Zodiac Station

Sixteen

‘But he made it.’

Franklin stood in the centre of the cabin, staring down at Kennedy. The mummified face looked right back. If there was any expression there, the bandages hid it pretty well.

‘Is there something you want to tell me, Captain?’

No point bluffing. ‘Anderson’s on this ship. He’s hurt, but he’s alive. We picked him up off the ice a few hours ago. He’s the one who told us about the fire at Zodiac.’

Kennedy reached out and scrabbled for the water on the side table. He nearly knocked it over.

‘Let me.’ Franklin tipped the plastic cup to Kennedy’s lips. The water slurped and gurgled in his throat.

‘Have you got someone watching him?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And would he be carrying a gun?’

‘You think—’

Kennedy gripped Franklin’s wrist. Water slopped over the cup’s edge and soaked the bandages.

‘If Anderson’s on-board, you’ll need all the protection you’ve got.’

‘Was he responsible …?’

Kennedy released his grip. ‘Have you spoken to Bob Eastman yet?’

‘He’s still unconscious.’

‘He knows more than me.’

Franklin refilled the cup at the washstand faucet and put it back beside the bed. He picked up the stateroom phone and put in a call to Santiago, on the bridge. Then he sat down.

‘Just tell me it how it happened.’

I opened the Twin Otter’s door, just as I described. Up front, I could see Trond, the pilot, slumped down in his seat. His harness had broken — we found it later several metres from the aircraft. He had a cut to his head, but he was OK. With a little help from Greta, he was able to walk away.

Anderson lay on his stretcher — untouched. At the risk of offending his guardian angel, I’ll take some of the credit for that. I’d worried so much about the flight, I’d wrapped him up like a china doll. I checked his vital signs — all good. The only thing that had come off in the crash was the gas-supply mask. I left it off. If he’d survived that, perhaps he was ready to wake up.

I’m making light of it now, because no one was badly hurt. At the time, we were all shaken, especially the students. Back at the Platform, they gathered in the mess: lots of tears and hugging and cups of tea. I wandered around dispensing comfort and chocolate. When they weren’t looking, I popped another diazepam. Works better than tea, for me.

In between, I shuttled back to check on my patients. As I went past the radio room, I saw Greta sitting in front of the computer talking to someone. I assumed it must be Anderson’s kid — she never called anyone normally. God only knows what she said to him.

Anderson was still asleep in the medical room; Trond was awake, but I’d made him lie down in a bunk to be sure he hadn’t any internal damage.

‘What happened?’ I asked him, shining a light in his pupil.

‘Fuel leak.’ He grimaced. ‘I don’t know how. Everything was checked in Tromsø before we left.’

‘Could you have hit something when you took off? A piece of gravel? A lump of ice?’

‘I doubt it.’ He winced as I changed the dressing on his forehead. ‘But the aircraft is old. Perhaps a seal had broken, or one of the tubes came loose.’

‘Accidents happen,’ I said. If you’re a doctor, you learn to talk in clichés.

‘Yeah,’ he said heavily. Almost as if he didn’t believe me.

There’d been one other person on the plane — though he didn’t much care. When Trond and Anderson were settled, Greta and I drove out to the wreck and fetched in Hagger. There was something grotesque in the way he’d been carted around since he died — sledges, Sno-Cats, crashed planes and still not at rest. Like something out of Faulkner.

There was no telling how much longer he’d have to wait for his eternal peace. The South Pole gang only keep one plane to service Zodiac; the rest are in Antarctica. They’d need a few days, at least, to dig up a replacement, and even then they’d want to take out the wounded first. So I put him on ice.

The cold store’s a spooky place. The ice cover around the base itself isn’t deep enough, so they put it in a glacier just over the hill. As you know, the glacier moves, so every season they have to build a new one. They dig a trench about two metres deep in the ice, cut some steps down to it, then roof it with plywood. As soon as the first snow falls, the plywood’s covered and frozen into the glacier. The room underneath stays chilled steady at ten below, no need for electricity. And if you run out of space, you can just carve out more room from the side walls, like the ancients quarrying out catacombs as they filled up with the dead.

As I say, it’s a spooky place. The snow accumulates, the cave sinks deeper and the stairs get longer. The roof sags under the weight. The only light comes from a few bare bulbs strung from the ceiling; the shadows loom large, especially down the side tunnels. Samples wrapped in plastic rustle as you go past, and it seems to go on for ever.

I loaded Hagger on to the dolly and pushed him to the far end. The body bag I’d put him in was a brittle thing, probably twenty years old, and all that banging about in the crash had torn big holes in it. You could see him inside.

I sliced it off with a box cutter. Underneath, he was still wearing the clothes he’d had on when he died — right down to his glove liners. I hadn’t examined the body properly when Greta and Tom brought him in. Checked the pulse, signed the certificate. Again, I noticed the clothes were stiff and heavy with ice, as if they’d been drenched and then frozen. If he’d been working on sea ice and fallen through, I could have understood it — but he’d been halfway up a glacier.

