"The first bold bargain that I come at,

again made contact with Hillcrest. My heart sank when I heard the grim news that they'd hardly progressed a couple of miles in the previous twelve hours. In that bitter cold, it seemed -and where they were temperatures were all of thirty degrees lower than they were with usheating up an eight gallon drum of petrol, even using stoves, blow-lamps and every means at their disposal, to the point of boiling was a heartbreakingly slow job, and the Sno-Cat gobbled up in a minute all the pure fuel they could distil in thirty times that. Beyond that, there was no news: Uplavnik, which they had contacted less than an hour previously, had still nothing fresh to report. Without a word, Jackstraw and I packed up the equipment and made our way back to the cabin of the tractor. Jackstraw's almost invariable Eskimo cheerfulness was at the lowest ebb I had ever seen, he seldom spoke now and even more rarely smiled. As for me, I felt our last hope was gone. We started up the tractor again at eleven o'clock and headed straight into the pass, myself at the wheel. I was the only person left in either the driving compartment or the cabin behind: Mahler and Marie LeGarde, vanished under a great mound of clothing, rode on the dog-sled while the others walked. The tractor was wide, the trail narrow and sometimes sloping outwards and downwards, and with a sideslip into the gaping crevasse that bordered our path nobody inside the cabin would have had any chance of escape. The first part was easy. The trail, sometimes not more than eight or nine feet broad, more often than not opened out into a shelf wide enough, almost, to be called the flat floor of a valley, and we made rapid progress. At noonI'd warned Hillcrest that we would be traversing the Vindeby Nunataks then and would have to miss our regular radio schedulewe were more than half-way through and had just entered the narrowest and most forbidding defile in the entire crossing when Corazzini came running up alongside the tractor and waved me down to a stop. I suppose he must have been shouting but I'd heard nothing above the steady roar of the engine: and, of course, I'd seen nothing, because they had all been behind me and the width of the tractor cabin made my driving mirror useless. Trouble, Doc," he said swiftly, just as the engine died. "Someone's gone over the edge. Come on. Quick!" "Who?" I jumped out of the seat, forgetting all about the gun I habitually carried in the door compartment as an insurance against surprise attack when I was driving. "How did it happen?" "The polaroid pdc3030 digital camera German girl." We were running side by side round a corner in the track towards the little knot of people forty yards back, clustering round a spot on the edge of the crevasse. "Slipped, fell, I dunno. Your friend's gone over after her." "Gone after her!" I knew that crevasse was virtually bottomless. "Good God!" I pushed Brewster and Levin to one side, peered gingerly over the edge into the blue-green depths below, then drew in my breath sharply. To the right, as I looked, the gleaming walls of the crevasse, their top ten feet glittering with a beaded crystalline substance like icing sugar, and here not more than seven or eight feet apart, stretched down into the illimitable darkness, curving away from one another to form an immense cavern the size of which I couldn't even begin to guess at. To the left, more directly below, at a depth of perhaps twenty feet, the two walls were joined by a snow and ice bridge, maybe fifteen feet long, one of the many that dotted the crevasse through its entire length. Jackstraw was standing on this pressed closely into one edge, holding an obviously dazed Helene in the crook of his right arm. It wasn't hard to work out Jackstraw's presence there. Normally, he was far too careful a man to venture near a crevasse without a rope, and certainly far too experienced to trust himself to the treachery of a snow-bridge. But, when Helene had stumbled over the edge, she must have fallen heavilyalmost certainly in an effort to protect her broken collar-boneand when she had risen to her feet had been so dazed that Jackstraw, to prevent her staggering over the edge of the snow-bridge to her death, had taken the near-suicidal gamble of jumping after her to stop her. Even in that moment I wondered if I would have had the courage to do the same myself. I didn't think so. "Are you all right?" I shouted. "I think my left arm is broken," Jackstraw said conversationally. "Would you please hurry, Dr Mason? This bridge is rotten, and I can feel it going." His arm broken and the bridge goingand, indeed, I could see chunks of ice and snow falling off from the underside of the arch on which he was standing! The matter-of-fact lack of emotion of his voice was more compelling than the most urgent cry could possibly have been. But for the moment I was in the grip of a blind panic that inhibited all feeling, all thought except the

With the forresters that were slain.

