Bear Island

12

Otto's stocks of liquid cheer were taking a severe beating. It is a medical commonplace that there are those who, under severe stress, resort to the consumption of large quantities of food. Olympus Productions Ltd. harboured none of those. The demand for food was nonexistent, but, in a correspondingly inverse proportion, alcoholic solace was being eagerly sought and the atmosphere in the cabin was powerfully redolent of that of a Glasgow public house when a Scottish soccer team has resoundingly defeated its ancient enemies from across the border. The sixteen people scattered around the cabin-the injured Heyter apart-showed no desire to repair to their cubicles, there was an unacknowledged and wholly illogical tacit assumption that if Judith Haynes could die in her cubicle anyone could. Instead, they sat scattered around in twos and threes, drinking silently or conversing in murmurs, furtive eyes forever moving around the others present, all deepening a cheerless and doom-laden Mr. which stemmed not from Judith Haynes's death but from what might or might not be yet another impending disaster: although it was close on seven now, with the darkness almost total and the snow falling steadily out of the north, Heissman, Goin, and Jungbeck had not yet returned.

Otto, unusually, sat by himself, chewing on a cigar but not drinking: he gave the impression of a man who is wondering what fearsome blow fate now has in store for him. I had talked to him briefly some little time previously and he had given it as his morose and unshakable opinion that all three of them had been drowned: none of them, as he had pointed out, knew the first thing about handling a boat. Even if they managed to survive more than a few minutes in those icy waters, what hope lay for them if they did swim to shore. If they reached a cliff face, their finger would only scrabble uselessly against the smoothly vertical rock until their strength gave out and they slid under: if they managed to scramble ashore at some more accessible point, the icy Mr. would reach through their soaked clothes to their soaked bodies and freeze them to death almost instantly. If they didn't turn up, he said, and now he was sure they wouldn't, he was going to abandon the entire venture and wait for Smithy to bring help and if that didn't come soon he would propose that the entire company strike out for the safety of Tunheim.

The entire company had momentarily fallen silent and Otto, looking across the cabin to where I was standing, gave a painful smile and said, as if in a desperate attempt to lighten the atmosphere: "Come, come, Dr. Marlowe, I see you haven't got a glass."

`No," I said. I don't think it's wise."

Otto looked around the cabin. If he was being harrowed by the contemplation of his rapidly dvAndling stocks he was concealing his grief well.

"The others seem to think it's wise."

"The others don't have to take into account the danger of exposing opened pores to zero temperatures."

"What?" He peered at me. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that if Heissman, Jungbeck, and Goin aren't back here in a very few minutes I intend to take the fourteen-footer and go to look for them."

"What!" This in a very different tone of voice. Otto hauled himself painfully to his feel? as he always did when he was preparing to appear impressive. "Go to look for them? Are you mad, sir? Look for them, indeed. On a night like this, pitch dark, can't see a hand in front of your nose. No, by God, I've already lost too many people, far too many. I absolutely forbid it."

"Have you taken into account that their engine may have just failed? That they're just drifting helplessly around, freezing to death by the minute while we sit here doing nothing?"

I have and I don't believe it possible. The boat engines were overhauled completely before our departure and I know that Jungbeck is a very competent mechanic. The matter is not to be contemplated."

"I'm going anyway."

"I would remind you that that boat is company property."

"Who's going to stop me taking it?"

Otto spluttered ineffectually, then said: "You realise-"

I realise." I was tired of Otto. "I'm fired."

"You'd better fire me too, then," Conrad said. We all turned to look at him. "I'm going along with him."

I'd have expected no less from Conrad, he, after all, had been the one to initiate the search for Smithy soon after our landing. I didn't try to argue with him. I could see Mary Stuart with her hand on his arm, looking at him in dismay: if she couldn't dissuade him, I wasn't going to bother to try.

"Charles!" Otto was bringing the full weight of his authority to bear.

"I would remind you that you have a contract-"

the contract," Conrad said.

Otto stared at him in disbelief, clamped his lips quite shut, wheeled and headed for his cubicle. With his departure everybody, it seemed, started to speak at the same time. I crossed to where the Count was moodily drinking the inevitable brandy. He looked up and gave me a cheerless smile.

