Bear Island Read online

  ‘Terribly far wrong?’ Heaven only knew that I couldn’t have agreed with her more. ‘What should be wrong, Mary dear?’

  She said gravely: ‘You would not patronize me, Dr Marlowe? You would not humour a silly female?’

  I had to answer at once so I said obliquely but deliberately: ‘I would not insult you, Mary dear. I like you too much for that.’

  ‘Do you really?’ She smiled faintly, whether amused by me or pleased at what I’d said I couldn’t guess. ‘Do you like all the others, too?’

  ‘Do I—I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t you find something odd, something very strange about the people, about the atmosphere they create?’

  I was on safer ground here. I said frankly: ‘I’d have to have been born deaf and blind not to notice it. One is warding off barely-expressed hostilities, elbowing aside tensions, wading through undercurrents the whole of the livelong day, and at the same time, if you’ll forgive the mixing of the metaphors, trying to shield one’s eyes from the constant shower of sparks given off by everyone trying to grind their own axes at the same time. Everyone is so frighteningly friendly to everyone else until the moment comes, of course, when everyone else is so misguided as to turn his or her back. Our esteemed employer, Otto Gerran, cannot speak too highly of his fellow directors, Heissman, Stryker, Goin and his dear daughter, all of whom he vilifies most fearfully the moment they are out of earshot, all of which would be wholly unforgivable were it not for the fact that Heissman, Stryker and his dear daughter each behave in the same fashion to Otto and their co-directors. You get the same petty jealousies, the same patently false sincerities, the same smilers with the knives beneath the cloaks on the lower film unit crew level—not that they, and probably rightly, would regard themselves as being any lower than Otto and his chums—I use the word “chums”, you understand, without regard to the strict meaning of the word. And, just to complicate matters, we have this charming interplay between the first and second divisions. The Duke, Eddie Harbottle, Halliday, the stills man, Hendriks and Sandy all cordially detest what we might call the management, a sentiment that is strongly reciprocated by the management themselves. And everybody seems to have a down on the unfortunate director, Neal Divine. Sure, I’ve noticed all of this, I’d have to be a zombie not to have, but I disregard ninety-odd per cent and just put it down to the normally healthy backbiting bitchery inseparable from the cinema world. You get fakes, cheats, liars, mountebanks, sycophants, hypocrites the world over, it’s just that the movie-making milieu appears to act as a grossly distorting magnifying-glass that selects and highlights all the more undesirable qualities while ignoring or at best diminishing the more desirable ones—one has to assume that there are some.’

  ‘You don’t think a great deal of us, do you?’

  ‘Whatever gave you that impression?’

  She ignored that. ‘And we’re all bad?’

  ‘Not all. Not you. Not the other Mary or young Allen—but maybe that’s because they’re too young yet or too new in this business to have come to terms with the standard norms of behaviour. And I’m pretty sure that Charlie Conrad is on the side of the angels.’

  Again the little smile. ‘You mean he thinks along the same lines as you?’

  ‘Yes. Do you know him at all?’

  ‘We say good morning.’

  ‘You should get to know him better. He’d like to know you better. He likes you—he said so. And, no, we weren’t discussing you—your name cropped up among a dozen others.’

  ‘Flatterer.’ Her tone was neutral, I didn’t know whether she was referring with pleasure to Conrad or with irony to myself. ‘So you agree with me? There is something very strange in the atmosphere here?’

  ‘By normal standards, yes.’

  ‘By any standards.’ There was a curious certainty about her. ‘Distrust, suspicion, jealousy, one looks to find those things in our unpleasant little world, but one does not look to find them on the scale that we have here. Do not forget that I know about those things. I was born in a Communist country, I was brought up in a Communist country. You understand?’

  ‘Yes. When did you get away?’

  ‘Two years ago. Just two years.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Please. Others may wish to use the same way.’

  ‘And I’m in the pay of the Kremlin. As you wish.’

  ‘You are offended?’ I shook my head. ‘Distrust, suspicion, jealousy, Dr Marlowe. But there is more here, much more. There is hate and there is fear. I—I can smell it. Can’t you?’

