The Land God gave to Cain

CHAPTER ONE

‘Your name Ian Ferguson?’ The question was flung at me out of a cloud of dust and I straightened up from the theodolite to find one of the Company Land-Rovers had pulled in behind me. The engine was ticking over and the driver was leaning out so that his sun-reddened face was clear of the windscreen. ‘All right. Hop in, chum. You’re wanted down at Company Office.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘I dunno. Said it was urgent and sent me up to get you. Probably you got your levels wrong and the runway’s on the skew.’ He grinned. He was always trying to get a rise out of the younger engineers. I entered the figures in my notebook, shouted to my rodholder that I wouldn’t be long and clambered in, and then we drove off across the rough ground, trailing a streamer of dust behind us.

The Company Office was just where the old runway finished and our new construction began. It was a large wooden hut with a corrugated iron roof, and as I went in the place was like an oven, for it was very hot in England that September. ‘Oh, there you are, Ferguson.’ Mr Meadows, the chief engineer came to meet me. ‘Afraid I’ve some bad news for you.’ The roar of an aircraft taking off shook the hut and through it I heard him say, ‘Telegram for you. Just came through on the phone.’ He handed me a sheet of paper.

I took it with a sudden feeling of foreboding. I knew it must be my father. The message was written in pencil. Please come home at once. Dad taken very bad. Love. Mother.

‘When’s the next train to London — do you know, sir?’

He glanced at his watch. ‘In about half an hour. You might just make it.’ His voice sounded undecided. ‘I find you had leave about three months ago on account of your father. You’re quite certain it’s serious? I mean — ‘

‘I’m sorry, sir. I’ll have to go.’ And then, because he remained silent, I felt I had to explain. ‘My father was badly shot up on a bombing mission during the war. He was a radio operator and he got a shell in the back of the neck. His legs are paralysed and he can’t speak. The brain was damaged, too.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’ Mr Meadows’ pale eyes looked hurt. ‘Of course you must go. I’ll have one of the Land-Rovers take you down.’

I just caught the train and three hours later I was in London. All the way up I had been thinking of my father and wishing I could remember him as he had been when I was a kid. But I couldn’t. The broken, inarticulate wreck that I had grown up with overshadowed all my early memories and I was left with the general impression of a big, friendly man. I had only been six when he joined the R.A.F. and went away to the war.

When I was at home I’d go and sit with him sometimes in that upstairs room where he had the radio. But he lived in a world of his own, and though he would converse by passing notes to me, I always had the impression that I was intruding. The neighbours thought him a bit balmy, and so he was in a way, sitting up there day after day in his wheelchair contacting other ‘ham’ radio operators. It was mostly Canada he contacted and once, when I was curious and wanted to know why, he’d got excited; his shattered larynx had produced queer incoherent noises and his big, heavy face had reddened with the effort of trying to communicate something to me. I remember I had asked him to write down what he was trying to tell me, but the note he passed me simply said, Too complicated. It’s a long story. His eyes had gone to the shelf where he kept his Labrador books and an oddly frustrated look came over his face. And after that I had always been conscious when I was up there of the books and the big map of Labrador that hung on the wall above the transmitter. It wasn’t a printed map. He’d drawn it himself whilst in hospital.

I was thinking of this as I hurried down the familiar street, wondering whether there was any solid reason for his interest in Labrador or whether it was something to do with his mental state. A shell had ripped open his skull and the doctors had said the brain was permanently injured, though they’d done a good job of patching him up. The sun had set now and all our side of the street was black in shadow so that it was like a wall of brick. The uniformity of it all saddened me and unconsciously I slowed my pace, remembering that room and the morse key on the table and how he’d insisted on having the station’s call sign painted on the door. Mother didn’t really understand him. She hadn’t his education and she couldn’t see his desperate need of that radio room.

I think I knew I wasn’t ever going to see him in that room again. Our house had its gate and door painted red, which was all that distinguished it from its neighbours, and as I approached I saw that the upstairs blinds were drawn.

My mother came to the door and greeted me quietly. ‘I’m glad you’ve come, Ian.’ She wasn’t crying. She just looked tired, that was all. ‘You saw the blinds, didn’t you? I would have told you in the telegram, but I wasn’t certain. I got Mrs Wright from next door to send it. I had to wait for the doctor.’ Her voice was lifeless and without emotion. She had come to the end of a long road.

