Killer

“Yes it does. You just don’t know enough about me. You see, I love the theatre, cinema, all that; I can’t get enough of it. It started at school, I suppose, in Edinburgh. I mean, I’d grown up in the wilds. I knew a fair amount about red deer, grouse, salmon, trout, and suddenly there I was in Edinburgh and it was all totally different. It . . . I don’t know . . . it caught me, somehow. And then there was Oxford, of course.”

At that moment the water boiled. Simon came over for his coffee, but he didn’t stay long; he just cast a speculative look at the two of them from under lowered eyebrows and then drifted away again, the steaming mug cupped between his mittened hands.

The time slipped by unnoticed as Kate worked quietly and with surprising success at keeping Colin’s mind on the distant past, eliciting a surprising number of stories about his undergraduate days at Oxford.

But then the stories began to take a darker turn as they jumped forward into the more recent past. Again, an unsuspected side to him began to emerge as he told of drowning his sorrows in London, Paris, Rome; carrying his nebulous but terribly weighty sense of guilt everywhere with him. The names of several women appeared and disappeared in his disjointed narrative and she found herself wondering what they were like – Marie-France, Laura, Isabella, the others . . .

“COLIN!”

Quick came tearing past the latrine-cum-supply tent, stumbling over the tent-pegs, sliding on the ice. His face was white.

“Colin. It’s back. It’s out there now!”

Ross looked up. As though a switch had been thrown deep inside him, the growing love he had felt for Kate turned to a cold, terrible hatred. Abruptly he saw Job again, trapped against that immense chest, hemmed in by the white-sided flippers. “Right,” he said. “Let’s get the bastard.”

“Get it? For Christ’s sake how do we do that? We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t get us!”

But Ross wasn’t listening. His cold eyes were sweeping over what was left of the floe trying to catalogue everything they had which could be used as a weapon. There was very little: two harpoons; one axe; fire, perhaps. A little ammunition. He thought of making more bombs with the bullets and then he remembered that they had lost the fuse with the dynamite.

So that was it: hand to hand. God, he thought, if only they had something which would hold it still for a few minutes while they got at it with the harpoons and the axe. He looked down, kicking snow aimlessly over a thick orange strand. What they really needed, he decided, was a net.

A net!

It came to him in a great flash. The net! And, even before the details were clear in his mind, he was moving.

“Simon. Put the boat together. Load up the lifejackets.”

“The boat!” Quick’s eyes swept disbelievingly over the collapsible dinghy lying in a jumble beside the hole where the old supply tent had stood. “Colin, you’re not thinking of going out after the thing!”

But Ross had already caught up the axe, and was using it to loosen the pegs at the ends of the ropes holding the net in place. These pegs were now inches from the water, and as he worked on them, his gaze probed the water restlessly for any sign of his enemy. He was muttering to himself, “Just a few more minutes, Aipalookvik, you bastard; just hold off a few more minutes.”

Eight ropes held the net in position, one going out from each corner, one from the centre of each side. He began by loosening the pegs on the three ropes pointing east. Then he loosened the one pointing south, his boots several inches deep in water. He searched the placid water before looking down to start work. The hairs on his neck were erect with the tension. It was all very well muttering to the whale that it ought to wait, but he would be in dire trouble if it wasn’t in a listening mood. Between each stroke he looked up, sweat running on his face. As soon as the peg sprang free, he was off at a brisk jog to the next one, the first of the three on the round bows of their ice-ship. Four to go.

Once again he paused and surveyed the deceptively quiet sea. He was at the end of the net now. He began to chop at the ice. Again, between strokes he searched the water with keen eyes, but nothing moved except the grey waves and the restless blue floes.

He moved up the net and chopped the next peg free as well. When he had done so he turned and began to walk casually back up the floe. Only two pegs at opposite sides remained, with the few pegs in the edge of the net itself, holding the floe tenuously in one piece.

“Simon,” he called, “are you sure you saw anything?” Quick looked up from fastening the last section of the boat in place and glanced over at Ross. He saw the tall man walking towards him slowly, silhouetted against the grey sea. And then, improbably, a black spike began to grow out of the top of his head. Quick gaped. What was happening?

And then he realised. “BEHIND YOU!”