"If you want a third suicidal volunteer, my dear boy…"

"How long have you known Otto Gerran?"

"What's that?" He seemed momentarily at a loss, then quaffed some more brandy. "Thirty-odd years. It's no secret. I knew him well in prewar Vienna. Why do you-"

"You were in the film business then?"

"Yes and no." He smiled in an oddly quizzical fashion. "Again it's on the record. In the halcyon days, my dear fellow, when Count Tadeusz Leswzynski-that's me-was, if not exactly a name to be conjured with, at least a man of considerable means, I was Otto's angel, his first backer."

Again a smile, this time amused. "Why do you think I'm a member of the board?"

"What do you know of the circumstances of Heissman's sudden disappearance from Vienna in I939"

The Count stopped being amused. I said: "So that's not on the record."

I paused to see if he would say anything and when he didn't I went on: "Watch your back, Count."

"My-my back?"

"That part of the anatomy that's so subject to being pierced by sharp objects or rapidly moving blunt ones. Or has it not occurred that the board of Olympus are falling off. their lofty perches like so many stricken birds? One lying dead outside, another lying dead inside and two more at peril or perhaps even perished on the high seas. What makes you think you should be so lucky? Beware the slings and arrows, Tadeusz. And you might tell Neal Divine and Lonnie to beware of the same things, at least while I'm gone. Especially Lonnie-I’d be glad if you made sure he doesn't step outside this cabin in my absence. Very vulnerable things, backs."

The Count sat in silence for some moments, his face not giving any thing away, then he said: "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about."

I never for a moment thought you would." I tapped the bulky pocket of his anorak. "That's where it should be, not lying about uselessly in your cabin."

"What for heaven's sake?"

"Your 9-mm. Beretta automatic."

I left the Count on this suitably enigmatic note and moved across to where Lonnie was making hay while the sun shone. The hand that held his glass shook with an almost constant tremor and his eyes were glassy but his speech was as intelligible and lucid as ever.

"And once again our medical Lochinvar or was it Launcelot gallops forth to the rescue," Lonnie intoned. I can't tell you, my dear boy, how my heart fills with pride-"

"Stay inside when I'm gone, Lonnie. Don't go beyond that door. Not once. Please. For me."

"Merciful heavens!" Lonnie hiccoughed on a grand scale. "One would think I am in danger."

"You are. Believe me, you are."

"Me? Me?" He was genuinely baffled. "And who would wish ill to poor old harmless Lonnie?"

"You'd be astonished at the people who would wish ill to poor old harmless Lonnie. Dispensing for the moment with your homilies about the innate kindness of human nature, will you promise me, really promise me, that you won't go out tonight?"

"This is so important to you, then, my boy?"

It is.

"Very well. With this gnarled hand on a vat of the choicest malt-?'

I left him to get on with what promised to be a very lengthy promise indeed and approached Conrad and Mary Stuart who seemed to be engaged in an argument that was as low-pitched as it was intense. They broke off. and Mary Stuart put a beseeching hand on my arm. She said: "Please, Dr. Marlowe. Please tell Charles not to go. He'll listen to you, I know he will." She shivered. I just know that something awful is going to happen tonight."

"You may well be right at that," I said. "Mr. Conrad, you are not expendable."

I could, I immediately realised, have lighted upon a more fortunate turn of phrase. Instead of looking at Conrad she kept looking at me and the implications of what I'd said dawned on me quite some time after they had clearly dawned on her. She put both hands on my arm, looked at me with dull and hopeless eyes then turned and walked towards her cubicle.

"Go after her," I said to Conrad. "Tell her-"

"No point. I'm going. She knows it."

"Go after her and tell her to open her window and put that black box I gave her on the snow outside. Then close her window."

Conrad looked at me closely, made as if to speak, then left. He was nobody's fool, he hadn't even given a nod that could have been interpreted as acknowledgement.

He was back within a minute. We pulled on all the outer clothes we could and furnished ourselves with four of the largest torches. On the way to the door, Mary Darling rose from where she was sitting beside a still badly battered Allen. "Mr. Marlowe."

