The Land God gave to Cain

CHAPTER THREE

I didn’t sleep much that night and I was down at the Charter Company’s freight office by five-thirty. Farrow wasn’t there, of course, and I walked up and down in the grey morning light, feeling cold and empty inside. The office was locked, the tarmac deserted. I lit a cigarette and wondered, as I had done all night, whether I was making a fool of myself. A plane took off with a thunderous roar and I watched it disappear into the low overcast, thinking that in little more than an hour, if Farrow kept his word, I should be up there, headed west out into the Atlantic. I was shivering slightly. Nerves!

It was almost six when Farrow drove up in a battered sports car. ‘Jump in,’ he shouted. ‘Got to get you vaccinated. Otherwise it’s all fixed.’

We woke up a doctor friend of his and half an hour later I had got my certificate of vaccination, had cleared Customs and Immigration and was back at the freight office. I signed the ‘blood-chit’ that absolved the Company of responsibility for my death in the event of a crash, and then Farrow left me there and I hung about for another twenty minutes, waiting for take-off. There was no turning back now. I was committed to the flight and because of that I no longer felt nervous.

Shortly before seven the crew assembled and I walked with them across the tarmac to a big four-engined plane parked on the apron opposite the office. Inside, it was a dim-lit steel shell with the freight piled down the centre, strapped down to ring bolts in the floor. ‘Not very comfortable, I’m afraid,’ Farrow said, ‘but we don’t cater for passengers.’ He gave my shoulder a friendly squeeze. ‘Toilet’s aft if you want it.’ The door of the fuselage slammed shut and he followed his crew for’ard to the flight deck. I was alone then.

We took off just after seven, and though I had never flown before I could sense what was happening — the sound of the engines being run up one by one on test at the runway-end and then the solid roar of all four together and the drag of the airscrews as we began to move, the dim-lit fuselage rocking and vibrating around me. Suddenly it was quieter and I knew we had left the ground.

The exhilaration of the take-off gradually faded into the monotony of the flight as we drove smoothly on, hour after hour. I dozed a little and now and then Farrow or one of his crew came aft. Shortly after ten the navigator brought me sandwiches and hot coffee. An hour and a half later we landed at Keflavik in Iceland and I clambered stiffly out, blinking my eyes in the cold sunlight.

The airport was a featureless expanse, the buildings modern utilitarian blocks without character. The whole place had the crisp, cold, lifeless air of outer space. But the cafeteria in the main building yielded eggs and bacon and hot coffee, and the echoing hall was full of transit passengers passing the time by sending postcards and buying Icelandic souvenirs from counters gay with northern colours. We had over an hour there in the warmth whilst the plane was refuelled and a quick check made on one of the engines which was running rough. They found nothing wrong with the engine and by twelve-thirty I was back in the hollow roar of the fuselage and we were taking off on the last lap.

We flew high to clear a storm belt off the Greenland coast and it was cold. I dozed fitfully, the monotony only broken by an occasional cup of coffee, the lunch pack and brief talks with the crew as they came aft. It was nine-twenty by my watch when the flight engineer finally roused me. ‘Skipper says if you want to take a look at Labrador from the air you’d better come up for’ard right away. We’ll be landing in fifteen minutes.’

I followed him through the door to the flight deck. To my surprise it was daylight and, because I could see out, the long, cold hours spent huddled amongst the freight in the fuselage were suddenly forgotten. Not that there was anything to see… just the grey of cloud through the windshield and Farrow’s head outlined against it. The wireless operator gripped my arm as I passed, pulling me down towards him. ‘I’ve radioed the Tower to have Ledder meet you,’ he shouted in my ear. ‘Okay?’

‘Thanks.’

Farrow half turned his head and indicated the flight engineer’s seat beside him. ‘Going down now.’ He jerked his thumb downwards. The engines were already throttled back. ‘We’ll come out of the cloud at eight thousand.’ He tapped the altimeter dial where the pointer was dropping slowly. And he added, ‘You’ll have plenty of time to talk to Ledder. Another engine check. Port outer packed up a while back.’ He nodded towards the left-hand wing-tip where it wavered gently in the turbulent cloud mist. The outboard engine was lifeless, the propeller feathering slowly. ‘We’ll be there the night. Get away sometime tomorrow — I hope.’

I wanted to ask him whether we’d get down all right, but nobody seemed worried that we were flying on only three engines and I sat down and said nothing, staring ahead through the windshield, waiting for the moment when I should get my first glimpse of Labrador. And because there was nothing to see, I found myself thinking of my father. Had his flying duties ever taken him to Labrador or was I now doing the thing he’d wanted to do all his life? I was thinking of the books and the map, wondering what it was that had fascinated him about this country; and then abruptly the veil was swept away from in front of my eyes and there was Labrador.

The grimness of it was the thing that struck me — the grimness and the lostness and the emptiness of it. Below us was a great sheet of water running in through a desolate, flat waste, with pale glimpses of sand and a sort of barren, glacier-dredged look about it. But what held my attention was the land ahead where it rose to meet the sky. There were no hills there, no mountain peaks. It rose up from the coastal plain in one black, ruler-straight line, utterly featureless — a remote, bitter plateau that by its very uniformity gave an impression of vastness, of being on the verge of land that stretched away to the Pole.

There’s Goose now.’ Farrow was shouting in my ear and pointing. But I didn’t see it. My eyes were riveted by the black line of that plateau and I held my breath, strangely stirred as though by some old challenge.

‘Sure is a pretty country,’ Farrow shouted to me. ‘You can get lost in there just like that.’ And he snapped his fingers. ‘Nothing but lakes, and every one the same as the next.’ He was suddenly grinning. ‘The land God gave to Cain — that’s what Jacques Carrier called it when he first discovered it.’

The land God gave to Cain! The words mingled with my thoughts to trickle through my mind in a cold shiver. How often I was to remember later the aptness of that description!

We were coming in now, the water of Goose Bay rising to meet us, the airfield clearly visible. The flight engineer tapped me on the shoulder and I clambered out of his seat and went back into the dimness of the fuselage. A few moments later we touched down.

When we had come to rest with the engines cut, the navigator came aft and opened the freight door. Daylight entered the fuselage, bringing with it warmth and the smell of rain, and through the open door I looked out across wet tarmac to a line of green-painted, corrugated iron buildings. A man stood waiting on the apron, alone, a tall, dark-featured man in some sort of a plastic raincoat.

