The Ice Child (42 page)

Meanwhile Crozier had got to his feet. “I want you to make a hospital tent,” he told Goodsir. “We will leave you with as much as we dare. I want you to stay here with MacDonald. Stanley and Peddie will come with me.”

Crozier looked down at the man whose interests had so fascinated him before he was enlisted—the pathologist with a passion for natural science, who had so enthused at the prospect of Arctic exploration.

Goodsir’s expression was almost blank.

“Mr. Stanley is too sick to walk, sir,” Goodsir told him.

Thirty-three

There was no night now.

From May to July, twenty-four hours of sunshine was the great bear’s world. She stood now on the edge of Simpson Strait, her head hung low with exhaustion. It was raining, the steady forty-mile-an-hour wind blowing the rain horizontally toward her. The sea ice was breaking up.

She had no idea if the cub were alive or dead. She had not been able to feed him. The seal were far out in the water, and she had had no luck in pursuing them. She had walked one hundred and eight miles, and she no longer knew the purpose of her movement. The cub lay on the rocky shoreline, curled slackly in upon itself. She regarded it with dull perplexity, until a movement in the water distracted her.

Offshore an adult male bear was still-hunting.

The water was relatively shallow, and a seal was feeding and diving, resurfacing in almost the same spot every time that it needed to breathe. The female bear onshore could not see the prey, but she could see the predator, lying motionless in the water every time the seal came back to the surface. He lay absolutely still, in imitation of floating pack ice, until he was only a few yards from his victim. Then, abruptly, he lunged, snapping his jaws together over its back. There was a flurry of water and blood, until the seal’s body was flipped out onto the nearest ice, wriggling helplessly in its death throes.

The female had slumped to the ground, after scenting the kill. She had no wish to cross the male’s path or interrupt his feeding. She lay inert, her cub at her back, waiting for the male to pass up the strait and leave her alone.

It was midnight when he came ashore.

She was lying with her back to the wind, in a pit dug from the gravel ridge of the beach, the cub pulled to her side. The smell awoke her. She lifted her head and saw a second fresh kill drawn up on the rocks, and the male walking, with a deceptive, careless, shambling gait, toward them.

In a moment she was on her feet.

The male skirted her, scenting the cub, interested in its immobility. He would have no compunction in killing it, if he could get close enough, and as he suddenly increased his speed, the female charged him.

She had one, and only one, advantage over him. He was heavier, well insulated, and slower than her undernourished bulk. She took him in the shoulder, fastening her teeth close to the bone, tearing his flesh and drawing blood. Surprised, but not deterred, he backed up, head still low, signaling his aggression.

She stood her ground.

If he could not get to the cub, it was highly likely that the male would kill her, feeding on her body before her offspring’s. All that he needed was that the kill should be short, so that his thickly covered body would not overheat. If she held him off for half an hour or so, he would give up, intolerably hot, his temperature close to danger point.

She did not reason that her life should be given up for her son. She did not even register him anymore. This was a battle of instinct and not emotion, a determination for the survival of her own line. She would fight to the death for him.

Her second charge was harder than the first, expending most of her energy. She pounded his shoulder with her forelegs, as he snapped at her head, trying to find the softer spot below the jaw. This was not the ritual posturing of his early adult life, between himself and other young males, characterized by open-mouthed threats and the wrestle to pin the opponent off-balance on the ground. She was a greater challenge than he had anticipated, and he only managed to hold on to her for seconds. He backed away, grunting, his eyes on the body of the cub.

Then his pain registered.

He assessed her, as the blood colored his pristine coat.

Then, as quickly as he had come, he walked away.

She watched him, eyes narrowed, head raised, until his shape merged with the slate-gray-on-white coloring. He eased back into the ocean, swimming slowly, ignoring the seal, heading out to the harder ice floes.

She stood for almost an hour before catching the faint message on the air. It took her almost as long to rouse the cub, before they walked on. As she made the first few steps, she was aware of the new sensation at the base of her throat.

But she ignored it.

It was of no importance.

Thirty-four

Since Jo’s Sunday-evening broadcast, all hell had been let loose.