At the foot of the stairs she said, ‘You’d like to see him, I expect.’ She took me straight up to the darkened room and left me there. ‘Come down when you’re ready. I’ll make you a pot of tea. You must be tired after the journey.’

He was lying stretched out on the bed and the furrows of his face, that had been so deep-etched by years of pain, seemed to have been miraculously smoothed out. He looked at peace and in a way I felt glad for him. I stood there a long time, thinking of the fight he’d made of it — seeing him, I think, clearly for the first time as a brave and gallant man. Anger and bitterness stirred in me then at the rotten deal he’d had from life and the unfair way others get through a war scot-free. I was a little confused and in the end I knelt beside his bed and tried to pray. And I kissed the cold, smooth forehead and tiptoed out and went down the stairs to join my mother in the parlour.

She was sitting with the tea table in front of her, staring at it without seeing it. She looked old and very frail. It had been a hard life for her. ‘It’s almost a relief, Mother, isn’t it?’

She looked at me then. ‘Yes, dear. I’ve been expecting it ever since he had that stroke three months ago. If he had been content to just lie in bed… but he would get up every day and wheel himself along to that room. And he’d be there till all hours, particularly lately. The last week or so, he couldn’t seem to leave the wireless alone.’ She always called it the wireless.

And then, when she had poured my tea, she told me how it had happened. ‘It was very strange and I wouldn’t dream of telling the doctor. He’d never believe me and he’d want to give me pills or something. Even now I’m not sure I didn’t imagine it. I was sitting down here, sewing, when I suddenly heard your Dad call out to me. “Mother!” he called. And then something else. I couldn’t say what it was for he was up in that room and he had the door shut as usual. But I could have sworn he called out “Mother,” and when I got up to the wireless room I found him standing up. He had forced himself up out of his chair and his face was all red and mottled with the effort he was making.’

‘You mean he was standing up on his own?’ It was incredible. My father hadn’t stood in years.

‘Yes. He was leaning on the table and reaching out with his right hand. To the wall, I think. For support,’ she added quickly. And then she said, ‘He turned his head and saw me and tried to say something. And then his face became all twisted with pain. He gave a sort of strangled cry and all his body went suddenly limp and he fell down. I don’t know when exactly he died. I laid him on the floor and made him as comfortable as possible.’ She began to cry quietly.

I went over to her and she clung to me whilst I did my best to comfort her, and all the time the picture of my father’s struggle to stand stayed in my mind. ‘What made him suddenly make such a desperate effort?’ I asked.

‘Nothing.’ She looked up at me quickly with such a strange, protective look that I wondered.

‘But it must have been something. And to find his voice like that — suddenly after all these years.’

‘I can’t be certain. I may have imagined it. I think I must have.’

‘But just now you said you were positive he called out to you. Besides, you went up there. He must have called out. And to find him on his feet; there must have been some compelling reason.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Your Dad was like that. He never would give up. The doctor thinks — ‘

‘Had he got his earphones on when you went in?’

‘Yes. But… Where are you going, Ian?’ I didn’t answer for I was already through the door and running up the stairs. I was thinking of the map of Labrador. She had found my father standing at the table, reaching out to the wall — and that was where the map hung. Or perhaps he had been trying to reach the bookshelf. It was below the map and it contained nothing but the books on Labrador. He was fascinated by the country. It was an obsession with him.

I turned left at the top of the stairs and there was the door with STATION G2STO stencilled on it. It was so familiar that, as I pushed it open, I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t find him seated there in front of the radio. But the wheelchair was empty, swivelled back against the wall, and the desk where he always sat was unnaturally tidy, the usual litter of notebooks, magazines and newspapers all cleared away and stacked neatly on top of the transmitter. I searched quickly through them, but there was no message, nothing.

I had been so certain I should find a message, or at least some indication of what had happened, that I stood at a loss for a moment, looking round the small den that had been his world for so long. It was all very familiar, and yet it had a strangeness because he was no longer there to give it point.