I gathered my things together, and then Farrow came down through the fuselage. ‘I’ll fix you up with a room at the T.C.A. Hotel,’ he said. ‘You can get a meal there. The time, by the way, is …’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Five twenty-two. There’s four and a half hours difference between Goose and England.’ And he added, There’ll be transport to run us down as soon as I’m through with the maintenance people and we’ve cleared Immigration.’ He had moved on to the door by then and I heard a voice say: ‘Captain Farrow? My name’s Simon Ledder. I was told to meet your flight.’ It was a slow voice, puzzled and a little resentful.

And then I was at the door and Farrow said, ‘Well, here you are. Here’s the guy you wanted to talk to.’ And as I jumped out on to the tarmac he was already walking away with a casual lift of his hand.

‘Where will I find you?’ I called after him. I didn’t want to lose him. The place looked so vast and desolate.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t forget you,’ he answered over his shoulder. His crew were waiting for him and when he had caught them up, they all went on together in a bunch. I heard the flight engineer’s rather high-pitched laugh, and then they disappeared into the hangar.

‘What did you want to see me about?’ Ledder’s voice was dull and flat and I turned to find him standing close beside me, his hands in his pockets and a bored look on his face.

I’d thought about this meeting all through the monotonous hours of the flight, but now that I was alone with him, I found myself at a loss for words. The references to him in my father’s log books had given him an importance in my mind I couldn’t reconcile with this morose-looking individual. ‘Do you recall the name Ferguson?’ I asked. ‘James Finlay Ferguson. He’s dead now, but — ‘

‘The expedition of nineteen hundred. Is that what you mean?’ There was a sudden flicker of interest in the eyes that peered at me through thick horn-rimmed lenses.

Intuition should have told me that a gap in the past was being bridged for me, but my mind was on Briffe and the things my father had written. ‘No, Station G2STO,’ I said. ‘It’s about those radio contacts you had with him.’ But the momentary flicker of interest had vanished from his eyes and his face was blank. ‘Your call sign is VO6AZ, isn’t it?’ I asked him.

He nodded, waiting.

‘G2STO contacted you three times in the past few weeks. Don’t you remember?’

‘Sure I do. It was six times to be exact.’ His voice sounded weary. And then he added, ‘What are you, Police or Air Force?’

I didn’t answer that. I thought maybe he’d talk more readily if he believed I had authority to question him. ‘Can we go somewhere where we can talk?’ I said. It was beginning to rain again and an aircraft had started warming up its engines farther along the apron. ‘There are one or two questions — ‘

‘Questions?’ That seemed to touch him off. ‘I’ve had nothing but questions about this darned ham for the past few days. G2STO! I’m sick of him. The crazy bastard claims he picked up a transmission from Paul Briffe. That’s what you’ve come about, isn’t it?’ His manner was openly hostile. ‘Well, I spent a whole day making out a report on him. The Station Commander here has a copy of it, if you want to see it. I’ve nothing to add. Nothing at all.’

I was too angry to say anything. To come all this way and find that Ledder was completely unco-operative… it was what I’d feared the moment I had seen him waiting there, sullenly, on the apron.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘do you want to see the report?’

I nodded and we began to walk across the tarmac.

‘You know about Briffe?’ He was looking at me. I think he was puzzled by my silence. ‘He couldn’t have made that transmission.’

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘How do I know? Why, the man was dead. How the hell can a man who’s been dead a week suddenly start sending?’

‘You don’t know he’s dead,’ I said.

He stopped then. ‘How do you mean?’

‘He’s been reported dead. That’s all.’

‘That’s all, you say.’ He was peering at me curiously. ‘What are you getting at?’

‘Just that you can’t be absolutely certain he didn’t transmit,’ I told him. ‘Not unless you were listening in for him on his frequency that day.’ I was facing him then. ‘Were you listening in for him at two o’clock on the twenty-ninth?’

‘The time I was given was nine twenty-five.’

‘Yes, of course.’ That was the four and a half hours difference. ‘It would have been nine twenty-five here. But you weren’t listening for him then, were you?’

He shook his head. ‘Why should I? The search had been called off three days before, and I’d no reason to think — ‘

‘Then you can’t be absolutely certain.’

‘I tell you Briffe was dead.’ I had touched his professional pride and he said it angrily. ‘If I thought there’d been a chance of any transmission, I’d have kept constant watch. But there wasn’t. He’d been dead since the twentieth.’

Perhaps he wasn’t so unlike my father when it came to radio. ‘You’ve only the pilot’s word for that,’ I said.

He stared at me and his face had a startled look. ‘Are you suggesting … Look, for Chrissake, Laroche is all right.’ He was looking at me with sudden suspicion. ‘You’re not the Police. You’re not Air Force either. Who are you?’

‘My name’s Ian Ferguson,’ I said. ‘The crazy bastard you spoke of was my father, and I happen to believe that he did pick up some sort of a transmission.’ My words had shocked him and I didn’t give him time to recover, but added quickly, ‘My father made several contacts with you.’ I pulled out the sheet of paper with the entries I had isolated. ‘The first time was on the twenty-third of September, and then again on the twenty-fifth of last month and again on the twenty-sixth. Did he seem crazy to you then?’

‘No, but that was before — ‘

‘He was perfectly rational, was he?’

‘He asked some odd questions,’ he answered evasively.

I hesitated. But this wasn’t the moment to find out what those questions were. ‘Forget for the moment that Briffe has been reported dead,’ I said, ‘and that my father ever picked up this transmission. Cast your mind back to the first time he contacted you. Can you remember what your reaction was?’

‘I tell you, he asked some odd questions,’ he answered uncomfortably. ‘Otherwise there was nothing to it, I guess. He was just another ham.’

‘Look,’ I said, trying to get my own urgency across to him. ‘My father was a radio operator, like you.’ Surely there was some sort of freemasonry between these men whose world was the ether, some sense of brotherhood. ‘I know he was contacting you W/T and that all you get is a lot of dots and dashes, but something must come through, some indication — ‘

‘It’s not the same as Voice, you know. And he always contacted me on Key — never Voice.’

