Southtrap

She looked away and found an imaginary thread on her quilted sleeve.

'And then?'

'I would have discharged my responsibility as captain.'

'But not your conscience, John.'

'On the other hand, I could carry on. I could bury Holdgate at sea tomorrow. In that event, the case against the killer might break down for lack of evidence. Both police and medical evidence. There would be no body, no clues. It would all be at the bottom of the sea.'

There must be a doctor somewhere, John!'

There is. In the Crozet Islands. That's about two days' steaming east of Prince Edward, as you know.'

'You'd do that?'

'I couldn't keep a body on board that long.'

'What… what… have you done with… it… him?'

I gestured with my head. 'In the sick-bay. Just up the corridor.'

She started to her feet. 'John — it's all a nightmare! It's too horrible to think about…!'

I reached out to her and she came fiercely to me for a moment. Her lips were hard against mine. Then she pulled away.

'We mustn't, John! I don't want you this way if it's just because… because…'

'Because what, Linn?'

'People who are under threat are driven into one another's arms — like in a bombing raid — and then when the danger's gone they find they have nothing left for each other.'

She moved away and stood between the edge of her bunk and the door of the built-in clothes cabinet. Her head was held back in her characteristic way.

'Do you think I regard this danger as big as that?'

In answer, she spread her arms wide across the corner where she stood so that I could see the deep cleavage of her breasts.

I went to her. Her tongue was warm and soft and seeking against my palate.

Light years passed.

It was she who ended it, breathless, sobbing, pulling her elbows down over her breasts like a boxer covering up from an attack which could have only one outcome.

'Now's not the time, my darling! I need you, I want you, but we've got this horror to attend to…'

I found my voice. 'Sometime?'

'Any other time you want, my darling. You don't have to have an excuse to bring coffee next time.'

A roll of the ship brought us together again. We let the sweet electricity flow between us until both of us had sense enough left to throw the trip-switch.

We found our previous places and our half-cold coffee. As I looked into her green-grey eyes, I felt I was talking on two levels — outwardly about Holdgate and inwardly in a silent exchange about ourselves.

I tried to marshal my thoughts. 'Listen, Linn. I believe the key to both murders lies in what your father tried to tell me in hospital. I can't forget those words of his — stay away from Dina's Island. It was like a command. I can't help feeling it was tied up with what he did in the war when he escaped the German raider. But it was all so disconnected and rambling.'

'We're right back to where we started, John.'

'Not quite. We have Captain Jacobsen aboard. I'm going to interview him in the morning. There's a lot I want to ask him.'

'Mrs Jacobsen's a big obstacle. She's very protective about him and his heart condition.'

'Maybe. But Jacobsen is the only one left of those three catcher skippers who escaped. Both the others died violently. I've got to know more about the circumstances because of what's happening now, right here aboard this ship.'

'But Holdgate can't possibly have had anything to do with them.'

'I said earlier I felt like that fancy navigational device,' I replied. 'I still do. A feature of the instrument is that it accumulates errors and gradually and imperceptibly one strays further from the original true position.'

'So whether or not you carry on with the cruise depends on what Captain Jacobsen says?'

I finished my laced coffee and lit a cigarette. I needed both.

'I also intend to show Captain Jacobsen the knife that killed Holdgate. That killer whale on it has some significance.'

'John, this is a Norwegian ship. Dad recruited the crew from whalermen he'd known in his whaling days. That knife could belong to any of them. What do you intend to do, John!'

Her face was very strained now.

I still temporized. 'You're the owner of the Quest, Linn. Don't forget that.'

'But you're the captain, John.'

I stood up and looked down at her. 'Linn, when I knocked at your door, I had finally decided. As you say, it's my decision, and my decision alone. If I call off the cruise it would be a deathblow to a large part of one of the most ambitious international scientific projects ever planned. Maybe the project is big enough to outweigh the death of one man, even of two men. I wouldn't know about that. I only know that by pushing on I am somehow honouring the memory of a man whom I respected and liked beyond anyone I have met in my life. This cruise was his dream.' I leaned down and kissed her gently. 'And also the dream of someone I love.'

She held me, until at last I looked at my watch and said, 'I'm overdue on the bridge already.'

'Do you have to go, my darling?' she whispered.

My mind was already racing to the cold hard realities beyond her closed door. Tomorrow's burial at sea. All the questions to be asked and to be answered. Captain Jacobsen.

I kissed her again in reply. She said, 'I'm going to dress. No point in trying to go to sleep.'

'When you're up, use the day cabin if you like. You can reach me on the bridge any time you want.'

I shut the door behind me. But I hadn't yet finished with the corridor. There was something I wanted to check in the sick-bay. I wanted to examine the knife in Holdgate's throat more closely in case I couldn't risk Captain Jacobsen's health by showing him the body.

I took the sick-bay key from my pocket where I had put it after Wegger, Petersen and I had stowed the body inside.

I rolled back Holdgate's blanket. I need not have been concerned for Captain Jacobsen.

The knife was gone.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

My thoughts spun like the circular fan that cleared the bridge window of fog condensation and of the vicious spatters of rain brought by every squall. It was after midnight and I was on watch on the port side of the bridge, trying to see through the cleared space. Two of the nine bridge windows had the fan-like device for keeping vision clear. Mine was the second from the port side. There was a similar window to starboard.

I could not penetrate the murk ahead. The fo'c'sle deck and bow searchlight were an amorphous blur. Mentally, I was equally blind — in the fog of unanswerable questions, surmises and doubts which Holdgate's death had pitched at me. I had no recollection of making my way from the body in the sick-bay to the bridge. I might have been suffering from that strange loss of memory which hits men in mid-winter deep in the ice towards the South Pole.

I crossed impatiently to the window on the starboard side of the bridge, as if that would help. In spite of the fan it was as fogged as the one I had left. The wind rattled a loose pane — this was the windward side and taking its force. I felt confined and restricted, as out of touch with the elements as the ship's models in bottles which the travel agency had distributed among the passengers as a publicity gimmick.

Inside the steel-and-glass capsule of the bridge each man was at his station and all was in order — the big wooden wheel, the instruments, the clicking log, the silent Kelvin Hughes echo-sounder, the pulse of diesels, the brass clock on the bulkhead with its hands at ten minutes past midnight. I felt trapped, insulated from reality. I wanted the icy wind on my face; I wanted to watch it mow the tops off the white-capped swells racing in from the south-west as they became visible close to the Quest's side. I needed its lash to shake loose from deep within me solutions which were at that moment out of reach.