Bear Island Read online

  ‘Easy come, easy go,’ I said. ‘I’ve just stolen it from Mr Gerran’s private supply.’

  ‘Confession noted.’ He helped himself. ‘This makes me an accessory. Cheers.’

  ‘I assume you’ve just come from Mr Gerran,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. He’s most upset. Sad, sad, about that poor young boy. An unfortunate business.’ That was something else about Goin, he always got his priorities right: the average company accountant, confronted with the news of the death of a member of a team, would immediately have wondered how the death would affect the project as a whole: Goin saw the human side of it first Or, I thought, he spoke of it first: I knew I was being unfair to him. He went on: ‘I understand you’ve so far been unable to establish the cause of death.’ Diplomacy, inevitably, was second nature to Goin: he could so easily and truthfully have said that I just hadn’t a clue.

  So I said it for him. ‘I haven’t a clue.’

  ‘You’ll never get to Harley Street talking that way.’

  ‘Poison, that’s certain. But that’s all that’s certain. I carry the usual sea-going medical library around with me, but that isn’t much help. To identify a poison you must be able either to carry out a chemical analysis or observe the poison at work on the victim—most of the major poisons have symptoms peculiar to themselves and follow their own highly idiosyncratic courses. But Antonio was dead before I got to him and I lack the facilities to do any pathological work, assuming I could do it in the first place.’

  ‘You’re destroying all my faith in the medical profession. Cyanide?’

  ‘Impossible. Antonio took time to die. A couple of drops of hydrocyanic—prussic acid—or even a tiny quantity of pharmacopoeial acid, and that’s only two per cent of anhydrous prussic acid—and you’re dead before your glass hits the floor. And cyanide makes it murder, it always makes it murder. There’s no way I know of it can be administered by accident. Antonio’s death, I’m certain, was an accident.’

  Goin helped himself to some more scotch. ‘What makes you so certain it was an accident?’

  ‘What makes me so certain?’ That was a difficult one to answer off the cuff owing to the fact that I was convinced it was no accident at all. ‘First, there was no opportunity for the administering of poison. We know that Antonio was alone in his cabin all afternoon right until dinner-time.’ I looked at the Count. ‘Did Antonio have any private food supplies with him in his cabin?’

  ‘How did you guess?’ the Count looked surprised.

  ‘I’m not guessing. I’m eliminating. He had?’

  ‘Two hampers. Full of glass jars—I think I mentioned that Antonio would never eat anything out of a tin—with all sorts of weird vegetable products inside, including dozens of baby food jars with all sorts of purees in them. A very finicky eater, was poor Antonio.’

  ‘So I’m beginning to gather. I think our answer will lie there. I’ll have Captain Imrie impound his supplies and have them analysed on our return. To get back to the opportunity factor. Antonio came up to the dining saloon here, had the same as the rest of us—’

  ‘No fruit juices, no soup, no lamb chops, no potatoes,’ the Count said.

  ‘None of those. But what he did have we all had. Then straight back to his cabin. In the second place, who would want to kill a harmless person like that—especially as Antonio was a total stranger to all of us and only joined us at Wick for the first time? And who but a madman would administer a deadly poison in a closed community like this, knowing that he couldn’t escape and that Scotland Yard would be leaning over the quay walls in Wick, just waiting for our return?’

  ‘Maybe that’s the way a madman would figure a sane person would figure,’ Goin said.

  ‘What English king was it who died of a surfeit of lampreys?’ the Count said. ‘If you ask me, our unfortunate Antonio may well have perished from a surfeit of horseradish.’

  ‘Like enough.’ I pushed back my chair and made to rise. But I didn’t get up immediately. Way back in the dim and lost recesses of my mind the Count had triggered off a tiny bell, an infinitesimal tinkle so distant and remote that if I hadn’t been listening with all my ears I’d have missed it completely: but I had been listening, the way people always listen when they know, without knowing why, that the old man with the scythe is standing there in the wings, winding up for the back stroke. I knew both men were watching me. I sighed. ‘Decisions, decisions. Antonio has to be attended to—’

  ‘With canvas?’ Goin said.