It was Jackstraw who heard it firstit was always Jackstraw, whose hearing was an even match for his phenomenal eyesight, who heard things first. Tired of having my exposed hands alternately frozen, I had dropped my book, zipped my sleeping-bag up to the chin and was drowsily watching him carving figurines from a length of inferior narwhal tusk when his hands suddenly fell still and he sat quite motionless. Then, unhurriedly as always, he dropped the piece of bone into the coffee-pan that simmered gently by the side of our oil-burner stovecurio collectors paid fancy prices for what they Some lost legs, and some lost arms, imagined to be the dark ivory of fossilised elephant tusksrose and put his ear to the ventilation shaft, his eyes remote in the unseeing gaze of a man lost in listening. A couple of seconds were enough. "Aeroplane," he announced casually. "Aeroplane!" I propped myself up on an elbow and stared at him. "Jackstraw, you've been hitting the methylated spirits again." "Indeed, no, Dr Mason." The blue eyes, so incongruously at

"If thou be Robin Hood," said the old wife,

know it wasn't you." "No," she whispered. Again she shuddered, even more uncontrollably than before, and I tightened my arm round her. "I'm frightened, Dr Mason. I'm frightened." "There's nothing" I'd started off to say there was nothing to be frightened of, before I realised the idiocy of the words. With a ruthless and unknown murderer among us, there was everything in the world to be frightened of. I was scared myself: but admitting that to this youngster wasn't likely to help her morale any. So I started talking, telling her of all the things we had found out, of the suspicions we had and of what had happened to me, and when I finished she looked at me and said: "But why was I taken into the wireless cabin? I must have been, mustn't I?" "You must have been," I agreed. "Why? Probably so that someone could turn a gun on you and threaten to kill you if the second officerJimmy Waterman, you called him, wasn't it -didn't play ball. Why else?" "Why else?" she echoed. She gazed at me, the wide brown eyes never leaving mine, and then I could see the slow fear touching them again and she whispered: "And who else?" "How do you mean 'Who else'?" "Can't you see? If someone had a gun on Jimmy Waterman, someone else must have had one on the pilots. You can see yourself that no one could cover both places at the same time. But Captain Johnson must have been doing exactly as he was told, just as Jimmy was." It was so glaringly obvious that a child could have seen it: it was so glaringly obvious that I'd missed it altogether. Of course there must have been two of them, how else would it have been possible to force the entire crew to do as they were ordered? Good heavens, this was twice as bad, ten times as bad as it had been previously. Nine men and women back there in the cabin, and two of them killers, ruthless merciless killers who would surely kill again, at the drop of a hat, as the needs of the moment demanded. And I couldn't even begin to guess the identity of either of them. "You're right, of course, Miss Ross," I forced myself to speak calmly, matter-of-factly. "It was blind of me, I should have known." I remembered how the bullet had passed clear through the man in the back seat. "I did know, but I couldn't add one and one. Colonel Harrison and Captain Johnson were killed by different gunsthe one by a heavy carrying weapon, like a Colt or a Luger, the other by a less powerful, a lighter weapon, like something a camera digital docking hp station woman might have used." I broke off abruptly. A woman's gun! Why not a woman using it? Why not even this girl by my side? It could have been her accomplice that had followed me out to the plane earlier in the evening, and it would fit in beautifully with the facts. . . . No, it wouldn't, faints couldn't be faked. But perhaps- "A woman's gun?" I might have spoken my thoughts aloud, so perfectly had she understood. "Perhaps even meor should I say perhaps still me?" Her voice was unnaturally calm. "Goodness only knows I can't blame you. If I were you, I'd suspect everyone too." She pulled the glove and mitten off her left hand, took the gleaming ring off her third finger and passed it across to me. I examined it blankly in the light of my torch, then bent forward as I caught sight of the tiny inscription on the inside of the gold band: "J. W.-M. R. Sept. 28,1958'. I looked up at her and she nodded, her face numb and stricken. "Jimmy and I got engaged two months ago. This was my last flight as a stewardesswe were being married at Christmas." She snatched the ring from me, thrust it back on her finger with a shaking hand and when she turned to me again the tears were brimming over in her eyes. "Now do you trust me?" she sobbed. "Now do you trust me?" For the first time in almost twenty-four hours I acted sensibly -1 closed my mouth tightly and kept it that way. I didn't even bother reviewing her strange behaviour after the crash and in the cabin, I knew instinctively that this accounted for everything: I just sat there silently watching her staring straight ahead, her fists clenched and tears rolling down her cheeks, and when she suddenly crumpled and buried her face in her hands and I reached out and pulled her towards me she made no resistance, just turned, crushed her face into the caribou fur of my parka and cried as if her heart was breaking: and I suppose it was. I suppose, too, that the moment when a man hears that a girl's fiance* has died only that day is the last moment that that man should ever begin to fall in love with her, but I'm afraid that's just how it was. The emotions are no respecters of the niceties, the proprieties and decencies of this life, and, just then, I was clearly aware that mine were stirred as they hadn't been since that dreadful day, four years ago, when my wife, a bride of only three months, had been killed in a car smash and I had given up medicine, returned to my first great love,