‘You remained in charge throughout, Dr Jolly?’ I asked.
‘Bless my soul, no. Captain Folsom, here, was in a pretty shocked condition for the first twenty-four hours, but when he’d recovered from that he took over. I’m only a pill-roller, old boy. As a leader of men and a dashing man of action — well, no, quite frankly, old top, I don’t see myself in that light at all.’
‘You did damned well, all the same.’ I looked round the company. ‘That most of you won’t be scarred for life is due entirely to the quick and highly-efficient treatment Dr Jolly gave you under almost impossible circumstances. Well, that’s all. Must be a pretty painful experience for all of you, having to relive that night again. I can’t see that we can ever hope to find out how the fire started, just one of those chance in a million accidents, what the insurance companies call an act of God. I’m certain, Hewson, that no shadow of negligence attaches to you and that your theory on the outbreak of fire is probably correct. Anyway, although we’ve paid a hellishly high cost, we’ve learnt a lesson — never again to site a main fuel store within a hundred yards of the camp.’
The meeting broke up. Jolly bustled off to the sick-bay, not quite managing to conceal his relish at being the only medical officer aboard who wasn’t hors de combat. He had a busy couple of hours ahead of him — changing bandages on burns, checking Benson, X-raying Zabrinski’s broken ankle and resetting the plaster.
I went to my cabin, unlocked my case, took out a small wallet, relocked my case and went to Swanson’s cabin. I noticed that he wasn’t smiling quite so often now as when I’d first met him in Scotland. He looked up as I came in in answer to his call and said without preamble: ‘If those two men still out in the camp are in any way fit to be moved I want them both aboard at once. The sooner we’re back in Scotland and have some law in on this the happier I’ll be. I warned you that this investigation of yours would turn up nothing. Lord knows how short a time it will be before someone else gets clobbered. God’s sake, Carpenter, we have a murderer running loose.’
‘Three things,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s going to get clobbered any more, that’s almost for certain. Secondly, the law, as you call it, wouldn’t be allowed to touch it. And in the third place, the meeting this morning was of some use. It eliminated three potential suspects.’
‘I must have missed something that you didn’t.’
‘Not that. I knew something that you didn’t. I knew that under the floor of the laboratory were about forty Nife cells in excellent condition — but cells that had been used.’
‘The hell you did,’ he said softly. ‘Sort of forgot to tell me, didn’t you?’
‘In this line of business I never tell anyone anything unless I think he can help me by having that knowledge.’
‘You must win an awful lot of friends and influence an awful lot of people,’ Swanson said dryly.
‘It gets embarrassing. Now, who could have used cells? Only those who left the bunkhouse from time to time to send out the S O S’s. That cuts out Captain Folsom and the Harrington twins — there’s no question of any of the three of them having left the bunkhouse at any time. They weren’t fit to. So that leaves Hewson, Naseby, Dr Jolly, Jeremy, Hassard and Kinnaird. Take your choice. One of them is a murderer.’
‘Why did they want those extra cells?’ Swanson asked. ‘And if they had those extra cells why did they risk their lives by relying on those dying cells that they did use? Does it make sense to you?’
‘There’s sense in everything,’ I said. If you want evasion, Carpenter has it. I brought out my wallet, spread cards before him. He picked them up, studied them and returned them to my wallet.
‘So now we have it,’ he said calmly. ‘Took quite a while to get round to it, didn’t you? The truth, I mean. Officer of M.I.6. Counterespionage. Government agent, eh? Well, I won’t make any song and dance about it, Carpenter, I’ve known since yesterday what you must be: you couldn’t be anything else.’ He looked at me in calm speculation. ‘You fellows never disclose your identity unless you have to.’ He left the logical question unspoken.
‘Three reasons why I’m telling you. You’re entitled to some measure of my confidence. I want you on my side. And because of what I’m about to tell you, you’d have known anyway. Have you ever heard of the Perkin-Elmer Roti satellite missile tracker camera?’