  ‘With canvas. Count’s cabin cleaned up. Death has to be logged. Death certificate. And Mr Smith will have to make the funeral arrangements.’

  ‘Mr Smith?’ The Count was vaguely surprised. ‘Not our worthy commanding officer.’

  ‘Captain Imrie is in the arms of Morpheus,’ I said. ‘I’ve tried.’

  ‘You have your deities mixed up,’ Goin said. ‘Bacchus is the one you’re after.’

  ‘I suppose it is. Excuse me, gentlemen.’

  I went directly to my cabin but not to write out any death certificate. As I’d told Goin, I did carry a medical library of sorts around with me and it was of a fair size. I selected several books, including Glaister’s Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology, 9th edition (Edinburgh 1950), Dewar’s Textbook of Forensic Pharmacy (London 1946) and Gonzales, Vance and Helpern’s Legal Medicine and Toxicology, which seemed to be a pre-war book. I started consulting indices and within five minutes I had it.

  The entry was listed under ‘Systematic Poisons’ and was headed ‘Aconite. Bot A poisonous plant of the order Ranunculaceae. Particular reference Monkshood and Wolfsbane. Phar. Aconitum napellus. This, and aconitine, an alkaloid extract of the former, is commonly regarded as the most lethal of all poisons yet identified: a dose of not more than 0.004 gm is deadly to man. Aconite and its alkaloid produce a burning and peculiar tingling and numbing effect where applied. Later, especially with larger doses, violent vomiting results, followed by paralysis of motion, paralysis of sensation and great depression of the heart, followed by death from syncope.

  ‘Treatment. To be successful must be immediate as possible. Gastric lavage, 12 gm of tannic acid in two gallons of warm water, followed by 1.2 gm Unnic acid in 180 ml tepid water: this should be followed by animal charcoal suspended in water. Cardiac and respiratory stimulants, artificial respiration and oxygen will be necessary as indicated.

  ‘N.B. The root of aconite has frequently been eaten in mistake for that of horseradish.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  I was still looking at, but no longer reading the article on Aconite when it was gradually borne in upon my preoccupation that there was something very far amiss with the Morning Rose. She was still under way, her elderly oil-fired steam engines throbbing along as dependably as ever, but her motion had changed. Her rolling factor had increased till she was swinging wickedly and dismayingly through an angle of close on 70 degrees: the pitching factor had correspondingly decreased and the thudding jarring vibration of the bluff bows smashing into the quartering seas had fallen away to a fraction of what it had previously been.

  I marked the article, closed the book, then lurched and stumbled—I could not be said to have run for it was physically impossible—along the passageway, up the companionway, through the lounge and out on to the upper deck. It was dark but not so dark as to prevent me from gauging direction by the feel of the gale wind, by the spume blowing off the top of the confused seas. I shrank back and tightened my grip on a convenient handrail as a great wall of water, black and veined and evil, reared up on the port side, just for’ard of the beam: it was at least ten feet higher than my head. I was certain that the wave, with the hundreds of tons of water it contained, was going to crash down square on the fore-deck of the trawler, I couldn’t see how it could fail to, but fail it did: as the wave bore down on us, the trough to starboard deepened and the Morning Rose, rolling over to almost forty degrees, simply fell into it, pressed down by the great weight of water on its exposed port side. There c
ame the familiar flat explosive thunderclap of sound, the Morning Rose vibrated and groaned as over-stressed plates and rivets adjusted to cope with the sudden shearing strain, white, icily-cold water foamed over the starboard side and swirled around my ankles, and then it was gone, gurgling through the scuppers as the Morning Rose righted itself and rolled far over on its other side. There was no worry about any of this, no threat to safety and life, this was what Arctic trawlers had been built for and the Morning Rose could continue to absorb this punishment indefinitely. But there was cause for worry, if such a word can be used to express a desperately acute anxiety: that massive wave which had caught the trawler on her port bow, had knocked her almost 20 degrees off course. She was still 20 degrees off course, and 20 degrees off course she remained: nobody was making any attempt to bring her round. Another, and a smaller sea, and then she was lying five more degrees over to the east and here, too, she remained. I ran for the bridge ladder.

