The Chilling, page 19
Miraculously, the monster released her foot.
Another shot rang out, and the beast slumped onto the ice with a rumbling groan.
Marion looked up. A few metres away, Curly stood with the gun gripped tight in both hands. As soon as the creature stopped moving, he relaxed his arms to his sides.
Breathing heavily, Marion scrambled away from the beast. Its enormous body was at her feet, with a head wound bleeding out on the ice. As the pooling blood crept towards her boots, she jerked her legs away and sat up, yanking the daypack off her aching back. She reached inside and gripped the knife’s handle.
Curly came up to her. He looked wrecked, as though he’d run a mile. ‘Are you okay?’ he panted.
‘I will be.’ She pulled the knife out of its sheath. On shaking knees, she crawled through the blood to the creature. Then she plunged the blade deep into its guts.
She used her weight to penetrate the outer layer of skin, then she moved the knife smoothly towards the tail end. When the belly was slit open, the fresh remains of a penguin and several half-digested fish spilled out.
Wordlessly, Marion gestured to Curly. He nodded and knelt beside her. Together, they pulled out fistfuls of the raw fish and started to gorge themselves. They held the steaming insides up to their faces and bit off pieces of flesh, swallowing them whole.
The others came to join them, shouting with excitement. They brought with them a small axe and a bag, to cut up the leopard seal and take it back to camp.
Overcome by exhaustion and shock, Marion fell into a heap not far from the carcass. Only then did she look over at the seal’s head and notice that half its skull was missing. The image was eerily familiar, and her mind flashed back to Jason’s body lying on the deck.
Once she’d realised he was dead, she had picked up the gun and gone searching through the passageways. Then there had only been one thought in her mind, even when she’d heard the alarm warning them to abandon ship.
I need to find Nick Coltheart.
27
Kit wanted to join the SAR team to resume the search for Sally, but Bill asked her to stay behind. The Antarctic Division had been in touch overnight: they needed to perform the preliminary autopsy on Dustin’s body via video link that morning. The corpse had partially thawed out, and an inspection was required before the tissues deteriorated any further. They had already received the necessary consent form from Dustin’s relative.
Thankfully, Kit wouldn’t be required to perform any invasive procedures. Her job would be to guide a portable webcam over the body and take high-resolution photos for the lead pathologist back in Hobart. A full autopsy would be performed in November, once Dustin’s body had been shipped to Tasmania.
In the surgery, Bill wheeled in the corpse and helped Kit remove the clothing. They used large pairs of scissors, with Kit cutting off the upper garments and Bill working on the trousers. Within fifteen minutes, they had Dustin’s body undressed and laid out on the surgical table. Once the video link was established with the autopsy technician, Bill discreetly left the room.
Alone with the corpse, Kit took a moment to collect her thoughts. Under the fluorescent lights, Dustin’s skin shone pale blue as if he’d caught some of the glacial brightness of the iceberg in the harbour. He was on his back with his arms reaching upwards in rigor mortis and his knees bent at odd angles above the table. She felt a tugging in her heart as she gazed upon his face and saw the slackness in his cheeks. Grey and unshaven, he looked much older than his forty-two years and much sadder than she remembered him. Did he always look so depressed? she wondered.
In a tinny voice, the technician instructed Kit to begin with a whole-of-body visual inspection, asking her to describe what she saw. Surveying the corpse, Kit said, ‘The body appears to be intact and unharmed, apart from some minor bruising and lacerations on the right leg.’ At the technician’s prompting, she placed the webcam over the spot in question. She’d noticed the graze below Dustin’s knee as soon as Bill removed the trousers; dried blood ran down the doctor’s calf and into his woollen socks. To her mind, the injury could have been caused by a fall on the rocks alongside the road. If Dustin had sat down in the bar and inspected his leg, that would explain the blood spatters on the bar-room floor. Alternatively, she thought, the blood could have been caused on the spot as the result of a fight or a struggle. She took photos so the pathologist could examine the evidence later.