Only that had changed. All the rest remained — the school pictures, the caps, the wartime photographs, and the bits and pieces of planes with the scribbled signatures of the air crews who had been his companions. And over by the door hung the same faded picture of my grandmother, Alexandra Ferguson, her strong face unsmiling and yellowed above the tight-buttoned bodice.

I stared at it, wondering whether she would have known the answer. I had often seen him glance at the picture — or was it at the things that hung below it, the rusted pistol, the sextant, the broken paddle and the torn canvas case with the moth-eaten fur cap hanging over it? Alexandra Ferguson was his mother. She had brought him up, and somehow I’d always known those relics beneath the photograph belonged to the north of Canada, though I couldn’t remember anybody ever telling me so.

I dug back in my memory to the vague impression of a grey, bleak house somewhere in the north of Scotland, and a terrifying old woman who had come to me in the night. The photograph didn’t recall her to my mind, for all I remembered was a disembodied face hanging over me in the flickering flame of the night light, a cold, bitter, desiccated face, and then my mother had come in and they had shouted at each other until I had screamed with fear. We had left next morning and as though by common consent neither my mother nor my father had ever mentioned her to me again.

I turned back to the room, the memory of that scene still vivid. And then I was looking at the radio receiver and the morse key with the pencil lying beside it, and the memory faded. These were the things that now dominated all the bits and pieces of his life. Together they represented all that had been left to him, and somehow I felt that, as his son, I should have enough understanding of him to wring from them the thing that had driven him to such a superhuman effort.

I think it was the pencil that made me realize something was missing. There should have been a log book. He always kept a radio log. Not a proper one, of course; just a cheap exercise book in which he jotted things down — station frequencies and their times of broadcasting, scraps of weather forecasts or ships’ talk or anything from Canada, all mixed up with little drawings and anything else that came to his mind.

I found several of these exercise books in the drawer of the table, but they didn’t include the current one. The latest entry in these books was for September 15, a page of doodling in which it was almost impossible to decipher anything coherent at all. Drawings of lions seemed to predominate, and in one place he had written: C2-C2-C2 … where the hell is that? The scrawled line of a song caught my eye — LOST AND GONE FOREVER — and he had ringed it round with a series of names — Winokapau — Tishinakamau — Attikonak — Winokapau — Tishinakamau — Attikonak — repeated over and over again as a sort of decoration.

Turning back through the pages of these old log books I found they were all like that — a queer mixture of thoughts and fancies that made me realize how lonely he had been up there in that room and how desperately turned in upon himself. But here and there I picked out dates and times, and gradually a pattern emerged. Every day there was an entry for 2200 hours, undoubtedly the same station transmitting, for the entry was nearly always followed by the call sign VO6AZ, and on one page he had written V06AZ came through as usual. Later I found the name Ledder occurring — Ledder reports or Ledder again, in place of the call sign. The word expedition occurred several times.

It is difficult to convey the impression these muddled pages made. They were such an extraordinary mixture of fact and nonsense, of what he had heard over the air and the things that came into his mind, all patterned and half-obliterated with childish lines and squiggles and odd names and little drawings with the shape of a lion repeated and repeated in page after page. A psychiatrist would probably say that it was all symptomatic of cerebral damage, and yet most people doodle when they are much alone with their thoughts, and through it all ran the thread of these reports from V06AZ.

I turned to the bookcase behind me, which housed his technical library, and took down the Radio Amateur Call Book. This I knew listed all the world’s ham operators under their different countries, together with their call signs and addresses. He had explained the call sign system to me once. The prefix gave the location. G, for instance, was the prefix for all British hams. I started to look up Canada, but the book fell open almost automatically at Labrador and I saw that VO6 was the prefix for this area. Against the call sign VO6AZ appeared the names Simon amp; Ethel Ledder, c/o D.O.T. Communications, Goose Bay.

The knowledge that he had been in regular contact with Labrador drew me again to the map hanging above the transmitter, the names he had written on that last page running through my head — Winokapau — Tishinakamau — Attikonak. It was like the opening of Turner’s poem and, leaning forward across the desk, I saw that he had made some pencil markings on the map. I was certain they hadn’t been there when I’d last been in the room with him. A line had been drawn from the Indian settlement of Seven Islands on the St. Lawrence, running north into the middle of Labrador, and against it was pencilled the initials — Q.N.S. amp; L.R. To the right of it, about halfway up, an almost blank area of the map had been ringed, and here he had written Lake of the Lion with a large question mark after it.