  I bumped into and almost knocked down a person at the precise spot where I’d bumped into Mary dear an hour ago. Contact this time was much more solid and the person said ‘Oof!’ or something of that sort. The kind of gasp a winded lady makes is quite different from a man’s and instinct and a kind of instantaneous reasoning told me that I had bumped into the same person again: Judith Haynes would be in bed with her spaniels and Mary darling was either with Allen or in bed dreaming about him: neither, anyway, was the outdoor type.

  I said something that might have been misconstrued as a brusque apology, side-stepped and had my foot on the first rung when she caught my arm with both hands.

  ‘Something’s wrong. I know it is. What?’ Her voice was calm, just loud enough to make itself heard over the high-pitched obbligato of the wind in the rigging. Sure she knew something was wrong, the sight of Dr Marlowe moving at anything above his customary saunter was as good as a police or air raid siren any day. I was about to say something to this effect when she added: ‘That’s why I came on deck,’ which effectively rendered stillborn any cutting remarks I’d been about to make, because she’d been aware of trouble before I’d been: but, then, she hadn’t had her thoughts taken up with Aconitum napellus.

  ‘The ship’s not under command. There’s nobody in charge on the bridge, nobody trying to keep a course.’

  ‘Can I do anything?’

  She was wonderful. ‘Yes. There’s a hot-water electric geyser on the galley bulkhead by the stove. Bring up a jug of hot water, not too hot to drink, a mug and salt. Lots of salt.’

  I sensed as much as saw her nod and then she was gone. Four seconds later I was inside the wheel-house. I could dimly see one figure crumpled against the chart-table, another apparently sitting straight by the wheel, but that was all I could see. The two overhead lights were dull yellow glows. It took me almost fifteen frantic seconds to locate the instrument panel just for’ard of the wheel, but only a couple of seconds thereafter to locate the rheostat and twist it to its clockwise maximum. I blinked in the hurtfully sudden wash of white light.

  Smithy was by the chart-table, Oakley by the wheel, the former on his side, the latter upright, but that, I could see, didn’t mean that Oakley was in any better state of health than the first mate, it was just that neither appeared capable of moving from the positions they had adopted. Both had their heads arched towards their knees, both had their hands clasped tightly to their midriffs. Neither of them was making any sound. Possibly neither was suffering pain and the contracted positions they had assumed resulted from some wholly involuntary motor mechanism: it was equally possible that their vocal cords were paralysed.

  I looked at Smithy first. One life is as important as the next, or so any one of a group of sufferers will think, but in this case I was concerned with the greatest good of all concerned and the fact that the ‘all’ here just coincidentally included me had no bearing on my choice: if the Morning Rose was running into trouble, and I had a strange fey conviction that it was, Smithy was the man I wanted around.

  Smithy’s eyes were open and the look in them intelligent. Among other things the aconite article had stated that full intelligence is maintained to the very end. Could this be the end? Paralysis of motion, the article had said and paralysis of motion we undoubtedly had here. Then paralysis of sensation—maybe that’s why they weren’t crying out in agony, it could have been that they had been screaming their heads off up on the bridge here with no one around to hear them, but now they weren’t feeling anything any more. I saw and vaguely recorded the fact that there were two metal canteens lying close together on the floor, both of them very nearly emptied of food. Both of them, I would have thought, were in extremis but for one very odd factor: there was no sign of the violent vomiting of which the article had spoken. I wished to God that somewhere, sometime, I had taken the trouble to learn something about poisons, their causes, their effects, their symptoms and aberrant symptoms—which we seemed to have here—if any.

  Mary Stuart came in. Her clothes were soaking and her hair was in a terrible mess, but she’d been very quick and she’d got what I’d asked her to— including a spoon, which I’d forgotten. I said: ‘A mug of hot water, six spoons of salt. Quick. Stir it well.’ Gastric lavage, the book had said, but as far as the availability of tannic acid and animal charcoal was concerned I might as well have been on the moon. The best and indeed the only hope lay in a powerful and quick-acting emetic. Alum and zinc sulphate was what the old boy in my medical school had preferred but I’d never come across anything better than sodium chloride—common salt. I hoped desperately that aconitine absorption into the bloodstream hadn’t progressed too far— and that it was aconitine I didn’t for a moment doubt. Coincidence is coincidence but to introduce some such fancy concoction as curare at this stage would be stretching things a bit. I levered Smithy into a sitting position and was just getting my hands under his armpits when a dark-haired young seaman, clad—in that bitter weather—in only jersey and jeans came hurrying into the wheel-house. It was Allison, the senior of the two quartermasters. He looked—not stared—at the two men on the deck: he was very much a seaman cast in Smithy’s mould.