‘Of course he did,’ I said angrily. ‘How else could he contact you? But even so,’ I added, ‘something must come through, surely — some indication of the sort of man he was, his mood, something?’

‘I tell you, it was all on Key. If I’d had a QSO — a Voice contact — then maybe…’ He gave a little shrug. ‘To tell you the truth I didn’t think much about him — not then.’

It was raining harder now, but he made no move to take shelter and I asked him again what he’d thought of my father. ‘You must have formed some impression.’ And when he didn’t answer, I said impatiently, ‘Don’t the men you contact on the air mean anything to you? Surely you must have got some impression — ‘

‘He was just another ham, that’s all.’ He said it irritably. ‘I pick up any number of hams.’

I felt suddenly tired of the whole thing then. My father had meant nothing to this morose Canadian operator, nothing at all. There seemed to be no point in my having made the trip to Goose. In desperation I said, ‘At least you didn’t think him irrational or irresponsible — at that time?’

‘I tell you, I didn’t think anything about him. I was puzzled by his questions. That was all.’

Over two thousand miles, and I was no further forward. I asked him about the questions then and he said it was all set down in the report he’d written. ‘All I could remember, anyway.’ And he added, ‘If you want to come back to the house I could show you the report there. I kept a copy.’

I hesitated because the invitation had been made so grudgingly, but then he looked at his watch and said, ‘It’s after five-thirty now. I guess the Station Commander will have left anyway.’

‘All right.’ I was thinking that perhaps I’d get more out of him at his home, and without a word he turned and led me back across the apron. As we passed the open door of the hangar, Farrow appeared and called to me. ‘If you come into the office now we can get the formalities completed.’ And then to Ledder: ‘Give you a lift down, if you like. The truck will be here any minute.’

‘Okay, thanks,’ Ledder said. ‘Save me a wetting. That’s the worst of this dump,’ he added, turning to me with the ghost of a smile. ‘We’re not allowed a car of our own. A question of gas, I guess. The bay’s frozen half the year and then supplies have to be flown in.’

We went into the office, and whilst my passport was being checked and my suitcase cleared, Farrow inquired about Ledder. ‘Got what you wanted?’ he asked in a whisper.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’

‘Oh, well, you’ve plenty of time. Take-off won’t be till seven in the morning, and that’s presuming they work on that engine all night.’

‘You’re here the night, are you?’ Ledder said. And when Farrow nodded, he turned to me. ‘Then you’d better get some food and come over to my place afterwards. The D.O.T. houses are right across from the hotel.’

The truck had already arrived. We piled in, and a moment later we were bumping along a dirt road overlooking the bay. The airport dropped behind us, desolate in the rain, and below us I caught a glimpse of a jetty with a steamer alongside and beyond that some seaplanes anchored close against the shore, small and indistinct in the fading light. Beside the road bulldozers had exposed the gravel soil in raw slashes, the clearings littered with uprooted trees, and here and there the yellow wood of a new construction was reared up out of the naked land. The whole place had a lost feel about it, raw and ugly like a frontier settlement. It was a gauntlet flung in nature’s face, the scrub spruce crowding it in so that I was conscious all the time of the infinite wastes that lay beyond it.

The hotel was a low, sprawling building made up of a series of wood-frame huts angled out in the form of a star. Thin dwarf scrub lapped round the sandy clearing. The rain had slackened and as we climbed out of the truck, I could see the hills across the bay again, dark and remote and very blue. It had become suddenly colder. Ledder pointed me out his house, just visible through a screen of trees. ‘Come over as soon as you’ve had your supper,’ he said. And then we left him and went inside to be greeted with the hot breath of steam heating turned full on. The place had a bare, barrack air, but surprisingly the rooms were neat and very modern, the food good.

It was almost seven-thirty before I’d finished eating and I came out into a biting wind. It was dark and the stars had a frosty look. A thin pale curtain of northern lights wavered across the sky and the silence was absolute. Through the trees the lights of Ledder’s house had the warm glow of orange curtains.

He came to the door dressed in a vivid, short-sleeved shirt open at the neck. There was a little girl with him and in the room beyond his wife and another woman sat chatting through the blare of the radio. He introduced me and I stood there, feeling awkward because I wanted to talk to him alone. The room was overpoweringly hot, full of very new-looking furniture upholstered in brilliant colours. ‘Would you care for some coffee?’ Mrs Ledder asked.

I shook my head. ‘I’ve just had some.’

She laughed. She was young and jolly, with broad features and fair hair, rather pretty except that she was a little too stockily built. But that may have been because she was going to have a child and was wearing a smock. ‘It’s easy to see you’re not a Canadian, Mr Ferguson. No Canadian would ever refuse a cup of coffee because he’d just had one, that’s for sure. Simon and the boys drink it all the time. Sure you won’t change your mind?’

I shook my head, and Ledder said, ‘Well, if you don’t want any coffee we’ll go down below, shall we? It’ll be quieter there.’ He pulled open a door under the stairs and switched on the light. ‘You must excuse the mess, but I’m just installing some new equipment.’

I followed him down steps that led into a sort of cellar that was probably meant to house just the furnace and hot water boiler. But there was also a desk thrust close against one wall with a mass of radio equipment stacked round it like a barricade. Toys littered the floor, odds and ends of household gear, the remains of a Christmas tree, a pram, and over everything lay a sprinkling of tools and the insides of old radio sets. ‘Is this where you work?’ I asked.

‘Sure. Folk here are always asking me to fix something or other.’

‘I mean — is this where you send from?’

He nodded and went across to the desk. ‘I told you it was a mess.’

I don’t know what I’d expected. Something neat and tidy, I suppose. It seemed incredible that this junk room of a basement should be VO6AZ and that out of this muddle he could have made contact with my father on the other side of the Atlantic. ‘It doesn’t look much I know, not all spick and span like the D.O.T. station.’ He was sitting down and rummaging amongst some papers in a drawer. ‘But I can tell you this, there’s equipment here that Goose Radio hasn’t got.’ He slammed the drawer shut. ‘Here you are,’ he said and held out a typed sheet of foolscap. I took it from him. It was headed: REPORT ON BRITISH AMATEUR RADIO STATION G2STO. ‘You must remember that when I wrote that I knew Briffe was dead,’ he said, his smile half-apologetic. ‘And I didn’t know your father’s name. If I’d known his name it might have made some sense.’

