Night Without End

CHAPTER FIVE—Monday 6 P.M.—7 P.M.

For maybe five seconds, maybe ten, I sat there without moving, as rigid and motionless as the dead man by my side, bent right arm frozen in the act of folding the newspaper cutting into my parka pocket. Looking back on it, I can only think that my brain had been half numbed from too long exposure to the cold, that the shock of the discovery of the savagely murdered men had upset me more than I would admit even to myself, and that the morgue-like atmosphere of that chill metal tomb had affected my normally unimaginative mind to a degree quite unprecedented in my experience. Or maybe it was a combination of all three that triggered open the floodgates to the atavistic racial superstitions that lurk deep in the minds of all of us, the nameless dreads that can in a moment destroy the tissue veneer of our civilisation as if it had never been, and send the adrenalin pumping crazily into the bloodstream. However it was, I had only one thought in mind at that moment, no thought, rather, but an unreasoning blood-freezing certainty: that one of the dead pilots or the flight engineer had somehow risen from his seat and was walking back towards me. Even yet I can remember the frenzy of my wild, frantic hope that it wasn't the co-pilot, the man who had been sitting in the right-hand pilot's seat when the telescoping nose of the airliner had folded back on him, mangling him out of all human recognition.

Heaven only knows how long I might have sat there, petrified in this superstitious horror, had the sound from the control cabin not repeated itself. But again I heard it, the same metallic scraping sound as someone moved around in the darkness among the tangled wreckage of the flight deck, and as the touch of an electric switch can turn a room from pitch darkness to the brightness of daylight, so this second sound served to recall me, in an instant, from the thrall of superstition and panic to the world of reality and reason, and I dropped swiftly to my knees behind the high padded back of the seat in front of me, for what little shelter it offered. My heart was still pounding, the hairs still stiff on the back of my neck, but I was a going concern again, my mind beginning to race under the impetus invariably provided by the need for self-preservation.

And that self-preservation entered very acutely into it I did not for a moment doubt. A person who had killed three times to achieve her ends -1 had no doubt at all as to the identity of the person in the control cabin, only the stewardess had seen me leave for the plane—and protect her secret wouldn't hesitate to kill a fourth. And she knew her secret was no longer a secret, not while I lived, I had stupidly made my suspicions plain to her. And not only was she ready to kill, but she had the means to kill—of the fact that she carried a gun and was murderously ready to use it I'd had grisly evidence in the past few minutes. Nor need she hesitate to use it: apart from the fact that falling snow had a peculiarly blanketing effect on all sound, the south wind would carry the crack of a pistol-shot away from the cabin.

Then something snapped inside my mind and I was all of a sudden fighting mad. Perhaps it was the thought of the four dead men—five, including the co-pilot—perhaps it was the inevitable reaction from my panic-stricken fear of a moment ago, and perhaps, too, it had no little to do with the realisation that I, too, had a gun. I brought it out from my pocket, transferred the torch to my left hand, jumped up, pressed the torch button and started running down the aisle.

It was proof enough of my utter inexperience in this murderous game of hide-and-seek that it was not until I was almost at the door at the forward end of the cabin that I remembered how easy it would have been for anyone to crouch down behind the backs of one of the rearward facing front seats and shoot me at point-blank range as I passed. But there was no one there and as I plunged through the door I caught a fleeting glimpse of a dark muffled figure, no more than a featureless silhouette in the none too powerful beam of my torch, wriggling out through the smashed windscreen of the control cabin.

I brought up my automatic—the thought that I could be indicted on a murder charge for killing a fleeing person, no matter how criminal a person, never entered my mind—and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. I squeezed the trigger again, and before I remembered the existence of such a thing as a safety-catch the windscreen was no more than an empty frame for the thickening snow that swirled greyly in the darkness beyond, and I plainly heard the thud of feet hitting the ground.—Cursing my stupidity, and again oblivious of the perfect target I was presenting, I leaned far out of the window. Again I was lucky, again I had another brief sight of the figure, this time scurrying round the tip of the left wing before vanishing into the snow and the dark.

Three seconds later I was on the ground myself. I landed awkwardly but picked myself up at once and skirted round the wing, pounding after the fleeing figure with all the speed I could muster in the hampering bulkiness of my furs.

