Behind me I heard Paule echo my thoughts in a whisper so hoarse that I barely recognized her voice. ‘Man Dieu!’ she breathed. ‘We are too late.’
‘Yes,’ I murmured. ‘We’re too late.’ And then I looked up at the Lion Rock standing there in the middle of the lake. At least I had reached Lake of the Lion. I had done what my grandmother had tried to do — what my father would doubtless have done in the end, if he hadn’t been so badly injured in the war. I had reached James Finlay Ferguson’s last camp. That at least was something.
I looked down at Briffe’s body again and my eyes, blurred with exhaustion, seemed to see it as that other body that had lain here beside this lake for more than fifty years, and I remembered what Laroche had said: a heap of bones — and a hole drilled in the skull. At least Briffe hadn’t died like that, but still a shudder ran through me, for the drawn and sunken features told of a slower death, and close behind me Paule whispered, ‘He killed him, didn’t he?’
I turned then and saw her standing, staring down at her father with a blank look of misery and despair on her face. I didn’t say anything, for she knew the truth now; the body and the transmitter were evidence enough. And then slowly, almost woodenly — like a puppet on a string — she turned and faced Laroche. ‘You killed him!’ The whisper of her words carried down the lake’s edge, so clear in the frozen stillness that she might have shouted the accusation aloud, and her face as she said it was contorted with horror. ‘You left him here to die — alone.’
Alone! That one word conjured a vision of what Briffe’s end had been. I think Laroche saw it, too, for his face was quite white, and though he tried to speak, he couldn’t get the words out. And then Paule repeated her accusation in a rising crescendo of sound that bubbled out of her throat as a scream of loathing and horror. ‘You killed him! You left him here to die …’ Her throat closed on the words and she turned away from him and went stumbling blindly up through the trees like an animal searching for some dark corner in which to hide.
If Laroche had let her go, it might have been all right; but he couldn’t. ‘Paule — for God’s sake!’ he cried. And before Darcy or I could do anything to stop him, he had started after her. And he was up with her in a second, for she was sobbing so wildly, so hysterically that she tottered rather than ran up the slope. He reached out and caught hold of her arm. ‘Paule — you’ve got to listen to me.’ He jerked her round, and then his hand fell from her elbow and he stepped back as though at a blow for her eyes blazed with hatred and her white face had a trapped look, full of bewilderment and fear.
‘Paule!’ He held out his hand to her in a pleading gesture. But in the same instant, she cried, ‘Don’t touch me. If you touch me, I’ll-‘
‘Paule, you’ve got to listen to me.’
I heard her cry, ‘No. Keep away from me.’ It was said as he reached out and gripped hold of her again, and in the same instant she made a quick movement of her arm, there was the glitter of steel, and then she was stabbing at him with that thin-bladed Indian knife, stabbing at him again and again, screaming something at him in French, or it may have been Indian, until finally his knees sagged under him and he sank groaning to the ground at her feet. He looked up at her then, and for a moment they stared at each other, and then he suddenly collapsed and lay still, and she was left standing, staring with a dazed expression at the knife in her hand. She stared at the reddened blade and a drop of blood gathered on the point and fell like a piece of red confetti on to the trampled snow.
Suddenly she flung the knife from her and with a sobbing intake of breath, fell on to the snow beside him. ‘Darling!’ She had seized hold of his head and was staring down into his face, which was paper-white and bloodless under the stubble. ‘Mon Dieu!’ She looked up then and searched about her blindly as though for aid, and finally her eyes lighted on Darcy and myself, still standing there, helpless spectators of the tragedy.
“I think I’ve killed him,’ she said in a toneless voice. ‘Would one of you see, please.’ And as Darcy went and knelt beside Laroche’s body, she laid the head down and stood up, suddenly quite composed. ‘I am going to — see to my father dow,’ she said, and she went slowly down through the trees towards the half-sunken aircraft and the sandy beach below the rocks that had been Briffe’s last camping place, moving slowly like a girl walking in her sleep.
I went over to Darcy then, my knees trembling and weak with the shock of what had happened. ‘Is he — dead?’
Darcy didn’t reply. He had laid Laroche’s body out on the snow and was unzipping his parka.
‘It all happened so quickly,’ I murmured.
He nodded. ‘Things like that always do.’
‘I was thinking about Briffe and what had happened here.’
He had undone Laroche’s parka and the sweater underneath was all soaked in blood, sodden patches that ran into one another, dark red against the dirty white of the wool. He cut it away with his knife, deftly exposing the white flesh beneath the bush shirt and the sweat-grimed vest, as though he were skinning an animal. And when he had the whole chest exposed, with the half-dozen knife wounds gaping red and slowly welling blood, he put his head down and listened to the heart. And then he nodded slowly like a doctor whose diagnosis has been proved correct. ‘Where’s that girl gone?’ he demanded, looking up at me.
‘She’s gone to see to her father.’
‘Well, she can’t do anything for him. Fetch her back here. I want a big fire built, and hot water and bandages.’
‘He’s alive then?’
‘Yeah — just. I guess the thickness of the parka saved him.’ He looked quickly about him. ‘Build the fire over there in the shelter of those rocks where Briffe had his camp. And tell Paule to find something clean for bandages.’ Darcy slipped his axe from his belt. ‘Here, take this. I want a big fire, and I want it kept going. Now get moving.’ And as I left him, I heard him say, ‘This is a hell of a thing to have happened.’ And I knew he was wondering how we were to get out with a wounded man.
I went back through the trees and down over the rocks to the little beach where Paule knelt on the gravel beside the frozen body of her father. I remember I was surprised to see how small a man he was, and though death had smoothed some of the wrinkles from the weather-beaten skin, the face was the face of an old and bitter man. Starvation had shrunk the flesh of the cheeks and stretched the skin tight across the bones, so that the features looked shrivelled and only the grizzled beard had any virility left in it. His body, with the lower half still encased in his sleeping-bag, was sprinkled with a light dusting of snow. There was snow on the radio set, too, and all the simple necessities with which he had endeavoured to support life lay scattered around him, half-buried in a white-frozen crust.
I told Paule what she had to do, but she didn’t seem to take it in. ‘He’s dead,’ she murmured. ‘My father’s dead.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. But there’s nothing you can do for him now.’
‘We were too late.’ She said it in the same dull, flat voice, and though she wasn’t crying, she seemed utterly dazed. ‘If only I had done something about it when that first report of a transmission came through. Look! He was trying to get through to me. And I agreed with them,’ she murmured brokenly. ‘I agreed that the search should be called off.’