Alistair Maclean - Athabasca

Athabasca

Alistar MacLean

"I found him."

"How come?"

"Instinct, I guess." The bitterness in Houston's voice was unmistakable. "One of those finely honed instincts that comes into operation about ten hours too late."

"Meaning that Finlayson could have been saved if this instinct of yours had been operational ten hours ago?"

"Maybe -- but almost certainly not. John was murdered."

"Shot? Knifed? What?"

"Nothing like that. I didn't examine him. I knew that Mr. Morrison and you wouldn't want me to touch him. I didn't have to examine him. He's outside, it's thirty below, and all he's wearing is a linen shirt and jeans. He's not even got shoes on. That makes it murder."

Dermott said nothing, so Houston continued. "Apart from the fact that he'd never have crossed the outside doorstep voluntarily without his Arctic clothing, he'd never have been permitted to do so anyway. There are always people in the reception area, besides a person who mans the central telephone full-time. By the same token, it would have been impossible for anyone to carry him out."

"Lugging corpses is conspicuous. So?"

"He wouldn't even have had to be a corpse. I think he was silenced in his own bedroom and bundled straight out the window. The cold would have finished him off. Here come your friends. I'll go get some more flashlights."

Outside, the cold was breathtaking. The temperature, as Houston had said, stood at thirty below. The forty-mile-per-hour gale brought the combination of temperature and chill-factor down to minus seventy. Even double-wrapped as a polar bear, without an exposed inch of flesh, the fact remains that one still has to breathe -- and breathing in those conditions, until numbness intervenes, is a form of exquisite and refined agony. In the initial stages it is impossible to tell whether one is inhaling glacial air or superheated steam: a searing sensation dominates all else. The only way to survive for any length of time is to breathe pure oxygen from a suitably insulated tank -- but those are not readily available in the Arctic.

Houston led them around the right hand corner of the main building. After about ten yards he stopped, bent down and shone his flashlight between the supporting pilings. Other beams joined his.

A body lay face down, an insignificant heap already half-covered by the drifting snow. Dermott shouted, "You have sharp eyes, Houston. A lot of people would have missed this. Let's get him inside."

"Don't you want to examine him here, have a look around?"

"I do not. When this wind drops we'll come back and look for clues. In the meantime, I don't want to join Finlayson here."

"I agree," Morrison said. His teeth chattered audibly, and he was shaking with the cold.

Recovering the body from under the building provided the four men with no problem. Even if Finlayson had weighed twice as much, they would have had him out in seconds flat, such was their determination to regain shelter and warmth as soon as possible. As it was, Finlayson was slightly built, and handling him was like handling a 150-pound log, so solidly frozen had he become. When they were clear of the pilings Dermott looked up at a brightly lit window above and yelled through the wind, "Who's room is that?"

Houston shouted, "His."

"Your theory fits, doesn't it?"

"It does."

When they brought Finlayson into the reception area, there were perhaps half-a-dozen men sitting or standing around. For a moment nobody said anything. Then one man stepped forward and, with some diffidence, asked, "Shall I bring Dr. Blake?"

Mackenzie shook his head, sadly. "I'm sure he's an excellent doctor, but no medical school has yet got around to offering a course on raising a man from the dead. Thanks all the same."

Dermott said, "Have we got an empty room where we can put him?" Houston looked at him and Dermott shook his head in self-reproach. "Okay. So my mind's gummed up with cold or lack of sleep or both. His own room, of course. Where can we find a rubber sheet?"

So they took Finlayson to his room and laid him on the rubber sheet on top of his bed. Dermott said, "Is there an individual thermostat control in here?"

"Sure," said Houston. "It's set on seventy-two."

"Turn it up."

"What for?"

"Dr. Blake will want to do a postmortem. You can't examine a person who's frozen solid. We're getting experienced at this sort of thing. Too experienced." Dermott turned to Mackenzie. "Houston thinks Finlayson was silenced in this room. Killed, knocked out, we don't know. He also thinks that our friends got rid of him by the simple expedient of opening the window and dumping him onto the snow bank beneath."

Mackenzie crossed to the window, opened it, shivered at the icy blast of air that swept into the room, leaned out and peered down. Seconds later he had the~window firmly closed again.

"Has to be that. We're directly above the spot where we found him. And it's in deep shadow down there." He looked at Houston. "Is there much traffic along there at night?"

"None. Nor during the day. No call for it. Track leads nowhere."

"So the killers left either by the front door or by this same window. They did the obvious thing-just stuffed him under the building, hoping the snow would have drifted over him before daylight came." Mackenzie sighed. "He couldn't by any chance have felt sick, opened the window for some fresh air, fell and crawled under the building?"

Dermott said, "You believe that's possible?"

"No. John Finlayson wouldn't get a breath of fresh air that way. He got a dearth of fresh air. Murder."

"Well, I think the boss should be told."

"He's sure going to be pleased, isn't he?"

Brady was furious. His black scowl accorded ill with his heliotrope pyjamas. He said, "Progress on all fronts. What do you two intend to do?"

Mackenzie said pacifically, "That's why we're here. We thought you might be able to give us a lead."

"A lead? How the hell can I give you a lead? I've been asleep." He corrected himself. "Well, for a few minutes, anyway. Sad about Finlayson. Fine man, by all accounts. What do you reckon, George?"

"One thing's for sure. The similarities between what happened here tonight and what occurred at Pump Station Four are too great to be a coincidence. As with the two engineers, so with Finlayson. They all saw or heard too much for their own health. They recognized a person or persons whom they knew well and who knew them, and those people were engaged in something that couldn't be explained away. So they had to be silenced in the most final way."

Brady thought for a moment, and asked, "Is there a direct connection between Bronowski being clobbered and Finlayson being killed?"

"I wouldn't bet on it," Dermott said. "Tie-up looks too obvious. You could argue that Bronowski escaped because he didn't catch his assailants red-handed in whatever they were doing, and that Finlayson died because he did. But that's too easy, too glib."

"What does Houston think?"

"He doesn't appear to have any more idea about it than we do."

"'Appear?'" Brady seized on the word. "You mean he may know more than he's telling?"

"At the moment he's not saying or telling anything."

"But you don't trust him?"

"No. And while we're at it, I don't trust Bronowski."

"Hell, man, he's been savagely assaulted."

"Assaulted. Not savagely. I don't trust Dr. Blake, either."