Isvik

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  Isvik

  Hammond Innes

  To the memory of

  DOROTHY

  who was only able to travel

  the first half of this book with me.

  CONTENTS

  I

  THE POOLS WINNER

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  II

  ANGEL OF DEATH

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  III

  RENDEZVOUS AT USHUAIA

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  IV

  ON ICE

  ONE

  TWO

  V

  PORT STANLEY

  ONE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I

  THE POOLS WINNER

  ONE

  January, and East Anglia under a mantle of snow. It was still falling, tiny flakes driving across the flatness of the airfield, hangars edged with icicles and only the cleared runway cutting a black swathe through the bitter cold. I had left the guardroom till last, knowing they would have kept it warm. There was damp rot in the floorboards under the reception window, worm in door lintels that were beginning to rot at the base. I completed the entries on my clipboard and stood there for a moment checking back through my notes.

  The Admin Sergeant, who had been escorting me round the various messes and quarters, returned from answering the phone. ‘Station Commander would like you to join him for a drink before you leave.’

  I didn’t say anything, my mind concentrated on the job in hand, wondering whether I had missed anything. Twenty-three pages of notes and tomorrow I would have to cost it all out, produce a report, and an estimate, of course. It was an old station, mostly built in the war years, the quarters patched again and again, windows and doors largely of untreated wood protected only by paint. There were huts, too, that were beginning to crumble. It would be quite a big job, and whether Pett, Poldice got it would depend on my figures, as would the profit they made, and this was my first big survey since the company had been taken over.

  I closed my clipboard. The Sergeant repeated the invitation and I asked him, why the Station Commander? I had done RAF stations before and it was the Wing Commander Admin who had always looked after me, never the Station Commander.

  ‘Couldn’t say, sir.’ He glanced at the clock over the desk. ‘He’s waiting for you in the officers’ mess, so if you’ve finished I’ll take you across.’

  It was past one and no sign of a rise in temperature as we walked along the frozen roadway past the main gate where the security men huddled for warmth in their glassed-in box. The sound of engines warming up was loud on the freezing wind and our breath smoked. The Great Ouse would be edged with ice today right down to King’s Lynn, and my little yawl, lying in its gut on the Blakeney salt marshes, would be frozen in.

  The Group Captain was waiting for me in the main bar, a tall, dark man with an aquiline nose and a craggy face. There was a wing commander and a squadron leader with him, but he didn’t introduce me and they drifted away as he asked me what I would have to drink. When I said a whisky mac, he nodded – ‘Good choice, but I’m flying this afternoon.’ He was drinking orange juice.

  The bar was dark, the lights on, and as soon as I had been handed my drink he took me over to a table in the far corner. ‘You know a good deal about ships, I believe. Wooden ships.’ He waved me to a chair.

  ‘Do you mean sailing ships?’

  He nodded.

  I told him I had been on a few. ‘Sail training ships.’ The grateful warmth of the drink seeped down into my stomach. ‘And I’ve a boat of my own,’ I added. ‘Wood, not fibreglass. Why?’

  ‘Old ships,’ he said, not answering my question. ‘Square-riggers.’ He reached into the buttoned pocket of his uniform and pulled out several folded sheets of paper. ‘This time last year I was in the Falklands.’ He was silent a moment, looking down at the sheets. His mind seemed to have drifted back to his period on the islands. ‘Strange place,’ he murmured. ‘The most extraordinary command I ever had.’ He lifted his head, his eyes focussing on me again. ‘How long do you reckon a wooden ship would last in the Antarctic, in the sort of icy conditions you get down there?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Depends on a lot of things – the type of timber used in the construction of the hull, its condition, the latitude you’re talking about and the range of temperature.’ And I added, ‘It’s also a question of how many months of the year it’s’ subjected to freezing, and particularly whether the timbers are immersed all the time. If the air has been allowed to get at them …’ I hesitated, staring at him and wondering what was in his mind. ‘So many variables, it’s impossible to say without knowing all the circumstances.’

