The Ice Child (6 page)

Music swelled over the sound of Doug Marshall’s voice, and his image dissolved into a shot from the prow of a masted boat.

“The ships were low in the water,” Marshall’s commentary now began. “Weighed down with stores and equipment, and fantastic amounts of food. They had over thirty-two thousand pounds of beef, thirty-two thousand pounds of pork, thirty-three thousand pounds of preserved meat, thirty-six hundred gallons of spirits, two hundred gallons of wine, seven thousand pounds of tobacco, and twenty-seven hundred pounds of candles. Not to mention a hand organ that played fifty tunes, a hundred Bibles, and a dog called Neptune.”

Gina, who had started the process of checking her e-mail, paused, her hands hovering above the keyboard. Then she put her glasses on and leaned on the desk, staring at the screen. “That’s some stack of victuals,” she murmured.

But Jo wasn’t listening. Her gaze was fixed on the TV.

“Although they were bark-rigged sailing ships,” Marshall continued, “they both had railway steam locomotives belowdecks. Specially adapted for the trip, the trains had been stripped of their front wheels, but they still weighed fifteen tons apiece.” He smiled, shaking his head at the improbability of it. “Imagine the room they took up in the holds,” he said. “Partly because of them, stores were packed everywhere, above- and belowdeck. And just to add to the weight, the ships’ hulls were blanketed with iron to protect them against the enormous power of pack ice.”

The screen images clouded, the soundtrack rising with the noise of a fierce gale. Spray flecked the lens as the bows plunged into a stronger current. Chasing out from the Thames estuary and into the waters of the North Sea.

“On July fourth the ships restocked at Greenland,” Marshall said. “They were seen by the whaling ships
Enterprise
and
Prince of Wales
on July 28, as they entered Lancaster Sound. But neither they—nor any of their crew—were ever seen again.”

Finally, Jo stopped the tape.

She turned to Gina.

“It’s what he chases,” she said.

“Who?”

“Douglas Marshall.”

“Marshall, yeah, hmm,” Gina commented.

“But you see?” Jo demanded. “He’s the expert on Franklin. He’s been looking for those ships for years. He found a canister from one of them—” She leaned over and tapped the papers she had given Gina. “It’s in there somewhere. Both ships had little copper canisters that they wrote messages for, then sealed up and threw overboard. They were a kind of marker. But only one was ever found, in Greenland. Until Douglas Marshall found another one four years back.”

“What did it say?” Gina asked.

“It’s in those papers,” Jo told her.

Gina was tempted to look but stopped herself. “Look, Jo—”

“Do you think he went to Greenland looking for another canister?” Jo asked.

Gina crossed her arms and looked steadily at her. “Did you see the item?” she asked.

“What item?”

“This morning.”

Gina took the morning copy of
The Courier
and flipped it open to the third page. Halfway down, below the photograph of a Royal Navy helicopter, was an article.

Blizzards Force Search Teams Back

The overnight search for the British scientist Douglas Marshall and his Inuit guide was last night called off until first light, following the worst weather conditions in the search area in living memory.

Marshall, 39, Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge’s Blethyn College, went missing four days ago in the Uummanniaq Fjord in northwestern Greenland.…

Jo glanced back at Gina.

“They’ll never find him out there,” Gina said.

Jo said nothing. She was reading, and then rereading, the article.

“I see the angle,” Gina said. She fisted her hand and pressed it to the top of her desk. “The vanishing explorer. He’s relived his hero’s life.”

To her surprise Gina saw Jo color slightly. The younger woman turned the page and carefully folded the newspaper. Then she walked slowly to the window.

Looking at Jo’s turned back, Gina frowned for a moment. Then a small light dawned on her face. For a moment her expression was all astonishment.

She got up, walked around her desk, and drew level with Jo.

“You wanted him to freeze, remember?” she said. “Only last weekend you wanted him to freeze.”

Jo’s expression betrayed no emotion at all—not a flicker—as she gazed at the river.

John Marshall let himself into his father’s third-floor flat in Cambridge.

There was mail behind the door, almost two weeks’ worth. He hesitated a fraction, then picked it up, putting it on the first flat surface to hand.

