Bear Island Read online

  The lee door opened and two people came staggering into the room, both young, both bespectacled, both with faces all but obscured by windblown hair. They saw me, hesitated, looked at each other and made to leave, but I waved them in and they came, closing the door behind them. They staggered across to my table, sat down, pushed the hair from their faces and I identified them as Mary Darling, our continuity girl, and Allen—nobody knew whether he had another name or whether that was his first or second one—the clapper/loader. He was a very earnest youth who had recently been asked to leave his university. He was an intelligent lad but easily bored. Intelligent but a bit short on wisdom—he regarded film-making as the most glamorous job on earth.

  ‘Sorry to break in on you like this, Dr Marlowe.’ Allen was very apologetic, very respectful. ‘We had no idea—to tell you the truth we were both looking for a place to sit down.’

  ‘And now you’ve found a place. I’m just leaving. Try some of Mr Gerran’s excellent scotch— you both look as if you could do with a little.’ They did, indeed, look very pale indeed.

  ‘No, thank you, Dr Marlowe. We don’t drink.’ Mary Darling—everyone called her Mary darling— was cast in an even more earnest mould than Allen and had a very prim voice to go with it. She had very long, straight, almost platinum hair that fell any old how down her back and that clearly hadn’t been submitted to the attentions of a hairdresser for years: she must have broken Antonio’s heart. She wore a habitually severe expression, enormous horn-rimmed glasses, no make-up—not even lipstick—and had about her a businesslike, competent, no-nonsense, I can-take-care-of-myself-thank-you attitude that was so transparently false that no one had the heart to call her bluff.

  ‘No room at the inn?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ Mary darling said, ‘it’s not very private down in the recreation room, is it? As for those three young—young—’

  ‘The Three Apostles do their best,’ I said mildly. ‘Surely the lounge was empty?’

  ‘It was not.’ Allen tried to look disapproving but I thought his eyes crinkled. ‘There was a man there. In his pyjamas. Mr Gilbert.’

  ‘He had a big bunch of keys in his hands.’ Mary darling paused, pressed her lips together, and went on: ‘He was trying to open the doors where Mr Gerran keeps all his bottles.’

  ‘That sounds like Lonnie,’ I agreed. It was none of my business. If Lonnie found the world so sad and so wanting there was nothing much I or anybody could do about it: I just hoped that Otto didn’t catch him at it. I said to Mary: ‘You could always try your cabin.’

  ‘Oh, no! We couldn’t do that.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ I tried to think why not, but I was too old. I took my leave and passed through the stewards’ pantry into the galley. It was small, compact, immaculately clean, a minor culinary symphony in stainless steel and white tile. At this late hour I had expected it to be deserted, but it wasn’t: Haggerty, the chief cook, with his regulation chef’s hat four-square on his greying clipped hair, was bent over some pots on a stove. He turned round, looked at me in mild surprise.

  ‘Evening, Dr Marlowe.’ He smiled. ‘Carrying out a medical inspection of my kitchen?’

  ‘With your permission, yes.’

  He stopped smiling. ‘I’m afraid I do not understand, sir.’ He could be very stiff, could Haggerty, twenty-odd years in the Royal Navy had left their mark.

  ‘I’m sorry. Just a formality. We seem to have a case of food poisoning aboard. I’m just looking around.’

  ‘Food poisoning! Not from this galley, I can assure you. Never had a case in my life.’ Haggerty’s injured professional pride quite overcame any humanitarian concern he might have had about the identity of the victim or how severe his case was. ‘Twenty-seven years as a cook in the Andrew, Dr Marlowe, last six as Chief on a carrier, and if I’m to be told I don’t run a hygienic galley—’

  ‘Nobody’s telling you anything of the sort.’ I used to him the tone he used to me. ‘Anyone can see the place is spotless. If the contamination came from this galley, it won’t be your fault.’

  ‘It didn’t come from this galley.’ Haggerty had a square ruddy face and periwinkle blue eyes: the complexion, suffused with anger, was now two shades deeper and the eyes hostile. ‘Excuse me, I’m busy.’ He turned his back and started rattling his pots about. I do not like people turning their backs on me when I am talking to them and my instinctive reaction was to make him face me again, but I reflected that his pride had been wounded, justifiably so from his point of view, so I contented myself with the use of words.