  He nodded, opening out the folded sheets and smoothing them against his knee.

  They were photocopies of what looked like pages from a notebook, very creased and the scribble illegible from where I was sitting. ‘You’re thinking of the hulks still lying around the Falklands, are you?’ I asked him. One of our directors had gone out there at the time they were preparing the SS Great Britain for the long haul back to the original graving dock in Bristol where she had been built. He gave slide shows locally of the pictures he had taken, and since wood preservation was still the company’s main business, many of the pictures were close-ups of the wrecked and abandoned ships he had seen around the islands. ‘If you want information about the Falkland hulks, you’d better ask Ted Elton,’ I told him.

  ‘No, not around the Falklands. I don’t know where, that’s the trouble.’ He tapped the sheets he was holding. ‘These are pages from a glaciologist’s notebook. They were found on his body and I had them copied before sending his things back to London.’ He passed them across to me. ‘He was probably on the flight deck waiting for his first sight of the Ice Shelf, otherwise he wouldn’t have seen it.’ And he added slowly, ‘Or did he imagine it?’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘A ship. A big sailing ship. Locked in the ice.’

  ‘An old ship? You said something about an old ship, a square-rigger.’

  He nodded. ‘Read what he says.’ He passed me the sheets and I held them up to the light.

  There were three of them stapled together and the first words that caught my eye were: Masts gone, of course. Just the stumps, all coated in ice. The deck, too. All I could see was the outline. An old wooden ship. I’m certain. Unfortunately my camera was back aft with my gear. Three masts and what looked like gun ports, the deck a clear stretch of ice bounded by battered bulwarks, and aft of the wheel …

  I turned to the second page, the writing suddenly very shaky, almost illegible, as though the aircraft had hit turbulence.… a figure. The helmsman, frozen to the wheel. That’s what it looked like. The ghost of a man, and the ghost of a ship, all draped in white, snow or ice, only the outline showing. And then it was gone, my eyes blinking in the ice glare. I almost didn’t believe what I had seen, but this is what it looked like … And on the third page he had drawn a rough sketch of the vessel.

  ‘Have you shown this to anyone with a knowledge of old ships?’ I asked the Group Captain.

  ‘I haven’t personally,’ he said, ‘but the National Maritime have reported on it. They say it looks like an early nineteenth-century frigate. But of course that’s largely guesswork. The sketch is too rough for anybody to be certain, and the question they raise is the same that everybody has raised who has read those pages – did Sunderby really see it or did he hallucinate? His name was Charles Sunderby.’ He paused, tugging at the lobe of his left ear. ‘He
had been home on sick leave, his trouble apparently requiring psychiatric treatment.’ He said it hesitantly. ‘The effect of a winter at McMurdo. He had done several Sno-Cat journeys to icebergs out in the pack, examining the heavy layering that apparently takes place when new ice is forced up over older ice.’ He turned his head, looking suddenly straight at me. ‘So, back to my original question: could a wooden vessel of the late 1700s, or early 1800s, survive almost two centuries in that part of the world? I know in Alaska and the north of Canada, where there are no termites, wood can last almost indefinitely. The gun carriages at Fort Churchill, they go back to the formative years of the Hudson Bay Company.’

  ‘It depends very much on the degree of humidity in the summer months,’ I said. ‘But even if the timber could last, would the ship?’

  He nodded. ‘Knowing what the winds are like down there you’re probably right. But I met the man. We had a drink together the night before he left.’ He sat there for a moment, staring down at his glass, lost in thought. The odd thing was he was scared. That’s why it sticks in my mind so.’ He spoke slowly, reminiscing. ‘A glaciologist and scared of the ice. That’s why he’d been home on leave, to sort his problem out. Or did he have some sort of premonition? Do you believe in that sort of thing?’

