Whiteout!

The state of the body was still vivid in my mind. I said, 'It'll be very difficult to do. Whoever it is, he's in a terrible state. He was flattened by the tractor.'

'Fingerprints?' Kelleher said, impractically.

Nobody bothered to reply. Then Allen said, 'Boots.'

'What about them?'

Allen smiled faintly. 'Boot size is stamped into the leather binding inside the top of the boot.'

Kelleher opened the clothing locker. Inside were Kirton's various overalls, some sealed in sterile packs. On the floor of the locker were operating theatre footwear of green rubber. He picked one up and examined it. 'Eleven.'

I said, 'That's no use unless we know Harrer's size.'

'Well, we know Kirton's an eleven, regular fitting,' Kelleher said. He turned to Allen. 'How many fittings are there?'

'Three. Narrow, regular, wide.'

'Odds are two to one, then. And eleven's a big size.'

'Harrer was a big guy, too,' Allen muttered.

'We'll go look at the boots,' Kelleher said.

I grimaced, but it was obvious we had to return to the trench. Kelleher picked up his bundle of sheets and I collected a knife and some scissors, knowing we'd need them. There wasn't a soul moving in the whole length of Main Street. We hurried to the death trench, slipped inside and got to work. It was macabre and grisly and horrible. The felt boot was frozen to the crushed foot and I had to cut it away as best I could. The size was ten and a half, wide fitting.

'A difference,' I said, 'But it's not much to go .on.'

Kelleher thought for a moment. 'Dog tags. They should be round his neck, on a string.'

But they weren't.

Kelleher said, 'Rule is, they wear them the whole time. Maybe our friend took them off, before he . . .'

'Perhaps. But it's not enough, is it?'

'Rings? Watches?'

Together, sickened, we managed to get at a pocket, we proddeda nd probed, but it was empty. This had been a man; now it waslike a tangle of meat from a freezer. We found his left hand, badly mangled, and cut the glove away with difficulty. There was no ring, nor was there a watch on the wrist. Then, quite suddenly, 1 was staring at that broken hand, noting broad, practical fingers and nails which, though clean, were thickened and grainy. The third finger, the only one undamaged, had a ragged cuticle. I crouched there, thinking back, remembering Kirton as I'd sat drinking his coffee and listening to his music and how I'd noticed his precise, surgeon's hands. These weren't the fingers whose dexterity I'd envied.

As I lifted my head, my eyes met Kelleher's. 'That's not Kirton's hand!' I said. He nodded. 'Not in a million years.'

It led to a lot more talk, which I won't go over. We went back to the medical block for the benefit of Allen's advice, but by now he was sleeping deeply and this time even Kelleher hadn't the heart to awaken him. We stood beside his bed, talking softly, tracing and retracing the ground, trying to make sense of a situation that seemed to have no sense in it. It was unlikely and probably impossible that Kirton could still be alive, and we could see no reason why Harrer's body should have been dressed in Kirton's clothes and dumped where the tractor would run over it and thereby render it unidentifiable. There seemed no point in making one of the sleds look as though there was a body in it, when the deception would be discovered, and investigated with real determination, as soon as the bodies reached Thule. So?

So nothing.

So two men, Kirton and Carson, were now missing for totally unexplained reasons. And, presumably, were dead.

At last I said, a little wearily, 'Look, it's not your business and it's not mine. We have facts now. It's criminal not to tell Coveney. At least he can take action out in the open.'

Kelleher said 'No,' with sudden vehemence.

'Why not?'

'Because whoever the hell it is who's doing all this, he doesn't know what we got now. The minute we tell Coveney, the whole place finds out.'

'And maybe he gets caught?'

'Sure. More likely he doesn't. There's still no solid information.'

I stared at him in sudden anger. 'So we do nothing?'

Kelleher stretched. 'No. There's one little thing I'd like to try.'

'What?'

He hesitated, then bent to pick up the bundle of sheets. 'Leave it with me, Harry. I'll be in the reactor trench.'

'You're not going to tell me?'

