The Snow Tiger / Night of Error Read online

  ‘Oh, Mike, do you think …?’ Liz put her hand on McGill’s and her eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘I’m torn, Mike. The police have taken Charlie away because of the avalanche and …’

  ‘No!’ said McGill sharply. ‘Not because of the avalanche. That hasn’t been proved – and may never be.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘Ian intended to meet you last night but, instead, he got Charlie. Stenning saw them at the hotel. And Charlie beat Ian half to death in the car park, probably when he was on his way to look for you. There was no car accident. The police were waiting to arrest Charlie for assault as soon as he came out of the hall.’

  Liz was as pale as she had been when McGill had first seen her in the church after the avalanche. He said gently, ‘He had to be stopped, Liz. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if he and I had gone that extra two hundred feet up the west slope after the avalanche and I’d seen those ski tracks. I think, maybe, there’d have been another avalanche victim. He’s strong enough to have torn me in half. He had to be stopped and I took the quickest way Iknew.’

  Liz sighed shudderingly. ‘I knew he was violent and had his strange ways, and I knew they were becoming worse. But not as bad as this. What will become of him, Mike?’

  ‘He’ll be all right. There’ll be people to look after him. I don’t think he’ll stand trial for anything. He’s beyond that, Liz – way beyond. You saw him this afternoon – you know what I mean. Harrison said as much, too.’

  She nodded. ‘So it’s all over.’

  ‘It’s over,’ he agreed. ‘My masters want me to go south to the the ice. They’ve put up a geodesic dome at the South Pole – Buckminster Fuller strikes again – and they want a snowman to check the foundations.’

  McGill leaned back in his chair and picked up his glass. He said casually, ‘Ian is in the Princess Margaret Hospital – third floor. The Ward Sister is a tough old bird called Quayle but if you say you are Ian’s fiancee she might let you …’

  He became aware he was talking to thin air. ‘Hey, you haven’t finished your drink!’

  But Liz was halfway across the room on her way, and beside her Victor trotted, his tail waving in a proud plume.

  NIGHT OF ERROR

  DEDICATION

  For STAN HURST, at last, with affection

  EPIGRAPH

  And when with grief you see your brother stray, Or in a night of error lose his way, Direct his wandering and restore the day. To guide his steps afford your kindest aid, And gently pity whom you can’t persuade: Leave to avenging Heaven his stubborn will, For, O, remember, he’s your brother still.

  JONATHAN SWIFT

  PREFACE

  The Pacific Islands Pilot, Vol. II, published by the Hydrographer of the Navy, has this to say about the island of Fonua Fo’ou, almost at the end of a long and detailed history:

  In 1963, HMNZFA Tui reported a hard grey rock, with a depth of 6 feet over it, on which the sea breaks, and general depths of 36 feet extending for 2 miles northwards and 1 1/2 miles westward of the rock, in the position of the bank. The eastern side is steep-to. In the vicinity of the rock, there was much discoloured water caused by sulphurous gas bubbles rising to the surface. On the bank, the bottom was clearly visible, and consisted of fine black cellar lava, like volcanic cinder, with patches of white sand and rock. Numerous sperm whales were seen in the vicinity.

  But that edition was not published until 1969.

  This story began in 1962.

  MAP

  ONE

  I heard of the way my brother died on a wet and gloomy afternoon in London. The sky was overcast and weeping and it became dark early that day, much earlier than usual. I couldn’t see the figures I was checking, so I turned on the desk light and got up to close the curtains.

  I stood for a moment watching the rain leak from the plane trees on the Embankment, then looked over the mistshrouded Thames. I shivered slightly, wishing I could get out of this grey city and back to sea under tropic skies. I drew the curtain decisively, closing out the gloom.

  The telephone rang.

  It was Helen, my brother’s widow, and she sounded hysterical. ‘Mike, there’s a man here – Mr Kane – who was with Mark when he died. I think you’d better see him.’ Her voice broke. ‘I can’t take it, Mike.’