I put my head to where I figured her ear lay behind the tangled platinum hair and whispered: "I'm wonderful?"

She nodded solemnly, eyes sad behind the huge horn-rimmed glasses, and kissed me. I didn't know what the audience thought of this little vignette and didn't much care: probably a last tender farewell to the good doctor before he moved out forever into the outer darkness. As the door closed behind us, Conrad said complainingly: "She might have kissed me too."

I think you've done pretty well already," I said. He had the grace to keep silent. With our torches off. we moved across to what shelter was offered to the now quite heavily falling snow by the provisions hut and remained there for two or three minutes until we were quite certain that no one had it in mind to follow us. Then we moved round the side of the main cabin and picked up the black box outside Mary Stuart's window. She was standing there and I'm quite sure she saw us but she made no gesture or any attempt to wave goodbye: it seemed as if the two Marys had but one thought in common.

We made our way through the snow and the darkness down to the jetty, stowed the black box securely under the stern sheets, started up the outboard-5-1/2 horsepower only, but enough for a fourteen-footer-and cast off. As we came round the northern arm of the jetty Conrad said: "Christ, it's as black as the earl of hell's waistcoat. How do you propose to set about it?"

"Set about what?"

"Finding Heissman and company, of course."

"I couldn't care if I never saw that lot again," I said candidly. "I've no intention of trying to find them. On the contrary, all our best efforts are going to be brought to bear to avoid the While Conrad was silently mulling over this volte-face, I took the boat, the motor throttled right back for prudence's sake, just over a hundred yards out until we were close into the northern shore of the Sor-Hamna and cut the engine. As the boat drifted to a stop I went foreword and eased anchor and rope over the side.

"According to the chart," I said, "there are three fathoms here. According to the experts, that should mean about fifty feel? of rope to prevent us from drifting. So, fifty feel?. And as we're against the land and so can't be Silhouetted, that should make us practically invisible to anyone approaching from the south. No smoking, of course."

Very funny," Conrad said. Then, after a pause, he went on carefully: "Who are you expecting to approach from the south?"

"Snow White and the seven dwarfs."

"All right, all right. So you don't think there's anything wrong with them?"

I think there's a great deal wrong with them, but not in the sense you mean.

"Ah!" There was a silence which I took to be a very thoughtful one on his part. "Speaking of Snow White."

"Yes?"

"How about whiling away the time by telling me a fairy story?"

So I told everything I knew or thought I knew and he listened in complete silence throughout. When I finished I waited for comment but none came so I said: "I have your promise that you won't clobber Heissman on sight?"

"Reluctantly given, reluctantly given." He shivered. Jesus, it's cold."

"It will be. Listen."

At first faintly, intermittently, through the falling snow and against the northerly wind, came the sound of an engine, closing: within two minutes the exhaust beat was sharp and distinct. Conrad said: "Well, would you believe it. They got their motor fixed."

We remained quietly where we were, bobbing gently at anchor and shivering in the deepening cold, as Heissman's boat rounded the northern arm of the jetty and cut its engine. Heissman, Goin, and Jungbeck didn't just tie up and go ashore immediately, they remained by the jetty for over ten minutes. It was impossible to see what they were doing, the darkness and the snow made it impossible to see even the most shadowy outlines of their forms, but several times we could see the flickering of torch beams behind the jetty arm, several times I heard distinctly metallic thuds and, twice, I imagined I heard the splash of something heavy entering the water. Finally, we saw three pinpoints of light move along the main arm of the jetty and disappear in the direction of the cabin.

Conrad said: I suppose, at this stage, I should have some intelligent questions to us!"

"And I should have some intelligent answers. I think we'll have them soon. Get that anchor in, will you?"

I started up the outboard again and, keeping it at its lowest revolutions, moved eastwards for another two hundred yards then turned south until, calculating that the combination of distance and the northerly wind had taken us safely out of earshot of the cabin, I judged the moment had come to open the throttle to its maximum.