The next phase of the inspection required her to position the camera over different parts of the body. She found she could do this with some detachment, as long as she didn’t think of the corpse as Dustin. The most challenging part came when the technician asked her to feel around his scalp, to check for head injuries. His hair was cold and wet, sending a chill through her. She glanced down and noticed his eyes were partly open beneath the lashes. The moment was strangely intimate. When she pulled her hands away, they were trembling.
The inspection concluded with Kit taking a few blood samples for forensic analysis. The examination had to be cut short due to an issue with the audio. When the technician logged off, Kit let out a shuddering sigh. Never had she been so pleased to experience a tech malfunction.
Afterwards, she distracted herself by looking over medical supplies. Now that Dustin was gone, Bill had told her she would have to oversee patient care on the base with telemedicine assistance from Hobart. She paced restlessly in the small confines of the surgery, trying to block out images from the autopsy and longing to hear news of Sally.
When Blondie popped his head around the door, she started with a jump.
‘Blondie,’ she said with a weary smile.
She was feeling bleak and unsociable, but it was hard to turn Blondie away. After their search-and-rescue experience on the Petrel, he’d become one of her strongest allies—the one to whom she’d confided her fears about Sally earlier that morning. His presence had been comforting. With his blunt ocker manners and down-to-earth opinions, he could be counted on as a source of calm reassurance. He felt very strongly that Sally would be okay and reminded Kit that her friend was an Antarctic veteran and a field training officer—she had the skills and the resources to survive. She would have had her survival pack, containing a sleeping bag, a bivvy, some dry clothes, food and water, a compass, and a first-aid kit.
Now, however, Kit’s apprehension sat like a frozen lump in her chest.
‘Any word?’ asked Blondie, eyebrows raised.
‘No, but I’m hoping to hear back any minute.’
‘Need another pair of eyes?’ He glanced at the inventory on Dustin’s desk.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And another brain—this one is spent.’ She looked helplessly at the boxes on the counter and the floor. She’d been sorting through them in a haphazard way.
‘Having a bad day?’ he asked.
Kit laughed at the understatement. ‘Yeah, you could say that.’
Looking down, she noticed that Blondie was clutching a vitamin D container. It was his pretext for coming to see her. ‘Thought I’d get a refill,’ he said, shaking the empty vial.
She glanced at the cardboard boxes out in the waiting room. They contained an assortment of medical supplies that Dustin had brought over from the Green Store—but no vitamin D.
‘Oh,’ she said, the last hateful memory of the pills flashing through her mind, ‘we don’t have any of those.’
‘Oh, right.’ Blondie hooked a thumb towards the sea ice. ‘All gone, eh?’
Kit sighed. ‘But we’ll get by, won’t we?’ She smiled thinly. ‘If seasonal affective disorder is our only other worry this winter, that’ll be a good thing.’
‘There are worse things, for sure.’ He shuffled his feet in the doorway and took a deep breath before asking, ‘So you’re gonna be our new doc?’
‘Not quite. I’m not a trained doctor. I don’t think anyone knows what we’re going to do exactly, because no one’s ever lost their medical practitioner before. Bill and the medicine branch at headquarters are coming up with a contingency plan.’
The next ship containing personnel wouldn’t arrive for another seven months. In the meantime, Bill had suggested that the expeditioners would have their monthly check-ups via teleconferencing with a doctor back in Australia. They’d been given a practitioner’s email address and encouraged to get in touch if they required counselling or urgent advice. On the ground at Macpherson, Kit would continue in her role as medical assistant and perform simple diagnostic tests—such as X-rays, and blood and urine checks—as well as admin in the surgery.
‘Lucky we’re all so disgustingly healthy here,’ said Blondie, straightening his shoulders.
‘Lucky for us—’ Kit was going to add ‘for now’, but she was interrupted by a disturbance in the hallway.
It wasn’t an especially loud noise, just a slight thumping against the wall and two deep masculine voices speaking to one another. But in her heightened state of anxiety, she was sensitive to emotions—and those out in the corridor seemed intense.
She frowned at Blondie as if to ask, What’s going on?
He ducked his head out into the hall. ‘Everything all right, guys?’
