The Ice Child (2 page)

Gina’s first thought had been that Jo hardly looked painfully young. She was, as Gina’s mother would have said, five foot five of fresh air—thin, almost scrawny; antsy with impatience; quick to humor, quick to anger. Her smile hid a sharp, ironic mind. She stuck out her hand that first day and shook Gina’s with a fierce grip. It had been quite a job to get her to sit down, such was her enthusiasm to get going.

Sitting now in the city center, looking at her, Gina smiled to herself behind the newspaper page. Jo was stretched out in her chair, eyes closed and turned to the sun. For a second she looked the perfect picture of relaxation. Until she opened one eye, yawned, and tapped the newspaper in Gina’s grasp.

“What’s the opposition say?” she asked, ruffling her hair and wriggling upright in her seat.

“Nothing radical,” Gina said. “Except for that.” She held open the paper at the third page. Jo shielded her eyes against the sun and looked at the article.

There was a map on the top right-hand corner—an indented coastline and contour lines of mountains that ran down to the sea.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Greenland,” Gina said. “You know Douglas Marshall?”

Jo had to think for a second. “Give me a clue.”

“BBC Two.”

A long moment went by. “Gardening,” Jo guessed at last.

“Not even close,” Gina said. “Archaeology.
Far Back.
”

“Ah,” Jo acknowledged. “Lots of running about with bits of pottery. Which one was Marshall?” she asked.

“The tall hairy one.”

“They were all hairy.”

“The smiling one. The ship expert.”

“Oh,
him.
” Jo vaguely remembered a tall man, habitually dressed in a battered leather jacket. Not a good color. Dirty red. Faded flash. “What’s happened to him?”

“He’s lost.”

“What, there?” Jo asked, glancing at the map.

“In the land of ice and snow, uh-huh.”

Jo took the page from Gina and took a second to skim the article. Douglas Marshall had been reported missing while on an archaeological trip in one of the most inhospitable landscapes on earth. She sighed heavily. “This guy’s gone on some harebrained personal mission in a snowstorm, and now we’re supposed to all go out and find him,” she said. She pointed to the final paragraph of the article. “Look, they’ve actually sent a bloody frigate. What a waste of money.”

Gina frowned at her. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do,” Jo countered. “The expense! What has he gone there for, really? Personal glory. Some obsession or other, I bet.”

“You cynic!”

“It’s true,” Jo retorted. “I mean, it’s like these other idiots who cross Siberia in a balloon, or something. Hang gliding down Everest, whatever. It’s comic-book stuff.”

Gina took the page back from her. “Actually,” she said, “it’s an academic exercise. An expedition.”

“Same thing.”

“But he could be dying, Jo!”

“Did we ask him to do it?”

“We have to do something.”

“Send out the fleet?”

“Yeah, send out the fleet, why not? He’s a British subject.”

Jo burst out laughing. “What ho,” she said. “Wave the flag.” She looked away, down toward the traffic.

“So … what’s the alternative?” Gina asked. “Let him freeze?”

“Yes,” Jo said. And she almost meant it.

Jo had almost forgotten the conversation when she went into
The Courier
the following Tuesday. It was ten o’clock, and the building was already busy. She put her head around Gina’s door, just to wave hello.

“Hey, come here,” Gina called.

“I’m going up to the clippings library,” Jo said.

“In a minute,” Gina replied. “Sit.”

Jo did so. “What is it?” she asked. “Something good? Send me to Cannes, Gina. Look at me. I’ll die if I don’t get sun.”

Gina was sorting through papers on her desk. “Marshall,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about him. He’s still missing. I want you to do a piece.”

Jo’s gaze settled on her. “You’re joking. Not the madman.”

“No. I want you to go and talk to his wife.”

“His
wife?
Ah, Gina. No.”

“Why not?”

Jo shook her head. “I can’t go steaming in there. And I don’t know a thing about him. And I don’t really want to either. You
know
that.”

Gina nodded, but briefly, the nod dismissing the objection rather than seeing its point. “We haven’t heard anything at all from Mrs. Marshall, and that’s why I want you to go.”

“To talk to her …”

“To talk to someone who knows the family.”

“Because?”

“Because no journalist has
ever
spoken to Alicia Marshall.”