  ‘You have a point to make, Mary dear, and you’re leading up to it in a very tortuous fashion. I wish you would come to it.’ I looked at my watch. ‘I do not wish to be rude to you but neither do I wish to be rude to the person who is waiting to see me.’

  ‘If people hate and fear each other enough, terrible things can happen.’ This didn’t seem to require even an affirmative, so I kept silent and she went on: ‘You say that those illnesses, those deaths, are the result of accidental food poisoning. Are they, Dr Marlowe? Are they?’

  ‘So this is what has taken you all this long time to lead up to? You think—you think it may have been deliberate, have been engineered by someone. That’s what you think?’ I hoped it was clear to her that the idea had just occurred to me for the first time.

  ‘I don’t know what to think. But yes—yes, that’s what I think.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who?’ She looked at me in what appeared to be genuine astonishment. ‘How should I know who? Anybody, I suppose.’

  ‘You’d be a sensation as a prosecuting counsel. Then if not who, why?’

  She hesitated, looked away, glanced briefly back at me, then looked at the deck. ‘I don’t know why, either.’

  ‘So you’ve no basis for this incredible suggestion other than your Communist-trained instincts.’

  ‘I’ve put it very badly, haven’t I?’

  ‘You’d nothing to put, Mary. Just examine the facts and see how ridiculous your suggestion is. Seven disparate people affected and all struck down completely at random—or can you give me a reason why so wildly diverse a group as a film producer, a hairdresser, a camera focus assistant, a mate, a bo’sun and two stewards should be the victims? Can you tell me why some lived, why some died? Can you tell me why two of the victims assimilated this poison from food served at the saloon table, two from food consumed in the galley and one, the Duke, who may have been poisoned in either the galley or the saloon? Can you, Mary?’

  She shook her head, the straw-coloured hair fell over her eyes and she let it stay there. Maybe she didn’t want to look at me, maybe she didn’t want me to look at her.

  ‘After today,’ I said, ‘I’ve been left standing, I’ve been widely given to understand, among the ruins of my professional reputation but I’ll wager what’s left of it, together with anything else you care to name, that this wholesale poisoning is completely accidental and that no person aboard the Morning Rose wished to, hoped to or intended to poison those seven men.’ Which was a different thing entirely from claiming that there was no one aboard the Morning Rose who was responsible for the tragedy. ‘Not unless we have a madman aboard, and you can say what you like—you’ve already said it—about our highly—ah—individualistic shipboard companions, none of them is unhinged. Not, that is, criminally unhinged.’

  She hadn’t looked at me once when I was speaking, and even when I’d finished, continued to present me with a view of the crown of her head. I rose, lurched across to the armchair where she was sitting, braced myself with one hand on the back of her chair and placed a finger of the other under her chin. She straightened and brushed back the hair from her eyes, brown eyes, large and still and full of fear. I smiled at her and she smiled back and the smile didn’t touch her eyes. I turned and left the lounge.

  I was quite ten minutes late for my appointment in the galley and as Haggerty had already made abundantly clear to me that he was a stickler for the proprieties
, I expected to find him in a mood anywhere between stiff outrage and cool disapproval. Haggerty’s attention, however, was occupied with more immediate and pressing matters, for as I approached the galley through the stewards’ pantry I could hear the sound of a loud and very angry altercation. At least, Haggerty was being loud and angry.

  It wasn’t so much an altercation as a monologue and it was Haggerty, his red face crimson now with anger and his periwinkle blue eyes popping, who was conducting it: Sandy, our props man, was the unfortunate party on the other side of this very one-sided argument and his silent acceptance of the abuse that was being heaped upon him stemmed less from the want of something to say than from the want of air. I thought at first that Haggerty had his very large red hand clamped round Sandy’s scrawny neck but then realized that he had the two lapels of Sandy’s jacket crushed together in one hand: the effect, however, was about the same, and as Sandy was only about half the cook’s size there was very little he could do about it, I tapped Haggerty on the shoulder.

  ‘You’re choking this man,’ I said mildly. Haggerty glanced at me briefly and got back to his choking. I went on, just as mildly: ‘This isn’t a naval vessel and I’m not a Master-At-Arms so I can’t order you about. But I am what the courts would accept as an expert witness and I don’t think they’d question my testimony when you’re being sued for assault and battery. Could cost you your life’s savings, you know.’