I had just noticed Attikonak L. inked in against the outline of a large, sprawling lake, when the door behind me opened and there was a little gasp. I turned to find my mother standing there with a frightened look on her face. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

She seemed to relax at the sound of my voice. ‘You did give me a turn -1 thought for a moment — ‘ She checked herself and I realized suddenly that this was how my father had stood, leaning on the table and reaching Over towards the map of Labrador.

‘It was the map, wasn’t it?’ I was excited by the sudden certainty that it was the map that had drawn him to his feet.

A shadow seemed to cross her face. Her gaze fastened on the log books strewn on the table. ‘What are you doing up here, Ian?’

But I was remembering something a Canadian pilot had told me at the airfield — something about a party lost in Labrador and Canadian Air Force planes searching for them. The references to an expedition in the log books, the map and my father’s obsession with Labrador, and that sudden frightened look on my mother’s face — it was all coming together in my mind. ‘Mother,’ I said. ‘There was a message, wasn’t there?’

She looked at me then and her face went blank. ‘I don’t know what you mean, dear. Why don’t you come down and finish your tea. Try to forget about it;’

But I shook my head. ‘You do know what I mean,’ I said, and I went over to her and took hold of her hands. They were cold as ice. ‘What did you do with his log book?’

‘His log book?’ She stared at me and I could feel her trembling. ‘Aren’t they all there?’

‘You know they aren’t. The current one — it’s missing. What have you done with it?’

‘Nothing, dear. You don’t understand -1 was too busy. It’s been a terrible day … terrible.’ She began to cry gently.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘All the log books are there, except the current one. It should have been on the table beside the morse key. He always kept it there, and now it’s gone.’

‘He may have thrown it away. Or perhaps he’d forgotten to keep it for a time. You know how your father was. He was like a child.’ But she wouldn’t look at me and I knew she was hiding something.

‘What have you done with it, Mother?’ I shook her gently. ‘He received some sort of a message. Something to do with Labrador.’

‘Labrador!’ The word seemed to explode out of her mouth. Her eyes widened and she was staring at me. ‘Not you, too, Ian. Please God. Not you. All my life …’ Her voice trailed away. ‘Now come down and have your tea, there’s a good boy. I can’t take any more — not today.’

I can remember the weariness in her voice, the note of pleading — and how cruel I was. ‘You never understood him, did you, Mother?’ I said that to her, and I believed it. ‘If you’d understood him, you’d know there was only one thing would drive him to call out, struggling to his feet and reaching out for the map. It was the map he was reaching out to, wasn’t it?’ And I shook her gently whilst she just stared at me with a sort of fascination. I told her then about the planes searching for a geological party lost in Labrador. ‘Whatever Dad may have been during these last few years, he was still a first-class radio operator. If he picked up some sort of a message from them…’ I had to make her see it my way — how important it could be. ‘Those men’s lives might depend on it,’ I said.

She shook her head slowly. ‘You don’t know,’ she murmured. ‘You can’t know.’ And she added, ‘It was all in his imagination.’

‘Then he did pick up a message?’

‘He imagined things. You’ve been away so much … you don’t know what went on in his mind.’

‘He didn’t imagine this,’ I said. ‘It made him suddenly find his voice. It forced him to his feet and the effort killed him.’ I was being intentionally brutal. If my father had killed himself in an effort to save other men’s lives, then I wasn’t going to have his effort go for nothing, whatever my mother’s reason for concealing it. ‘Look — I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I must have that log book.’ And when she only stared at me with a sort of dumb misery in her eyes, I said, ‘He wrote the message down in it, didn’t he? Didn’t he, Mother?’ I was exasperated by her attitude. ‘For God’s sake! Where is it! Please, Mother — you must let me see it!’

A defeated look showed in her face and she gave a tired little sigh. ‘Very well, Ian. If you must have it…’ She turned then and went slowly out of the room. ‘I’ll get it for you.’

I went with her because I had an instinctive feeling that if I didn’t she might destroy it. I couldn’t understand her attitude at all. I could literally feel her reluctance as I followed her down the stairs.