‘What’s your problem?’ came a man’s voice in anger. He sounded like Skelly.
With a twinge of concern, Kit joined Blondie in the doorway. The scene that greeted her reminded her of footage of Antarctic huskies who would suddenly lose it and engage in brawls out on the ice.
Nick had Skelly’s back flattened against the wall, one hand clenching his shirt. The diminutive chef was almost comically dwarfed by the other man. He clawed at Nick’s large hand on his chest, trying to loosen the grip on his shirt, and ended up spitting in frustration, ‘Get yer fuckin’ hands off me!’
Nick’s face was a blank sheet of rage. ‘What did you say?’ he demanded with a snarl. ‘What did you say?’
Blondie took control. ‘Okay, guys,’ he said, striding over and placing a tentative hand on Nick’s shoulder. ‘Let’s break this up, shall we? Come on.’ He gave Nick a quick but firm pat on the back.
Nick stared murderously at Skelly, apparently prepared to let things escalate. But then he caught sight of Kit in the doorway and seemed to think better of it. He relaxed his grip on Skelly’s crumpled shirt and stepped away.
Skelly raised himself up to his full height. He glared at Nick while smoothing down his shirt and shaking his head in disbelief. ‘What the fuck is your problem?’ he growled, shouldering Nick as he edged past him and marched off down the corridor. Blondie followed.
Kit gazed steadily at Nick, who was pacing up and down with nervous energy. After a while, he pressed his forehead to the wall, then stared at the floor and exhaled loudly. There was a short silence. He cupped his face between his hands and rubbed his cheeks. ‘Arghhh!’ he yelled, throwing his head back.
‘What happened?’ asked Kit, her arms crossed.
Nick gaped at her as if he’d only just remembered she was there. He seemed shocked and incredulous. ‘Skelly said something to me, in this corridor, just then.’
‘What?’
‘Something …’
She went to him and touched his arm. ‘Did he jog your memory?’
‘He—he …’ Nick paused, appearing to collect himself, then continued in a calmer, more measured tone. ‘He asked me if I was looking for drugs.’
‘Why did that upset you?’
‘I don’t know.’ Rubbing his neck, he looked away. ‘Maybe I don’t like drugs.’
Kit frowned in confusion. Something wasn’t adding up. She was almost a hundred per cent sure that Skelly was the man she’d met in the darkened corridor of the Star that night, on her way to see the green flash. She’d later learnt he was a last-minute replacement for their scheduled chef. Given her experience on the ship, it didn’t seem implausible that he’d offered Nick drugs. But why had that rattled Nick so much?
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said suddenly.
Kit scowled at his back as he walked away. She didn’t know why he’d reacted so violently to Skelly, but she did know one thing: if ever Nick had lied to her, it was at that moment.
28
The Weddell seals were stupidly trusting. They sunned themselves on the rocks, basking on their backs, with their mottled grey-brown fur exposed to the air. They didn’t perceive humans as a threat; they barely acknowledged their presence. When the Petrel crew members came up close, they turned and winked their beautiful brown eyes, seeming to smile beneath their whiskers. And when one of their number was shot dead, they didn’t even seem to notice. To them, the blast of the gun was just another loud disturbance, like the roaring of the wind or the calving of an iceberg.
Marion was glad that there was no panic among the seals—it would make them easier to hunt.
Soon after the incident with the leopard seal, someone noticed a few Weddell seals up ahead on the ice. In the relentlessly white landscape, their silvery brown hides were easy to spot. After getting some sleep, the crew ventured back to the area. Curly walked right up to a seal, pointed the gun at its head and pulled the trigger. After that, two men with sacks moved in. They had to carve up the seal before it froze solid, but there was nothing like hunger to focus the mind and get the job done.
The day before, the crew had cut the leopard seal’s hide into cross-sections, then laboriously removed its intestines and other guts with a serrated knife. They didn’t leave a single edible scrap behind. But they knew the leopard seal would provide only so much food for twenty-one people who’d been starving for weeks. Seal flesh was salty game meat and made some people gag, but it was nutritious and provided much-needed energy. They had to take it when they could.