  ‘Working very late, Mr Haggerty?’

  ‘Dinner for the bridge,’ he said stiffly. ‘Mr Smith and the bo’sun. They change watches at eleven and eat together then.’

  ‘Let’s hope they’re both fit and well by twelve.’

  He turned very slowly. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I mean that what’s happened once can happen again. You know you haven’t expressed the slightest interest in the identity of the person who’s been poisoned or how ill that person is?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, sir.’

  ‘I find it very peculiar. Especially as the person became violently ill just after eating food prepared in this galley.’

  ‘I take orders from Captain Imrie,’ he said obliquely. ‘Not from passengers.’

  ‘You know where the captain is at this time of night. In bed and very, very sound. It’s no secret. Wouldn’t you like to come with me and see what you’ve done? To look at this poisoned person.’ It wasn’t very nice of me but I didn’t see what else I could do.

  ‘To see what I’ve done!’ He turned away again, deliberately placed his pots to one side and removed his chef’s hat. ‘This had better be good, Doctor.’

  I led the way below to Antonio’s cabin and unlocked the door. The smell was revolting. Antonio lay as I had left him, except that he looked a great deal more dead now than he had done before: the blood had drained from face and hands leaving them a transparent white. I turned to Haggerty.

  ‘Good enough?’

  Haggerty’s face didn’t turn white because ruddy faces with a mass of broken red veins don’t turn that way, but it did become a peculiar muddy brick colour. He stared down at the dead man for perhaps ten seconds, then turned away and walked quickly up the passage. I locked the door and followed, staggering from side to side of the passage as the Morning Rose rolled wickedly in the great troughs. I made my erratic way through the dining saloon, picked up the Black Label from Captain Imrie’s wrought-iron stand, smiled pleasantly at Mary darling and Allen—God knows what thoughts were in their minds as I passed through—and returned to the galley. Haggerty joined me after thirty seconds. He was looking ill and I knew he had been ill. I had no doubt that he had seen a great deal during his lifetime at sea but there is something peculiarly horrifying about the sight of a man who has died violently from poisoning. I poured him three fingers of scotch and he downed it at a gulp. He coughed, and either the coughing or the scotch brought some colour back to his face.

  ‘What was it?’ His voice was husky. ‘What— what kind of poison could kill a man like that? God, I’ve never seen anything so awful.’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s what I want to find out. May I look round now?’

  ‘Christ, yes. Don’t rub it in, Doctor—well, I didn’t know, did I? What do you want to see first?’

  ‘It’s ten past eleven,’ I said.

  ‘Ten past—my God, I’d forgotten all about the bridge.’ He prepared the bridge dinner with remarkable speed and efficiency—two cans of orange juice, a tin opener, a flask of soup, and then the main course in snap-lidded metal canteens. Those he dumped in a wicker basket along with cutlery and two bottles of beer and the whole preparation took just over a minute.

  While he was away—which wasn’t for more than two minutes—I examined what little open food supplies Haggerty carried in his galley, both on shelves and in a large refrigerator. Even had I been c
apable of it, which I wasn’t, I’d no facilities aboard for analysing food, so I had to rely on sight, taste and smell. There was nothing amiss that I could see. As Haggerty had said, he ran a hygienic galley, immaculate food in immaculate containers.

  Haggerty returned. I said, Tonight’s menu, again.’

  ‘Orange juice or pineapple juice, oxtail—’

  ‘All tinned?’ He nodded. ‘Let’s see some.’ I opened two tins of each, six in all, and sampled them under Haggerty’s now very apprehensive eye. They tasted the way those tinned products usually taste, which is to say that they didn’t taste of anything very much at all, but all perfectly innocuous in their pallid fashion.

  ‘Main course?’ I said. ‘Lamb chops, brussels, horseradish, boiled potatoes?’

