Zodiac Station Read online

  In between, I shuttled back to check on my patients. As I went past the radio room, I saw Greta sitting in front of the computer talking to someone. I assumed it must be Anderson’s kid – she never called anyone normally. God only knows what she said to him.

  Anderson was still asleep in the medical room; Trond was awake, but I’d made him lie down in a bunk to be sure he hadn’t any internal damage.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked him, shining a light in his pupil.

  ‘Fuel leak.’ He grimaced. ‘I don’t know how. Everything was checked in Tromsø before we left.’

  ‘Could you have hit something when you took off? A piece of gravel? A lump of ice?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ He winced as I changed the dressing on his forehead. ‘But the aircraft is old. Perhaps a seal had broken, or one of the tubes came loose.’

  ‘Accidents happen,’ I said. If you’re a doctor, you learn to talk in clichés.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said heavily. Almost as if he didn’t believe me.

  There’d been one other person on the plane – though he didn’t much care. When Trond and Anderson were settled, Greta and I drove out to the wreck and fetched in Hagger. There was something grotesque in the way he’d been carted around since he died – sledges, Sno-Cats, crashed planes and still not at rest. Like something out of Faulkner.

  There was no telling how much longer he’d have to wait for his eternal peace. The South Pole gang only keep one plane to service Zodiac; the rest are in Antarctica. They’d need a few days, at least, to dig up a replacement, and even then they’d want to take out the wounded first. So I put him on ice.

  The cold store’s a spooky place. The ice cover around the base itself isn’t deep enough, so they put it in a glacier just over the hill. As you know, the glacier moves, so every season they have to build a new one. They dig a trench about two metres deep in the ice, cut some steps down to it, then roof it with plywood. As soon as the first snow falls, the plywood’s covered and frozen into the glacier. The room underneath stays chilled steady at ten below, no need for electricity. And if you run out of space, you can just carve out more room from the side walls, like the ancients quarrying out catacombs as they filled up with the dead.

  As I say, it’s a spooky place. The snow accumulates, the cave sinks deeper and the stairs get longer. The roof sags under the weight. The only light comes from a few bare bulbs strung from the ceiling; the shadows loom large, especially down the side tunnels. Samples wrapped in plastic rustle as you go past, and it seems to go on for ever.

  I loaded Hagger on to the dolly and pushed him to the far end. The body bag I’d put him in was a brittle thing, probably twenty years old, and all that banging about in the crash had torn big holes in it. You could see him inside.

  I sliced it off with a box cutter. Underneath, he was still wearing the clothes he’d had on when he died – right down to his glove liners. I hadn’t examined the body properly when Greta and Tom brought him in. Checked the pulse, signed the certificate. Again, I noticed the clothes were stiff and heavy with ice, as if they’d been drenched and then frozen. If he’d been working on sea ice and fallen through, I could have understood it – but he’d been halfway up a glacier.

  Down in the dark, something offended me about those clothes. I unzipped the coat, pulled off the hat and worked his hands free of the gloves. It was ridiculous, sentimental, but I thought he deserved a more traditional pose. I lifted his arm and tried to fold it across his chest.

  The arm was frozen solid. I bent it as delicately as possible, terrified of snapping it. Too gingerly: it slipped out of my grip. I lifted it again, and as it came into the light I saw the palm of his hand.

  It was covered in blood.

  I would have screamed, if it hadn’t been for the diazepam. The drug numbed me better than the cold. Instead, I examined the body with narcotic detachment. Hagger had died of a fall; there’d been no puncture wounds. So where could the blood have come from?

  It wasn’t blood. Shining my head torch on his hands, I could see the stain was too pink for that. Even in the poor light, it made a shocking splash of colour on his pale skin.

  ‘Have you started robbing graves now?’

  Annabel’s voice was enough to lower the temperature in that room another couple of degrees. I turned slowly. She stood at the bottom of the stairs, framed by the blue light seeping through the ice.

  ‘The plane shook him about. I’m tidying him up.’

  She advanced down the long tunnel. Her breath made icy clouds under the lamps. She stopped at a metal rack full of ice cores and started checking the labels.