Marion noticed that when Curly fired the gun, he didn’t hesitate. He dug his heels into the snow, his legs apart. Gripping the weapon in his hands, he aimed with precision, then pulled the trigger in one smooth motion.
She was grateful to him for his outer calm. He’d shared almost none of the crew’s harrowing despair over the past few weeks. Outwardly, he seemed indifferent to their predicament. While everyone else was drowning in despair, he was observing the weather or using the compass and a map to draw up a crude trajectory along the coastline. She was pleased that at least one person was keeping it together.
The voyage leader, however, seemed intent on getting a rise out of him.
As they were cutting up the seal, Thorn asked Curly where he’d got the weapon.
‘It’s Jason’s,’ he said, ignoring Marion’s surprised look.
‘Jason’s?’ Thorn pulled his head in and frowned. ‘Why do you have it?’
‘He leant it to me. It was in my survival bag.’
‘There are so many problems with that, I just don’t know where to begin,’ snapped Thorn. Personal firearms had been forbidden on the voyage. He took a moment to collect himself. ‘But right now, we’ve got something to eat because of that revolver, and I’m prepared to let it go, so long as you keep that thing safe and never point it in my direction. Got it?’
With his head bowed and the gun hanging limply at his side, Curly nodded. When he looked up again, he caught Marion’s eye.
She was relieved that he’d covered for her. She wasn’t ready for an interrogation about the weapon just yet. When she’d noticed it lying next to Jason’s lifeless body, she’d instantly recognised the firearm as his. He refused to travel anywhere without it.
She watched Curly smoothly tuck the gun into his daypack. If I never see that thing again, she thought, it’ll be too soon.
It was the weapon Nick had used to kill Jason.
29
Kit spoke to Sally’s mother, Helena, over a satellite phone in the entertainment area. In Kit’s late teenage years, the Rivers’ household had provided the warmth and variety that was lacking in her own home environment. A stay-at-home mum, Helena was a vibrant, contented contrast to Daphne, a single parent perpetually worn out by two jobs. Kit wanted to delay the phone call till they had positive news. But now Sally had been missing for three nights: it was time to let Helena know.
It broke Kit’s heart to hear the hope and terror in the older woman’s voice. ‘We’ll find her,’ said Kit, as Helena wept. ‘I promise you.’
When Kit hung up, she had a sudden thought. What if Sally had turned on one of the spare GPS transmitters for the seals? With the help of a satellite tracking system, the devices enabled them to record the long-range movements of the seal population in the surrounding area. If she were lost in the snow with her gear, then this would be one way to advertise her location. Kit would just need to look at recent data and find a pattern that didn’t fit the daily movements of a seal.
But she was soon disappointed. When she pulled up the tracker on her laptop in the mess area, it seemed that all the GPS transmitters had ventured into the sea that day, before returning to one of the breeding sites on the ice. They were doing what they were meant to do: behaving like seals.
Disheartened, Kit set out a number of the gold-coloured plastic boxes on the main dining table. Each tracker was rectangular and about the size of a cigarette packet, with a bendy black antenna on top. More often than not, over the course of a year, the devices would be accidentally knocked off or become detached from the seals, and so they needed to affix as many as they could in order to get some useful results. Sally had been keen to get as many attached as possible before the winter. There were only a few weeks to go before the weather would make any outdoors work extremely difficult. Today would have been one of the few opportunities left for Sally to recruit subjects.
Kit resolved to head out to the nearby breeding site. The SAR team had returned there to look for Sally, but Kit hadn’t yet revisited the area. She was tired of sitting around indoors, waiting to hear news—she was impatient to retrace Sally’s last steps for herself. While she was out there, she could tag a few seals. It was the least she could do for her friend.
Grimacing with the effort, Kit used her fingernails to prise the top off one tracker and insert the long-life batteries. She then checked to see that the transmitter really did send out her location in real time; she watched the computer as it processed a position update on the screen, down to the nearest twenty-five metres or so. To assist, the screen provided a detailed high-resolution map.