  ‘All right, Helen; shoot him over. I’ll be here until five-thirty – can he make it before then?’

  There was a pause and an indistinct murmur, then Helen said, ‘Yes, he’ll be at the Institute before then. Thanks, Mike. Oh, and there’s a slip from British Airways – something has come from Tahiti; I think it must be Mark’s things. I posted it to you this morning – will you look after it for me? I don’t think I could bear to.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ I said. ‘I’ll look after everything.’

  She rang off and I put down the receiver slowly and leaned back in my chair. Helen seemed distraught about Mark and I wondered what this man Kane had told her. All I knew was that Mark had died somewhere in the Islands near Tahiti; the British Consul there had wrapped it all up and the Foreign Office had got in touch with Helen as next of kin. She never said so but it must have been a relief – her marriage had caused her nothing but misery.

  She should never have married him in the first place. I had tried to warn her, but it’s a bit difficult telling one’s prospective sister-in-law about the iniquities of one’s own brother, and I’d never got it across. Still, she must have loved him despite everything, judging by the way she was behaving; but then, Mark had a way with his women.

  One thing was certain – Mark’s death wouldn’t affect me a scrap. I had long ago taken his measure and had steered clear of him and all his doings, all the devious and calculating cold-blooded plans which had only one end in view – the glorification of Mark Trevelyan.

  I put him out of my mind, adjusted the desk lamp and got down to my figures again. People think of scientists – especially oceanographers – as being constantly in the field making esoteric discoveries. They never think of the office work entailed – and if I didn’t get clear of this routine work I’d never get back to sea. I thought that if I really buckled down to it another day would see it through, and then I would have a month’s leave, if I could consider writing a paper for the journals as constituting leave. But even that would not take up the whole month.

  At a quarter to six I packed it in for the day and Kane had still not shown up. I was just putting on my overcoat when there was a knock on the door and when I opened it a man said, ‘Mr Trevelyan?’

  Kane was a tall, haggard man of about forty, dressed in rough seaman’s clothing and wearing a battered peaked cap. He seemed subdued and a little in awe of his surroundings. As we shook hands I could feel the callouses and thought that perhaps he was a sailing man – steam seamen don’t have much occasion to do that kind of hand work.

  I said, ‘I’m sorry to have dragged you across London on a day like this, Mr Kane.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said in a raw Australian accent. ‘I was coming up this way.’

  I sized him up. ‘I was just going out. What about a drink?’

  He smiled. ‘That ‘ud be fine. I like your English beer.’

  We went to a nearby pub and I took him into the public bar and ordered a couple of beers. He sank half a pint and gasped luxuriously. ‘This is good beer,’ he said. ‘Not as good as Swan, but good all the same. You know Swan beer?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it,’ I said. ‘I’ve never had any. Australian, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yair; the best beer in the world.’

  To an Australian all things Australian are the best. ‘Would I be correct if I said you’d done your time in sail?’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Too right you would. How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve sailed myself; I suppose it shows somehow.’

  ‘Then I won’t have to explain too much detail when I tell you about your brother. I suppose you want to know the whole story? I didn’t t
ell Mrs Trevelyan all of it, you know – some of it’s pretty grim.’

  ‘I’d better know everything.’

  Kane finished his beer and cocked an eye at me. ‘Another?’

  ‘Not for me just yet. You go ahead.’

  He ordered another beer and said, ‘Well, we were sailing in the Society Islands – my partner and me – we’ve got a schooner and we do a bit of trading and pick up copra and maybe a few pearls. We were in the Tuamotus – the locals call them the Paumotus, but they’re the Tuamotus on the charts. They’re east of …’

  ‘I know where they are,’ I interrupted.

  ‘Okay. Well, we thought there was a chance of picking up a few pearls so we were just cruising round calling on the inhabited islands. Most of ’em aren’t and most of ‘em don’t have names – not names that we can pronounce. Anyway we were passing this one when a canoe came out and hailed us. There was a boy in this canoe – a Polynesian, you know – and Jim talked to him. Jim Hadley’s my partner; he speaks the lingo – I don’t savvy it too good myself.

