‘At the other end,’ he elaborated. ‘You live to fight another day.’

I gave up on packing and padded along the corridor to the galley. Danny the cook was there, elbow-deep in washing-up.

‘Any chance of some breakfast?’

He heated oil in a pan, and soon the galley was filled with the smell of bacon and eggs. He was a big man, with the sort of gentleness that comes from total confidence in your own strength. The sort of gentleness that could turn ferocious in the wrong circumstances. I never saw him wear more than a T-shirt; I don’t think he ever left the building.

He handed me the plate, and a steaming mug of coffee. Mid-morning, the mess was empty; I’d have felt ridiculous sitting there on my own. I gestured to the island in the middle of the galley.

‘Do you mind if I …?’

‘Pull up a pew.’

I tucked into my breakfast while he started on the washing-up. The food tasted like heaven. As he pottered around the kitchen, I remembered what Quam had said. Danny knows all the gossip.

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘At dinner last night — when Eastman was making a scene. There were three of them who didn’t put their hands up. Eastman, Fridge and Annabel Kobayashi.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did they have against him?’

Danny took an enormous pot out of the sink and rubbed it with a dishcloth. ‘Fridge and Hagger, they used to be good mates, but then it went wrong. They had some bust-ups. Slanging matches you could hear through the whole station.’

‘What about?’

‘Science stuff. Fridge thought Hagger had nicked some of his work.’

I found that hard to believe. Fridge was an atmospheric scientist, nothing to do with microbiology.

‘As for Eastman,’ Danny continued, ‘well, that’s easy enough. You know he’s CIA.’

I almost laughed — but that would have been a mistake. Danny was deadly serious. ‘How do you know?’

‘In the kitchen all day — you hear things. All those aerials and satellites — says he’s working on astronomy or something, but that’s just cover, innit.’

‘Is it?’

‘They pay three million pounds a year for this dump. You think anyone spends that on polar bears? Look at the map. When Russia launches its nukes, they’re coming straight over our heads on their way to the States. This whole place, it’s one big spook station.’

‘Like an early-warning station?’

‘That’s right. So that when it all kicks off, they’re ready. The old mining tunnels up in the north? They’re kitting them out as some sort of bunker. When the ice caps melt and sea levels rise, this is where they’ll hole up.’

I felt dizzy. ‘The CIA?’

‘The Illuminati. The CIA are the frontmen, but it’s the Illuminati who really call the shots.’

‘You think so?’

‘Logical. The bees are dying out. When society collapses because there’s no more crops, they’ll need a safe place to sit it out. Nowhere’s further off the edge of the planet than Utgard.’

Now I wasn’t sure if we were talking about a nuclear holocaust, or climate change, or some other environmental catastrophe. ‘Next you’ll be telling me there’s a spaceship buried under the ice.’

He gave me a measured look. ‘More likely it’s a meteorite carrying alien DNA. Between you and me, I think Dr Hagger might have been on to it. That’s why they got to him — to shut him up.’

‘Well, he did do work on DNA,’ I allowed, ‘but—’

‘Exactly. You’ve seen the sign on the door — “High infection risk of unknown DNA”. What else could it be?’

There was no point trying to explain that the only risk of contamination in Hagger’s lab was that someone would mix up his samples. ‘I’ll try to avoid any alien DNA,’ I promised.

Danny’s knives gleamed as he snapped them on to a magnetic strip on the wall. ‘Truth to tell, they’ll probably come for you next.’

‘You think so?’ I looked over my shoulder. All I saw was the empty dining room.

‘You’re Hagger’s assistant — who knows what he told you. It’s probably best you’re leaving.’

‘Not until tomorrow.’

‘Then watch your back,’ said Danny darkly. ‘They’re already on to you. Probably gave you some bollocks excuse about the plane needing a part, or the weather or something.’

I scraped up the last few bits of yolk from my plate and licked them off the knife. Clearly, it was nonsense. But I wasn’t able to laugh it off as much as I’d have liked.

I carried my plate over to the sink. ‘And Annabel? What was her beef with Hagger?’

‘He was shagging her.’

I thought of Annabel — aloof, unattainable, slicing up her food like a surgeon with a scalpel. I tried to imagine her falling for Hagger. I’d have been more ready to believe she was part of the Illuminati conspiracy.

‘When?’

‘Last summer. Then she turned up here this season and found someone else had been keeping his bed warm over the winter.’

‘One of the grad students?’

A sly shake of his head. ‘Students only got here last week.’

I was about to ask who — and then I realised I knew. It came down to a shortlist of one.

‘Greta?’

The pan went up on the shelf with a clatter. ‘Well, he wasn’t gay, was he?’

Danny had given me so much to think about I didn’t know where to begin. Eastman and the Illuminati, I discounted. Fridge and the stolen data didn’t make any sense. And Annabel’s affair with Hagger seemed almost as far-fetched — though, on reflection, I could just about believe it. More than one pretty young student had found herself in Hagger’s office after hours; three of them had married him.

But Greta?

I was still thinking about it when I ran into Fridge coming down the corridor in his cold-weather gear.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Gemini. Jensen’s flying me up. Annabel has some samples for me.’

I had a day to kill, and I didn’t want to spend it hanging around the base. And I was suddenly interested in seeing more of Fridge and Annabel.

‘Got room for one more?’

Camp Gemini was a few tents and three of the round red huts on the top of the ice dome. I saw them as we flew in, spread over the ice cap like oversized snooker balls. A rough flag line marked out the boundary; inside were four snowmobiles, a couple of sledges and a lot of equipment boxes. A weather station stood on a steel truss at the edge of the camp. The anemometer rattled around, and the wind made the guy ropes moan. I hoped it wouldn’t be too windy for Jensen to fly us back.

Annabel came and met us. Out here, with the high sun full on the snow, she looked dazzling. Even her ECW kit looked tailored. Her trousers hugged her long legs, stretching when she knelt to examine something. Her red parka was cinched in at the waist, her hair swept under her hat to show a slim neck and elfin face, covered with a chic pair of sunglasses. No wonder Hagger fell for her; no wonder she was furious when he dumped her. I felt aggrieved on her behalf.

She pointed to a pile of plastic cool boxes — the sort of thing you’d use for beer at a barbecue.

‘You need help lifting?’

Fridge nodded at me. ‘Tom’s the muscle.’

The coolers weren’t big, but even with two of us I struggled to carry them. After the first two, I had to stop to catch my breath. Cold air rasped my lungs and made me cough.

‘What’s inside?’

‘Popsicles,’ Fridge said with a grin. He snapped the catches and opened one up. Inside, I saw stacks of long cylinders: ice cores, milky white, about ten centimetres thick and wrapped in plastic. Each one had a reference number scrawled in marker pen.

‘What happens to these at Zodiac?’

‘We’ve got a cold store — a hole, basically — dug into the ice. Better than a freezer. I do some preliminary work at Zodiac, and when the plane comes, we send them back to Norwich for more analysis.’

It didn’t sound as if Hagger’s lab freezer was part of the workflow. I wondered how one of the cores had ended up there, and if that had anything to do with the data Fridge had accused Hagger of stealing — if Danny was right about that.