She had hidden it under the table linen in one of the drawers of the sideboard, and as she handed it to me, she said, ‘You won’t do anything foolish now, will you?’

But I didn’t answer her. I had seized hold of the exercise book and was already seated at the table, leafing through the pages. It was much the same as the others, except that the entries were more factual with fewer doodles and the word search caught my eye several times.

And then I was staring at the last entry on a page clear of all other jottings: CQ — CQ — CQ, — Any 75-metre phone station — Any 75-metre phone station — Come in someone please — Come in someone please — K.

There it was in my father’s laboured hand, and the desperation of that cry called to me through the shaky pencilled words in that tattered child’s exercise book. And underneath he had written BRIFFE — It must be. And the date and the time — September 29,1355 — voice very faint. Voice very faint! And below that, with the time given as 1405 — Calling again. CQ — CQ — CQ etc. Still no reply. Then the final entry: Calling VO6AZ now. Position not known but within 30 miles radius C2 — situation desperate — injured and no fire — Baird very bad — Laroche gone — CQ — CQ — CQ-Can hardly hear him — Search for narrow lake (obliterated) — Repeating… narrow lake with rock shaped like … The message ended there in a straggling pencil line as though the point of it had slipped as he made the effort to stand.

Injured and no fire! I sat there, staring at the pencilled words, a vivid picture in my mind of a narrow desolate lake and an injured man crouched over a radio set. Situation desperate. I could imagine it. The nights would be bitter and in the daytime they’d be plagued with a million flies. I’d read about it in those books of my father’s. And the vital part was missing — the bit that had brought my father to his feet.

‘What are you going to do?’ My mother’s voice sounded nervous, almost frightened.

‘Do?’ I hadn’t thought about it. I was still wondering what it was that had so galvanized my father. ‘Mum. Do you know why Dad was so interested in Labrador?’

‘No.’

The denial was so quick, so determined, that I looked up at her. Her face was very pale, a little haggard in the gathering dusk. ‘When did it start?’ I asked.

‘Oh, a long time ago. Before the war.’

‘So it wasn’t anything to do with his being shot up?’ I got up from the chair I had been sitting in. ‘Surely you must know the reason for it? In all these years he must have told you why — ‘

But she had turned away. ‘I’m going to get supper,’ she said, and I watched her go out through the door, puzzled by her attitude.

Alone, I began thinking again about those men lost in Labrador. Briffe — that was the name Farrow had talked about in the Airport Bar. Briffe was the leader of some sort of geological expedition, and I wondered what one did in a case like this. Suppose nobody but my father had picked up that message? But then they were bound to have heard it in Canada. If Dad had picked it up at a distance of over two thousand miles … But, according to Dad, Goose Bay hadn’t replied. And if by some queer chance he had been the only radio operator in the world to pick that message up, then I was the thread on which those men’s lives hung.

It was an appalling thought and I worried about it all through supper — far more I think than about my father’s death, for I couldn’t do anything about that. When we had finished the meal I said to my mother, ‘I think I’ll just walk as far as the call box.’

‘Who are you going to phone?’

‘I don’t know.’ Who did one ring? There was Canada House. They were really the people to tell, but they’d be closed now. ‘The police, I suppose.’

‘Do you have to do anything about it?’ She was standing there, wringing her hands.

‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘I think somebody ought to know.’ And then. because I still didn’t understand her attitude, I asked her why she’d tried to hide the message from me.

‘I didn’t know if you …’ She hesitated, and then said quickly, ‘I didn’t want your father laughed at.’

‘Laughed at? Really, Mother! Suppose nobody else picked up this transmission? If these men died, then you’d have been responsible.’

Her face went blank. ‘I didn’t want them laughing at him,’ she repeated obstinately. ‘You know what people are in a street like this.’

‘This is more important than what people think.’ My tone was impatient. And then, because I knew she was upset and tired, I kissed her. ‘We shan’t be bothered about it,’ I reassured her. ‘It’s just that I feel that I must report it. It wouldn’t be the first time he picked up a transmission that no other operator received,’ I added, and I went out of the house and back along the street to the Underground.