  ‘What he said was that there was a white man on the island who was very sick, and so we went ashore to have a look at him.’

  ‘That was my brother?’

  ‘Too right, and he was sick; my word yes.’

  ‘What was wrong with him?’

  Kane shrugged. ‘We didn’t know at first but it turned out to be appendicitis. That’s what we found out after we got a doctor to him.’

  ‘Then there was a doctor?’

  ‘If you could call him a doctor. He was a drunken old no-hoper who’d been living in the Islands for years. But he said he was a doctor. He wasn’t there though; Jim had to go fifty miles to get him while I stayed with your brother.’

  Kane took another pull at his beer. ‘Your brother was alone on this island except for the black boy. There wasn’t no boat, either. He said he was some sort of scientist – something to do with the sea.’

  ‘An oceanographer.’ Yes, like me an oceanographer. Mark had always felt compelled, driven, to try and beat me whatever the game. And his rules were always his own.

  ‘Too right. He said he’d been dropped there to do some research and he was due to be picked up any time.’

  ‘Why didn’t you take him to the doctor instead of bringing the doctor to him?’ I asked.

  ‘We didn’t think he’d make it,’ said Kane simply. ‘A little ship like ours bounces about a lot, and he was pretty sick.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. He was painting a rough picture.

  ‘I did what I could for him,’ said Kane. ‘There wasn’t much I could do though, beyond cleaning him up. We talked a lot about this and that – that was when he asked me to tell his wife.’

  ‘Surely he didn’t expect you to make a special trip to England?’ I demanded, thinking that even in death it sounded like Mark’s touch.

  ‘Oh, it was nothing like that,’ said Kane. ‘You see, I was coming to England anyway. I won a bit of money in a sweep and I always wanted to see the old country. Jim, my cobber, said he could carry on alone for a bit, and he dropped me at Panama. I bummed a job on a ship coming to England.’

  He smiled ruefully. ‘I won’t be staying here as long as I thought – I dropped a packet in a poker game coming across. I’ll stay until my cash runs out and then I’ll go back to Jim and the schooner.’

  I said, ‘What happened when the doctor came?’

  ‘Oh sure, you want to know about your brother; sorry if I got off track. Well, Jim brought this old no-good back and he operated. He said he had to, it was your brother’s only chance. Pretty rough it was too; the doc’s instruments weren’t any too good. I helped him – Jim hadn’t the stomach for it.’ He fell silent, looking back into the past.

  I ordered another couple of beers, but Kane said, ‘I’d like something stronger, if you don’t mind,’ so I changed the order to whisky.

  I thought of some drunken oaf of a doctor cutting my brother open with blunt knives on a benighted tropical island. It wasn’t a pretty thought and I think Kane saw the horror of it too, the way he gulped his whisky. It was worse for him – he had been there.

  ‘So he died,’ I said.

  ‘Not right away. He seemed okay after the operation, then he got worse. The doc said it was per … peri …’

  ‘Peritonitis?’

  ‘That’s it. I remember it sounded like peri-peri sauce – like having something hot in your guts. He got a fever and went delirious; then he went unconscious and died two days after the operation.’

  He looked into his glass. ‘We buried him at sea. It was stinking hot and we couldn’t carry the body anywhere – we hadn’t any ice. We sewed him up in canvas and put him over the side. The doctor said he’d see to all the details – I mean, it wasn’t any use for Jim and me to go all the way to Papeete – the doc knew all we knew.’

  ‘You told the doctor about Mark’s wife – her address and so on?’

  Kane nodded. ‘Mrs Trevelyan said she’d only just heard about it – that’s the Islands postal service for you. You know, he never gave us nothing for her, no personal stuff I mean. We wondered about that. But she said some gear of his is on the way – that right?’