  He looked up at me, his grey eyes wide. Not the sort of man who’d know about fear, I thought. And then he said, ‘Poor bugger. I nearly lent him my amulet – the one given me by an Ethiopian just before he died. We were on the grain run from Djibouti. Grain and rice, and I had pulled him aboard at the last minute, thinking to hell with regulations, I’d save one of the poor bastards. But I didn’t succeed and he gave me this …’

  He put his hand inside his shirt and pulled out a face like a sunflower carved out of some pale-coloured stone. ‘Worn it ever since.’ And he added, ‘We all of us have moments when we need to grip on to something – something that will reassure us that the luck hasn’t run out. So I never gave it to him and his plane disappeared into the ice.’ He slipped the amulet back inside his shirt, silent again.

  ‘When did it happen?’ I asked him.

  ‘What? Oh, the plane. Let’s see. I’ve been back almost six months now and it happened just before I left MPA. Funny thing, you know, it was only by chance that he caught that particular flight. He had been flown out from somewhere in the States in an Argentine Air Force plane. He was Argentinian, you see. At least, that’s what his passport said. But he was an Ulsterman really. His nature, I mean – very puritan. He landed up at the Uruguayan base near Montevideo, then hitched a ride to Mount Pleasant on one of our aircraft that had been diverted to await an engine replacement. All chance – haphazard airlifts that were like stepping stones to oblivion, the final step when he hitched the ride on that American plane. It landed in my bailiwick because of an electrical fault, and as soon as my engineers had sorted it out it took off, and that’s the last anybody saw of it.’

  ‘How did you come by the notebook then?’ I asked him.

  ‘A big German icebreaker found the bodies. They were lying out on a layered floe of old ice about thirty miles north-west of the Ice Shelf, not far from where Shackleton’s Endurance was crushed. No sign of the plane, no flight recorder, nothing to indicate what happened, just the bodies lying there as though they had only had time to scramble out onto the floe before the plane sank.’ His hand was fingering the lobe of his left ear again. ‘Very strange. The whole thing is very strange. The only written record we have of anything that happened on that flight is there in Sunderby’s notes on ice conditions and his sighting of that extraordinary Flying Dutchman of a vessel.’ He sighed. ‘Could he have imagined it? He was a scientist, very precise in his speech …’ He hesitated, shaking his head. ‘Well, it’s past history now and it all happened a long way away. A very long way away.’ He repeated the words thoughtfully as though he needed to remind himself that time had moved on and he was back in Britain.

  He glanced at his watch and got to his feet. ‘I’ve got to go now. A young pilot who’s a wizard in the air, but can’t handle money, or women it seems.’ And he added, ‘Expensive boys, fighter pilots. Cost the taxpayer a hell of a lot to train them. And after I’ve done my best to sort the poor devil out …’ He smiled at me, a sudden flash of charm. ‘One of the joys of flying is that you leave everything behind you on the ground. Including that muck.’ He nodded at the tall windows where the light had almost vanished as snow swept across the flatness of the airfield. ‘At fifteen thousand feet I should hit blue sky and sunshine.’

  I handed the notes back to him and as we went towards the door he said, ‘It was the AOC reminded me of it. Had a visit from him last week. He’d just come back from Chile where they had flown him down to Punta Arenas, that base of theirs down in the Magellan Strait. There was a lot of talk apparently of an old frigate with an Argentinian crew and flying the Argentine flag having been sailed through the Strait just after the war en route to their base in the far south of Tierra del Fuego. Apparently some woman, a relative of one of the crew, had recently been making enquiries.’

  He paused as we reached the big carpeted foyer at the front entrance of the Mess. ‘You all right for transport?’ And when I told him my car was parked behind the building he took me down a corridor that led past the cloakrooms and showed me a short cut through some offices. ‘Strange,’ he said as we parted, ‘the way that episode stays in my mind. Those bodies tying out on the ice, and Sunderby’s notebook recording ice conditions in the Weddell Sea, nothing else, and at the end of all that scientific stuff, those three pages describing the glimpse he’d had of a sort of ghost ship locked in the ice.’ He shook his head, his features dark and sombre as though the man’s death was something personal, his memory a physical hurt. ‘Drive carefully,’ he said as he opened the door on to a brick passageway. ‘Everything’s freezing out there.’ His hand was on my shoulder, almost pushing me out, the door shutting abruptly behind me as though in talking to me he had revealed too much of himself.