The TV appeal had begun at six-twenty. It was just a five-minute slot. The first two minutes outlined the James Norberry Trust; then pictures of Doug Marshall came onto the screen. Excerpts from his series reminded viewers of the personality that had earned the series high ratings. They had chosen one program in particular, the broadcast from the Severn Estuary, where a Neolithic woodhenge had appeared from the sea at low water, and where Doug had insisted that the henge stay in situ.

Superimposed over that same shot came Sam’s face. This was Sam at his first birthday, hands plunged into lime-green Jell-O and face transformed with delight.

And then Sam was shown as he was now, face swollen, arms bruised. Pasty colored, listless. Helpless.

The phones began ringing at the James Norberry Trust after the first of Doug’s pictures went up. Every single phone was occupied as Sam’s birthday photo appeared. And the switchboard was jammed by the time that the camera rested on him as he lay in Jo’s arms under the lilac tree.

The trust had received forty-eight hundred calls from potential donors by Sunday midnight.

By Wednesday the figure had become twenty-six thousand.

The Courier
, too, was swamped.

It had run a front-page picture of John on the Friday, and by the following week their post was full of letters, each claiming to have seen Doug’s son. Unfortunately, it appeared that he was in several hundred places at once. In Thailand, on holiday. In New Zealand. In the south of France, or Ireland. And all over England.

“And so it goes on,” Gina muttered.

She had done her share of the letter opening, staying late with Mike, painstakingly reading each one.

“If only the insane ones would leave us alone,” she’d muttered, just last night. She’d flung a piece of closely written paper at Mike. “See that?” she demanded. “Some middle-aged woman in Cleveleys reckons she’s got John tied up in her sitting room.”

They’d exchanged reluctant smiles. Other letters stacked up on the Cleveleys pile. At the end of the day they dared not trash them, however. They locked them in a filing cabinet.

Just in case.

This morning, drumming her fingers on her desk, Gina thought awhile. She had heard all about John’s passions and preoccupations from Jo long before; they had discussed him a countless number of times lately. Ignoring the fact that she had a meeting scheduled for five minutes ago, she logged on to the Internet and searched
polar bear
.

Alta Vista came up with dozens of sites. Choosing one at random, she spent ten minutes gazing at the explanation of the polar bear’s plight. How global warming was shrinking their habitat, increasing the summers, shortening the periods of ice.

“Jesus,” she muttered, scrolling down the page. “Fifteen thousand bears in the Canadian Arctic. Fifteen thousand distractions.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to ward off a threatening headache.

She scanned through the net for the Canadian Hydrographic Service. Found it. Brought up the cloud/snow/ice conditions from the Service’s satellites that showed the weather conditions in the area that fascinated John: King William Island and Lancaster Sound. They showed a Landsat data graph, with ice breaking up in Cambridge Bay in July. Sea ice in Victoria Strait in August. Impossibly complicated shallow- and deep-water images, and networks of tiny islands.

She rested her chin in the palm of her hand and stared at the screen. If John ever tried to get there, he would put himself completely out of reach, she thought. Victoria Strait was about as isolated as any place on earth could be, frozen in for eleven months of the year—in a good year. It was unnavigable by any normal shipping, littered as it was with gravel shoals and sandbanks that made it dangerous. When it wasn’t frozen, the shoreline was flooded with ice runoff, and there were no landmarks to be seen on the flat, barren island. Gina shivered suddenly.

She closed off the site and pursued a different route.

After five minutes she came up with
The Franklin Trail
, several expeditions that had been made in the area in the 1990s, specifically to gather Franklin data. Every day the team’s activities had been submitted by satellite phone to their Web master, and Gina watched as the screen loaded up a whole raft of images. An arctic poppy and yellow lichen; ice drifting off King William Island; a commemorative plaque. A femur with deep knife marks.

Surprised by the last photograph, Gina leaned forward on her desk, brow furrowed with concentration.

Purpose:

To excavate, analyze, and interpret a Franklin site discovered on King William Island in the summer of 1992 by Barry Ranford and Mike Yarascavich. To do some further exploration of the Terror Bay area.