  ‘I had a month’s worth of ice on that flight. Now all it’s good for is cocktails.’

  ‘And was that the most important thing on the plane, do you think?’

  She didn’t rise to the bait. ‘You can’t fix the ice cores with paracetamol and a sticky plaster. But …’ she pulled out a semicircular tube of ice ‘… we back it up. We split the cores down the middle with a table saw, so if there’s any doubt about the lab sample, we can double-check against the original.’

  She counted them off, then swore. ‘One of them’s missing.’

  ‘I didn’t take it,’ I said reflexively. Probably sounded guilty as sin. I glanced at the body behind me. I thought how grudges stack up. ‘Could Hagger have taken it?’

  ‘The one that’s missing is a deep core, right from the glacier bed. Martin wouldn’t have been interested.’

  ‘Hagger’s got something on his hands,’ I said. I twisted the arm so she could see his palm. ‘Do you know what that is?’

  She gave it a quick glance. ‘Do you?’

  I did. But I wanted her to say it. ‘Some kind of stain.’

  ‘It’s Rhodamine B. Fluorescent dye. We use it to measure flow through the glaciers. It’s so concentrated, you can pour fifty mil into the top of a glacier, and a few hours later you’ll find it coming out the bottom.’

  She played with the end of her hair. ‘It stains like hell if you spill it.’

  ‘Who else uses it on Utgard?’

  ‘My students.’

  I let his hand drop and stood. ‘Any thoughts how Hagger got it on himself?’

  ‘We haven’t used it here since last summer. Rhodamine’s only any good in the ablation season – i.e., when there’s meltwater.’

  I wondered if it had anything to do with the water that had soaked Hagger’s clothes. I decided it was time to be blunt.

  ‘What have you got on your hands, Annabel? Blood, maybe?’

  She stared at me in disbelief. ‘God, you’re melodramatic. And mean.’

  ‘You were supposed to be Hagger’s partner on Saturday. You were alone with Tom Anderson when he fell in the moulin.’ Without really thinking about it, I’d started to move towards her. Annabel took a step back.

  ‘Do you think I didn’t think of that? I’ve seen the way everyone looks at me. For what it’s worth, I was as shocked about Anderson as anyone. I had to pull him out of that hole. As for Martin …’

  ‘As for Martin …’ I prompted.

  ‘He was an arrogant shit. But that doesn’t make him worse than any other man on this base.’

  ‘Present company excluded.’

  ‘Do you really think …?’ She laughed, as if the whole idea was too ridiculous to contemplate. ‘Maybe I should be flattered you think I’m such a stone-cold bitch I could do it. I suppose you’ve invented a motive.’

  ‘Revenge.’

  ‘For what?’ I made a you-know sort of gesture with my eyes. ‘That?’ Another incredulous laugh. ‘He was a fifty-something man with three divorces, receding hair and a career going down the toilet. Life was getting its own revenge on him.’

  ‘Then how do you explain the dye on his hands?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  She held my gaze, defiant across the frozen room. The light flickered; the roof seemed to sag in. Suddenly, what had felt so certain a minute ago melted away.

  ‘Did you
have any more mud to throw? Or have you finished?’

  I mumbled something. She advanced towards me so that her face glowed yellow in the light.

  ‘Do you think this is easy? I’m the only woman scientist on a station full of men. Technically, I’m sure you’re all brilliant, but socially you’re hairy Neanderthals who haven’t emerged from the last ice age yet. Everyone here looks at me like I’m a fucking piece of steak they want to get their paws on.’

  She moved to go, then thought of one more thing.

  ‘You know why you want to believe that I killed Hagger? Because the idea that a woman would kill a man for love flatters your egos. It makes you think you’re worth something.’

  Seventeen

  Kennedy

  I hadn’t finished breakfast next morning when Quam called me into his office. He sat behind his desk, fingers working a rubber band fit to snap.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘I was hoping to finish my cornflakes.’

  ‘You know damn well what I’m talking about. I’ve had reports – from more than one of my staff – that you’re putting it about Hagger was murdered.’