Navigating, if that was the word for it, was easier than I had thought it would be. We'd been out more than long enough now to achieve the maximum in night sight and I had little difficulty in making out the coastline to my right: even on a darker night than this it would have been difficult not to distinguish the sharp demarcation line between the blackness of the cliffs and the snow-covered hills stretching away beyond them.

Neither was the sea as rough as I had feared it might be: choppy, but no more than that, the wind could hardly have lain in a more favourable quarter than it did that night. Kapp Malrogren came up close on the starboard band and I turned the boat more to the southwest to move into the Evjebukta, but not too much, for although the cliffs were easily enough discernible, objects low in the water and lying against their black background were virtually undetectable and I had no wish to run the boat onto the islands that I had observed that morning in the northern part of the bay.

For the first time since we'd weighed anchor Conrad spoke. He was possessed of an exemplary patience. Clearing his throat, he said: "Is one permitted to ask a question?"

"You're even permitted to receive an answer. Remember those extraordinary stacks and pinnacles close by the cliffs when we were rounding the south of the island in the Morning Rose?"

"Of blessed memory," Conrad said yearningly.

"No need for heartbreak," I said encouragingly. "You'll be seeing her again tonight."

"What!"

"Yes, indeed."

"The Morning Rose?"

"None other. That is to say, I hope. But later. Those stacks were caused by erosion which in turn were caused by tidal streams, storm waves, and frost-island used to be much bigger than it is now, bits of it are falling into the sea all the time. This same erosion also caused caves to form in the cliffs. But it formed something else-I knew nothing about it until this afternoon-which I think must be unique in the world. Two or three hundred yards in from the southern tip of this bay, a promontory called Kapp Kolthoff, is a tiny horseshoe-shaped harbour-I saw it through the binoculars this morning."

"You did?"

"I was out for a walk. At the inner end of this harbour there is an opening, not just any opening, but a tunnel that goes clear through to the other side of Kapp Kolthoff. It must be at least two hundred yards in length. It's called Perleporten. You have to have a large-scale map of Bear Island to find it. I got my hands on a large-scale map this afternoon."

"That length? Straight through? It must be manmade."

"Who the hell would spend a fortune tunnelling through two hundred yards of rock from A to B, when you can sail from A to B in five minutes.

I mean in Bear Island?"

"It's not very likely," Conrad said. "And you think Heissman and his friends may have been here?"

I don't know where else they could have been. I looked every place I could look this morning in the Sor-Hamna and in this bay. Nothing."

Conrad said nothing, which was one of the things I liked about a man who I was beginning to like very much. He could have asked a dozen questions to which there were as yet no answers but because he knew there were none he refrained from asking them. The Evinrude kept purring along with reassuring steadiness and in about ten minutes I could see the outline of the cliffs on the south of the Evjebukta looming up. To the left, the tip of Kapp Kolthoff was clearly to be seen. I imagined I could see white breakers beyond.

"There can't possibly be anyone to see us," I said, "and we don't need our night sight any more. I know there are no islands in the vicinity. Headlamps would be handy-"

Conrad moved up into the bows and switched on two of our powerful torches. Within two minutes I could see the sheer of dripping black cliffs less than a hundred yards ahead. I turned to starboard and paralleled the cliffs to the northwest. One minute later we had it-the eastward facing entrance to a tiny circular inlet. I throttled the motor right back and moved gingerly inside and almost at once we had it-a small semicircular opening at the base of the south cliff. It seemed impossibly small. We drifted towards it at less than one knot. Conrad looked back over his shoulder.

"I'm claustrophobic."

"Me, too."

If we get stuck?"

"The sixteen-footer is bigger than this one."

"If it was here. Ah, well, in for a penny, in for a pound."

I crossed my mental fingers that Conrad would have cause to remember those words and eased the boat into the tunnel. It was bigger than it looked but not all that bigger. The waves and waters of countless aeons had worn the rock walls as smooth as alabaster. Although it held a remarkably true direction almost due south it was clear, because of the varying widths and the varying heights of the tunnel roof, that the band of man had never been near the Perleporten; then, suddenly, when Conrad called out and pointed ahead and to the right, that wasn't so clear any more. The opening in the wall, no more, really, than an indentation hardly distinguishable from one or two already passed, was, at its deepest, no more than six feel?, but it was bounded by an odd Hat shelf that varied from two to five feel? in width. It looked as if it had been manmade but, then, there were so many curiously shaped rock formations in those parts that it might just possibly have resulted from natural causes. But there was one thing about that place that absolutely was in no way due to natural causes: a pile of grey-painted metal bars, neatly stacked in crisscross symmetry.