Another shot rang out, and the beast slumped onto the ice with a rumbling groan.
Marion looked up. A few metres away, Curly stood with the gun gripped tight in both hands. As soon as the creature stopped moving, he relaxed his arms to his sides.
Breathing heavily, Marion scrambled away from the beast. Its enormous body was at her feet, with a head wound bleeding out on the ice. As the pooling blood crept towards her boots, she jerked her legs away and sat up, yanking the daypack off her aching back. She reached inside and gripped the knife’s handle.
Curly came up to her. He looked wrecked, as though he’d run a mile. ‘Are you okay?’ he panted.
‘I will be.’ She pulled the knife out of its sheath. On shaking knees, she crawled through the blood to the creature. Then she plunged the blade deep into its guts.
She used her weight to penetrate the outer layer of skin, then she moved the knife smoothly towards the tail end. When the belly was slit open, the fresh remains of a penguin and several half-digested fish spilled out.
Wordlessly, Marion gestured to Curly. He nodded and knelt beside her. Together, they pulled out fistfuls of the raw fish and started to gorge themselves. They held the steaming insides up to their faces and bit off pieces of flesh, swallowing them whole.
The others came to join them, shouting with excitement. They brought with them a small axe and a bag, to cut up the leopard seal and take it back to camp.
Overcome by exhaustion and shock, Marion fell into a heap not far from the carcass. Only then did she look over at the seal’s head and notice that half its skull was missing. The image was eerily familiar, and her mind flashed back to Jason’s body lying on the deck.
Once she’d realised he was dead, she had picked up the gun and gone searching through the passageways. Then there had only been one thought in her mind, even when she’d heard the alarm warning them to abandon ship.
I need to find Nick Coltheart.
27
Kit wanted to join the SAR team to resume the search for Sally, but Bill asked her to stay behind. The Antarctic Division had been in touch overnight: they needed to perform the preliminary autopsy on Dustin’s body via video link that morning. The corpse had partially thawed out, and an inspection was required before the tissues deteriorated any further. They had already received the necessary consent form from Dustin’s relative.
Thankfully, Kit wouldn’t be required to perform any invasive procedures. Her job would be to guide a portable webcam over the body and take high-resolution photos for the lead pathologist back in Hobart. A full autopsy would be performed in November, once Dustin’s body had been shipped to Tasmania.
In the surgery, Bill wheeled in the corpse and helped Kit remove the clothing. They used large pairs of scissors, with Kit cutting off the upper garments and Bill working on the trousers. Within fifteen minutes, they had Dustin’s body undressed and laid out on the surgical table. Once the video link was established with the autopsy technician, Bill discreetly left the room.
Alone with the corpse, Kit took a moment to collect her thoughts. Under the fluorescent lights, Dustin’s skin shone pale blue as if he’d caught some of the glacial brightness of the iceberg in the harbour. He was on his back with his arms reaching upwards in rigor mortis and his knees bent at odd angles above the table. She felt a tugging in her heart as she gazed upon his face and saw the slackness in his cheeks. Grey and unshaven, he looked much older than his forty-two years and much sadder than she remembered him. Did he always look so depressed? she wondered.
In a tinny voice, the technician instructed Kit to begin with a whole-of-body visual inspection, asking her to describe what she saw. Surveying the corpse, Kit said, ‘The body appears to be intact and unharmed, apart from some minor bruising and lacerations on the right leg.’ At the technician’s prompting, she placed the webcam over the spot in question. She’d noticed the graze below Dustin’s knee as soon as Bill removed the trousers; dried blood ran down the doctor’s calf and into his woollen socks. To her mind, the injury could have been caused by a fall on the rocks alongside the road. If Dustin had sat down in the bar and inspected his leg, that would explain the blood spatters on the bar-room floor. Alternatively, she thought, the blood could have been caused on the spot as the result of a fight or a struggle. She took photos so the pathologist could examine the evidence later.