‘Quite a mouthful,’ he murmured. ‘No.’
‘Heard of Samos? Samos III?’
‘Satellite and Missile Observation System?’ He nodded. ‘I have. And what conceivable connection could that have with a ruthless killer running amok on Drift Station Zebra?’
So I told him what connection it could have. A connection that was not only conceivable, not only possible, not only probable, but absolutely certain. Swanson listened very carefully, very attentively, not interrupting even once and at the end of it he leaned back in his chair and nodded. ‘You have the right of it, no doubt about that. The question is, who? I just can’t wait to see this fiend under close arrest and armed guard.’
‘You’d clap him in irons straight away?’
‘Good God!’ He stared at me. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘I don’t know. Yes, I do. I’d leave him be. I think our friend is just a link in a very long chain and if we give him enough rope he’ll not only hang himself, he’ll lead us to the other members of the chain. Besides, I’m not all that sure that there is only one murderer: killers have been known to have accomplices before now, Commander.’
‘Two of them? You think there may be two killers aboard my ship?’ He pursed his lips and squeezed his chin with a thoughtful hand, Swanson’s nearest permissible approach to a state of violent agitation. Then he shook his head definitely. ‘There may only be one. If that is so, and I knew who he was, I’d arrest him at once. Don’t forget, Carpenter, we’ve hundreds of miles to go under the ice before we’re out into the open sea. We can’t watch all six of them all the time and there are a hundred and one things that a man with even only a little knowledge of submarines could do that would put us all in mortal danger. Things that wouldn’t matter were we clear of the ice, things that would be fatal under it.’
‘Aren’t you rather overlooking the fact that if the killer did us in he’d also be doing himself in?’
‘I don’t necessarily share your belief in his sanity. All killers are a little crazy. No matter how excellent their reasons for killing, the very fact that they do kill makes them a rogue human being, an abnormal. You can’t judge them by normal standards.’
He was only half-right, but unfortunately that half might apply in this case. Most murderers kill in a state of extreme emotional once-in-a-lifetime stress and never kill again. But our friend in this case had every appearance of being a stranger to emotional stress of any kind — and, besides, he’d killed a great deal more than once.
‘Well,’ I said doubtfully. ‘Perhaps. Yes, I think I do agree with you.’ I refrained from specifying our common ground for agreement. ‘Who’s your candidate for the high jump, Commander?’
‘I’m damned if I know. I listened to every word that was said this morning. I watched the face of each man who spoke — and the faces of the ones who weren’t speaking. I’ve been thinking nonstop about it since and I’m still damned if I have a clue. How about Kinnaird?’
‘He’s the obvious suspect, isn’t he? But only because he’s a skilled radio operator. I could train a man in a couple of days to send and receive in morse. Slow, clumsy, he wouldn’t know a thing about the instrument he was using, but he could still do it. Any of them may easily have been competent enough to operate a radio. The fact that Kinnaird is a skilled operator may even be a point in his favour.’
‘Nife cells were removed from the radio cabin and taken to the laboratory,’ Swanson pointed out. ‘Kinnaird had the easiest access to them. Apart from Dr Jolly who had his office and sleeping quarters in the same hut.’
‘So that would point a finger at Kinnaird or Jolly?’
‘Well,
wouldn’t it?’
‘Certainly. Especially if you will agree that the presence of those tinned foods under the lab. floor also points a finger at Hewson and Naseby, both of whom slept in the cookhouse where the food was stored, and that the presence of the radiosonde balloon and the hydrogen in the lab. also points a finger at Jeremy and Hassard, one a met. officer and the other a technician who would have had the easiest access to those items.’
‘That’s right, confuse things,’ Swanson said irritably. ‘As if they weren’t confused enough already.’
‘I’m not confusing things. All I’m saying is that if you admit a certain possibility for a certain reason then you must admit similar possibilities for similar reasons. Besides, there are points in Kinnaird’s favour. He risked his life to go back into the radio room to bring out the portable transmitter. He risked almost certain suicide when he tried to go in the second time to bring out his assistant, Grant, and probably would have died if Jeremy hadn’t clobbered him. Look what happened to that man Foster who went in there immediately afterwards with a wet blanket over his head — he never came out.
