The Ice Child (3 page)

Bolton fished a thermos from under the desk. “We have a machine here that never works, and we have Mrs. Cropp, who does. But I don’t like to bother her,” he said, pouring the drink into two plastic cups.

They sipped.

“My phone has never stopped ringing,” he said.

“You must be fed up with us all.”

“No, no,” he replied cheerfully. “I’m very popular all of a sudden.”

“Has Douglas Marshall been missing before?”

“No. Never.”

“But he’s been on expeditions.…”

“Oh, yes. The Antarctic, you know. Turkey. Asia. The Caribbean.”

“And the Arctic?”

“Yes, twice.”

“I see,” she said. She glanced around her. “Have you known him long?”

“Over ten years.”

“Really?” she said. “I’m sorry. You must be frantic.”

He nodded slightly. “Yes … it’s unlike Douglas. But … one tries not to be frantic, exactly.”

“But anxious …”

“Oh, yes.”

“And his wife.”

“Alicia?” He stopped. Paused just a fraction too long. “Yes, of course.”

Jo smiled. “I would like to talk to her. Is that possible?”

To her surprise Bolton blushed. “No.”

The abruptness of the reply took her aback. “A very short interview,” she said. “Perhaps a photograph?”

Bolton shook his head. “Alicia never gets involved in the public side.”

“Just five minutes. Do you have her address?”

“No, I’m sorry … if you want to ask me about Doug’s journey, anything about that …”

She let it go temporarily. “I might as well tell you, I know nothing about Doug Marshall and I don’t understand this passion for Greenland.”

“You don’t know his background?” Bolton asked.

“Not really.”

“Qilatitsoq?”

“No.”

Bolton shook his head. He stood up and took a box file from one of the closest shelves. Opening it, he took out a sheaf of papers and began removing pages from among the pile. “I was going to make a press release, if I ever got around to it,” he said. “Take a copy. It’s Doug’s curriculum vitae … a couple of articles he’s written.…”

She took the papers from him. “Thank you.”

“The Inuit communities are where he started,” Bolton continued. “Because of Franklin. Franklin has been Doug’s lifelong passion. Of course, he’s done other things—a considerable number of other things—but the Inuit and Franklin were the subject of his original doctoral thesis. That set him off on the Greenland mummies. You’ve heard of them?”

“I’m sorry.”

Bolton ran a hand through his hair. “Six women and two children. Dead for over five hundred years. They were in a magnificent state of preservation.”

“Oh … like these ones they found in the Andes?”

“Similar. Similar preservation. Cold and dry, you see?”

“And these were …”

“Inuit. What we once called Eskimo. Or Esquimaux.” He spelled it for her.

“And this is why Doug Marshall is there again, because of mummies?”

“Yes.”

“He’s found more?”

“Not quite. Doug feels there is one other, a crucial religious site, deeper in the fjord.”

“I see,” Jo said. But in all honesty she couldn’t see. A people living on ice. She couldn’t imagine a place dominated by the dark.

“And of course,” Bolton said, “there’s the Franklin connection.”

The phone rang. He picked it up.

Jo sat watching him. She had no idea at all who—or what—Franklin was. She felt her mind go momentarily blank and recognized it as her hitting-the-wall feeling, a sensation she habitually got when her interest in a story waned, or the smell of it left her. A good story had that speeding sensation, and the scent of revelation. There was nothing to reveal here, except a passion for the dead. And even that was an old story. She gently tapped Bolton’s desk, to attract his attention.

“How long has he been looking for these other bodies?” she whispered.

He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Six years.”

“
Six …
”

Forget that, then, she thought. How crazy did you have to be, for God’s sake, to look for six years for dead people in a place that was permanently frozen?

Bolton started to flick the pages of the diary open in front of him. His gaze drifted away, as he listened to the caller on the other end of the line. “He has a
lecture
at two-thirty.…”

Jo got to her feet. Taking a piece of paper from her bag, she scribbled on it,
Are you free at lunchtime?

He glanced at it, nodded, wrote
1:30
on the page.
Perhaps
.

“Thanks,” she said.

Going down the stairs, she stopped halfway, thinking.

The world was looking for a man who couldn’t be found. And the press were looking for a woman who didn’t want to be found.