Seated at his desk he seemed a different person, more alive, more vital — I suppose because this was his world, as it had been my father’s. His hand strayed automatically to the key, the way my father’s always had. It was a different key, an American side-operated pattern known as a bug key. But though the key was different, the gesture was the same. ‘As far as I was concerned G2STO was nuts and that’s all there was to it.’ His voice was easy and natural, all the hostility gone out of it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added. ‘But I guess I was pretty tired of the whole business by then. I should have checked his name in the book.’

I stared down at the report, wondering why the name should have made any difference. He had detailed six contacts and two of the three that I didn’t know about concerned Briffe’s sending frequency. ‘I see my father first contacted you on August the eleventh,’ I said. ‘He asked for Briffe’s transmitting time, and you gave it to him. The sending frequency, too.’

‘Sure I did. There was nothing secret about it.’

‘What was the frequency?’

‘Three seven eight zero.’

I got out my sheet of notes. August 11: Briffe. Briffe. Who is Briffe? ‘Is that it?’ I asked, showing him the note I had made.

He leaned forward, looking at it. ‘Seventy-five meter phone band. Net frequency three point seven eight zero. Yes, that’s it.’

It explained the half-obliterated entry I had found. ‘Take a look at that,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t read the date, but it was somewhere towards the end of August.’

‘Three point seven eight zero — nothing, nothing, nothing, always nothing.’ He read it out slowly and then looked up at me. ‘Well?’

‘It means my father was watching on Briffe’s frequency.’

‘It means he was curious, sure. But then so were several other hams. There were two Canadians, one at Burnt Creek and the other right up in Baffin Island, listening regularly. It doesn’t mean anything. They were just interested, that’s all.’

Then what about this contact on September 26? That was the day the search was called off. According to your report my father actually contacted you that evening to check Briffe’s frequency and ask whether there was any other frequency he might use in an emergency. Doesn’t that make it obvious that he was keeping watch for Briffe?’

‘Paul Briffe only had an old forty-eight set. It was operated by a hand generator and a British ham would be more than two thousand miles outside normal range.’

‘Outside of normal range, yes,’ I said impatiently. ‘Nevertheless, my father was keeping watch. You knew that, and yet down here at the bottom of your report you give it as your opinion that G2STO couldn’t possibly have picked up a transmission from Briffe. And you list your reasons — one of them, that, granted freak reception and the transmission having actually been made, the odds against G2STO choosing that particular moment to listen in are too great. What exactly did you mean by that?’

‘Just what I say,’ he answered sharply. ‘Take all those points together — Briffe transmitting when he’s known to be dead, freak reception and finally the remote chance that your father should be keeping watch at that precise moment. It just doesn’t make sense.’

‘Why not? The odds are against it, I admit, but it’s not impossible.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ he exclaimed irritably. ‘The plane crashed on the evening of the fourteenth. We were on constant watch until the twenty-sixth when the search was abandoned — not only us, but the Air Force, Government stations, and a whole bunch of hams. We picked up nothing. And three days after we ceased watch G2STO reports contact. Suppose Briffe did transmit on the twenty-ninth as he says. To be certain of picking up that transmission he’d have had to be listening on net frequency for three whole days, twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four.’ He shook his head. ‘It just isn’t credible.’

‘My father was paralysed,’ I said. ‘He had nothing else to do.’

He stared at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said tonelessly. ‘I guess they didn’t tell us anything about him.’

‘They didn’t tell you then that he died immediately after picking up the transmission?’

‘No. I guess that explains it — why you’re here, I mean. I’d been wondering about that.’

‘That transmission killed him.’

His eyes widened, looking at me curiously. ‘How do you mean?’

I told him then about my father calling out and how he’d somehow struggled to his feet. I told him the whole story, and when I’d finished, he said, ‘I didn’t know about all this.’ His soft, slow voice was shocked, his tone apologetic. ‘They didn’t give any details, not even his name. I been thinking about that over my supper. It was those questions he asked that started me thinking he was nuts. If they’d given me his name I might have understood what he was getting at. As it was those questions just seemed so Goddamned irrelevant.’ He nodded to the report in my hand. ‘Read ‘em. They’re all there. You’ll see what I mean then. You’d have thought he was nuts if they’d come at you out of the blue, so to speak — anybody would.’

I could see his point, for on the second occasion my father had contacted him he’d asked him if Briffe had ever mentioned Lake of the Lion. That was on September 10, and when Ledder had said No and had refused to give him the exact location of Area Cl, he had requested details of the reports or at least the code so that he could follow the progress of the expedition for himself. Finally: He asked me to question Laroche about Lake of the Lion and report his reaction.

‘Why did he want you to question Laroche about the lake?’ I asked. ‘Did he say?’

‘No, he didn’t say. I tell you, they’re damned queer questions, some of them.’

On September 15, the day after the geologists had disappeared, my father had asked him a lot of questions about what had happened and why Briffe had been in such a hurry to reach C2. Had I asked Laroche about Lake of the Lion and what was his reaction? Where was C2? My negative replies seemed to annoy him. On September 23 my father had made contact again, asking for information about Laroche. Could I find out for him whether Canadian geologists still remembered the expedition of 1900 into the Attikonak area? And two days later he had asked about this again. / told him that it was still talked about and added that if he wanted further details he should contact the Department of Mines in Ottawa.

And then there was the final contact in which Ledder had confirmed Briffe’s sending frequency.

I folded the report up and put it down on the desk beside him, conscious that he was watching me, waiting for me to tell him what those questions meant. He expected me to know, and the fact that I didn’t made me feel uncomfortable, so that my throat felt suddenly constricted and my eyes moist. To gain time I asked him about C2. ‘Was it in the Attikonak area?’

He nodded. ‘Sure. The advance party were camped right on the river bank.’ And then he added, ‘What was his interest in the Attikonak River, do you know that? And this Lake of the Lion he asked about?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’ It was a confession that I’d never bothered to get very close to my father. ‘My mother might know,’ I murmured uncomfortably.

He was puzzled now. ‘But those questions make sense to you, don’t they.’