‘Again, would Kinnaird have mentioned the Nife cells if he had any guilt complex about them? But he did. That, incidentally, might have been why Grant, the assistant radio operator, collapsed in there and later died — Kinnaird had told him to bring out the other Nife cells and he was overcome because he stayed there too long looking for things that had already been removed from the hut. And there’s one final point: we have Naseby’s word for it that the door of the radio room was jammed, presumably by ice. Had Kinnaird been playing with matches a few moments previously, that door wouldn’t have had time to freeze up.’
‘If you let Kinnaird out,’ Swanson said slowly, ‘you more or less have to let Dr Jolly out too.’ He smiled. ‘I don’t see a member of your profession running round filling people full of holes, Dr Carpenter. Repairing holes is their line of business, not making them. Hippocrates wouldn’t have liked it.’
‘I’m not letting Kinnaird out,’ I said. ‘But I’m not going off halfcocked and pinning a murder rap on him either. As for the ethics of my profession — would you like a list of the good healers who have decorated the dock in the Old Bailey? True, we have nothing on Jolly. His part in the proceedings that night seems to have consisted in staggering out from the radio room, falling flat on his face and staying there till pretty near the end of the fire. That, of course, has no bearing upon whatever part he might have taken in the proceedings prior to the fire. Though against that possibility there’s the fact of the jammed door, the fact that Kinnaird or Grant would have been almost bound to notice if he had been up to something — Jolly’s bunk was at the back of the radio room and he would have had to pass Kinnaird and Grant to get out, not forgetting that he would also have to stop to pick up the Nife cells. And there is one more point in his favour — an apparent point, that is. I still don’t think that Benson’s fall was an accident and if it was no accident it is difficult to see how Jolly could have arranged it while he was at the foot of the sail and Benson at the top and it’s even more difficult to see why he should have stood at the foot of the sail and let Benson fall on top of him.’
‘You’re putting up a very good defence case for both Jolly and Kinnaird,’ Swanson murmured.
‘No. I’m only saying what a defence lawyer would say.’
‘Hewson,’ Swanson said slowly. ‘Or Naseby, the cook. Or Hewson and Naseby. Don’t you think it damned funny that those two, who were sleeping at the back or east side of the cookhouse, which was the first part of the hut to catch fire, should have managed to escape while the other two — Flanders and Bryce, wasn’t it — who slept in the middle should have suffocated in there? Naseby said he shouted at them and shook them violently. Maybe he could have shouted and shaken all night without result. Maybe they were already unconscious — or dead. Maybe they had seen Naseby or Hewson or both removing food supplies and had been silenced. Or maybe they had been silenced before anything had been removed. And don’t forget the gun. It was hidden in the petrol tank of the tractor, a pretty damn’ funny place for a man to hide anything. But nothing funny about the idea occurring to Hewson, was there? He was the tractor-driver. And he seems to have taken his time about getting around to warn Captain Folsom. He said he had to make a wide circuit to avoid the flames but apparently Naseby didn’t find it so bad when he went to the radio room. Another thing, a pretty telling point, I think, he said that when he was on the way to the bunkhouse the oil drums in the fuel store started exploding. If they only started exploding then how come all the huts -the five that were eventually destroyed, that is — were already uncontrollably on fire. They were uncontrollably on fire because they were saturated by flying oil so the first explosions must have come a long time before then. And, apart from warning Folsom — who had already been warned — Hewson doesn’t seem to have done very much after the fire started.’
‘You’d make a pretty good prosecuting counsel yourself, Commander. But wouldn’t you think there is just too much superficially against Hewson? That a clever man wouldn’t have allowed so much superficial evidence to accumulate against him? You would have thought that, at least, he would have indulged in a little firefighting heroics to call attention to himself?’
