Otto didn't bother. He informed me that the Count, Neal. Divine, Allen, Cecil, and Nary Darling had taken off. with the Sno-Cat and cameras along Lerner's Way and that he and Conrad were following immediately.

Hendriks and the Three Apostles were abroad with their sound recording equipment. Smithy and Heyter had left over an hour previously for Tunheim. Initially, I found &s vaguely disturbing, I would have thought that Smithy would have at least woken and spoken to me before leaving. On reflection, however, I found this omission less than disturbing: it was a measure of Smithy's confidence in himself and, by implication, my unspoken confidence in himself, that he had not thought it necessary to seek either advice or reassurance before his departure. Finally, Otto told me, Heissman and his handheld camera, along with Jungbeck, had taken off. on his location reconnaissance in the sixteen-foot work-boat: they had been accompanied by Goin, who had volunteered to stand in for the now absent Heyter.

Otto stood up, drained his cup and said: "About my daughter, Dr. Marlowe."

"She'll be all right." She would never again be all right.

"I'd like to talk to her before I go." I couldn't begin to imagine a reason why he should wish to talk to her or she to him, but I refrained from comment. He went on: "You have no objections? Medical ones, I mean?"

"No. just straightforward commonsense ones. She's under heavy sedation. You couldn't even shake her awake."

"But surely-"

"Two or three hours at the very least. If you don't want my advice, Mr. Gerran, why ask for it?"

"Fair enough, fair enough. Leave her be." He headed towards the outer door. "Your plans for the day, Dr. Marlowe?"

"Who's left here?" I said. "Apart from your daughter and myself?"

He looked at me, his brows levelled in a frown, then said: "Mary Stuart.

Then there's Lonnie, Eddie, and Sandy. Why?"

"They're asleep?"

"As far as I know. Why?"

"Someone has to bury Stryker."

"Ah, yes, of course. Stryker. I hadn't forgotten, you know, but-yes, of course. Yes, yes. You-?"

Yes.

I am in your debt. A ghastly business, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly. Thank you again, Dr. Marlowe." He waddled purposefully towards the door.

"Come, Charles, we are overdue."

They left. I poured myself some coffee but had nothing to eat for it wasn't a morning for eating, went outside into the equipment shed and found myself a spade. The frozen snow was not too deep, not much more than a foot, but the perma-frost had set into the ground and it cost me over an hour and a half and, what is always dangerous in those high latitudes, the loss of much sweat before I'd done what had to be done. I returned the spade and went inside quickly to change: it was a fine clear morning of bitter cold with the sun not yet in the sky, but no morning for an overheated man to linger. Five minutes later, a pair of binoculars slung round my neck, I closed the front door softly behind me. Despite the fact that it was now close on ten o'clock, Eddie, Sandy, Lonnie, and Mary Stuart had not as yet put in an appearance. The presence of the first three would have given me no cause for concern for all were notorious for their aversion to any form of physical activity and it was extremely unlikely that any would have suggested that they accompany me on my outing: Mary Stuart might well have done so, for any number of reasons: curiosity, the wish to explore, because she'd been told to keep an eye on me, even, maybe, because she would have felt safer with me than being left behind at the cabin. But whatever her reasons might have been I most definitely didn't want Mary Stuart keeping an eye on me when I was setting out to keep an eye on Heissman.

But to keep an eye on Heissman I had first of all to find him and Heissman, inconveniently and most annoyingly, was nowhere to be seen. The intention, as I had understood it, was that he, with Jungbeck and Goin, should cruise the Sor-Hamna in the sixteen-footer, in search of likely background material. But there was no trace of their boat anywhere in the Sor-Hamna and from where I stood in the vicinity of the cabin I could take in the whole sweep of the bay at one glance. Against the remote possibility that the boat might have temporarily moved in behind one of the tiny islands on the east side of the bay I kept the glasses on those for a few minutes. Nothing stirred. Heissman, I was sure, had left the Sor-Hamna.

He could have moved out to the open sea to the cast by way of the northern tip of the island of Makehl, but this seemed unlikely. The northerly seas were whitecapped and confused, and apart from the fact that Heissman was as far removed from the popular concept of an intrepid seaman as it was possible to imagine it seemed unlikely that he would have forgotten Smithy's warning the previous day about the dangers inherent in taking an open-pooped boat out in such weather. Much more likely, I thought, he'd moved south out of the Sor-Hamna into the sheltered waters of the next bay to the south, the Eviebukta.

I, too, made my way south. Initially, I moved in a southwesterly direction to give the low cliffs of the bay as wide a berth as possible, not from any vertiginous fear of heights but because Hendriks and the Three Apostles were down there somewhere recording, or hoping to record, the cries of the kittiwake gulls, the fulmars, the black guillernots which were reputed to haunt those parts: I had no reason to fear anything at their hands, I just didn't want to go around arousing too much curiosity.

The going, diagonally upwards across a deceptively easy-looking slope, proved very laborious indeed. Mountaineering ability was not called for, which in view of my lack of expertise or anything resembling specialised equipment, was just as well: what was required was some form of in-built radar to enable me to detect the presence of hidden fissures and sudden dips in the smooth expanse of white, and in this, unfortunately, I was equally lacking, with the result that I fell abruptly and at fairly regular intervals into drifts of newly formed snow that at times reached as high as my shoulders. There was no physical danger in this, the cushioning effect of newly driven snow is almost absolute, but the effort of almost continuously extricating myself from those miniature ravines and struggling back up to something resembling terra firma-which even then had seldom less than twelve or fifteen inches of soft snow-was very wearing indeed. If it were so difficult for me to make progress along such relatively simple ground I wondered how Smithy and Heyter must be faring in the so much more wildly rugged mountainous terrain to the north.

It took me just on an hour and a half to cover less than a mile and arrive at a vantage point of a height of about five hundred feel? that enabled me to see into the next bay-the Evjebukta. This wide U-shaped bay, stretching from Kapp Malmgren in the northeast to Kapp Kolthoff in the southwest, was just over a mile in length and perhaps half of that in width: the entire coastline of the bay consisted of vertical cliffs, a bleak, forbidding, and repellent stretch of grey water and precipitous limestone that offered no haven to those in peril on the sea.

I stretched out gratefully on the snow and, when the thumping of my heart and the rasping of my breathing had quietened sufficiently for me to hold a pair of binoculars steady, I used them to quarter the Evjebukta. It was completely bereft of life. The sun was up now, low over the southeastern horizon, but even although it was in my eyes, visibility was good enough and the resolution of the binoculars such that I could have picked up a seagull floating on the waters. There were some little islands to the north of the bay and, of course, there were the cliffs immediately below me that blocked off. all view of what might be happening at their feel?: but if the boat was concealed either behind an island or under the cliffs, it was most unlikely that Heissman would remain in such positions long for there would he nothing to detain him.