the cut on your back, the fibres from your tunic. Here’s where you were sitting – or standing – when the plane crashed. Pity it caught you off balance. But at least you managed to retain your hold on your gun.’ She was gazing at me now with sick eyes, and her face was a mask carved from white papiermâché. ‘Missed your cue, Miss Ross – your next line of dialogue was “What gun?”. I’ll tell you – the one you had lined up on the second officer. Pity you hadn’t killed him then, isn’t it? But you made a good job of it later. Smothering makes such a much less messy job, doesn’t it?’

‘Smothering?’ She had to try three times before she got the word out.

‘On cue, on time,’ I approved. ‘Smothering. When you murdered the second officer in the cabin last night.’

‘You’re mad,’ she whispered. Her lips, startlingly red against the ashen face, were parted and the brown eyes enormous with fear and sick despair. ‘You’re mad,’ she repeated unsteadily.

‘Crazy as a loon,’ I agreed. Again I caught her arm, pulled her out on to the flight deck and trained my flashlight on the captain’s back. ‘You wouldn’t, of course, know anything about this either.’ I leaned forward, jerked up the jacket to expose the bullet hole in the back, then stumbled and all but fell as she gave a long sigh and crumpled against me. Instinctively I caught her, lowered her to the floor, cursed myself for having fallen for the fainting routine even for a second, and ruthlessly stabbed a stiff couple of fingers into the solar plexus, just below the breastbone.

There was no reaction, just no reaction at all. The faint had been as genuine as ever a faint can be and she was completely unconscious.

The next few minutes, while I sat beside her on the front seat of the plane waiting for her to recover consciousness, were some of the worst I have ever gone through. Self-reproach is a hopeless word to describe the way I swore at myself for my folly, my utter stupidity and unforgivable blindness, above all for the brutality, the calculated cruelty with which I’d treated this poor, crumpled young girl by my side. Especially the cruelty in the past few minutes. Perhaps there had been excuse enough for my earlier suspicions, but there was none for my latest actions: if I hadn’t been so consumed by anger, so utterly sure of myself so that the possibility of doubt never had a chance to enter my mind, if my mind hadn’t been concentrated, to the exclusion of all else, on the exposure of her guilt, I should have known at least that it couldn’t have been she who had jumped down from the control cabin half an hour ago when I had rushed up the aisle, for the simple but sufficient reason that she had been incapable of getting up there in the first place. Quite apart from her injury, I should have been doctor enough to know that the arms and shoulders I had seen while attending to her back that evening weren’t built for the acrobatic performance necessary to swing oneself up and through the smashed windscreen. That had been no act she had put on when she had fallen back into the snow, I could see that clearly now; but I should have seen it then.

I still hadn’t got beyond the stage of calling myself by every name I could think of when she stirred, sighed and straightened in the crook of the arm with which I was supporting her. Her eyes opened slowly, focused themselves on me, and I could feel the pressure on my forearm as she shrank away.

‘It’s all right, Miss Ross,’ I urged her. ‘Please don’t be afraid. I’m not mad – really I’m not – just the biggest blundering half-witted idiot you’re ever likely to meet in all the rest of your days. I’m sorry, I’m most terribly sorry for all I’ve said, for all I’ve done. Do you think you can ever forgive me?’

I don’t think she heard a word I said. Maybe the tone of my voice gave her some reassurance, but it was impossible to tell. She shuddered, violently, and twisted her head to look in the direction of the flight deck.

‘Murder!’ The word was so low that I could hardly catch it. Suddenly her voice became high-pitched, unsteady. ‘He’s been murdered! Who – who killed him?’

‘Now take it easy, Miss Ross.’ My heavens, I thought, of all the fatuous advice. ‘I don’t know. All I know is that you had nothing to do with it.’

‘No.’ She shook her head tiredly. ‘I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Captain Johnson. Why should anyone – he hadn’t an enemy in the world, Dr Mason!’

‘Maybe Colonel Harrison hadn’t an enemy either.’ I nodded towards the rear of the plane. ‘But they got him too.’

She stared down the plane, her eyes wide with horror, her lips moving as if to speak, but no sound came.

‘They got him too,’ I repeated. ‘Just as they got the captain. Just as they got the second officer – and the flight engineer.’

‘They?’ she whispered. ‘They?’

‘Whoever it was. I only know it wasn’t you.’

‘No,’ she whispered. Again she shuddered, even more uncontrollably than before, and I tightened my arm round her. ‘I’m frightened, Dr Mason. I’m frightened.’

‘There’s nothing—’ I’d started off to say there was nothing to be frightened of, before I realised the idiocy of the words. With a ruthless and unknown murderer among us, there was everything in the world to be frightened of. I was scared myself: but admitting that to this youngster wasn’t likely to help her morale any. So I started talking, telling her of all the things we had found out, of the suspicions we had and of what had happened to me, and when I finished she looked at me and said: ‘But why was I taken into the wireless cabin? I must have been, mustn’t I?’

‘You must have been,’ I agreed. ‘Why? Probably so that someone could turn a gun on you and threaten to kill you if the second officer – Jimmy Waterman, you called him, wasn’t it – didn’t play ball. Why else?’

‘Why else?’ she echoed. She gazed at me, the wide brown eyes never leaving mine, and then I could see the slow fear touching them again and she whispered: ‘And who else?’

‘How do you mean “Who else”?’

‘Can’t you see? If someone had a gun on Jimmy Waterman, someone else must have had one on the pilots. You can see yourself that no one could cover both places at the same time. But Captain Johnson must have been doing exactly as he was told, just as Jimmy was.’

It was so glaringly obvious that a child could have seen it: it was so glaringly obvious that I’d missed it altogether. Of course there must have been two of them, how else would it have been possible to force the entire crew to do as they were ordered? Good heavens, this was twice as bad, ten times as bad as it had been previously. Nine men and women back there in the cabin, and two of them killers, ruthless merciless killers who would surely kill again, at the drop of a hat, as the needs of the moment demanded. And I couldn’t even begin to guess the identity of either of them …

‘You’re right, of course, Miss Ross,’ I forced myself to speak calmly, matter-of-factly. ‘It was blind of me, I should have known.’ I remembered how the bullet had passed clear through the man in the back seat. ‘I did know, but I couldn’t add one and one. Colonel Harrison and Captain Johnson were killed by different guns – the one by a heavy carrying weapon, like a Colt or a Luger, the other by a less powerful, a lighter weapon, like something a woman might have used.’

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 – I 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 fiancé 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 – I 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?’