I didn’t know what to say. It came down to this, that Ledder would only be convinced that the message was genuine if I could explain the motive behind my father’s questions, and I didn’t know the motive. That belonged to the map and the books and the relics of the Canadian North, all the secret world I’d never shared. It’s a long story. That was the only reference he’d ever made to it. If only I’d persisted then. With a little patience I could Have dug it out of him.

Ledder had picked up the report and was staring at it. ‘I could kick myself,’ he said, suddenly tossing it down amongst the litter of papers. ‘I’d only to look him up in the book. But I’d lent my copy to somebody in the D.O.T. and I just didn’t bother to go and find him and get it back.’ He had misunderstood my silence. ‘It never occurred to me,’ he added, looking up at me apologetically.

‘What never occurred to you?’ I asked. There was something here that I didn’t understand.

That his name was important,’ he answered.

‘Important? How do you mean?’

‘Well, if I’d known it was James Finlay Ferguson …’ He broke off abruptly, staring at me with a puzzled frown. ‘He was related, wasn’t he?’

‘Related?’ I didn’t know what he was getting at. ‘Related to whom?’

‘Why, to the Ferguson that got killed up in the Attikonak area in 1900.’

I stared at him. So that was it. The expedition of 1900. ‘Was there a Ferguson on that expedition?’ I asked.

‘Sure there was. James Finlay Ferguson.’ He was looking at me as though he thought it was I who was crazy now. ‘You mean you don’t know about it?’

I shook my head, my mind busy searching back through my childhood to things I’d half forgotten — my mother’s fears, my father’s obsession with the country. This was the cause of it all then.

‘But the name?’ He said it almost angrily, as though he were being cheated of something that would add interest to the monotony of life in this distant outpost. ‘And him asking all those questions? You mean it’s just coincidence that the names were the same? Was it just because of that your father was interested?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, it wasn’t that.’ And I added hastily, ‘It’s just that my father never talked about it.’ I, too, felt cheated — cheated because he hadn’t shared the past with me when it belonged to me and was my right.

‘Never talked about it? Why ever not?’ Ledder was leaning forward. ‘Let’s get this straight. Are they related or not — your father and this Ferguson who went into Labrador?’

‘Yes, of course they are,’ I answered. ‘They must be.’ There was no other explanation. It was a pity that my grandmother had died when I was still a child. I would like to have talked to her now.

‘What relationship?’ Ledder was staring up at me. ‘Do you know?’

‘His father, I think.’ It must have been his father for I hadn’t any great uncles.

‘Your grandfather, in fact.’

I nodded. And it would have been grandmother Alexandra who would have given him the names of James Finlay. I was thinking it was strange that my father had been born in the year 1900.

‘But how do you know it’s your grandfather?’ Ledder asked. ‘How do you know when you didn’t even know there was an expedition back at the beginning of the century?’

I told him about the sextant and the paddle and the other relics hanging on the wall, and about my grandmother and the house in Scotland, and how she’d come to me in the night when I was barely old enough to remember. ‘I think she must have been going to tell me about that expedition.’ Talking to him about it, everything seemed to fall into place — my father’s obsession, everything. And then I was asking him about the expedition. ‘Can you give me the details?’ I said. ‘What happened to Ferguson?’

‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘In fact, I don’t know very much about it — only what the Company geologist told me. There were two of them went in, from Davis Inlet. Two white men, no Indians. One was a prospector, the other a trapper, and it ended in tragedy. The trapper only just escaped with his life. The prospector — that was Ferguson — he died. That’s all I know.’ He turned to the desk and picked up his log, searching quickly through it. ‘Here you are. Here’s the geologist’s reply: Expedition 1900 well known because one of the two men, James Finlay Ferguson, was lost.’

‘And he was a prospector?’

‘So Tim Baird said.’

‘Was he prospecting for gold?’ I was remembering that my mother had once said I wasn’t to ask about my grandfather… an old reprobate, she had called him, who had come to a bad end and wasted his life searching for gold.

‘I don’t know what he was prospecting for. Tim didn’t say.’

But it didn’t matter. I was quite certain it was gold, just as I was quite certain that this was the past that had bitten so deep into my father in his loneliness. It was just a pity that I’d never bothered to get the story out of him.

‘It’s odd he never talked to you about it,’ Ledder said, and I realized that he was still uncertain about it all.

‘I told you, he couldn’t talk.’ And I added, ‘It’s so long since he was wounded that now I can’t even recall the sound of his voice.’

‘But he could write.’

‘It was an effort,’ I said.

‘And he left no record?’

‘Not that I know of. At least, I didn’t find one when I looked through his things. I suppose it was too complicated or something. That’s what he said, anyway. What else did the geologist tell you?’

‘Just what I’ve read out to you — nothing else.’ He was sitting there, doodling with a pencil on the cover of his log.

‘What about this man Tim Baird? Did he tell you anything else — the name of the other man, or where they went or what they were looking for?’

‘No. I guess he didn’t know much about it. I’ve told you all I know.’ He shook his head, frowning down at the pattern he was tracing. ‘Dam’ queer him not telling you anything about it, and the thing an obsession with him.’

‘That was because of my mother,’ I said. ‘I think she must have made him promise. She didn’t want me involved. I think she hated Labrador,’ I added, remembering the scene on the platform as the train was about to leave. And here I was in Labrador.

My mind switched back to the questions my father had asked and I picked up the report again. I was thinking of the map above the transmitter, the name Lake of the Lion pencilled on it. ‘Did you ask Laroche about Lake of the Lion?’

‘No. I never had the chance.’ And then Ledder had stopped doodling and was looking up at me. ‘You know, it wasn’t so much the strangeness of his questions that made me think him crazy. It was this obsession with an old story — ‘

‘My father wasn’t crazy,’ I said sharply. I was still wondering why he should have been so interested in Laroche’s reaction.

‘No, I guess he wasn’t.’ Ladder’s voice was slow, almost reluctant. ‘If I’d known his name was James Finlay Ferguson it would have made some sense.’ He was excusing himself again. But then, after a pause, he said, ‘But even so, if he wasn’t crazy …’ He left the sentence unfinished, staring down at the desk and fiddling with the morse key. ‘Did he keep a log?’ he asked at length.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. And I gave him the sheet of notes, glad that I’d isolated them from the actual books. ‘Those are all the entries that concern Briffe, right from the time my father first picked up your transmissions until that final message.’ I tried to explain to him again that writing had been difficult for him and that my father usually just jotted down a note to remind him of the substance of each transmission, but he didn’t seem to be listening. He was going carefully through the notes, sucking at a pencil and occasionally nodding his head as though at some recollection.