  Haggerty looked at me again and this time he didn’t look away. Reluctantly, he removed his hand from the little man’s collar and just stood there, glaring and breathing heavily, momentarily, it seemed, at a loss for words.

  Sandy wasn’t. After he’d massaged his throat a bit to see if it were still intact, he addressed a considerable amount of unprintable invective to Haggerty, then continued, shouting: ‘You see? You heard, you great big ugly baboon. It’s the courts for you. Assault and battery, mate, and it’ll cost you—’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said wearily. ‘I didn’t see a thing and he didn’t lay a finger on you. Be happy you’re still breathing.’ I looked at Sandy consideringly. I didn’t really know him, I knew next to nothing about him, I wasn’t even sure whether I liked him or not. Like Allen and the late Antonio, if Sandy had another name no one seemed to know what it was. He claimed to be a Scot but had a powerful Liverpool accent. He was a strange, undersized, wizened leprechaun of a man, with a wrinkled walnut-brown face and head—his pate was gleamingly bald—and stringy white hair that started about earlobe level and cascaded in uncombed disarray over his thin shoulders. He had quick-moving and almost weasel-like eyes but maybe that was unfair to him, it may have been the effect of the steel-legged rimless glasses that he affected. He was given to claiming, when under the influence of gin, which was as often as not, that he not only didn’t know his birthday, he didn’t even know the year in which he had been born, but put it around 1919 or 1920. The consensus of informed shipboard opinion put the date, not cruelly, at 1900 or slightly earlier.

  I noticed for the first time that there were some tins of sardines and pilchards on the deck, and a larger one of corned beef. ‘Aha!’ I said. ‘The midnight skulker strikes again.’

  ‘What was that?’ Haggerty said suspiciously.

  ‘You couldn’t have given our friend here a big enough helping for dinner,’ I said.

  ‘It wasn’t for myself.’ Sandy, under stress, had a high-pitched squeak of a voice. ‘I swear it wasn’t You see—’

  ‘I ought to throw the little runt over the side. Little sneaking robbing bastard that he is. Down here, up to his thieves’ tricks, the minute any back’s turned. And who’s blamed for the theft, eh, tell me that, who’s blamed for the theft? Who’s got to account to the captain for the missing supplies? Who’s got to make the loss good from his own pocket? And who’s going to get his pay docked for not locking the galley door?’ Haggerty’s blood pressure, as he contemplated the injustices of life, was clearly rising again. ‘To think,’ he said bitterly, ‘that I’ve always trusted my fellow men. I ought to break his bloody neck.’

  ‘Well, you can’t do that now,’ I said reasonably. ‘You can’t expect me, as a professional man, to perjure myself in the witness box. Besides, there’s no harm done, nothing stolen. You’ve no losses to pay for, so why get in bad with Captain Imrie?’ I looked at Sandy, then at the tins on the floor. ‘Was that all you stole?’

  ‘I swear to God—’

  ‘Oh, do be quiet.’ I said to Haggerty: ‘Where was he, what was he doing when you came in?’

  ‘He’d his bloody great long nose stuck in the big fridge there, that was what he was doing. Caught him red-handed, I did.’

  I opened the refrigerator door. Inside it was packed with a large number of items of very restricted variety—butter, cheeses, long-life milk, bacon and tinned meats. That was all. I said to Sandy: ‘Come here. I want to look through your clothes.’

  ‘You want to look through my clothes?’ Sandy had taken heart from his providential deliverance from the threat of physical violence and the knowledge that he would not now be reported to those in authority. ‘And who do you think you are then? A bleedin’ cop? The CID, eh?’

  ‘Just a doctor. A doctor who’s trying to find out why three people died tonight.’ Sandy stared at me, his eyes widening behind his rimless glasses, and his lower jaw fell down. ‘Didn’t you know that Moxen and Scott were dead? The two stewards?’

  ‘Aye, I’d heard.’ He ran his tongue over his lips. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Not yet.’