She was running straight back to the cabin, following the line of bamboo sticks, and I could both hear the thudding of feet in the frozen snow and see the wildly erratic swinging of a torch, the beam one moment pooling whitely on the ground beside the flying feet, the next reaching ahead to light up the bamboo line. She was moving swiftly, much more so than I would have thought her capable of doing, but nevertheless I was steadily overhauling her when suddenly the torch beam ahead curved away in a new direction, as the runner angled off into the darkness, about forty-five degrees to the left. I turned after her, still following both my sight of the torch and sound of the feet. Thirty yards, forty, fifty—then I stopped and stood very still indeed. The torch ahead had gone out and I could hear nothing at all.

For the second time that night I cursed my unthinking folly. What I should have done, of course, was to carry straight on back to the cabin and await the moment she turned up there, as she inevitably must: no person could hope to survive for any great length of time, without shelter of some kind, in the deadly cold of that arctic night.

But it wasn't too late yet. The wind had been blowing almost directly in my face as I had been running: all I had to do was walk back, keeping it on my left cheek, and I would be bound to hit the line of bamboos at right angles, and the chances of my passing unwittingly between two of them, with the light of my torch to help me, did not exist. I turned, took one step, then two, then halted in my tracks.

Why had I been lured out here away from the bamboo line? Not so that she could thereby escape me—she couldn't do it that way. As long as we both lived, we were both utterly dependent on the cabin and would have to meet there sooner or later.

As long as we both lived! God, what a fool I was, what a veriest amateur at this game. The only way she could escape me, really and permanently escape me, was if I no longer lived. I could be shot down here and no one would ever know. And as she had stopped running before I had and been first to switch out her torch, she must have a much better idea of my position than I of hers. And these two rash, incautious steps I had taken had given her a new and even more accurate bearing on my position. Perhaps she was only feet away now, lining her gun up for the kill.

I switched on my torch and whirled round in a complete circle. Nobody there, nothing to be seen at all. Only the frozen feathers of the snow brushing my cheeks in the blackness of the night, the low moaning lament of the soughing south wind and the faint rustle of ice spicules brushing their blind way across the iron-hard surface of the ice-cap.

Swiftly, softly, I moved half a dozen long steps to my left. My torch was out now, and I'd been crazy ever to switch it on in the first place. Nothing could have been better calculated to betray my position—the light of a torch, seen head on, can be seen at twenty times the farthest distance that its beam will reach. I prayed that a flurry of snow had hidden it.

Where would the attack come from—downwind, so that I could see nothing in that blinding snow, or upwind, so that I could hear nothing? Downwind, I decided—on the ice-cap one could move as silently as on a tar-macadam road. The better to hear, I pulled the parka hood off my head: the better to see, I slipped up my goggles and stared out unwinkingly under my visored hands.

Five minutes passed, and nothing happened—if, that is, the freezing of my ears and forehead could be called nothing. Still no sound, still no sight of anything: the strain, the nerve-racking expectancy could not be borne for much longer. Slowly, with infinite care, I moved off in a circle of about twenty yards diameter, but I saw nothing, heard nothing, and so well adjusted now were my eyes to the darkness, so well attuned my ears to the ice-cap's mournful symphony of sound, that I would have sworn that had there been anyone there to be seen or heard, I would have seen or heard them. It was as if I were alone on the ice-cap.

And then the appalling truth struck me—I was alone. I was alone, I realised in a belated and chilling flash of understanding, because shooting me would have been a stupid way of disposing of both myself and my dangerous knowledge—the discovery of a bullet-riddled body on the ice-cap during the brief hours of daylight would have provoked a hundred questions and suspicions. Much more desirable, from the killer's point of view, would be my dead body without a trace of violence. Even the most experienced man can get lost in a snow-storm on the ice-cap.

And I was lost. I knew I was lost, I was convinced of it even before I got the wind on my left and walked back to the line of bamboo poles. The bamboos were no longer there. I made a wide circle, but still found nothing. For at least twenty yards back in the direction of the plane, and probably all the way towards the cabin, the poles had been removed, that slender series of markers which alone meant all the difference between safety and being irrecoverably lost on the ice-cap, were no longer there. I was lost, really and truly lost.

For once, that night, I didn't panic. It wasn't just that I knew that panic would be the end of me. I was consumed by a cold fury that I should have been so ignominiously tricked, so callously left to die. But I wasn't going to die. I couldn't even begin to guess what the tremendously high stakes must be in the murderous game that this incredibly ruthless, wickedly-deceptive gentle-faced stewardess was playing, but I swore to myself that I wasn't going to be one of the pawns that were going to be brushed off the table. I stood still, and took stock.