Finally he pushed the sheet away and leaned back, tilting his chair against the wall and staring across the room. ‘Queer,’ he murmured. ‘They make sense, and then again in places they don’t make sense.’ And after a moment he leaned forward again. Take this, for instance.’ He pulled the sheet towards him again and pointed to the entry for September 18 which read: LAROCHE. No, it can’t be. I must be mad. ‘What’s he mean — do you know?’

I shook my head.

‘And this on the twenty-sixth, the day after Laroche reached Menihek — L–L-L–L-L–IMPOSSIBLE.’ He looked up at me as he read it aloud, but there was nothing I could tell him. ‘Was he much alone?’ he asked.

‘There was my mother.’ I knew what he was getting at.

‘But that room you described and the hours he spent there every day with his radio. He was alone there?’ And when I nodded, he said, ‘We get men like that up here. The emptiness and the loneliness — they get obsessions. Bushed we call it.’ And then he asked me whether I’d brought the log books with me.

It was a request I had been dreading. One glance at them and he’d begin thinking my father was crazy again. But if I were to get him to help me he’d a right to see them. ‘They’re in my suitcase,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Could I see them please?’ He was reading through the notes again, tapping at the paper with his pencil, his lips pursed, absorbed in his thoughts. He evidently sensed my hesitation for he said, ‘Do you want a torch?’ He reached up to the high top of the desk and handed me one. ‘Just walk straight out. Ethel won’t mind.’ And then he was staring down at the notes again.

The two women were still there in the room upstairs. They stopped talking as I came in and Mrs Ledder said, ‘Ready for your coffee yet?’ The room looked very gay and cheerful after the bare, untidy basement.

‘I’m just going across to get something from the hotel,’ I explained.

She nodded, smiling at me, and I went out into the night. The stars were misting over and the cold had a harshness in it that I’d never experienced before.

I got the log books out of my suitcase and when I returned to the basement room, Ledder was hunched over the desk, writing. He had the radio on and through the crackle of atmospherics a voice was talking in a foreign language. ‘Brazil,’ he said, looking up at me. ‘Never have any difficulty getting South America.’ He switched the receiver off and I gave him the log books, trying to tell him that the drawings and doodlings were irrelevant. But he waved my explanations aside, and I stood and watched him work steadily back through the pages. ‘He was alone a lot, that’s for sure,’ he muttered, and my heart sank.

‘He just did it to pass the time,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Sure. It means nothing.’ He reached out to one of the cubbyholes of the desk. ‘Look at my pad.’ And he showed it to me all covered with doodles. ‘You got to do something whilst you’re waiting to pick up a transmission. It’s like telephoning.’ He smiled at me, and that was when I began to like him.

‘What sort of a person is Laroche?’ It was the question that had been in my mind ever since Farrow had pointed out to me the implications of that transmission.

‘Laroche?’ He seemed to have to drag his mind back. ‘Oh, I don’t know. A French Canadian, but a decent guy. Tallish, hair going slightly grey. I’ve only seen him once. He kept the Beaver down at the sea plane base and our paths didn’t cross. It was Tim Baird I kept in touch with. Bill Baird’s brother. He was base manager — looked after stores and all their requirements.’ He had turned to the page on which the final message had been written and he read it slowly, tapping his teeth with the pencil. ‘Search for a narrow lake with a rock shaped like…’ He read it aloud slowly and looked up at me. ‘A rock shaped like what?’

I didn’t say anything. I wanted to see if his mind would follow the track that mine had followed.

He was looking back through that last log book. ‘All these drawings of lions. I wonder if Laroche knows anything about that Lake of the Lion. Could that message have finished — a rock shaped like a lion? Here’s a drawing that shows a lion set into a rock. And another here.’ He looked up at me. ‘You said something about a map of Labrador over his desk. Was Lake of the Lion marked on it?’

‘He’d pencilled it in, yes,’ I said and explained how it had been enclosed in a rough circle covering the area between the Attikonak and the Hamilton.

He nodded. ‘And C2 was in that area.’ He was toying with the bug key and he suddenly slapped his hand on the desk. ‘Hell! No harm in telling them. Where’s your plane going on to?’

‘Montreal.’ I waited now, holding my breath.

‘Okay. The Company offices are there.’ He hesitated a moment longer, frowning and shaking his head. ‘It’s crazy,’ he muttered. ‘But you never know. There’s crazy enough things happen all the time up here in the North.’ He pulled the paper on which he had been writing closer to the key, read it through and then reached over to the transmitter. The pilot light glowed red and there was a faint hum as the set warmed up. And then he put the earphones on and hitched his chair closer to the desk. A moment later and his thumb was tapping at the key and I heard the buzz of his morse signal as he began to send.

I lit a cigarette. I felt suddenly exhausted. But at the same time I was relaxed. I had achieved something, at any rate. I had persuaded a man who had been hostile at first to take action. But it was all to be done over again at Montreal — the story of how my father had died, the explanations. All to be told again, over and over again perhaps. I wondered whether it was worth it, conscious of the size of the country out there in the darkness beyond the airport — the wildness and the emptiness of it. They’d both be dead by now surely. They couldn’t possibly have survived a whole week. But it was a chance, and because of my father and because of something in my blood, I knew I had to go on with it.

‘Well, that’s that, I guess.’ Ledder switched off the transmitter and pulled his earphones off. That’s what I told them.’ He handed me the slip of paper on which he’d pencilled his message. ‘It’s up to the Company now.’ He seemed relieved.

Possibility G2STO picked up transmission Briffe should not be ignored, I read. Urgently advise you see Ferguson’s son … I looked across at him. ‘I can’t thank you enough,’ I said.

He seemed suddenly embarrassed. ‘I’m only doing what I think right,’ he murmured. ‘There’s an outside chance, and I think they ought to take it.’

‘The authorities don’t think so. They think my father was mad.’ And I told him then about the expert’s report. I’d nothing to lose now the message was sent.