Neither of us spoke. Conrad switched on the other two torches, pivoted their heads until they were facing upwards and placed them all on the shelf, flooding the tiny area with light. Not without some difficulty we scrambled on to the shelf and looped the painter round one of the bars. Still without speaking I took the boat book and probed for bottom: it was less than five feel? below the surface and a very odd kind of rock it felt, too. I guddled around some more, left the hook strike something at once hard and yielding and hauled it up. It was a half-inch chain, corroded in places, but still sound. I hauled some more and the end of another rectangular bar, identical in size to those on the shelf and secured to the chain by an eye bolt, came into sight. It was badly discoloured. I lowered chain and bar back to the bottom.

Still in this uncanny silence I took a knife from my pocket and tested the surface of one of the bars. The metal, almost certainly lead, was soft and yielding, but it was no more than a covering skin, there was something harder beneath. I dug the knife blade in hard and scraped away an inch of the lead. Something yellow glittered in the lamplight.

"Well, now," Conrad said. "Jackpot, I believe, is the technical term."

"Something like that."

"And look at this." Conrad reached behind the pile of bars and brought up a can of paint. It was labelled Instant grey.

It seems to be very good stuff," I said. I touched one of the bars. "Quite dry. And, you must admit, quite clever. You saw off. the eye bolt, paint the whole lot over and what do you have?"

"A ballast bar identical in size and colour to the ballast bars in the mock-up sub."

"Ten out of ten," I said. I hefted one of the bars. "Just right for easy handling. A forty-pound ingot."

"How do you know?"

"It's my Treasury training. Current value-say thirty thousand dollars. How many bars in that pile, would you say?"

"A hundred. More."

"And that's just for starters. Bulk is almost certainly still under water. Paint brushes there?"

"Yes." Conrad reached behind the pile but I checked him.

"Please not," I said. "Think of all those lovely fingerprints."

Conrad said slowly: "My mind's just engaged gear again." He looked at the pile and said incredulously: "Three million dollars?"

"Give or take a few percent."

I think we'd better leave," Conrad said. "I'm coming all over avaricious."

We left. As we emerged into the little circular bay we both looked back at the dark and menacing little tunnel. Conrad said: "Who discovered this?"

I have no idea."

"Perleporten. What does that mean?"

"The Gates of Pearl."

"They came pretty close at that."

"It wasn't a bad try." The journey back was a great deal more unpleasant than the outward one had been, the seas were against us, the icy wind and the equally icy snow were in our faces and because of that same snow the visibility was drastically reduced. But we made it inside an hour. Almost literally frozen stiff but at the same time contradictorily shaking with the cold, we tied the boat up. Conrad clambered up on to the jetty. I passed him the black box, cut about thirty feel? off. the boat's anchor rope and followed. I built a rope cradle round the box, fumbled with a pair of catches and opened a hinged cover section which comprised a third of the top plate and two-thirds of a side plate. In the near total darkness switches and dials were less than half-seen blurs but I didn't need light to operate this instrument which was a basically very simple affair anyway. I pulled out a manually operated telescopic aerial to its fullest extent and turned two switches. A dim green light glowed and a faint hum, that couldn't have been heard a yard away, came from the box. I always think it's so satisfactory when those little toys work," Conrad said. "But won't the snow gum up the works?"

"This little toy costs just over a thousand pounds. You can immerse it in acid, you can boil it in water, you can drop it from a four-story building. It still works. It's got a little sister that can he fired from a naval gun. I don't think a little snow will harm, do you?"

I wouldn't think so." He watched in silence as I lowered the box, pilot light facing the stonework, over the south arm of the pier, secured the rope to a bollard, made it fast round its base and concealed it with a scattering of snow. "What's the range?"