  ‘It might be that,’ I said. ‘There’s something at Heathrow now. I’ll probably pick it up tomorrow. When did Mark die, by the way?’

  He reflected. ‘Must have been about four months ago. You don’t go much for dates and calendars when you’re cruising the Islands, not unless you’re navigating and looking up the almanack all the time, and Jim’s the expert on that. I reckon it was about the beginning of May. Jim dropped me at Panama in July and I had to wait a bit to get a ship across here.’

  ‘Do you remember the doctor’s name? Or where he came from?’

  Kane frowned. ‘I know he was a Dutchman; his name was Scoot-something. As near as I can remember it might have been Scooter. He runs a hospital on one of the Islands – my word, I can’t remember that either.’

  ‘It’s of no consequence; if it becomes important I can get it from the death certificate.’ I finished my whisky. ‘The last I heard of Mark he was working with a Swede called Norgaard. You didn’t come across him?’

  Kane shook his head. ‘There was only your brother. We didn’t stay around, you know. Not when old Scooter said he’d take care of everything. You think this Norgaard was supposed to pick your brother up when he’d finished his job?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said. ‘It’s been very good of you to take the trouble to tell us about Mark’s death.’

  He waved my thanks aside. ‘No trouble at all; anyone would have done the same. I didn’t tell Mrs Trevelyan too much, you understand.’

  ‘I’ll edit it when I tell her,’ I said. ‘Anyway, thanks for looking after him. I wouldn’t like to think he died alone.’

  ‘Aw, look,’ said Kane, embarrassed. ‘We couldn’t do anything else now, could we?’

  I gave him my card. ‘I’d like you to keep in touch,’ I said. ‘Perhaps when you’re ready to go back I can help you with a passage. I have plenty of contacts with the shipping people.’

  ‘Too right,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep in touch, Mr Trevelyan.’

  I said goodbye and left the bar, ducking into the private bar in the same pub. I didn’t think Kane would go in there and I wanted a few quiet thoughts over another drink.

  I thought of Mark dying a rather gruesome death on that lonely Pacific atoll. God knows that Mark and I didn’t see eye to eye but I wouldn’t have wished that fate on my worst enemy. And yet there was something odd about the whole story; I wasn’t surprised at him being in the Tuamotus – it was his job to go poking about odd corners of the seven seas as it was mine – but something struck a sour note.

  For instance, what had happened to Norgaard? It certainly wasn’t standard operating procedure for a man to be left entirely alone on a job. I wondered what Mark and Norgaard had been doing in the Tuamotus; they had published no papers so perhaps their investigation hadn’
t been completed. I made a mental note to ask old Jarvis about it; my boss kept his ear close to the grapevine and knew everything that went on in the profession.

  But it wasn’t that which worried me; it was something else, something niggling at the back of my mind that I couldn’t resolve. I chased it around for a bit but nothing happened, so I finished my drink and went home to my flat for a late night session with some figures.

  II

  The next day I was at the office bright and early and managed to get my work finished just before lunch. I was attacking my neglected correspondence when one of the girls brought in a visitor, and a most welcome one. Geordie Wilkins had been my father’s sergeant in the Commandos during the war and after my father had been killed he took an interest in the sons of the man he had so greatly respected. Mark, typically, had been a little contemptuous of him but I liked Geordie and we got on well together.

  He had done well for himself after the war. He foresaw the yachting boom and bought himself a 25-ton cutter which he chartered and in which he gave sailing lessons. Later he gave up tuition and had worked up to a 200-ton brigantine which he chartered to rich Americans mostly, taking them anywhere they wanted to go at an exorbitant price. Whenever he put into England he looked me up, but it had been a while since last I’d seen him.

  He came into the office bringing with him a breath of sea air. ‘My God, Mike, but you’re pallid,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to take you back to sea.’

  ‘Geordie! Where have you sprung from this time?’

  ‘The Caribbean,’ he said. ‘I brought the old girl over for a refit. I’m in between charters, thank God.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘With you – if you’ll have me. Esmerelda’s here.’