  ‘You can’t pin that on me. What are you talking about?’ Sandy’s brief moment of truculence was vanished as if it had never been. ‘I’ve nothing to do—’

  ‘Three men died and four almost did. They died or nearly died from food poisoning. Food comes from the galley. I’m interested in people who make unauthorized visits to the galley.’ I looked at Haggerty. ‘I think we’d better have Captain Imrie along here.’

  ‘No! Christ, no!’ Sandy was close to panic. ‘Mr Gerran would kill me—’

  ‘Come here.’ He came to me, the last resistance gone. I went through his pockets but there was no trace of the only instrument he could have used to infect foodstuffs in the refrigerator, a hypodermic syringe. I said: ‘What were you going to do with those tins?’

  ‘They weren’t for me. I told you. What would I want with them? I don’t eat enough to keep a mouse alive. Ask anyone. They’ll tell you.’

  I didn’t have to ask anyone. What he said was perfectly true: Sandy, like Lonnie Gilbert, depended almost exclusively upon the Distillers Co., Ltd to maintain his calorific quota. But he could still have been using those tins of meat as an insurance, as a red herring, if he’d been caught out as he had been.

  ‘Who were the tins for, then?’

  ‘The Duke. Cecil. I’ve just been to his cabin. He said he was hungry. No, he didn’t. He said he was going to be hungry ‘cos you’d put him on tea and toast for three days.’ I thought back to my interview with the Duke. I’d only used the tea and toast threat to extract information from him and it wasn’t until now that I recalled that I had forgotten to withdraw the threat. This much of Sandy’s story had to be true.

  ‘The Duke asked you to get some supplies for him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You told him you were going to get them?’

  ‘No. I wanted to surprise him. I wanted to see his face when I turned up with the tins.’

  Impasse. He could be telling the truth. He could equally well be using the story as a cloak for other and more sinister activities. I couldn’t tell and probably would never know. I said: ‘You better go and tell your friend the Duke that he’ll be back on a normal diet as from breakfast.’

  ‘You mean—I can go?’

  ‘If Mr Haggerty doesn’t wish to press a charge.’

  ‘I wouldn’t lower myself.’ Haggerty clamped his big hand round the back of Sandy’s neck with a grip tight enough to make the little man
squeal in pain. ‘If I ever catch you within sniffing distance of my galley again I won’t just squeeze your neck, I’ll break the bloody thing.’ Haggerty marched him to the door, literally threw him out and returned. ‘Got off far too easy if you ask me, sir.’

  ‘He’s not worth your ire, Mr Haggerty. He’s probably telling the truth—not that makes him any less a sneak-thief. Moxen and Scott ate here tonight after the passengers had dinner?’

  ‘Every night. Waiting staff usually eat before the guests—they preferred it the other way round.’ With the departure of Sandy, Haggerty was looking a very troubled and upset man, the loss of the two stewards had clearly shaken him badly and was almost certainly responsible for the violence of his reaction towards Sandy.

  ‘I think I’ve traced the source of the poison. I believe the horseradish was contaminated with a very unpleasant organism called clostridium botulinum, a sporing anaerobe found most commonly in garden soil.’ I’d never heard of such a case of contamination but that didn’t make it impossible. ‘No possible reflection on you—it’s totally undetectable before, during and after cooking. Were there any leftovers tonight?’

  ‘Some. I made a casserole for Moxen and Scott and put the rest away.’

  ‘Away?’

  ‘For throwing. There wasn’t enough to re-use for anything.’

  ‘So it’s gone.’ Another door locked.

  ‘On a night like this? No fear. The gash is sealed in polythene bags, then they’re punctured and go over the side—in the morning.’

  The door had opened again. ‘You mean it’s still here?’

  ‘Of course.’ He nodded towards a rectangular plastic box secured to the bulkhead by butterfly nuts. ‘There.’

  I crossed to the box and lifted the lid. Haggerty said: ‘You’ll be going to analyse it, is that it?’

  ‘That’s what I intended. Rather, to keep it for analysis.’ I dropped the lid. ‘That won’t be possible now. The bin’s empty.’

  ‘Empty? Over the side—in this weather?’ Haggerty came and unnecessarily checked the bin for himself. ‘Bloody funny. And against regulations.’