"Forty miles. It won't require a quarter of that tonight."

"And it's transmitting now?"

"It's transmitting now."

We moved back to the main arm of the pier, brushing footmarks away with our gloves. I said: I wouldn't think they would have heard us coming back, but no chances. A weather eye, if you please."

I was down inside the hull of the mock-up sub and had rejoined Conrad inside two minutes. He said: "No trouble?"

"None. The two paints don't quite match. But you'd never notice it unless you were looking for it."

We were not greeted like returning heroes. It would not be true to say that our return, or our early return, was greeted with anything like disappointment, but there was definitely an anticlimactic Mr. to it, maybe they had already expended all their sympathies on Heissman, Jungbeck, and Goin, who had claimed, predictably enough, that their engine had broken down in the late afternoon. Heissman thanked us properly enough but there was a faint trace of amused condescension to his thanks that would normally have aroused a degree of antagonism in me were it not for the fact that my antagonism towards Heissman was already so total that any deepening of it would have been quite impossible. So Conrad and I contented ourselves with making a show of expressing our relief to find the three voyagers alive while not troubling very much to conceal our chagrin. Conrad, especially, was splendid at this: clearly, he had a considerable future as an actor.

The atmosphere in the cabin was almost unbearably funereal. I would have thought that the safe return of five of their company might have been cause for some subdued degree of rejoicing, but it may well have been that the very fact of our being alive only heightened the collective awareness of the dead woman lying in her cubicle. Heissman tried to tell us about the marvellous backgrounds he had found that day and I couldn't help reflecting that he was going to have a most hellishly difficult job in setting up camera and sound crews within the extraordinarily restrictive confines of the Perleporten tunnel: Heissman desisted when it became clear that no one was listening to him. Otto made a half-hearted attempt to establish some kind of working relationship with me and even went to the length of pressing some Scotch upon me which I accepted without thanks but drank nevertheless. He tried to make some feebly jocular remark about open pores and it being obvious that I didn't intend venturing forth again that night and I didn't tell him, not just yet, that I did indeed intend to venture forth again that night but that as my proposed walk would take me no farther than the jetty it was unlikely that all the open pores in the world would incapacitate me. I looked at my watch. Another ten minutes, no more. Then we would all go for that little walk, the four directors of Olympus Productions, Lonnie, and myself. just the six of us, no more. The four directors were already there and, given the time Lonnie normally took to regain contact with reality after a prolonged session with the only company left in the world that gave him any solace, it was time that he was here also. I went down the passage and into his cabin. It was bitterly cold in there because the window was wide open and it was wide open because that was the way that Lonnie had elected to leave his cubicle which was quite empty. I picked up a torch that was lying by the rumpled cot and peered out the window. The snow was still falling steadily but not so heavily as to obscure the tracks that led away from the window. There were two sets of tracks. Lonnie had been persuaded to leave: not that he would have required much persuasion. I ignored the curious looks that came my way as I went quickly through the main cabin and headed for the provisions hut. Its door was open but Lonnie was not there either. The only sure sign that he had been there was a half-full bottle of Scotch with its screw top off. So much for Lonnie and his mighty oath taken with his hand on a vat of the choicest malt. The tracks outside the but were numerous and confused: it was clear that my chances of isolating and following any particular set of those was minimal. I returned to the cabin and there was no lack of immediate volunteers for the search: Lonnie had never made an unwitting enemy in his life.

It was the Count who found him, inside a minute, face down in a deep drift behind the generator shed. He was already shrouded in white, so he must have been lying there for some time. He was clad in only shirt, pullover, trousers, and what appeared to be a pair of ancient carpet slippers. The snow beside his head was stained yellow where the contents-or part of the contents-of yet another bottle, still clutched in his right hand, had been spilt.