I had no idea who I should get on to at Scotland Yard, so in the end I dialled 999. It seemed odd to be making an emergency police call when we hadn’t been burgled or anything. And when I got through to them I found it wasn’t easy to explain what it was all about. It meant telling them about my father and the ‘ham’ radio station he operated. The fact that he had just died because of his excitement over the message only made it more confusing.

However, in the end they said they had got it all clear and would contact the Canadian authorities, and I left the call box feeling that a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It was their responsibility now. I needn’t worry about it any more. And when I got back to the house, I put the log book away in my suitcase and went through into the kitchen, where my mother was quietly getting a meal. Now that the matter of the message was cleared up and the authorities notified, I began to see it from her point of view. After all, why should she worry about two men in a distant part of the world when my father was lying dead upstairs?

That night my mother had the little bedroom and I slept on the couch in the parlour. And in the morning I woke to the realization that there was a lot to be done — the funeral to arrange, all his things to go through and the pension people to be notified. I hadn’t realized before that death didn’t end with sorrow.

After breakfast I sent a wire to Mr Meadows and then went on to arrange things with the undertaker. When I got back it was almost eleven and Mrs Wright was in from next door having tea with my mother. It was Mrs Wright who heard the car draw up and went to the window to see. ‘Why, it’s a police car,’ she said, and then added, ‘I do believe they’re coming here.’

It was a Police Inspector and a Flight Lieutenant Mathers of the Canadian Air Force. They wanted to see the log book, and when I’d got it from my suitcase and had handed it to the inspector, I found myself apologizing for the writing. ‘I’m afraid it’s not very good. You see my father was paralysed and-‘

‘Yes, we know all about that,’ the Inspector said. ‘We’ve made inquiries, naturally.’ He was no longer looking at the page on which the message had been written, but was leafing back through the log book, the Flight Lieutenant peering over his shoulder. I began to feel uncomfortable then. The pages were such a muddle and in the Inspector’s hands the log looked exactly what it was, a child’s exercise book. I remembered my mother’s words — I didn’t want your father laughed at.

When he had examined every page, the Inspector turned back to the one on which the message was written. ‘I think you said that your father died immediately after writing this?’

I explained to him what had happened — how my mother thought she heard him call out to her and went up to find he had somehow struggled to his feet. And when I had finished, he said, ‘But you weren’t here at the time?’

‘No. My job is near Bristol. I wasn’t here.’

‘Who was here? Just your mother?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded. ‘Well, I’m afraid I’ll have to have a word with her. But first we’d like to have a look at the room where your father had his radio.’

I took them up and the Flight Lieutenant had a look at the radio whilst the Inspector prowled round, looking at the books and the map hanging on the wall. ‘Well, it’s all in working order,’ the Flight Lieutenant said. He had switched on the receiver and he had the earphones over his head whilst his fingers played with the tuning dial. But by then the Inspector had found the old log books in the drawer and was glancing through them.

At length he turned to me. ‘I’m sorry to have to ask you this, Mr Ferguson, but we’ve been on to the doctor and I understand your father had a stroke some three months ago. You were down here then?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But only for a few days. He made a very quick recovery.’

‘Have you been here since?’

‘No,’ I told him. ‘We’re on airfield construction at the moment. It’s a rush job and I haven’t had another chance — ‘

‘What I’m getting at is this … can you vouch for your father’s mental state? Could he have imagined this?’

‘No. Certainly not.’ I felt suddenly angry. ‘If you’re suggesting that my father…’ I stopped then, because I realized what must have prompted the question. ‘Do you mean to say nobody else picked up that transmission?’

‘Not as far as we know.’ He turned to the Flight Lieutenant. ‘However, there’s no doubt he was following the progress of this expedition,’ he said. ‘There are dozens of references to it in these notebooks, but…’ He hesitated, and then gave a little shrug. ‘Well, take a look for yourself.’ He passed the books across to the Canadian. I might not have been there as the Air Force officer bent down to examine them and the Inspector watched him, waiting for his reaction.

At length I could stand it no longer. ‘What’s wrong with the message?’ I asked.

‘Nothing, nothing — except…’ The Inspector hesitated.