Gina found what she was looking for on her desk. “Here’s Marshall’s biography,” she said, handing Jo five or six stapled sheets. “Marshall’s pretty upfront, but his wife likes to keep a low profile. Power-behind-the-throne stuff. A lot of money. She’s a trustee of the Academy. Rumored to be a bit of a bitch.”

Jo raised her eyebrows, interested at last. “Oh, yeah?”

“She was asked for a comment this week, on Monday,” Gina said. “And she said, ‘No comment.’”

“Who to?”

“
The Times.
”

“Ha,” said Jo, amused.

“You’ve seen the latest on him?”

“No.”

“They found the GPS.”

“What’s a GPS?” Jo asked.

“Global positioning. The one thing you need, a kind of satellite compass. It was dropped on the ice.”

Jo hesitated. “It’s really not my scene, you know,” she muttered. “Can’t you send someone else?”

“I’ve got a hunch,” Gina replied.

“What kind of hunch?”

“Dunno. Could be good for you.”

“Hmmph,” Jo responded, unimpressed. She leafed quickly through the papers in her lap. “I don’t even know what he was looking for in ruddy Greenland.”

“Medieval settlements. Something about Vikings and Eskimos.”

“Oh, thrilling.”

Gina ignored her. “The archivist at the Academy in Cambridge is called Peter Bolton.” She passed a page of notes across to accompany the photocopies. “He can only see you at eight tomorrow morning. He’s teaching all day.”

Jo held Gina’s eye for a few long seconds, before conceding. She knew the glint in her editor’s eye only too well to refuse. “Great,” she grumbled, as she packed the papers together.

It was a long way on the tube to Jo’s flat. After a full day correcting copy and researching for another piece she was scheduled to interview for on Friday, Jo was still not really interested in Marshall. Riding the stuttering rail, crammed into a car with a hundred other commuters, she only skimmed through his biography.

Douglas James Marshall, born Ontario 1957. Fellow of Blethyn College, professor of archaeology, specialist in marine sites, special interest Victorian ship construction, chairman Royal Commission 1989–92 Naval Heritage, author of
The Shipwreck Society
(1994),
Under the Mediterranean
(1996),
The Search for the
Caesar Augustus (1997).…

Over the last couple of years Douglas Marshall had become the spokesman for the University Exploration Academy, and was regularly wheeled out to comment on anything where a tame historical expert was needed. Plus, he had been a regular on the BBC 2 series. She could bring the title pictures to mind, even see the landscapes, and the stills that the Sunday supplements had used in various articles. But as for Marshall himself, she couldn’t visualize him beyond a broad, blurred smile.

When she got home, the light on the answering machine was flashing, and she saw the fax waiting. She ignored it while she showered and made herself a sandwich. Only grudgingly, after she had got out, and wrapped herself in a towel, did she read what Gina had given her.

Alongside Marshall’s biography was a copy of the Saturday article.

He had gone missing at a place called Uummannatsiaq.

Frowning, Jo went over to one of the moving firm’s boxes, where she rummaged for a moment among the books inside. She emerged with her old school atlas and sat down with it, riffling through the pages.

Uummannatsiaq
… she couldn’t even find it. She looked across from the islands of the Northwest Passage, over Baffin Bay, to Greenland. Even from the map she could see that the coastline there was mountainous and unforgiving. Surely at this time of year there would be ice packed deep into the fjords and way out to sea. If, indeed, the ice ever broke up at these places. She shuddered involuntarily. She had never liked the cold, and the thought of spending even one day in such an unforgiving climate was horrendous. Give her a beach with warm sand, somewhere that you could kick off your shoes and clothes.

She smiled to herself and flicked back through the atlas pages.

The book was a mixed bag of memories. Inside the cover her own childish hand had written her name, followed by the address she’d had at seven:
Rheindahlen JHQ, West Germany
. Her father, a career civil servant, and already fifty when Jo had been born, had been an advisor to the MOD. The atlas pages were grainy and thick, the lettering and layout old fashioned. As her father regularly traveled, it had been her daily ritual when a child to find where in the world Daddy might be. She vividly recalled turning to those countries, known to her even now by the texture of the paper under her fingers. She’d traced her father to places in the world whose very names had become part of his identity.
Kuwait. Singapore. The Falkland Islands
. More islands. Offshore islands like these, swept by wind and current. She looked at the great green sweep of Canada now, fringed with its border of ice.