He was already moving to the door. 'Sure I'll tell you. But later, okay? Give me a little time. And cover for me if Coveney comes in.'

I watched the door close behind him, annoyed at what I saw as wholly unnecessary secrecy. Allen slept peacefully in the bed Kelleher had occupied and I thought with irritation that if Coveney did arrive and saw a black face where he'd expected a white one, covering-up would be rather less easy than Kelleher had made it sound. Not that that there was much to be done about it ; there were no spare beds. For a while, I sat smoking in Kirton's comfortable chair, recovering my temper. The place was quiet now and I realized I was tired, and pulled out a desk drawer, put my feet up and let my eyes close. I'd no intention of sleeping, and didn't, because my brain, active if ineffectual, insisted on carrying out a review of events. Pointlessly, as ever, and destructive, too, because in my experience physical comfort demands mental comfort as a precondition and my futilely busy brain kept me shifting in the chair, so that the cycle of irritation and frustration completed itself and I couldn't relax at all. A couple of times I went over to look at Allen merely for the sake of something to do, and the third time I succeeded in barking my right shin on the open desk drawer and hopped about on one leg for a few seconds, swearing. As I slammed the drawer shut, it occurred to me that a search of Kirton's desk, if it achieved nothing else, would help to pass the time.

The loose-leaf notebook wasn't exactly hidden, but there were papers and folders on top of it. What struck me was the handwritten title on the front: Studies in Discomfort. When I opened it and began to read, I realized after a while that Kirton had begun it with the intention of producing a paper for some medical journal or other on the way men behaved within the difficult parameters of Camp Hundred. Then the content seemed to change style, becoming mildly humorous rather than gravely academic. Clearly he'd abandoned the serious project and was merely amusing himself. Later came another change. There were half a dozen small character sketches, none more than a single handwritten page in length. No names or ranks were mentioned, nor even specific jobs. All the same, the first one was inevitably and unmistakably Barney Smales, and though a note of Kirton's at the beginning of the notebook said he would avoid psychological jargon, a marginal note on Smales's profile said 'manic?' I continued reading, recognizing nobody else, until I'd finished the notes. But I didn't close the notebook; instead I turned back to profile four: Mr Chameleon Constant.

'It took me a long time,' Kirton had written, 'to realize that the man I encountered was not the man others saw. Most of us, in early life, make some kind of decision about the front we want to present to the world, and then simply go on developing it. Chameleon Constant goes one better, or perhaps six better. His game, and I'm certain it is a war game for him, lies in presenting marginally different pictures of himself to everybody he meets. He's Jekyll and Hyde and a few more, including traces of Einstein and Svengali, and there are times when I have to restrain myself from going to watch him at work. I believe he knows I know about him because very occasionally he'll give me a glance that's almost conspiratorial. Other people's opinions of him vary ludicrously, from "the worst bastard I ever met in my life", to "as near total decency as any man is likely to get". What's so strange is that he seems to get away with it all. In some extraordinary way he doesn't get talked about. He came to see me the first time about another man who seemed to be worried and depressed. Would I have a look at him? When I saw the man, he was certainly worried and depressed and said the reason was that Mr C.C, w as on his back. Specifically how ? Impossible to pin down. C.C, just radiated hatred and threat. I gave him some anti-depressants and when I saw C.C, again, told him what I'd done,but not the reason and that was the first time I saw the conspiratorial glance. I made a note to investigate. After that I mentioned his name to a few individuals, but never to groups, and the puzzling picture began to emerge. Everybody said something different. What it all comes down to, I suppose, is some notion he's got of total superiority. Trouble is, I suspect it's not unfounded. And I sometimes think that, given different circumstances, West Point or Harvard, C.C, might by now be either General of the Army or President of the United States. One of these days I'm going to get him interviewed, one at a time, by some high-grade psychiatrists, because he'll not only baffle the be-Jesus out of them ; he'll have them fighting in groups when they try to agree on what he is. Meanwhile, I keep quiet about it because I want to go on observing.'