The Flight Lieutenant looked up from the log books. ‘We’re not doubting he was in touch with Ledder, you know.’ His voice held a note of reservation, and as though conscious of this he added, ‘I checked with our people at Goose right away. Simon Ledder and his wife are both registered hams operating their own station under the call sign VO6AZ. They take on outside work and in this case they were acting as base station for the McGovern Mining and Exploration Company, receiving Briffe’s reports by R/T and transmitting them to the Company’s offices in Montreal.’

‘Well, then?’ I didn’t understand why they were still so doubtful about it. The fact that nobody else picked up the transmission — ‘

‘It’s not that,’ he said quickly. And he looked across at the Inspector, who said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Ferguson. All this must be very trying for you.’ He sounded apologetic. ‘But the fact is that Briffe and the man with him were reported dead — almost a week ago, didn’t you say, Mathers?’ He looked across at the Canadian.

‘That’s so, Inspector.’ The Flight Lieutenant nodded. ‘On September twenty-fifth to be exact.’ He tossed the log books on to the table. ‘I don’t want to seem unappreciative,’ he said, looking across at me. ‘Particularly as you say your father’s excitement at receiving the message was the cause of his death. But the fact is that Bert Laroche, the pilot of the crashed plane, trekked out on his own. He reached one of the construction camps of the Iron Ore Railway on the twenty-fifth and reported that the other two were dead when he left them. He’d been five days trekking out, so they were dead by September twentieth. Now you come along with the information that your father picked up a radio broadcast from Briffe yesterday. That’s nine whole days after Briffe was dead.’ He shook his head. ‘It just doesn’t make sense.’

‘The pilot might have made a mistake,’ I murmured.

He stared at me with a sort of shocked look. ‘I guess you don’t understand the Canadian North, Mr Ferguson. Men just don’t make that sort of mistake. Certainly not experienced fliers like Bert Laroche.’ And he added, ‘He crashed his Beaver floatplane into a rock trying to land on a lake in a snow storm. Briffe and Baird were injured. He got them ashore and the plane sank. That was on September the fourteenth. Baird died almost immediately, Briffe a few days later, and then he started to trek out.’

‘But the message,’ I cried. ‘How else could my father have known — ‘

‘It was all in the news-casts,’ Mathers said. The whole story — it was repeated over and over again.’

‘But not about the lake surely,’ I said impatiently. ‘How would my father know it was a lake with a rock in it? And how would he know about Briffe and Baird being injured and the pilot gone?’

‘I tell you, Briffe and Baird were dead by then.’

‘Are you suggesting he made it all up?’

Mathers shrugged his shoulders and reached for the last of the log books, turning the pages until he came to the message. He stared at it for a long time. ‘It just isn’t possible,’ he murmured. ‘If your father picked up a transmission, why didn’t someone else?’

‘You’ve checked, have you?’

‘We’re checking now. But, believe me, if anybody in Canada had picked it up, they’d have reported it immediately. The papers were full of the search when it was on.’

‘I can’t help that,’ I said. ‘Maybe nobody else picked it up. But my father did. The message is there in that log book to prove it.’ He made no comment. He was looking back again through the old log books. ‘I remember once,’ I added desperately, ‘my father picked up a message from a yacht in the Timor Sea when nobody else did. And another time he made a contact — ‘

‘But this is R/T. How could he possibly pick up Voice from an old set like Briffe’s?’ The Flight Lieutenant was still riffling through the pages of the logs, but now he suddenly closed them. ‘There’s only one explanation, I guess.’ He said it to the Inspector, who nodded agreement.

I knew what he meant and I was furious. I’d done what I thought was right and here were these two strangers trying to make out that my father was crazy. I wished to God I’d never reported the matter. My mother was right. How could I possibly make them understand that a lonely man could scribble a lot of nonsense all over those log books and yet be reliable when it came to picking up a transmission? ‘Surely somebody else must have picked the message up,’ I said helplessly. And then, because they didn’t say anything, but stood there looking uncomfortable, I let my feelings run away with me. ‘You think my father made it all up, don’t you? Just because he had a head wound and was paralysed and drew little pictures in those books, you think he isn’t to be relied on. But you’re wrong. My father was a first-class radio operator. Whatever the doctors or anybody else may say, he’d never make a mistake over a message like that.’

‘Maybe,’ the Canadian said. ‘But we’re two thousand five hundred miles from Labrador and Briffe wasn’t on Key, he was on Voice transmission — in other words, radio telephone.’