  ‘Right. But these things aren’t kept here.’ He took me to the adjacent cool room, where the fruits and vegetables were stored, thence below to the cold room, where sides of beef and pork and mutton swung eerily from steel hooks in the harsh light of naked bulbs. I found precisely what I had expected to find, nothing, told Haggerty that whatever had happened was clearly no fault of his, then made my way to the upper deck and along an interior passage till I came to Captain Imrie’s cabin. I tried the handle, but it was locked. I knocked several times, without result. I hammered it until my knuckles rebelled, then kicked it, all with the same result: Captain Imrie had still about nine hours’ sleep coming up and the relatively feeble noises I was producing had no hope of penetrating to the profound depths of unconsciousness he had now reached. I desisted. Smithy would know what to do.

  I went to the galley, now deserted by Haggerty, and passed through the pantry into the dining saloon. Mary darling and Allen were sitting on a bulkhead settee, all four hands clasped together, pale—very pale—faces about three inches apart, gazing into each other’s eyes in a kind of mystically miserable enchantment. It was axiomatic, I knew, that shipboard romances flourished more swiftly than those on land, but I had thought those phenomena were confined to the Bahamas and suchlike balmy climes: aboard a trawler in a full gale in the Arctic I should have thought that some of the romantically essential prerequisites were wholly absent or at least present in only minimal quantities. I took Captain Imrie’s chair, poured myself a small drink and said ‘Cheers!’

  They straightened and jumped apart as if they’d been connected to electrodes and I’d just made the switch. Mary darling said reproachfully: ‘You did give us a fright, Dr Marlowe.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Anyway, we were just leaving.’

  ‘Now I’m really sorry.’ I looked at Allen. ‘Quite a change from university, isn’t it?’

  He smiled wanly. ‘There is a difference.’

  ‘What were you studying there?’

  ‘Chemistry.’

  ‘Long?’

  ‘Three years. Well, almost three years.’ Again the wan smile. ‘It took me all that time to find out I wasn’t much good at it.’

  ‘And you’re now?’

  ‘Twenty-one.’

  ‘All the time in the world to find out what you are good at. I was thirty-three before I qualified as a doctor.’

  ‘Thirty-three.’ He didn’t say it but his face said it for him: if he was that old when he qualified what unimaginable burden of years is he carrying now? ‘What did you do before then?’

  ‘Nothing I’d care to talk about. Tell me, you two were at the captain’s table for dinner tonight, weren’t you?’ They nodded. ‘Seated more or less opposite Antonio, weren’t you?’

  ‘I think so,’ Allen said. That was a good start. He just thought so.

  ‘He’s not well. I’m trying to find out if he ate something that disagreed with him, something he may have been allergic to. Either of you see what he had to eat?’

  They looked at each other uncertainly.

  ‘Chicken?’ I said encouragingly. ‘Perhaps some French fries?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dr Marlowe,’ Mary darling said. ‘I’m afraid—well, we’re not very observant.’ No help from this quarter, obviously they were so lost in each other that they couldn’t even remember what they had eaten. Or perhaps they just hadn’t eaten anything. I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t been very observant myself. But then, I hadn’t been expecting a murder to happen along.

  They were on their feet now, clinging to each other for support as the deck tried to vanish from beneath their feet. I said: ‘If you’re going below I wonder if you’d ask Tadeusz if he’d be kind enough to come up and see me here. He’ll be in the recreation room.’

  ‘He might be in bed,’ Allen said. ‘Asleep.’

  ‘Wherever he is,’ I said with certainty, ‘he’s not in bed.’

  Tadeusz appeared within a minute, reeking powerfully of brandy, a vexed expression on his aristocratic features. He said without preamble: ‘Damned annoying. Most damned annoying. Do you know where I can find a master key? That idiot Antonio has gone and locked our cabin door from the inside and he must be hopped to the eyebrows with sedatives. Simply can’t waken him. Cretin!’

  I produced his cabin key. ‘He didn’t lock the door from the inside. I did from the outside.’ The Count looked at me for an uncomprehending moment, then mechanically reached for his flask as shocked understanding showed in his face. Not too much shock, just a little, but I was sure that what little there was was genuine. He tilted the flask and two or three drops trickled into his glass. He reached for the Black Label, helped himself with a steady but generous hand and drank deeply.