  At the end of the passage I walked out into the bitter wind that whistled across from the open space of the airfield to find my car with the windscreen iced over. I sprayed it, but even so I had to run the engine for a good five minutes before I had even a peephole I could see through, and all the way back the roads were icy as hell despite the salting, the weather conditions so bad I didn’t reach King’s Lynn until past four.

  The factory was in the industrial estate on the flats down river, but the Pett, Poldice offices were where they had always been, close by St Margaret’s and the old Hanseatic ‘steelyard’ that had been a sampling yard before the 1500s. The building was cold and strangely silent. Everybody seemed to have been sent off early. The office I shared was empty, my desk clear except for a letter typed on a single sheet of K.L. Instant Protection notepaper.

  I picked it up and took it over to the window, shocked and unbelieving as I stared down at those two brief paragraphs, two paragraphs that told me I wasn’t wanted any more.

  Dear Mr Kettil,

  This is to inform you that the Pett, Poldice operation will be closed down as of today. All manufacturing will thereafter be concentrated at the KLIP factory at Basingstoke, the whole Group being administered from Instant Protection’s Headquarters at Wolverhampton. Your services being no longer required, you will kindly vacate your office forthwith as both the office building and the factory have now been sold.

  The terms of your employment will, of course, be met, and our Wolverhampton office will be in touch with you at your home with regard to redundancy pay, pension, insurance etc.

  A man describing himself as ‘Personnel Executive’ had scrawled a faceless signature at the bottom.

  I think I must have read that letter through at least twice before I finally took it in. Redundancy, like newspaper disaster headlines, is something that happens to others, never to oneself. And we were such an old-established company.

  I stared out at the brown brick of the warehouse opposite that h
ad been converted into flats, the narrow gap between it and the next building showing a cold glimpse of the river. A mist of light powdery snow fell out of a pewter sky. It was typical of our firm to have held on to these offices for so long. The directors had thought the antiquity of the building an asset, for Pett, Poldice went right back to the days when ships were built of wood. They had been timber merchants then, and as the vessels coming up the Great Ouse to King’s Lynn changed from wood to iron, younger generations of the Pett family had diversified into importing tropical hardwoods, and later still into the preservation of timber, particularly the oak-framed and oak-roofed buildings of East Anglia.

  It was only when men we had never seen before began poking around the various departments asking questions about cashflow and cost ratios that we learned the Pett family had sold out to Instant Protection, a subsidiary of one of the big chemical companies and our keenest competitors. I should have realised then what was going to happen. But you don’t, do you? You bury your head in the sand and get on with your work. And there was plenty of that, for we had a full order book, which made it all the more tragic.

  I put my anorak on again, scooped up the few things that belonged to me and shut the door on almost five years of my life. Nobody even to say goodbye to, just an empty building and a security guard I’d never seen before on the door.

  I had never been forced to look for a job in my life. I had never been unemployed. I had simply followed in my father’s footsteps. He had worked for Pett, Poldice ever since the Navy released him from national service in 1956, and because I had always known there was a job there for me, most of my spare time was spent sailing out of Blakeney exploring the Wash and the Norfolk coast. That was after we had moved from the North End part of King’s Lynn to Cley, and when I had finished school I volunteered for one of the Drake projects, then crewed on a Whitbread round-the-worlder.

  I was lucky. I could do that because the certain prospect of a job with Pett, Poldice gave me a safety net from which to launch myself at the world. Now, suddenly, that safety net was gone and I discovered how harsh a world it could be. I had no qualifications and in the field of wood preservatives everybody seemed to be cutting staff – ‘streamlining’ was a word I heard all too often so that I met others who had been declared redundant, and quite a few of them did have the qualifications I lacked.