But he only smiled. ‘Maybe I can understand him better than they can. They’re a queer lot, radio operators,’ he added, and the smile extended to his eyes.

‘And it’s technically possible?’ I asked. ‘He could have picked up that message?’

‘Sure he could.’ And he added, ‘It would be freak reception, of course. But if a message was transmitted, then he could certainly have picked it up. Look.’ And he drew a little diagram for me, showing that, however faint the signal was, the waves would still rebound from the ionosphere to the earth and back again to the ionosphere. ‘They’d travel like that all the way round the earth, and if your aerial happened to be set up at one of the points of rebound, then it would be possible to pick up the transmission, even if it were six thousand miles away. It’s just one of those things.’

‘And the transmitter was with Briffe in the aircraft when it crashed?’

‘Yes. But the plane sank and they didn’t salvage anything. Laroche came out with nothing but the clothes he stood up in. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.’

Possible, but not probable! And always there seemed to be the blank wall of Laroche to block any credence being given to my father’s message. ‘You’ll see I’ve asked them to meet you at Dorval Airport and I’ve given them your flight number,’ he said. ‘I’ve also asked them to confirm through D.O.T. Communications. I don’t expect we’ll get a reply tonight, but it should come through fairly early in the morning.’

I nodded. He couldn’t have done more. And at that moment his wife called down the stairs to say that Mrs Karnak had gone and she’d made some fresh coffee for us.

We went up then, and over coffee in the bright warmth of their living-room, he gave me the first detailed account of Briffe’s disappearance. He told it, of course, from the point of view of a man whose contact with the outside world was exclusively by radio. Like my father, he was confined to scraps of information plucked from the ether, to news broadcasts and messages from planes flying to search. But he was much closer to it. He had even met the men who figured in the disaster — Briffe twice, Laroche once, and he knew a good deal about Bill Baird from talks with his brother, Tim, the Company’s base manager.

On September 12, Briffe had called for an air lift from Area Cl, which was Lake Disappointment, up to C2, on the banks of the Attikonak River. This request was made in the course of his usual daily report. He had completed the survey at Disappointment. ‘Aptly named was how he described it.’ Ledder smiled. And then he went on to explain that the survey party consisted of five men and the procedure in making the hop forward to the next area was always the same — three of the five men, Sagon, Hatch and Blanchard, would go forward as an advance party to establish the new camp, together with as much of the stores as the floatplane would carry and one canoe; Briffe and Baird would move up on the second flight with the transmitter, the other canoe and the rest of the stores.

This was the procedure adopted on September 14, and Ledder was now more or less amplifying my father’s notes for me. The air lift was actually called for September 13, but the weather had been bad and Laroche had decided to wait. However, the following day it was better and he took off early in the morning. Ledder had actually seen the little Beaver floatplane scudding a broad arrow out across the still waters of the bay, had watched it take off, circle and disappear into the haze beyond Happy Valley, headed west. He was off duty that day and after about an hour he tuned in on the 75-metre band. But Briffe didn’t come through until 1133. Laroche had arrived, but thick fog had closed in on the camp and was preventing take off for C2. The delay in transmission had been due to condensation on the terminals of the hand generator.

He immediately reported the delay in the flight to Montreal. It was apparently the normal procedure for either himself or his wife to keep a radio watch and report regularly to Montreal whenever a supply flight was made or the party were being air lifted to a new location. He reported again at 1230, Briffe having come through with the news that the fog had lifted and the Beaver had taken off with the advance party.

After that he heard nothing from Briffe until 1500 hours when the survey party leader came through with the information that the Beaver had not returned and the fog had clamped down again. It was Ledder’s report of this information to Montreal that my father had picked up. ‘I began to get worried then,’ Ledder said. ‘We had started picking up reports of a storm belt moving in from the Atlantic and things didn’t look so good. I asked Briffe to report every hour.’

At 1600 Briffe came through again. The fog had cleared, but the Beaver had still not returned. And then, at 1700, Briffe reported the plane safely back. Laroche had come down on a lake about ten miles short of C2 just before the fog closed in and had taken off again as soon as it had lifted. The advance party were now at C2 and Briffe’s only concern was to get himself and Baird and the rest of the equipment up there before nightfall. ‘I told him,’ Ledder said, ‘that I didn’t think it a good idea on account of the weather. He then asked me for a met. forecast.’ He was turning over the pages of his log which he had brought up with him. ‘Here you are.’ He passed it across to me. Weather worsening rapidly. Ceiling 1,000, visibility 500, heavy rain. Expect airfield close down here shortly. In-coming flights already warned and west-bound trans-Atlantic traffic grounded Keflavik. Rain will turn to snow over Labrador plateau. Winds tonight easterly 20 knots plus. Tomorrow reaching 40 knots; rain, sleet or snow on high ground Visibility nil at times.

‘And he decided to go on?’ I asked.

‘Yes, it was either that or stay at Disappointment, and the lake had poor holding ground, so that it meant the possible loss of the floatplane. In the end he decided to take a chance on it and make the flight.’

I remembered my father’s comment. He had called Briffe a fool, and he added: What’s driving him? Had there been something besides concern for the floatplane? ‘The pilot has the final word, surely?’

‘I guess so,’ Ledder said. ‘But by all accounts, Laroche isn’t frightened of taking a chance.’

‘He could have returned to base here.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘A twenty knot head wind and the risk that he’d be short of gas and unable to locate Goose. Maybe he thought going on to C2 the lesser of the two evils.’ And then he went on to tell me how Briffe had failed to come through as arranged at 2200 and how he and his wife had kept watch all that night. ‘But he never came through,’ Ledder said.

And in the morning conditions had been so bad that nothing could get in to Goose, let alone fly a search over the Labrador plateau. It had been like that for two days, and then one of the floatplanes from the base had flown in to C2 and had come back with confirmation that Briffe and his party were missing. The search was on then, with the R.C.A.F. contributing four Lancasters out of the Nova Scotia Air Rescue Station and the Iron Ore people flying a search out of Menihek.

He was giving me details of the search when his wife reminded him that they had promised to be at the Officers’ Mess at nine. ‘Perhaps Mr Ferguson would like to come with us,’ she suggested. But I hadn’t any Canadian money and, anyway, I wanted time to myself to think over what he had told me. I excused myself by saying I wanted to turn in early, finished my coffee and got up.