The next phase of the inspection required her to position the camera over different parts of the body. She found she could do this with some detachment, as long as she didn’t think of the corpse as Dustin. The most challenging part came when the technician asked her to feel around his scalp, to check for head injuries. His hair was cold and wet, sending a chill through her. She glanced down and noticed his eyes were partly open beneath the lashes. The moment was strangely intimate. When she pulled her hands away, they were trembling.
The inspection concluded with Kit taking a few blood samples for forensic analysis. The examination had to be cut short due to an issue with the audio. When the technician logged off, Kit let out a shuddering sigh. Never had she been so pleased to experience a tech malfunction.
Afterwards, she distracted herself by looking over medical supplies. Now that Dustin was gone, Bill had told her she would have to oversee patient care on the base with telemedicine assistance from Hobart. She paced restlessly in the small confines of the surgery, trying to block out images from the autopsy and longing to hear news of Sally.
When Blondie popped his head around the door, she started with a jump.
‘Blondie,’ she said with a weary smile.
She was feeling bleak and unsociable, but it was hard to turn Blondie away. After their search-and-rescue experience on the Petrel, he’d become one of her strongest allies—the one to whom she’d confided her fears about Sally earlier that morning. His presence had been comforting. With his blunt ocker manners and down-to-earth opinions, he could be counted on as a source of calm reassurance. He felt very strongly that Sally would be okay and reminded Kit that her friend was an Antarctic veteran and a field training officer—she had the skills and the resources to survive. She would have had her survival pack, containing a sleeping bag, a bivvy, some dry clothes, food and water, a compass, and a first-aid kit.
Now, however, Kit’s apprehension sat like a frozen lump in her chest.
‘Any word?’ asked Blondie, eyebrows raised.
‘No, but I’m hoping to hear back any minute.’
‘Need another pair of eyes?’ He glanced at the inventory on Dustin’s desk.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And another brain—this one is spent.’ She looked helplessly at the boxes on the counter and the floor. She’d been sorting through them in a haphazard way.
‘Having a bad day?’ he asked.
Kit laughed at the understatement. ‘Yeah, you could say that.’
Looking down, she noticed that Blondie was clutching a vitamin D container. It was his pretext for coming to see her. ‘Thought I’d get a refill,’ he said, shaking the empty vial.
She glanced at the cardboard boxes out in the waiting room. They contained an assortment of medical supplies that Dustin had brought over from the Green Store—but no vitamin D.
‘Oh,’ she said, the last hateful memory of the pills flashing through her mind, ‘we don’t have any of those.’
‘Oh, right.’ Blondie hooked a thumb towards the sea ice. ‘All gone, eh?’
Kit sighed. ‘But we’ll get by, won’t we?’ She smiled thinly. ‘If seasonal affective disorder is our only other worry this winter, that’ll be a good thing.’
‘There are worse things, for sure.’ He shuffled his feet in the doorway and took a deep breath before asking, ‘So you’re gonna be our new doc?’
‘Not quite. I’m not a trained doctor. I don’t think anyone knows what we’re going to do exactly, because no one’s ever lost their medical practitioner before. Bill and the medicine branch at headquarters are coming up with a contingency plan.’
The next ship containing personnel wouldn’t arrive for another seven months. In the meantime, Bill had suggested that the expeditioners would have their monthly check-ups via teleconferencing with a doctor back in Australia. They’d been given a practitioner’s email address and encouraged to get in touch if they required counselling or urgent advice. On the ground at Macpherson, Kit would continue in her role as medical assistant and perform simple diagnostic tests—such as X-rays, and blood and urine checks—as well as admin in the surgery.
‘Lucky we’re all so disgustingly healthy here,’ said Blondie, straightening his shoulders.
‘Lucky for us—’ Kit was going to add ‘for now’, but she was interrupted by a disturbance in the hallway.
It wasn’t an especially loud noise, just a slight thumping against the wall and two deep masculine voices speaking to one another. But in her heightened state of anxiety, she was sensitive to emotions—and those out in the corridor seemed intense.
She frowned at Blondie as if to ask, What’s going on?
He ducked his head out into the hall. ‘Everything all right, guys?’