‘No. You’re overlooking the fact that he would never have had reason to expect that there would be any investigation into the causes of the fire? That the situation would never arise where he — or anyone else, for that matter — would have to justify their actions and behaviour if accusations were to be levelled against them?’
‘I’ve said it before and I say it again. People like that never take a chance. They always act on the assumption that they may be found out.’
‘How could they be found out?’ Swanson protested. ‘How could they possibly expect to have suspicion aroused?’
‘You don’t think it possible that they suspect that we are on to them?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘That wasn’t what you were saying last night after that hatch fell on me,’ I pointed out. ‘You said it was obvious that someone was on to me.’
‘Thank the Lord that all I have to do is the nice uncomplicated job of running a nuclear submarine,’ Swanson said heavily. ‘The truth is, I don’t know what to think any more. How about this cook fellow — Naseby?’
‘You think he was in cahoots with Hewson?’
‘If we accept the premise that the men in the cookhouse who were not in on this business had to be silenced, and Naseby wasn’t, then he must have been, mustn’t he? But, dammit, how then about his attempt to rescue Flanders and Bryce?’
‘May just have been a calculated risk. He saw how Jeremy flattened Kinnaird when he tried to go back into the radio-room a second time and perhaps calculated that Jeremy would oblige again if he tried a similar but fake rescue act.’
‘Maybe Kinnaird’s second attempt was also fake,’ Swanson said. ‘After all, Jeremy had already tried to stop him once.’
‘Maybe it was,’ I agreed. ‘But Naseby. If he’s your man, why should he have said that the radio room door was jammed with ice, and that he had to burst it open. That gives Kinnaird and Jolly an out — and a murderer wouldn’t do anything to put any other potential suspect in the clear.’
‘It’s hopeless,’ Swanson said calmly. ‘I say let’s put the whole damn’ crowd of them under lock and key.’
‘That would be clever,’ I said. ‘Yes, let’s do just that. That way we’ll never find out who the murderer is. Anyway, before you start giving up, remember it’s even more complicated than that. Remember you’re passing up the two most obvious suspects of all — Jeremy and Hassard, two tough, intelligent birds who, if they were the killers, were clever enough to see that nothing pointed the finger against them. Unless, of course, there might have been something about Flanders and Bryce that Jeremy didn’t want anyone to see, so he stopped Naseby from going back into the cookhouse. Or not.’
Swanso
n almost glared at me. Watching his submarine plum-metting out of control beyond the 1000-feet mark was something that rated maybe the lift of an eyebrow; but this was something else again. He said: ‘Very well, then, we’ll let the killer run loose and wreck the Dolphin at his leisure. I must have very considerable confidence in you, Dr Carpenter. I feel sure my confidence will not be misplaced. Tell me one last thing. I assume you are a highly skilled investigator. But I was puzzled by one omission in your questioning. A vital question, I should have thought.’
‘Who suggested moving the corpses into the lab knowing that by doing so he would be making his hiding-place for the cached material a hundred per cent foolproof?’
‘I apologise.’ He smiled faintly. ‘You had your reasons, of course.’
‘Of course. You’re not sure whether or not the killer is on to the fact that we are on to him. I’m sure. I know he’s not. But had I asked that question, he’d have known immediately that there could be only one reason for my asking it. Then he would have known I was on to him. Anyway, it’s my guess that Captain Folsom gave the order, but the original suggestion, carefully camouflaged so that Folsom may no longer be able to pin it down, would have come from another quarter.’
Had it been a few months earlier with the summer Arctic sun riding in the sky, it would have been a brilliant day. As it was, there was no sun, not in that latitude and so late in the year, but for all that the weather was about as perfect as it was possible for it to be. Thirty-six hours — the time that had elapsed since Hansen and I had made that savage trip back to the Dolphin — had brought about a change that seemed pretty close to miraculous. The knifing east wind had died, completely. That flying sea of ice-spicules was no more. The temperature had risen at least twenty degrees and the visibility was as perfect as visibility on the winter ice-pack ever is.