  ‘You asked me to find out who was leaking data to DAR-X. I’m pretty sure it was Hagger. He even did a little unofficial work for them on the side.’

  ‘Hagger’s project had nothing to do with that.’ The rubber band was wound so tight it had cut off the blood to his fingertip. ‘I authorised it myself.’

  ‘And they were up by the glacier the day Hagger died.’

  ‘So were half the Zodiac personnel, for God’s sakes. You can’t be suggesting that DAR-X would do … that.’

  ‘No one ever accused oil companies of playing by the rules.’

  I didn’t mention Annabel. I guessed she’d already told Quam what I thought of her.

  ‘This has to stop,’ Quam said. ‘We’re all living close to the edge. Hagger, Anderson, now the crash. More major incidents in a week than we’ve had in twenty years.’

  ‘Still, it’s three,’ I said flippantly.

  ‘Three what?’

  ‘Bad things come in threes. Maybe that’s the end of it.’

  Quam didn’t see the funny side. ‘One man’s dead, two more nearly followed him. With the Twin Otter gone we’re cut off, probably for at least a week. If you ratchet up this paranoia any more, someone’s going to crack.’

  ‘Don’t you see the connection?’ I insisted. ‘First Hagger, then his assistant – and then the plane they were both on. The leak in the fuel tank – you think that was an accident too?’

  ‘Hagger was a busted flush. Shall I tell you a secret? His reputation, the big Nature paper – all built on lies. No one can replicate it, you know why? Because he doped his samples.’

  ‘He couldn’t have,’ I protested.

  ‘They emailed last week. They’re retracting the paper. We can’t have that kind of fraud here: the funding bodies would hit the roof. I told him to his face I was sending him home.’

  That set me back. I knew he’d been having trouble with his work, but this was something else. A third of scientific articles, even the peer-reviewed ones, turn out to be wrong, but no one ever says anything. They’re swept under the carpet and forgotten. For a major journal to publicly disown a paper is almost unheard of. Even the fellows who faked cold fusion back in the eighties didn’t have that happen to them.

  ‘You sacked Hagger?’

  ‘That very morning.’ He stretched the broken rubber band. There was a nick in it: I could see it would snap again soon.

  ‘You think I’m proud of it?’ he said. ‘If anyone’s responsible for his horrible death, it’s me. I must have driven him to it.’

  ‘I still think we should look into it. If Hagger committed suicide, it doesn’t explain Anderson. Or the plane, or—’

  ‘Enough!’ Quam stood. His face had gone as red as his fingertip, as though someone had wound a rubber band around his neck. ‘You’ve got to stop spreading these rumours – I’m ordering you. You can’t go around making people think there’s some kind of murderer on the loose.’

  Too late, he realised the door was open. Danny stood there, a dishcloth draped around his neck and his eyes wide. He’d started to shuffle back into the corridor, but Quam’s furious gaze brought him to a guilty stop.

  ‘Just wondered if Doc had finished his breakfast,’ he mumbled.

  I’d lost my appetite. But back in the medical room, Anderson had woken up. He sat on the little bed, staring around like an abductee taking his first look at the spaceship. His face was grey, his hair was a mess, and five days of beard growth made him look like a tramp.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Wednesday morning. And still at Zodiac.’

  He rubbed the back of his head. ‘I’m not sure …’

  ‘Some short-term memory loss is normal. You mustn’t fret about it. It’ll come back in good time.’

  ‘I need to talk to Luke.’ He glanced at the clock on the wall, panic spreading. ‘He’ll be at school.’

  ‘Greta’s spoken to him. He knows you’re OK.’

  ‘Right.’ He lay back, wincing as his head touched the pillow. I put two paracetamol in a cup and popped it on the table next to his bed. He stared at the ceiling.

  There was something I was dying to know. ‘Up on the Helbreen – when you fell. Do you remember that?’

  ‘I didn’t fall.’ Behind those eyes, the clouds parted. ‘Someone came at me.’

  ‘There wasn’t anyone there,’ I told him. ‘Except Annabel.’

  He frowned. ‘She’d gone behind the rocks. For a wee. Someone hit me from behind.’