“We’ll see about that,” she told herself.

She went over to the reception desk, and the same woman who had shown her in got up from a desk beyond the counter and came over to her.

Jo smiled. “Mr. Bolton’s given me the address of Mrs. Marshall, but I don’t know Cambridge,” Jo lied smoothly. “If I take a right from …”

Mrs. Cropp paused only for a second before she glanced down at the map that Jo was holding open in front of her. She shook her head. “Oh, you can’t get to it that way,” she said. “Go down the 603. You’ll come out at the highway. Cross over the bridge and carry on down toward the Eversdens.”

Jo took a gamble. She glanced at the map. “And the house is at Little Eversden?”

“No. Pass the Eversdens. But don’t get into Haslingfield. That’s too far.”

Jo gave her her broadest smile, folding the map. “That’s great,” she said.

“You’re welcome.”

Well
, Jo thought, going out of the door.

Someone’s going to get to the wife eventually
.

It might as well be me
.

According to her road map, which was not greatly detailed, there were maybe ten villages in those twenty square miles. She drove out into a cool, gray-on-green landscape. Roads that had been laid down centuries ago crossed the flat fens. Jo, who had an abiding passion for mountains—or at least a place where there were defined hills and valleys—always felt a little lost in the wide sweeps of East Anglia. The light was high and curious.

She passed a string of houses, bordering each side of the narrow road. The village was there and gone in thirty seconds. A fine mist of rain obscured her windshield. She put the wipers on, negotiated a right-angle turn that appeared from nowhere. The road narrowed further, to the width of a lane, and began to bump through sunken patches. On either side of the road were black-and-white markers, to show flood heights of the river that ran alongside. Ahead she could see a church.

She pulled in close to it and looked again at the map. The Marshalls had to live somewhere close. She imagined it would be a largish house, one known to the locals. Looking up, she saw a man walking his dog. She wound down her window.

“Excuse me,” she called, “is Mrs. Marshall’s house here?”

He shortened the dog’s leash, so that the spaniel wouldn’t jump up. “Marshall?”

“Alicia Marshall?”

“Don’t know a Marshall,” he said.

She drove on. Frustratingly, before long she found herself back at the A603 again. Gritting her teeth, she crossed the main road and headed south.

The rain began in earnest, and the light grew dim enough to need the lowbeams. Just as she switched them on, she saw a sign in the hedgerow, a little black-and-white sign at the edge of a path. But it was a full hundred yards before it registered with her, and she stepped on the brakes.

Franklin House
.

It was worth a try.

It was a beautiful mellow stone building, with a steep tiled roof. She guessed at eighteenth, maybe early nineteenth century. A huge magnolia tree so dominated the front of the house that it well nigh obscured the door.

Jo rang the bell. It was a long time before she heard footsteps, and the door was opened.

The woman who had answered was in her early forties and very tall. She wore a dark suit and had dark hair pulled back from her face. She was well groomed and composed, and, if not beautiful, certainly striking.

“Yes?”

“I’m looking for Mrs. Marshall,” Jo said.

“And you are …?”

Jo held out her hand. “Jo Harper … have I got the right house?”

The woman did not reach out her own hand. “What is it in connection with?”

“I’ve been speaking to Peter Bolton at the Academy,” Jo said.

Alicia Marshall’s face clouded. Her mouth turned down in an expression of distaste. “He sent you here?”

“No,” Jo replied, “but I was speaking to him an hour ago. I’m from
The Courier.
”

The mention of one of the most prestigious British newspapers sometimes eased the way into a conversation like this one; if it was anything at all, it was at least a guarantee that any story would be intelligently handled. Jo expected to see a softening in Alicia Marshall’s face.

Instead the other woman began to close the door.

“I was wondering if you could tell me about this trip,” Jo said. “Why your husband went … how you feel about such”—she hesitated for a second under the scathing gaze—“such adventures.”

For the first time Alicia Marshall smiled. “Adventures?” she echoed.

“Have you heard from your husband?”

“No.” The door caught a little on the flagstone floor of the hallway. Alicia pushed it hard.

“You’ve heard nothing at all? Since he left?”

“No. Now please—”

Jo put her hand on the door frame. “Are you separated?” she asked.