Although his father had given him a key, John didn’t like to come here. The key was nothing more than a token, something that Doug had offered when he had first moved in, but it was made plain that it was only for emergencies.

He wondered if Doug would call this an emergency. He could hear him now. “What made you think I wasn’t coming back?” he would say, with his concentrated, smiling stare. “What the hell made you think that?”

John smiled grudgingly to himself as he walked through the hall to the sitting room. Oh, only a couple of near-as-dammit obituaries on the TV. Only Peter Bolton’s face when John had seen him last night, catching him at the lecture theater at six, and seeing Bolton’s ashen look.

“Is there news?” Bolton had asked.

“No,” John had said. “I thought you might have heard.”

Bolton had put an arm around his shoulder and given him a ghost of a smile. “I won’t tell him you were worried, and you won’t tell him I was worried,” he said.

John bit his lip now, walking to the window and staring out at the view.

The air in the flat smelled musty and damp. It was a three-room front in the high Victorian apartment building, looking out over Parker’s Piece, and the trees in the narrow garden overshadowed the living space. There was a single bed in one corner of the main room, covered with a red throw. A couch that had seen considerably better days. A gas heater hooked onto the wall. In the corner opposite the bed, past the second floor-to-ceiling window, was a kitchen area—just a couple of counters, two small gas rings, a half-dozen cupboards.

His father had lived here for five years; although Alicia, John’s mother, would deny it. She always pretended that Doug still lived at home, at Franklin House. And as though to prove it she always kept his study dusted, with books arranged on the desk. She put flowers in there. She opened the windows, and cleaned and dusted it, and turned his chair around so that the cushions didn’t fade in the sun. She even had Doug’s clothes on the right-hand side of the wardrobe in her bedroom. She still slept on one side of the bed, with Doug’s side turned down. There were books on his bedside table; not as he would keep them, of course, in a haphazard stack that spilled onto the floor, but neatly laid out in a row of three. To one side of the books was his father’s watch, the old thirties Rolex that had belonged to his own father. John always looked at that watch, which, until five years ago, had never left Doug’s wrist, and now lay abandoned. Doug had forgotten it in the storm of the final morning at Franklin House. The fact that he had never come back for it, never even asked John to bring it—not that Alicia would let him—was somehow more poignant, more meaningful, than anything else. Even than his empty chair at dinner.

John walked over to the little kitchen. There wasn’t much food. He checked the fridge, took out a carton of milk, opened it, and poured it away down the sink. There was a pack of bacon, still in date. Two eggs. A loaf going green. John found a shopping bag, stuffed the loaf inside, and put it down, ready to take out.

Outside, the sun was trying to come out. It cast a watery light over the room, touching the desk under the window: the computer, books, and telephone. There was no answering machine. John sat down at the desk and tilted the chair backward, running fingers over the arms with their rounded edges, the size of a man’s palm. He curled his fingers over.

“He’s coming back,” he told the view of Parker’s Piece, the few morning pedestrians hurrying across it, the dog that was running in decreasing circles, the man on the bike who had stopped halfway across.

John had gone home last night, but only after trying to get out of it. He had rung Alicia, trying to find a good excuse.

“You ought to be here.”

“I have classes.”

“No one would expect you in class.”

In the long pause he could hear the clock in Alicia’s hallway ticking.

“You ought to be here,” she’d repeated.

He had gone, hitched a lift to the village.

She had been waiting for him as he opened the door. She must have watched him walk up the drive, and yet she’d not opened the door, but waited for his key in the latch.

“Darling,” Alicia had said, holding out her arms.

He’d given her a kiss.

“Are you hungry?”

“Don’t worry.”

“I do worry,” she said.

They had eaten in the dining room, not the kitchen. She had had it decorated.

“Do you like it? It’s Russian red.”

“It’s loud.” He’d smiled.

“It’s actually a period color,” she told him.

They had finished the meal in silence. It was an atmosphere he had grown used to in that house.

