Killer

She thought of Job. He was one of those people you seemed to know instantly and completely. His face always cheerful, his narrow eyes twinkling, his strange, lilting accent. He was just how she had imagined an Eskimo would be. Perhaps, she thought, that was why she seemed to know him so well so soon: he was on the surface the personification of some childhood dream and she therefore assumed that his depths and personality also fitted in with how she supposed Eskimos were.

And her father. She wondered, with a tingle half of excitement, half of the old fear which now seemed so silly, whether she was also filling out his character with dreams. He seemed so perfectly the way she remembered him. Good-hearted, cheerful, vague and vivid. The great mind humming away on levels far removed from humdrum reality. Accepting the new situation she had presented him with, seemingly without a second thought, far too consumed with his experiments and theories to be bothered for long with reality.

But the other two, what was she to make of them? They seemed to be opposites in every way. Colin, tall, dark, silent; Simon, smaller, blond, garrulous, sparking with nervous energy and drive, endlessly trying to prove that if not as tall, he was still as good as everyone else. It had been Simon, of course, who had held her attention between Anchorage and Fairbanks with his clipped, precise, dangerously tempting version of the cause of their quarrel.

They had all grown up together, he had said, Robin, Charlie, Ross and himself. Ross, Robin and he had gone to the same school. Ross and Robin had gone to Oxford together, and had split up only when Ross had gone into the business world and Robin in the army. Ross and Charlie had married young but there had been no family, partly because Ross had at that time started to build up his reputation as an Arctic expert and was rarely at home, and partly because Charlie always said that a husband and two brothers were family enough for her anyway. So they had remained a tight-knit, happy little group until that summer five years ago when Ross had been asked to lead a commemorative run to the South Pole following the same route as Scott’s ill-fated expedition in 1912. He had agreed. The army, not to be outdone, had added to the expedition their own team, led by Captain Robin Quick.

The final assault team had been Ross, Robin, two other army men named Smith and McCann, and Job’s brother Jeremiah. Only Ross had come out alive.

At the Enquiry, it had been implied that he had left the others to die so that he could steal their rations to ensure his own survival, and indeed, various of Robin’s possessions had been found on him. But he was exonerated, and given an important job with the big consortium which now employed them all, which had interests in and near Polar areas, and which needed an expert to advise them. While his wife Charlie, unable to endure the death of her brother, had shut herself away, taken to sleeping tablets, drugs, and finally killed herself.

So for five years he had hidden behind a desk in Washington earning the money while other men did the work.

Kate had noticed her father listening closely to Simon Quick’s harsh words and guessed that he knew less about the affair than he had led her to think. Through it all, though, Colin Ross had said nothing; had appeared not even to be listening. Through it all he had sat, the black wings of his brows gathered in a frown, staring distractedly out of the window, tugging at the black glove on his left hand. Instinct told Kate that there was in all probability another side to the story, one that Ross, from what little she knew of him, was too proud to tell. This seemed to her mysteriously satisfying; so she had listened without comment until the plane’s descent into Fairbanks field.

At Fairbanks they had eaten without leaving the plane. The strange old petrol truck which had laboured up the long runway to refuel them had been followed by another, more modern, with coffee and sandwiches. Unused as she was to flying, it had not occurred to her to wonder why the plane had been parked so far from the buildings at both Anchorage and at this airport. Had she asked the pilot, he would have told her in no uncertain terms, and also have given her a heated lecture upon the nature of some of their cargo. But she did not ask, and consequently sat in blissful ignorance as the jet lifted off again.

Some unexplained change in the engine note disturbed her train of thought now, and her mind shifted away from considerations of Colin Ross to her present situation. She turned a little towards her father, who sat across the gangway from her, lost in silent abstraction.

“What’s the camp like, Daddy?”