We turned him over. If ever a man looked like a dead man it was Lonnie. His skin was ice-cold to the touch, his face the colour of old ivory, his glazed unmoving eyes were open to the falling snow, and there was no rise and fall to his chest but on the off.-chance that there might just be some substance in the old saw that a special providence looks after little children and drunks I put my car to his chest and thought I detected a faint and far-off. murmur. We carried him inside and laid him on his cot. While oil beaters, hot water bags, and heated blankets were being brought in or prepared-apart from the general esteem in which Lonnie was held, everyone seemed almost pathetically eager to contribute to something constructive-I used my stethoscope and established that he did indeed have a heartbeat if such a term could be applied to something as weak and as fluttering as the wings of a wounded captive bird. I thought briefly of a heart stimulant and brandy and dismissed both ideas, both, in his touch-and-go condition, were as likely to kill him off. as to have any good effect. So we just concentrated on heating up the frozen and lifeless-seeming body as quickly as was possible while four people continuously massaged ominously white feel? and bands to try to restore some measure of circulation.

Fifteen minutes after we'd first found him he was perceptibly breathing again, a shallow and gasping fight for Mr., but breathing nevertheless. He was now as warm as artificial aids could make him so I thanked the others and told them they could go: I asked the two Marys to stay behind as nurses, because I couldn't stay myself: by my watch, I was already ten minutes late. Lonnie's eyes moved. No other part of him did, but his eyes moved. After a few moments they focussed blearily on me: he was as conscious as he was likely to be for a long time.

"You bloody old fool!" I said. It was no way to talk to a man with one foot still halfway through death's door, but it was the way I felt. "Why did you do it?"

"Aha!" His voice was a far-off. whisper.

"Who took you out of here" Who gave you the drink?" I was aware that the two Marys had at first stared at me then at each other but the time was gone when it mattered what anyone thought. Lonnie's lips moved soundlessly a few times. Then his eyes flickered shiftily and he gave a drunken cackle, no more than a faint rasping sound deep in his throat. "A kind man," he whispered weakly. `Very kind man."

I would have shaken him except for the fact that I would certainly have shaken the life out of him. I restrained myself with a considerable effort and said: "What kind man, Lonnie-

"Kind man," he muttered. "Kind man." He lifted one thin wrist and beckoned. I bent towards him. "Know something?" His voice was a fading murmur.

"Tell me, Lonnie."

"In the end-" His voice trailed away.

"Yes, Lonnie?"

He made a great effort. In the end"-there was a long pause, I had to put my ear to his mouth-"iii the end, there's only kindness." He lowered his waxen eyelids.

I swore and I kept on swearing until I realised that both girls were staring at me with shocked eyes, they must have thought that I was swearing at Lonnie. I said to Mary Stuart: "Go to Conrad-Charles. Tell him to tell the Count to come to my cubicle. Now. Conrad will know how to do it."

She left without a question. Mary Darling said to me: "Will Lonnie live, Dr. Marlowe?"

I don't know, Mary."

"But-but he's quite warm now-?'

It won't be exposure that will kill him, if that's what you mean."

She looked at me, the eyes behind the horn-rims at once earnest and scared. "You mean-you mean he might go from alcoholic poisoning?"

"He might. I don't know."

She said, with a flash of that almost touching asperity that could be so characteristic of her: "You don't really care, do you, Dr. Marlowe?"

"No, I don't." She looked at me, the pinched face shocked, and I put my arm round the thin shoulders. I don't care, Mary, because he doesn't care. Lonnie's been dead a long time now."

I went back to my cubicle, found the Count there and wasted no words. I said: "Are you aware that that was a deliberate attempt on Lonnie's life?"

"No. But I wondered." The Count's customary cloak of badinage had fallen away completely.

"Do you know that Judith Haynes was murdered?"

"Murdered!" The Count was badly shaken and there was no pretence about it either.

"Somebody injected her with a lethal dose of morphine. just for good measure, it was my hypodermic, my morphine." He said nothing. "So your rather illegal bullionlunt has turned out to be something more than fun and games."

Indeed it has."

`You know you have been consorting with murderers?"

I know now."

`You know now. You know what interpretation the law will put on that?"

"I know that too."

`You have your gun?" He nodded. `You can use it?"

I am a Polish count, sir." A touch of the old Tadeusz.

"And very impressive a Polish count should look in a witness box, too."

I said. "You are aware of course that your only hope is to turn Queen's Evidence?"

"Yes," he said. "I know that too."