‘That’s what my father implies. He says it’s Briffe’s voice he’s hearing.’

‘Sure. But I’ve already checked on this and all Briffe had was an old wartime forty-eight set. That’s the Canadian equivalent of your British Army eighteen set. It had been modified to operate on the seventy-five metre phone band, but he was still using it in conjuction with a hand generator. Even with a line aerial instead of a whip, Goose would have been just about at the limit of his range — that’s why he was reporting back to Ledder instead of direct to Montreal.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘But I do know this. See all those books up there? They’re about Labrador. My father was fascinated by the place. He knew what it would be like for those men lost out there. He knew that message was important. That’s why he suddenly found his voice and called out. That’s what forced him to his feet when he hadn’t stood — ‘

‘Just a minute,’ the Flight Lieutenant said. ‘You don’t seem to understand what I’ve been trying to tell you. Those men are dead. They’ve been dead more than nine days.’

‘But that message …’

There wasn’t any message.’ He said it quietly, and then added, ‘See here, Ferguson. I’m sorry about your father. But ‘.el’s be practical. We had four planes searching for almost a week. Then Laroche came out and reported the other two dead and we called off the search. Now you want me to advise a resumption of a full-scale search, involving machines and fliers in hours of duty over desolate country Just because your father wrote down a message in an exercise book before he died — a message that, even if it had been transmitted, it was technically impossible for him to pick up.’

There wasn’t anything I could say to that. ‘If it’s technically impossible — ‘

‘He was more than two thousand miles outside of normal range. Of course,’ he added, ‘there’s always the chance of freak reception, even at that distance, and just in case, I’m having inquiries made of all ham operators in Canada. I’ve also asked for a full report from Ledder. I think you can be quite sure that if any transmission was made on the twenty-ninth, then we’ll find somebody who picked it up.’

The Inspector nodded. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll keep these notebooks for the time being.’ He picked them up off the table. ‘I’d like to have them examined by our experts.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind.’ It seemed useless to say anything more. And yet … My eyes strayed to the map of Labrador. He’d forced himself to his feet in order to look at it. Why? What had been in his mind?

‘I don’t think it’s necessary for us to trouble Mrs Ferguson after all,’ the Inspector was saying. They went down the stairs then and I showed them out. ‘I’ll let you have these back in a day or so.’ The Inspector indicated the exercise books in his hand.

I watched them as they walked out to the police car and drove away. What had he meant by saying he’d like to have them examined by experts? But, of course, I knew, and I felt as though in some way I had let my father down. And yet, if the men were dead… I went back into the parlour to be faced with my mother’s reproachful gaze and Mrs Wright’s eager questioning.

But there were other, more practical things to think about, and with the funeral the sense of grief pushed everything else into the background of my mind.

It wasn’t until the morning I was leaving to return to Bristol that I was reminded of the strange message that had caused my father’s death. The postman brought a registered package addressed to me, and inside were the log books. There was also a letter, impersonal and final: I have to inform you that the Canadian authorities have been unable to obtain any confirmation of the message claimed to have been received by your father, Mr James Ferguson, on 29th September. Our experts have examined the enclosed, and in view of their report, and the statement by the only survivor that the two remaining members of the party are dead, the Canadian authorities do not feel that any useful purpose can be served by resuming the search. However, they wish me to express their appreciation, etc., etc.

So that was that. The experts — psychiatrists presumably — had looked at the log books and had decided that my father was mad. I tore the letter savagely across, and then, because I didn’t want my mother to find the fragments, I slipped them into my suitcase, together with the log books.

She came to the station to see me off. Ever since that visit from the police she had never once referred to the cause of my father’s death. As though by tacit consent we had avoided any reference to the message. But now, just as the train was about to leave, she gripped my hand. ‘You’ll let that Labrador business alone, won’t you, Ian? I couldn’t bear it if you…’ The whistle blew then and she kissed me, holding me close that way she hadn’t done since I was a kid. Her face was white and tired-looking and she was crying.

I got in and the train began to move, for a moment she stood watching, a small, lonely figure in black, and then she turned quickly and walked away down the platform. I often wonder whether she knew in her heart that she wouldn’t see me again for a long time.