Down in the dark, something offended me about those clothes. I unzipped the coat, pulled off the hat and worked his hands free of the gloves. It was ridiculous, sentimental, but I thought he deserved a more traditional pose. I lifted his arm and tried to fold it across his chest.

The arm was frozen solid. I bent it as delicately as possible, terrified of snapping it. Too gingerly: it slipped out of my grip. I lifted it again, and as it came into the light I saw the palm of his hand.

It was covered in blood.

I would have screamed, if it hadn’t been for the diazepam. The drug numbed me better than the cold. Instead, I examined the body with narcotic detachment. Hagger had died of a fall; there’d been no puncture wounds. So where could the blood have come from?

It wasn’t blood. Shining my head torch on his hands, I could see the stain was too pink for that. Even in the poor light, it made a shocking splash of colour on his pale skin.

‘Have you started robbing graves now?’

Annabel’s voice was enough to lower the temperature in that room another couple of degrees. I turned slowly. She stood at the bottom of the stairs, framed by the blue light seeping through the ice.

‘The plane shook him about. I’m tidying him up.’

She advanced down the long tunnel. Her breath made icy clouds under the lamps. She stopped at a metal rack full of ice cores and started checking the labels.

‘I had a month’s worth of ice on that flight. Now all it’s good for is cocktails.’

‘And was that the most important thing on the plane, do you think?’

She didn’t rise to the bait. ‘You can’t fix the ice cores with paracetamol and a sticky plaster. But …’ she pulled out a semicircular tube of ice ‘… we back it up. We split the cores down the middle with a table saw, so if there’s any doubt about the lab sample, we can double-check against the original.’

She counted them off, then swore. ‘One of them’s missing.’

‘I didn’t take it,’ I said reflexively. Probably sounded guilty as sin. I glanced at the body behind me. I thought how grudges stack up. ‘Could Hagger have taken it?’

‘The one that’s missing is a deep core, right from the glacier bed. Martin wouldn’t have been interested.’

‘Hagger’s got something on his hands,’ I said. I twisted the arm so she could see his palm. ‘Do you know what that is?’

She gave it a quick glance. ‘Do you?’

I did. But I wanted her to say it. ‘Some kind of stain.’

‘It’s Rhodamine B. Fluorescent dye. We use it to measure flow through the glaciers. It’s so concentrated, you can pour fifty mil into the top of a glacier, and a few hours later you’ll find it coming out the bottom.’

She played with the end of her hair. ‘It stains like hell if you spill it.’

‘Who else uses it on Utgard?’

‘My students.’

I let his hand drop and stood. ‘Any thoughts how Hagger got it on himself?’

‘We haven’t used it here since last summer. Rhodamine’s only any good in the ablation season — i.e., when there’s meltwater.’

I wondered if it had anything to do with the water that had soaked Hagger’s clothes. I decided it was time to be blunt.

‘What have you got on your hands, Annabel? Blood, maybe?’

She stared at me in disbelief. ‘God, you’re melodramatic. And mean.’

‘You were supposed to be Hagger’s partner on Saturday. You were alone with Tom Anderson when he fell in the moulin.’ Without really thinking about it, I’d started to move towards her. Annabel took a step back.

‘Do you think I didn’t think of that? I’ve seen the way everyone looks at me. For what it’s worth, I was as shocked about Anderson as anyone. I had to pull him out of that hole. As for Martin …’

‘As for Martin …’ I prompted.

‘He was an arrogant shit. But that doesn’t make him worse than any other man on this base.’

‘Present company excluded.’

‘Do you really think …?’ She laughed, as if the whole idea was too ridiculous to contemplate. ‘Maybe I should be flattered you think I’m such a stone-cold bitch I could do it. I suppose you’ve invented a motive.’

‘Revenge.’

‘For what?’ I made a you-know sort of gesture with my eyes. ‘That?’ Another incredulous laugh. ‘He was a fifty-something man with three divorces, receding hair and a career going down the toilet. Life was getting its own revenge on him.’

‘Then how do you explain the dye on his hands?’

‘I can’t.’

She held my gaze, defiant across the frozen room. The light flickered; the roof seemed to sag in. Suddenly, what had felt so certain a minute ago melted away.

‘Did you have any more mud to throw? Or have you finished?’

I mumbled something. She advanced towards me so that her face glowed yellow in the light.

‘Do you think this is easy? I’m the only woman scientist on a station full of men. Technically, I’m sure you’re all brilliant, but socially you’re hairy Neanderthals who haven’t emerged from the last ice age yet. Everyone here looks at me like I’m a fucking piece of steak they want to get their paws on.’

She moved to go, then thought of one more thing.

‘You know why you want to believe that I killed Hagger? Because the idea that a woman would kill a man for love flatters your egos. It makes you think you’re worth something.’