She closed the book and replaced it.

As she did so, she paused to look at the frayed red spine of the returned atlas, so out of place among the newer paperbacks, its fabric shedding, showing the cardboard underneath. The expression on her face was impenetrable. She had lost both father and mother in the last five years, and the isolation was still fresh.

Yet people like Douglas Marshall actually chose to exile themselves. She wondered, still staring at the spine of the school atlas, what kind of family she would find, waiting for Marshall’s return.

Only as she finally turned out the light did she catch sight of the fax machine again in the hallway. With a cup of coffee balanced in the crook of her arm, she pulled the piece of paper out, and managed to tear it.

Doug Marshall’s face, ripped in two, stared back at her.

On the top of the piece of paper Gina had scrawled,
This is your man
.

She slotted the two halves together. It was not a great photo.

Marshall’s face was screwed up against bright sunlight. Impossible to guess his age from that shot, though she might have tried at something less than the biography had told her. A frown into the camera, a backdrop of ocean. He was leaning on a white rail and holding something in one hand. She squinted at the image.

Impossible to say what it was that he was holding. It could have been a piece of iron, a metal rod, a wooden stick.

She sighed as she trailed to the bedroom.

“Oh, I’m going to love
you
,” she muttered as she closed the door.

The Exploration Academy was housed in a Georgian building, set back in its own gardens. It had once been a private house, whose discreet black railings, ornately finished with complicated patterns of leaves and vines, separated the residence from the street.

McCullock Road was in the heart of the city, close to Lion Yard, and by the time Jo got there, just before eight, the traffic was already building up. Cars were backed up in the narrow street, waiting for a delivery van unloading in front of one of the colleges. A hundred yards away down the street Jo glimpsed an archway with a wooden door, a green quadrangle beyond, a red coat of arms on the medieval wall above.

The double glass doors of the Academy led onto a large foyer. Pressing the doorbell, Jo could see a reception desk, with some sort of office behind, and glass-fronted cabinets in the hallway. To the left another door opened into a bigger room. To their right was a flight of stairs.

A woman came out of the office. She smiled at Jo through the glass as she unlocked the door and ushered her in.

“He’s upstairs,” she told Jo. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

She was shown to a chair in the hall.

The place was huge, the ceiling thirty feet high. Jo noticed, now, that at some time fairly recently the whole of the back of the building had been remodeled; beyond the flight of stairs the wall was glass, and a room-wide corridor led to another building, a modern block that looked like a library.

Several minutes ticked past.

Eventually she got up and walked to the cabinets that were ranged against the far wall.

She rested her hand on the sloping glass of the first. Under her palm lay a meaningless scatter of objects and a few sepia photographs. There was a silver spoon with a copper repair on the handle. The tattered remains of a small book, empty of pages, and what had once been gold initials faded on the front. A tiny piece of red tin or aluminum. A page with a drawing of some kind of engine.

She peered at the photographs. Four men in uniform, only one of them youthful. They had the very posed and rigid look of early Victorian daguerreotypes. Their names were underneath, but she barely read them. Not one was looking directly into the camera. Behind them in the case was a long and narrow map of a waterway.

“Miss Harper?”

She turned.

She hadn’t heard him approach, but a man was standing at her shoulder. He was barely her own height, not more than five foot six, and was incredibly round. He held out his hand.

“Peter Bolton.”

“Jo Harper.”

She liked him on sight: he had the face of an enthusiastic schoolboy. He was overweight, probably more than two hundred twenty pounds, and breathing heavily from the exertion of walking down the stairs.

“Come far?” he asked her.

“London,” she said.

“Ah,” he replied, commiserating. “Come with me. I’ve got hot chocolate.” He stopped and peered at her. “Do you drink hot chocolate?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Good.”

They went back to his office. In this assumption, made while she was driving here, trying to visualize both him and the institute, Jo had been right. It was a typical academic’s room, so much a cliché that it might have been prepared for a film set. Shelves lined the room floor to ceiling. Books lined the floor. Dust was everywhere. They could just about get in the room by pushing hard on the door, and picking their way over to two chairs marooned in a wash of files and paper.