‘What’s your problem?’ came a man’s voice in anger. He sounded like Skelly.
With a twinge of concern, Kit joined Blondie in the doorway. The scene that greeted her reminded her of footage of Antarctic huskies who would suddenly lose it and engage in brawls out on the ice.
Nick had Skelly’s back flattened against the wall, one hand clenching his shirt. The diminutive chef was almost comically dwarfed by the other man. He clawed at Nick’s large hand on his chest, trying to loosen the grip on his shirt, and ended up spitting in frustration, ‘Get yer fuckin’ hands off me!’
Nick’s face was a blank sheet of rage. ‘What did you say?’ he demanded with a snarl. ‘What did you say?’
Blondie took control. ‘Okay, guys,’ he said, striding over and placing a tentative hand on Nick’s shoulder. ‘Let’s break this up, shall we? Come on.’ He gave Nick a quick but firm pat on the back.
Nick stared murderously at Skelly, apparently prepared to let things escalate. But then he caught sight of Kit in the doorway and seemed to think better of it. He relaxed his grip on Skelly’s crumpled shirt and stepped away.
Skelly raised himself up to his full height. He glared at Nick while smoothing down his shirt and shaking his head in disbelief. ‘What the fuck is your problem?’ he growled, shouldering Nick as he edged past him and marched off down the corridor. Blondie followed.
Kit gazed steadily at Nick, who was pacing up and down with nervous energy. After a while, he pressed his forehead to the wall, then stared at the floor and exhaled loudly. There was a short silence. He cupped his face between his hands and rubbed his cheeks. ‘Arghhh!’ he yelled, throwing his head back.
‘What happened?’ asked Kit, her arms crossed.
Nick gaped at her as if he’d only just remembered she was there. He seemed shocked and incredulous. ‘Skelly said something to me, in this corridor, just then.’
‘What?’
‘Something …’
She went to him and touched his arm. ‘Did he jog your memory?’
‘He—he …’ Nick paused, appearing to collect himself, then continued in a calmer, more measured tone. ‘He asked me if I was looking for drugs.’
‘Why did that upset you?’
‘I don’t know.’ Rubbing his neck, he looked away. ‘Maybe I don’t like drugs.’
Kit frowned in confusion. Something wasn’t adding up. She was almost a hundred per cent sure that Skelly was the man she’d met in the darkened corridor of the Star that night, on her way to see the green flash. She’d later learnt he was a last-minute replacement for their scheduled chef. Given her experience on the ship, it didn’t seem implausible that he’d offered Nick drugs. But why had that rattled Nick so much?
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said suddenly.
Kit scowled at his back as he walked away. She didn’t know why he’d reacted so violently to Skelly, but she did know one thing: if ever Nick had lied to her, it was at that moment.
28
The Weddell seals were stupidly trusting. They sunned themselves on the rocks, basking on their backs, with their mottled grey-brown fur exposed to the air. They didn’t perceive humans as a threat; they barely acknowledged their presence. When the Petrel crew members came up close, they turned and winked their beautiful brown eyes, seeming to smile beneath their whiskers. And when one of their number was shot dead, they didn’t even seem to notice. To them, the blast of the gun was just another loud disturbance, like the roaring of the wind or the calving of an iceberg.
Marion was glad that there was no panic among the seals—it would make them easier to hunt.
Soon after the incident with the leopard seal, someone noticed a few Weddell seals up ahead on the ice. In the relentlessly white landscape, their silvery brown hides were easy to spot. After getting some sleep, the crew ventured back to the area. Curly walked right up to a seal, pointed the gun at its head and pulled the trigger. After that, two men with sacks moved in. They had to carve up the seal before it froze solid, but there was nothing like hunger to focus the mind and get the job done.
The day before, the crew had cut the leopard seal’s hide into cross-sections, then laboriously removed its intestines and other guts with a serrated knife. They didn’t leave a single edible scrap behind. But they knew the leopard seal would provide only so much food for twenty-one people who’d been starving for weeks. Seal flesh was salty game meat and made some people gag, but it was nutritious and provided much-needed energy. They had to take it when they could.