  All my suspicions about Annabel came back in a flash – her and Hagger, her and Anderson. But I couldn’t make myself believe it. She’d brought Anderson back to Zodiac, after all. Rescued him. If she’d really wanted to kill him, she’d gone about it all wrong.

  ‘You fell in a moulin,’ I corrected him. ‘Didn’t watch where you were going – banged your head.’

  ‘Someone hit me from behind.’ His eyes narrowed, focused on something far away.

  ‘Must have been a dream. You’ve been asleep for two days, head stuffed full of bumps and drugs. It’s normal you’re a little confused.’ I got my ophthalmoscope and shone the light in his eyes to check for concussion.

  ‘I found a notebook,’ Anderson said. ‘I was reading it.’

  So much for short-term memory loss. I wondered what to do. I still wasn’t sure if Anderson was on the level. At that stage, I didn’t trust anyone.

  If you ratchet up this paranoia any more, someone’s going to crack. Maybe Quam was right. My body was already starting to tell me it wanted another diazepam.

  I opened my cabinet. As I took out the notebook, I saw the burnt corner of the other notebook I’d found at the cabin. Does Ash know where it’s going? I hid it under the prescriptions book.

  ‘I had a flick through. Couldn’t make much sense of it,’ I said casually.

  He turned a couple of pages and raised an eyebrow. ‘“Fridge will kill me,”’ he read aloud.

  ‘A figure of speech. Martin did some work for DAR-X. Fridge thought that was sleeping with the enemy.’

  ‘And all this about “X”. “Concentration of X”, “dispersal of X” … Do you know what “X” is?’

  ‘I was hoping you could tell me.’

  I thought about what Quam had said. Hagger was a busted flush. Did it make any difference what he’d written in his notebook – or was it all fiction?

  I excused myself to check on the pilot, Trond. Halfway down the corridor, I ran into Jensen.

  ‘Can I have a word, Doc?’ I nodded. ‘In private?’

  ‘Of course.’

  There was no privacy in the medical room; we went to the pool room. It used to be a store cupboard, but one winter some bored technician made a half-size pool table out of old packing crates and crowbarred it in. The cues were flagpoles that had been machined down; the fe
lt from old boot liners. I can’t imagine where he found the balls.

  There was barely room for two people to stand either side of it, let alone to wield a cue. But it was tolerably private, and no one ever went in there outside the annual pool tournament. I leaned against the door to keep it shut, while Jensen spun a ball on the table.

  ‘There’s a rumour going around,’ he said. ‘Hagger – they’re saying it wasn’t an accident.’

  I didn’t need to ask how the rumour had started. If Danny had heard me in Quam’s office, everyone on Utgard would know by now. Eastman’s instruments had probably picked it up from space.

  ‘Ask Quam,’ I told him.

  ‘Do you know who’d have done it?’

  ‘No.’

  With a flick of his wrist, he sent the ball rolling towards one of the pockets.

  ‘I think I do.’

  The ball dropped in the pocket. Lost in my thoughts, I almost missed what Jensen had said: I was too busy thinking about Annabel and Anderson and Fridge and Quam.

  Then it registered.

  ‘You know who killed Hagger?’ I said stupidly.

  ‘That day – when Hagger died. I said I was flying Dr Ashcliffe all day looking for polar bears.’

  I nodded.

  ‘It’s not true. Not all true. We were out there, but we didn’t have much luck. Mid-morning, he told me to drop him off. He thought he’d have a better chance watching and waiting on the ground.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘The Russian mining town. Vitangelsk. I went off by myself, restocked a few of the fuel depots.’

  ‘How long were you gone?’

  ‘Two hours. Maybe three.’

  ‘Can you check the flight log?’

  He picked at the felt on the table. ‘Ash said I should write it up as if we’d been flying all day.’ He saw the look I was giving him. ‘It didn’t hurt anyone. The company bills the scientists for the time they book. They have to pay even if they don’t use it.’

  ‘You falsified the flight log? To hide the fact that Ash was on his own all afternoon?’ Vitangelsk is the other side of the mountain from the Helbreen; no distance at all. Ashcliffe could have skied it easily. If DAR-X hadn’t given him a lift.