  ‘He couldn’t hear me? He—he is beyond hearing?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Something he ate, I can’t think what else, some killer toxin, some powerful, quick-acting and deadly poison.’

  ‘Quite dead?’ I nodded. ‘Quite dead,’ he repeated. ‘And I told him to stop making such a grand opera Latin fuss and walked away and left a dying man.’ He drank some more scotch and grimaced, an expression that was no reflection on Johnnie Walker. ‘There are advantages in being a lapsed Catholic, Dr Marlowe.’

  ‘Rubbish. Sackcloth and ashes not only don’t help, they’re simply just not called for here. All right, so you didn’t suspect there was anything wrong with him. I saw him at table and I wasn’t any cleverer and I’m supposed to be a doctor. And when you left him in the cabin it was too late anyway: he was dying then.’ I helped him to some more scotch but left my own glass untouched: even one relatively sober mind around might prove to be of some help, although just how I couldn’t quite see at that moment. ‘You sat beside him at dinner. Can you remember what you ate?’

  ‘The usual.’ The Count, it was clear, was more shaken than his aristocratic nature would allow him to admit ‘Rather, he didn’t eat the usual.’

  ‘I’m not in the right frame of mind for riddles, Tadeusz.’

  ‘Grapefruit and sunflower seeds. That was about what he lived on. One of those vegetarian nuts.’

  ‘Walk softly, Tadeusz. Those nuts may yet be your pallbearers.’

  The Count grimaced again. ‘A singularly ill-chosen remark. Antonio never ate meat. And he’d a thing against potatoes. So all he had were the sprouts and horseradish. I remember particularly well because Cecil and I gave him our horseradish, to which, it seems, he was particularly partial.’ The Count shuddered. ‘A barbarian food, fit only for ignorant Anglo-Saxon palates. Even young Cecil has the grace to detest meat offal.’ It was noteworthy that the Count was the only person in the film unit who did not refer to Cecil Golightly as the Duke: perhaps he thought he was being upstaged in the title stakes but, more probably, as a dyed-in-the-wool aristocrat himself, he objected to people taking frivolous liberties with titles.

  ‘He had fruit juice?’

  ‘Antonio had his own homemade barley water.’ The Count smiled faintly. ‘It was his contention that everything that came out of a can had been adulterated before it went into that can. Very strict on those matters, was Antonio.’

  ‘Soup? Any of that?’

  ‘Ox-tail?’

  ‘
Of course. Anything else? That he ate, I mean?’

  ‘He didn’t even finish his main course—well, his sprouts and radish. You may recall that he left very hurriedly.’

  ‘I recall. Was he liable to sea-sickness?’

  ‘I don’t know. Don’t forget, I’ve known him no longer than yourself. He’s been a bit off-colour for the past two days. But then, who hasn’t?’

  I was trying to think up another penetrating question when John Cummings Goin entered. His unusual surname he’d inherited from a French grandfather in the High Savoy, where, apparently, this was not an altogether uncommon name. The film crew, inevitably, referred to him as Comin’ and Goin’, but Goin was probably wholly unaware of this: he was not the sort of man with whom one took liberties.

  Any other person entering the dining saloon from the main deck on a night like that would have presented an appearance that would have varied from the wind-blown to the dishevelled. Not one hair of Goin’s black, smooth, centre-parted, brushed-back hair was out of place: had I been told that he eschewed the standard proprietary hairdressing creams in favour of cow-hide glue, I would have seen no reason to doubt it. And the hairstyle was typical of the man—everything smooth, calm, unruffled and totally under control. In one area only did the comparison fall down. The hairstyle was slick, but Goin wasn’t: he was just plain clever. He was of medium height, plump without being fat, with a smooth, unlined face. He was the only man I’d ever seen wearing pince-nez, and that only for the finest of fine print which, in Goin’s line of business, came his way quite often: the pince-nez looked so inevitable that it was unthinkable that he should ever wear any other type of reading aid. He was, above all, a civilized man and urbane in the best sense of the word.

  He picked up a glass from a rack, timed the wild staggering of the Morning Rose to walk quickly and surely to the seat on my right, picked up the Black Label and said: ‘May I?’