Marion noticed that when Curly fired the gun, he didn’t hesitate. He dug his heels into the snow, his legs apart. Gripping the weapon in his hands, he aimed with precision, then pulled the trigger in one smooth motion.
She was grateful to him for his outer calm. He’d shared almost none of the crew’s harrowing despair over the past few weeks. Outwardly, he seemed indifferent to their predicament. While everyone else was drowning in despair, he was observing the weather or using the compass and a map to draw up a crude trajectory along the coastline. She was pleased that at least one person was keeping it together.
The voyage leader, however, seemed intent on getting a rise out of him.
As they were cutting up the seal, Thorn asked Curly where he’d got the weapon.
‘It’s Jason’s,’ he said, ignoring Marion’s surprised look.
‘Jason’s?’ Thorn pulled his head in and frowned. ‘Why do you have it?’
‘He leant it to me. It was in my survival bag.’
‘There are so many problems with that, I just don’t know where to begin,’ snapped Thorn. Personal firearms had been forbidden on the voyage. He took a moment to collect himself. ‘But right now, we’ve got something to eat because of that revolver, and I’m prepared to let it go, so long as you keep that thing safe and never point it in my direction. Got it?’
With his head bowed and the gun hanging limply at his side, Curly nodded. When he looked up again, he caught Marion’s eye.
She was relieved that he’d covered for her. She wasn’t ready for an interrogation about the weapon just yet. When she’d noticed it lying next to Jason’s lifeless body, she’d instantly recognised the firearm as his. He refused to travel anywhere without it.
She watched Curly smoothly tuck the gun into his daypack. If I never see that thing again, she thought, it’ll be too soon.
It was the weapon Nick had used to kill Jason.
29
Kit spoke to Sally’s mother, Helena, over a satellite phone in the entertainment area. In Kit’s late teenage years, the Rivers’ household had provided the warmth and variety that was lacking in her own home environment. A stay-at-home mum, Helena was a vibrant, contented contrast to Daphne, a single parent perpetually worn out by two jobs. Kit wanted to delay the phone call till they had positive news. But now Sally had been missing for three nights: it was time to let Helena know.
It broke Kit’s heart to hear the hope and terror in the older woman’s voice. ‘We’ll find her,’ said Kit, as Helena wept. ‘I promise you.’
When Kit hung up, she had a sudden thought. What if Sally had turned on one of the spare GPS transmitters for the seals? With the help of a satellite tracking system, the devices enabled them to record the long-range movements of the seal population in the surrounding area. If she were lost in the snow with her gear, then this would be one way to advertise her location. Kit would just need to look at recent data and find a pattern that didn’t fit the daily movements of a seal.
But she was soon disappointed. When she pulled up the tracker on her laptop in the mess area, it seemed that all the GPS transmitters had ventured into the sea that day, before returning to one of the breeding sites on the ice. They were doing what they were meant to do: behaving like seals.
Disheartened, Kit set out a number of the gold-coloured plastic boxes on the main dining table. Each tracker was rectangular and about the size of a cigarette packet, with a bendy black antenna on top. More often than not, over the course of a year, the devices would be accidentally knocked off or become detached from the seals, and so they needed to affix as many as they could in order to get some useful results. Sally had been keen to get as many attached as possible before the winter. There were only a few weeks to go before the weather would make any outdoors work extremely difficult. Today would have been one of the few opportunities left for Sally to recruit subjects.
Kit resolved to head out to the nearby breeding site. The SAR team had returned there to look for Sally, but Kit hadn’t yet revisited the area. She was tired of sitting around indoors, waiting to hear news—she was impatient to retrace Sally’s last steps for herself. While she was out there, she could tag a few seals. It was the least she could do for her friend.
Grimacing with the effort, Kit used her fingernails to prise the top off one tracker and insert the long-life batteries. She then checked to see that the transmitter really did send out her location in real time; she watched the computer as it processed a position update on the screen, down to the nearest twenty-five metres or so. To assist, the screen provided a detailed high-resolution map.