Summary of the trip:

The team of seven worked at the primary site from July 15, 1993, to July 29, 1993. Three hundred bones, including 5 skulls and 7 mandibles, were collected and shipped back.… Barry Ranford, Derek Smith, and John Harrington searched for the “hospital tent” of the Franklin expedition.…

Results:

As Gina’s eye traveled down the page, she caught her breath.

A minimum of eleven individuals were represented.…

92 bones had postmortem cut marks.…

Lead content of bones 82 and 83 parts per million.…

She sat back. “Postmortem cut marks,” she muttered to herself.

Interpreted as evidence of possible cannibalism.…

She looked away, feeling sick.

She tried to think of something else.

Over the river beyond her window, somewhere in that city landscape, Jo was, at this very minute, seeing Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital for the first time. Sam had been transferred there. Right now, she would be walking into the wards.

“Come back,” she whispered, to the empty office. “For God’s sake, John. Come back.”

She went straight to Great Ormond Street when she left work.

It was a terrible journey on a packed tube train. The smell of overheated, overcrowded Londoners jammed into the carriage was not inspiring, and to add insult to injury the escalators were broken down. By the time Gina emerged in Russell Square, she was gasping for air, and the walk up to the hospital seemed to take forever.

She eventually found Catherine and Jo in the corridor outside Sam’s ward, both leaning against the wall, a polystyrene cup in each of their hands. The coffee in them, Gina noticed, as she kissed both women, was stone cold.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Sleeping,” Catherine said.

“He just had another platelet transfusion,” Jo said. She looked at Gina with a new expression: one tinged with something more than fear. If Gina had had to put words to it, she might have settled for
fixated horror
. Jo looked like an accident victim. Walking shock. Gina’s own weariness suddenly evaporated, to be replaced with fear.

“What is it?” Gina said. “There’s something else. What?”

Catherine put her hand on Jo’s shoulder. “It’s the latest tests,” she said. “His neutrophils are zero point one. WBC five point four. Platelets eleven.”

The three of them had got used to this spoken shorthand. Sam had a blue sheet that was filled in daily. It was a record of his blood results and treatment. On the left-hand side was the date, then his weight, then the various levels, followed by the treatment given. Even Gina had dreamed of this form. It obsessed them all. They waited at the ward stations for the results to come back, and one of them filled in the figures herself.

Sam’s hemoglobin today was 102. The normal count was between 120 and 140.

His white blood count was 5.4. Not too bad. Normal was between 4 and 10.

Gina looked around for a chair. There was a bank of half a dozen farther along. “Sit with me,” she said, gently tugging Jo’s arm.

They crowded together on the chairs. Huddling for comfort.

“Neutrophils zero point one,” Gina repeated slowly. She knew the score only too well. The neutrophils were part of the white blood count. They were the cells that responded to antibiotics. They fought infection in the body. A normal level was anything between 1.5 and 8.5 per cubic millimeter.

“It can go to zero,” Jo murmured. “They record zero all the time. The head nurse told me.” She raised her eyes to Gina’s. The light in them was pleading.

“The platelets,” Gina whispered. “What happened to the platelets?”

She saw that Catherine’s eyes were filled with tears, and the girl was struggling not to let Jo see. No one said a word. They all knew that the normal level for platelets was between 150 and 400.

Sam’s was 11.

Oh, sweet Lord
, Gina thought. Eleven thousand per cubic millimeter.

Less than ten percent of what he needed, minimum.

Sam’s transfer here to Great Ormond had been a vote of confidence by the medical community, they had all thought. Taking Sam to the transplant center so that he would be ready at a moment’s notice, as soon as John was found. Now Gina wondered if Sam’s transfer had also had another motive. To bring him here now, because he would be too weak to survive a journey if his condition continued to deteriorate.

Would they still do the transplant if he got worse? Gina wondered. Surely he wasn’t strong enough to survive the preparatory chemotherapy if this carried on. He’d die in the isolation ward while he waited for the bone marrow.