  ‘What’s wrong, Doctor?’

  ‘Food poisoning.’

  ‘Had to be something like that. I was asleep. Something woke me. I knew something was wrong, that we weren’t under command.’ I believed him, all experienced seamen have this in-built capacity to sense trouble. Even in their sleep. I’d come across it before. He moved quickly to the chart-table then glanced at the compass. ‘Fifty degrees off course, to the east.’

  ‘We’ve got all the Barents Sea to rattle about in,’ I said. ‘Give me a hand with Mr Smith, will you?’

  We took an arm each and dragged him towards the port door. Mary dear stopped stirring the contents of the metal mug she held in her hand and looked at us in some perplexity.

  ‘Where are you going with Mr Smith?’

  ‘Taking him out on the wing.’ What did she think we were going to do with him, throw him over the side? ‘All that fresh air. It’s very therapeutic.’

  ‘But it’s snowing out there! And bitterly cold.’

  ‘He’s also—I hope—going to be very, very sick. Better outside than in. How does that concoction taste?’

  She sipped a little salt and water from her spoon and screwed up her face. ‘It’s awful!’

  ‘Can you swallow it?’

  She tried and shuddered. ‘Just.’

  ‘Another three spoons.’ We dragged Smithy outside and propped him in a sitting position. The canvas wind-dodger gave him some protection but not much. His eyes were open and following our actions and he seemed aware of what was going on. I put the emetic to his lips and tilted the mug but the fluid just trickled down his chin. I forced his head back and poured some of the emetic into his mouth. Clearly, all sensation wasn’t lost, for his face contorted into an involuntary grimace of distaste: more importantly, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down and I knew he’d swallowed some of it. Encouraged, I poured in
twice as much, and this time he swallowed it all. Not ten seconds later he was as violently ill as ever I’ve seen a man be. Over Mary’s protests and in spite of Allison’s very evident apprehension, I forced some more of the salt and water on him: when he started coughing blood I turned my attention to Oakley.

  Within fifteen minutes we had two still very ill men on our hands, clearly suffering violent abdominal pains and weak to the point of exhaustion, but, more importantly, we had two men who weren’t going to go the same way as the unfortunate Antonio had gone. Allison was at the wheel, with the Morning Rose back on course: Mary dear, her straw-coloured hair now matted with snow, crouched beside a very groggy Oakley: Smithy was now sufficiently recovered to sit on the storm-sill of the wheel-house, though he still required my arm to brace him against the staggering of the Morning Rose. He was beginning to recover the use of his voice although only to a minimal extent.

  ‘Brandy,’ he croaked.

  I shook my head. ‘Contra-indicated. That’s what the textbooks say.’

  ‘Otard-Dupuy,’ he insisted. At least his mind was clear enough. I rose and got him a bottle from Captain Imrie’s private reserve. After what his stomach had just been through, nothing short of carbolic acid was going to damage it any more. He put the bottle to his head, swallowed and was immediately sick again.

  ‘Maybe I should have given you cognac in the first place,’ I said. ‘Salt water comes cheaper, though.’

  He tried to smile, a brief and painful effort, and tilted the bottle again. This time the cognac stayed down, he must have had a stomach lined with steel or asbestos. I took the bottle from him and offered it to Oakley, who winced and shook his head.

  ‘Who’s got the wheel?’ Smithy’s voice was a hoarse and strained whisper as if it hurt him to speak, which it almost certainly did.

  ‘Allison.’

  He nodded, satisfied. ‘Damn boat,’ he said. ‘Damn sea. I’m sea-sick. Me. Sea-sick.’