It was hard to say when the war between his parents had begun. Perhaps before he even had any memories of them. His first picture of his mother was long before they had moved out to the village. He had a memory of an enormous staircase in a house something like this one; they rented a first floor set of rooms—he could see his mother now, the flat-heeled shoes passing him as he sat, rebelling against something she had said, on the stairs.

“Stay there all night, then,” she’d told him.

They had a scratchy, moquette-covered couch, a black-and-white television, and a carpet shedding long threads that he used to pull. He remembered her as constantly moving, and constantly talking. His father would be there at odd times—bleary eyed and monosyllabic in the morning, absent at night, or turning up very late, carrying his cases up those long, wide stairs.

“Your father is traveling,” Alicia would say. He could still—just—recall when she said it with warmth in her voice. Pride.

From a baby—from the first time he could form a rational thought about the cases and the absences—he’d wanted to go with his father.

“Where is he now?” he’d once asked. He must have been about six. “I want to go there.”

She’d brought a map from the bookshelf, unrolled it, made him sit in front of it at the desk.

“You see this island? This is where we are. This is England,” she’d told him. Her finger had trailed out to sea, crossed an endless width of blue. “You see this other island? Jamaica. In the West Indies. You see where it says?” She’d rolled the map back up, pushed it onto a shelf where he couldn’t reach it. “That’s where he is,” she’d said. And then she’d suddenly reached down to hold him, clutching him to her. “You’d want to leave your mummy?” she’d said. “Leave me all alone?”

His gaze had edged back to the rolled map. “What’s he doing?” he’d asked.

She’d let him go. “Diving in water.”

“What for?”

“To find buried things.”

For a long time he imagined his father diving into a warm sea, over and over, for fun. Only later did he grasp that Doug’s diving actually involved air tanks and endless hours of laborious work. During Jamaica—Doug had been gone for four months—John had waited with horrible impatience for his father to come back. He’d been convinced that his father would be loaded down with pirate booty. They had waited at Gatwick, John almost overcome with excitement at the idea that Doug would have gold cups and rings stuffed in his case, things that he would give to him, things that John could keep in his bedroom. He had even cleared a space for them on his bookshelves, for the treasure that he would show his friends.

But Doug had come back empty handed. “You can’t take anything away,” he’d explained to his son. “It has to be recorded. And it doesn’t belong to me, even if I find it.”

Ten years later, of course, he’d kept the Franklin cylinder.

Cheat
.

There were trips in the UK that Alicia had visited. Portland, Lyme Bay. What age had John been then? Seven? Eight? No more. Memories of sitting in a windswept cliff hotel. Of The Cobb at Lyme slippery with seawater. Of dark seaweed on Lyme’s beach, and a tearoom perched on the very edge, through whose steamed-up windows John had peered anxiously.

Doug had taken his son out on the dive boat one day at Lyme. It was John’s initiation into marine work. A gift and a test. John had read all the books about Lyme’s dozens of wrecks, all the dates, all the positions. He could name them and the dates they had foundered. He could even name some of the cargoes. He’d been fired up to show his father what he could do. He’d promised to help check the equipment, watch for his dad’s times, look at the tank’s air supply. Even make the tea. Alicia had showed him at home how to brew the kettle and fill the thermos. He’d practiced. He had wanted his father to be proud.

It could not have gone worse. He’d thrown up for five solid hours and had been returned to Alicia like a wet rag. He didn’t even know about seasickness when he’d set foot on that boat, but he sure as hell knew all about it by the time that it was five hundred yards from shore. He’d gripped the boat rail while the tide heaved. Watched his father’s descent into the gray-green murk, the trace of slithering bubbles on the waves. And suffered the complete soul-burning disgrace of being curled up on deck, feeling that the world had come to an end—or at least had been reduced down to a few yards of spattered planking that wouldn’t keep still even in a stiff breeze—by the time Doug finished the dive.

“We’ve got to make a sailor of you,” Doug had told him, frowning at the sight of him. “Jesus, J., look at the state of you.” He’d put a hand over his mouth, then laughed. “You stink, my man.”

I
hate you
, John had thought, eight-year-old grief welling up in his chest.

“I dived with my dad,” he’d told the kids at school. He never told them he’d puked up over most of the crew and been sent back to Mother by midday.