‘I’ll get the Company’s reply to you as soon as it comes through,’ Ledder said as he saw me to the door. ‘If there’s anything else I can do, let me know.’

I thanked him and went down the wooden steps, out into the night. ‘Good luck!’ he called after me, and then the door closed and I was alone in the darkness. The stars were gone now and it was snowing. It was so still I could almost hear the flakes falling, and without a torch it took me some time to find my way back to the hotel.

Actually I didn’t get to bed till almost midnight, for I sat up in the warmth of my room, making notes and thinking about what I should say to the Company officials. I suppose I was tired. At any rate, I didn’t wake up in the morning until a quarter to seven and I jumped out of bed in a panic, convinced that I had missed my flight. I hurried into my clothes and went along to Farrow’s room. To my relief he was still there, lying on his bed in his shirt and trousers. ‘I was afraid I’d missed you,’ I said as he opened his eyes, regarding me sleepily.

‘Relax,’ he murmured. ‘I won’t go without you.’ And he added, ‘Take-off won’t be till nine-thirty or later. There was no point in waking you.’ He turned over then and went to sleep again.

The truck called for us at nine and we hung around on the airfield until almost ten-thirty whilst the maintenance crew, who had been working most of the night, finished fixing the engine. The snow had gone and the air was cool and crisp, the hills across the bay sharply defined under a cold, grey sky streaked with cloud. There was a steely quality about Goose that morning, the menace of winter in the air. The country round was all greys and blacks, the scrub spruce unrelieved by any colour. The harshness of it was almost frightening.

And there was no word from Ledder. I told Farrow how Ledder had reacted when I had shown him my father’s log books, and he phoned Communications for me. But Ledder wasn’t there and there was no message for me.

We took off at ten-twenty and I had still heard nothing. I stood in the alley of the flight deck, watching Goose drop away from us below the port wing as we made a climbing turn. All ahead of us was a desolate waste of spruce with the thread of the Hamilton River winding through it. Then we were in cloud, and when we came out above it there was still no sun and the cloud layer below us was flat like a grey mantle of snow.

Later, watching from the flight engineer’s seat, there were rifts in the cloud layer and I could see the ground below, looking strangely close, though I knew it couldn’t be for we were flying at 6,600 feet. It was all ridged the way sand is when the tide is out, but the ridges were dark and grim-looking, with patches of exposed rock worn smooth by the tread of Ice Age glaciers, and all between was water, flat like steel and frosted white at the edges.

We flew on and on and the country below never changed. It was the grimmest land I had ever seen. The land God gave to Cain! It seemed as though it could never end, but would run on like that for ever, and after a while the flight engineer tapped me on the shoulder and I went back into the fuselage and sat down on the freight, feeling cold and depressed.

I had been there about an hour when the radio operator came aft to say that Farrow wanted a word with me. ‘We just got a message from Goose.’

Back in the flight deck alley, Farrow handed me a message slip. On it was written: Presd. McGovern Mng amp; Ex now at Iron Ore Terminal. Wishes question Ferguson earliest. Can you land him Seven Islands? ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ Farrow shouted to me.

‘Seven Islands? But that’s just an Indian fishing village,’ I said.

‘You think so?’ He laughed. ‘Then I guess you’re in for a shock. It’s quite a town. The Iron Ore Company of Canada is building a railway north from there to get at the ore in the centre of Labrador. Worth seeing since you’re an engineer. About the biggest project on this continent right now.’

So the line my father had pencilled on his map was a railway. ‘But can you land there?’ I asked doubtfully.

‘Sure. They got a good airstrip. And they need it. They’re supplying their forward camps entirely by air lift, flying everything in — even cement for the dam at Menihek and bulldozers for the Knob Lake ore deposits.’ He glanced back at me over his shoulder. ‘But I won’t be able to wait for you there. You understand that? You’ll be on your own from then on.’Ť I didn’t know what to say. The plane was suddenly immensely precious to me, a familiar, friendly oasis in the immensity of Canada that was beginning to roll itself out before me. To abandon it would be like abandoning a ship in mid-Atlantic. ‘Better make up your mind,’ Farrow shouted. ‘We got to alter course right now if we’re to drop you off at Seven Islands.’ He was watching me curiously. I suppose he saw my dilemma, for he added, ‘It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You’ve stirred ‘em up, and you can’t go higher than the president of the Company.’

There was nothing for it. I’d known that as soon as I had read the message. ‘All right,’ I said. And then, because that sounded ungrateful, I added, ‘You’re sure it’s all right for you to land there?’

‘Who’s to know?’ He grinned and pointed ahead through his side windows to where a pale glimmer like a cloud or mist showed along the horizon. ‘There’s the St Lawrence now. Another hour and we’ll be very close to Seven Islands. Okay?’

I nodded.

He called back instructions to the navigator and the radio operator, and then looked at me with a grin and added, ‘Who knows -1 may even get a mention in despatches if those poor devils are lifted out alive.’

A mood of optimism swept over me then and, as I went back into the fuselage, I was thinking that some divine providence must be guiding me.

The mood was still with me more than an hour later when we began to descend. I felt the check as the flaps went down and then the engines were throttled back and a moment later we touched down. We taxied for a while, bumping heavily over rough ground, and then we stopped, the engines quietly ticking over.

Farrow himself came back down the fuselage and opened the doors for me. ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘And see they look after you. We’ll be in Montreal until midday tomorrow if you want a ride back.’

‘Of course I want to go back with you,’ I shouted. I was appalled at the thought that he might return to England without me.

He clapped me on the shoulder and I jumped out into the backwash of air from the slowly turning props.

‘I’ll be there,’ I shouted to him.

The door slammed shut and I hurried clear, to stand a little way off, watching, with my suitcase gripped in my hand. Farrow was back at the controls. He waved to me through the windshield. The engines roared, kicking up a great swirl of dust, and then the machine that had brought me across the Atlantic went lumbering away over the hard-baked dirt of the airfield, out to the runway-end.

I watched it take off — watched it until it was a speck in the sky. I hated to see Farrow go. I was alone now, and there was nobody here I knew. I stood there for a moment, waiting and turning the loose change over in my pocket. I’d a few pounds in my wallet, but that was all. Nobody came out to meet me.