Alicia Marshall gave Jo a lingering look. Then, “You people,” she said at last, contempt in her voice.

“Would you speak to me about him?” Jo persisted.

“Please take your hand from the door.”

“Are you worried?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry? You’re not worried at all?”

Mrs. Marshall stared pointedly at Jo’s hand.

“Do you think he’s alive?” Jo asked.

“I really have no idea.”

Astonished at her tone, Jo dropped her hand.

Alicia Marshall shut the door in her face.

For some time Jo remained where she was, staring at the heavy iron knocker. Behind her the rain pattered down through the magnolia. Turning, she glanced up and saw the drops forming on the first half-opened petals on the naked branches.

“Not worried,” she murmured.

Past the tree a field stretched away to a patch of woodland. Nothing stirred in the landscape at all, not a blade of grass, nothing in the blue blur of the distant city. It was a picture book, with Douglas Marshall’s house delicately penciled in the foreground.

Jo wondered what had happened here, to make a wife want to seem careless of a husband’s life or death. And suddenly she felt very sorry indeed for Douglas Marshall.

And very interested indeed in what had taken him away from home.

Two

John Marshall was dreaming.

He knew it, but he couldn’t wake up.

He could see his father out on the ice, a long way out, a pinprick of black on a frozen ocean. The sky was a pale eggshell-blue above him. Doug was saying something to his only son—something very important—while he turned his head away, his words swallowed in the vast, flat space.

John looked down.

At his feet, outlined in the snow with curious clarity, were polar-bear prints. All four massive paws had left a closely spaced track: the claws had left long trails between each print. He stepped forward now and put his own foot inside one of the enormous depressions.

When he looked up, his father was gone.

Instead, not twenty yards from him, and rising, on her side, from the ice, was the
Jeanette
.

Shock coursed through him.
You’re dreaming
, he thought.
You’re at home
—
in bed
—
and asleep. It’s not real at all
. And yet it did look so real—De Long’s pretty little ship, bought in England, wooden hull, steam powered. He moved toward it along the line of bear prints, seeing how they circled the lifeless wreck.

How many years was it since the
Jeanette
had sailed? A hundred and thirty? She was not even a wreck now, but somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, crushed and broken … and yet here she was, not a man aboard her.

But him.

He suddenly felt the handrail as he came up the hatchway. He was climbing her with ease, the fluid ease of sleep. Just at the first rung, the rail was puckered and fluted, a lighter color showing in the oak. He knew that for almost two years the
Jeanette
had lived in a deadly, drifting dance. She had sailed free for only a matter of weeks, until the ice claimed her, and had held her, month after cold month, week after frozen week, as she trailed in a helpless triangular journey dictated by the polar drift.

He knew the details of the journey as if he had made it himself.

They had sailed from San Francisco in July 1879. They had passed through the Bering Strait at the end of August. They had been chasing a dream—the fantasy of a Polar Ocean. They had gone confidently north, planning to winter in the Chukchi Sea, believing that, where the Kuro Siwo Current met the Gulf Stream, the ocean would part, the ice would change to warmer water, and that there would be a straight path directly to the Pole.

They chased the dream for three years, and became finally stuck in ice in 1881. On June 11 that year the
Jeanette
’s hull suddenly began to murmur—very soft and low at first—as soft as a baby’s cry. Then, the ship began to grunt, like a human being receiving a blow to the solar plexus, over and over again.

John murmured in his sleep now, as if he himself were transfixed.

At four in the afternoon the ice suddenly pressed against the port side, jamming the ship hard on starboard. The
Jeanette
immediately keeled over to sixteen degrees, and the starboard ceiling opened over an inch between the beams, and De Long ordered the starboard boats down, and hauled away from the ship onto the ice floe.

The ice, meanwhile, was coming in the port side, raising the port bow and forcing the starboard bow down. In the engine room they saw that the
Jeanette
was breaking in two down its center, and water was pouring into the starboard coal bunkers. On deck the work of off-loading the dogs and foodstuffs went on with a silent desperation, every man momentarily expecting the ice to move again and the ship to split in two. She was warped, twisted like wet paper, the bolts barely withstanding the pressure, the deck slipping to a twenty-degree list, and sliding unstoppably underwater.