The snow was increasing now, thickening by the minute, building up into a blizzard with visibility cut down to a few feet: the yearly precipitation of the ice-cap was no more than seven or eight inches, and it was just my evil luck that it should fall so heavily that night. The wind was southerly, or had been, but in that fickle Greenland climate there was no knowing what minute it might back or veer. My torch was failing: continual use plus the cold had left it with a pale yellowish beam that reached not much more than a few yards: but that was the limit of visibility, anyway, even downwind. The plane, I calculated, was not much more than a hundred yards away, the cabin six hundred. My chances of stumbling upon the latter, flush as it almost was with the surface of the ice-cap, were no better than one in a hundred. But my chances of finding the plane, or what came to the same thing, the great quarter-mile trench that it had gouged out in the frozen snow when it had crash-landed, were far better than even: it was impossible that it could have already been filled in with drift. I turned until I had the wind over my left shoulder and started walking.

I reached the deep furrow in the snow inside a minute—I'd switched off my torch to conserve the battery but my stumble and heavy fall as I went over the edge was intimation enough—turned right and reached the plane in thirty seconds. I suppose I might possibly have lasted out the night inside the wrecked fuselage, but such was my singleness of purpose at the moment that the thought never occurred to me. I walked round the wing, picked up the first of the bamboos in the dim beam of my torch and started to follow them.

There were only five altogether. After that, nothing. Every one of the others had been removed. These five, I knew, pointed straight towards the cabin and all I had to do was to keep shifting the last of the five to the front, lining it up straight with the others in the light of my torch, and it would be bound to bring out to the cabin. Or so I thought, for perhaps ten seconds. But it was a task that really required two people to achieve anything like accuracy: what with that, the feebleness of my rapidly dying torch and the hopeless visibility, I couldn't be accurate within two or three degrees at the least. That seemed a trifle, but when I stopped and worked it out I discovered that, over the distance, even one degree out would have put me almost forty feet off course. On a night like that, I could pass by the cabin ten feet away and never see it. There were less laborious means of committing suicide.

I picked up the five sticks, returned to the plane and walked along the furrowed trench till I came to the depression where the plane had touched down. The 250-foot line of the antenna, I knew, was roughly four hundred yards away, just a little bit south of west—slightly to my left, that was, as I stood with my back to the plane. I didn't hesitate. I strode out into the darkness, counting my steps, concentrating on keeping the wind a little more than on my left cheek but not quite full face. After four hundred long paces I stopped and pulled out my torch.

It was quite dead—the dull red glow from the filament didn't even register on my glove six inches away, and the darkness was as absolute as it would ever become on the ice-cap. I was a blind man moving in a blind world, and all I had left to me was the sense of touch. For the first time fear came to me, and I all but gave way to an almost overpowering instinct to run. But there was no place to run to.

I pulled the drawstring from my hood and with numbed and clumsy hands lashed together two of the bamboos to give me a stick seven feet in length. A third bamboo I thrust into the snow, then lay down flat, the sole of my boot touching it while I described a complete circle, flailing out with my long stick into the darkness. Nothing. At the full stretch of my body and the stick I stuck the last two bamboos into the snow, one upwind, the other downwind from the central bamboo, and described horizontal flailing circles round both of these. Again, nothing.

I gathered up the bamboos, walked ten paces more, and repeated the performance. I had the same luck again—and again and again. Five minutes and seventy paces after I had stopped for the first time I knew I had completely missed the antenna line and was utterly lost. The wind must have backed or veered, and I had wandered far off my course: and then came the chilling realisation that if that were so I had no idea now where the plane lay and could never regain it. Even had I known the direction where it lay, I doubted whether I could have made my way back anyway, not because I was tired but because my only means of gauging direction was the wind in my face, and my face was so completely numbed that I could no longer feel anything. I could hear the wind, but I couldn't feel it.

Ten more paces, I told myself, ten more and then I must turn back. Turn back where, a mocking voice seemed to ask me, but I ignored it and stumbled on with leaden-footed steps, doggedly counting. And on the seventh step I walked straight into one of the big antenna poles, staggered with the shock, all but fell, recovered, grabbed the pole and hugged it as if I would never let go. I knew at that moment what it must be like to be condemned to death and then live again, it was the most wonderful feeling I had ever experienced. And then the relief and the exultation gradually faded and anger returned to take its place, a cold, vicious, all-consuming anger of which I would never have believed myself capable.

With my stick stretched up and running along the rimed antenna cable to guide me, I ran all the way back to the cabin. I was vaguely surprised to see shadows still moving in the lamp-lit screen that surrounded the tractor—it was almost impossible for me to realise that I had been gone no more than thirty minutes -but I passed by, opened the hatch and dropped down into the cabin.

Joss was still in the far corner, working on the big radio, and the four women were huddled close round the stove. The stewardess, I noticed, wore a parka—one she had borrowed from Joss—and was rubbing her hands above the flame.

"Cold, Miss Ross?" I inquired solicitously. At least, I had meant it to sound that way, but even to myself my voice sounded hoarse and strained.

"And why shouldn't she be, Dr Mason?" Marie LeGarde snapped. "Dr Mason', I noted. "She's just spent the last fifteen minutes or so with the men on the tractor."

"Doing what?"

"I was giving them coffee." For the first time the stewardess showed some spirit. "What's so wrong in that?"

"Nothing," I said shortly. Takes you a damned long time to pour a cup of coffee, I thought savagely. "Most kind, I'm sure." Massaging my frozen face, I walked away into the food tunnel, nodding to Joss. He joined me immediately.

"Somebody just tried to murder me out there," I said without preamble.

"Murder you!" Joss stared at me for a long moment, then his eyes narrowed. "I'll believe anything in this lot."

"Meaning?"

"I was looking for some of the radio spares a moment ago—a few of them seem to be missing, but that's not the point. The spares, as you know, are next to the explosives. Someone's been tampering with them."

The explosives!" I had a momentary vision of some maniac placing a stick of gelignite under the tractor. "What's missing?"

"Nothing, that's what so damned funny. I checked, all the explosives are there. But they're scattered everywhere, all mixed up with fuses and detonators."

"Who's been in here this afternoon?"

He shrugged. "Who hasn't?"

It was true enough. Everyone had been coming and going there all afternoon and evening, the men for a hundred and one pieces of equipment for the tractor body, the women for food and stores. And, of course, our primitive toilet lay at the farthest end of the tunnel.

"What happened to you, sir?" Joss asked quietly.

I told him, and watched his face tighten till the mouth was a thin white line in the dark face. Joss knew what it meant to be lost on the ice-cap.

"The murderous, cold-blooded she-devil," he said softly. "We'll have to nail her, sir, we'll have to, or God only knows who's next on her list. But—but won't we have to have proof or confession or something? We can't just—"

"I'm going to get both," I said. The bitter anger still dominated my mind to the exclusion of all else. "Right now."

I walked out of the tunnel and across the cabin to where the stewardess was sitting.

"We've overlooked something, Miss Ross," I said abruptly. "The food in your galley on the plane. It might make all the difference between life and death. How much is there?"

"In the galley? Not very much, I'm afraid. Only odds and ends for snacks, if anyone was hungry. It was a night flight, Dr Mason, and they had already had their evening meal."

Followed by a very special brand of coffee, I thought grimly. "Doesn't matter how little it is," I said. "It might be invaluable. I'd like you to come and show me where it is."

"Can't it wait?" The protest came from Marie LeGarde. "Can't you see that the poor girl is chilled to death?"

"Can't you see that I am too?" I snapped. It was a measure of the mood I was in when I could bring myself to speak like that to Marie LeGarde. "Coming, Miss Ross?"

She came. I was taking no chances this time, so I carried with me the big searchlight with its portable battery and another torch, and gave the stewardess an armful of bamboos. When we had reached the top of the hatchway steps she waited for me to lead the way, but I told her to walk in front. I wanted to watch her hands.

The snow was easing now, the wind dropping and visibility just a little improved. We walked the length of the antenna line, angled off a little way north of east, setting down an occasional bamboo, and were at the plane within ten minutes of leaving the cabin.

"Right," I said. "You first, Miss Ross. Up you go."

"Up?" She turned towards me, and though the big searchlight lying on the ground was no help in letting me see the expression of her face, the puzzled tone of her voice was exactly right. "How?"

"Same way as you did before," I said harshly. My anger was almost out of control now, I couldn't have restrained myself any longer. "Jump for it."

"The same way—" She stopped in mid-sentence and stared at me. "What do you mean?" Her voice was only a whisper.

"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 papiermache. "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 -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.