And then, quite suddenly, I knew! In seconds the mystery of days had been resolved. I knew now who
'young F.' was, and who the killer must be, and where he must have gone now. Bending over Kelleher's body, I rapidly searched his pockets for the keys, then raced along the trench to the door, turned the lock and stepped out into Main Street. I pulled my parka hood tight and kept my head down as I hurried in the direction of the tractor shed. As I opened the doors and stepped inside, cold air rushed over me. The big outer doors now gaped inwards! A light burned in the office and I tore over to it. Inside, the duty mechanic was slumped over the desk, an open paperback beneath his head. I shook his shoulder, but he wasn't sleeping; he was unconscious. Leaving the office, I went to the main doors. Heavy snow was falling. I looked at the tracks imprinted in the fresh snow and already being filled, their sharp outlines blurring. And the snow was falling vertically because the wind had dropped. It all fitted now. The weather-change had precipitated things, providing one last chance for the killer to maintain the mystery, a chance he'd had to take.
My TK4 stood, silent and shiny, to one side of the huge shed. 1 began to cross to it, then stopped. I'd need a weapon. A drum of petrol, probably used for engine cleaning, stood on a wooden packing case. I found a bottle, filled it and stuffed cotton waste in the neck. The TK4, icy cold as she was after being immobile for days in low temperatures, didn't start first bang. Bad advertisement, I thought with professional sourness, relieved no one had been present to see it. But she started at the second time of asking and gave a few pleased puffs as the rubber skirt ballooned and lifted her and the engines roared cheerfully. I eased her forward, nosing out through the doors into the blackness, then stopping briefly to give my eyes some chance to adjust. I didn't want to use the lights. The snow was very thick, cutting visibility back, and clouds blanketed the moon, but I dared wait no longer. The heavy tractor was slow, but the distance was small. He'd be there already, and searching. I turned the hovercraft eastwards and moved slowly over the snowfield, trying to remember all the details of the layout of Camp Hundred.
I knew that the camp perimeter was marked at a range of four hundred yards by triangular flags on high, flexible, steel poles mounted on barrels and sunk into the snow at five-yard intervals. He'd have followed them, and so must I. Visibility through the heavy snowfall was less than twenty yards and, tense with frustration, I kept the speed down.
I swore suddenly. The tracks! All I had to do was follow his tracks! Fifty-per-cent thinking again! I eased the TK.4 back towards the dim yellow square of light from the tractor shed, opened the side window and leaned out, searching the smooth white surface for the wide track-trail of the big diesel tractor.
There! As I moved her forward, creating a wind, bitter cold flooded in through the open window, chilling my face. I pulled the drawstring of my hood tighter and ghosted across the snow-field, through the thick curtain of silently-falling snow, in the wake of the big diesel tractor. Within a few yards I was suffering one of the hazards of a hovercraft running slowly over powder snow : the downward pressure of air blown out from beneath the skirt blasted dry crystals upwards into a fine fog all around me. They whirled higher than the cab, like an impenetrable fog, and enough blew in through the narrowed aperture of my parka hood to start chilling nose, cheekbones and chin. At speed the problem diminishes; the blow-up snow spray is left behind before it can cause a problem. But I couldn't go at speed. The need to follow the tracks without light dictated my rate of progress. I was also uncomfortably aware that the small snowstorm the TK4 was creating would serve to blank out the tracks behind me. There was also the possible hazard of running into the tractor. With visibility so short, it was likely that by the time I saw it, it would be too late to slow. I had to catch up with the tractor and its murderous occupant, but preferably not that way!
Then the hut loomed suddenly, only yards away. I had to cut the engine power and fling the steering round frantically to miss it, and that set me another problem. The tractor was not yet in sight but the hut was my starting point and if I went past it there would be trouble and delay in locating it again. I came to a decision quickly, backed off to set the TK4 down on low pressure a dozen yards or so from the hut, climbed out and walked towards it, my feet sinking inches deep into the soft, dry snow of the icecap. Reaching the hut, I turned to look round at the TK4, now little more than a vague shape that hummed quietly, its outline blurred and its engine noise muffled by the sheer weight of the snowfall. At first I thought the line had disappeared, blown away by the hurricane winds of the last days, but then I realized that snow reached a third the way up the side of the hut and that the line, instead of being waist level, would be at ankle height. As I hunted for it, I looked over my shoulder every few seconds, puzzled and menaced by the absence of the tractor, expecting an attack at any second. But nothing moved within my small circle of visibility and I kept telling myself that the harsh beat of its massive diesel would be clearly audible.
Then my foot brushed against the line and I bent to pick it up, slipped it into the dog's lead clip of my parka belt. Another cautious look all round me: no sign of man or tractor. I took the line in both hands and pulled, lifting it clear of the snow, and began to move along it. After ten yards I reached the first of the flag-topped anchor posts, unfastened and refastened the clip, and moved on again, examining the surface carefully at each step. A lot of precipitation had occurred since the last time anybody at Hundred had been able to venture out on to the cap, and what I was looking for would by now be thoroughly buried.
I had reached the third anchor post and was re-clipping my beltwhen I remembered with sudden horror that I was still wearing the same boots in which I'd gone down the well. And that they were damp! Instantaneously, my feet felt cold. Was it psychological or actual? It couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes since I'd left the cab of the TK4, but two minutes in damp boots is a long time on the icecap. Thank God the wind had died!
I trudged on, worried and frightened. It was crazy to have tried to give chase alone, yet the pressure of time had allowed me no other choice and I'd been aware of the risk; I'd also been close enough to death in the last hours and days for this pursuit to be only an extension of that peril. Irrationally the prospect of frozen feet was far more deeply horrifying; the thought that if I survived, it might be to hobble for the rest of my days on stumps, dried mymouth and prickled the back of my neck. Longing to turn back, I still marched on. The snow surface wasmarked only by windwhip, not by boots or mechanical tracks. As 1 pulled up each yard of buried line, it cut smoothly through the recent, loose-packed snow, to stretch ahead to the next anchor post.
I was at the tenth now, and hurrying, flexing my toes inside my boots to reassure myself that feeling and movement were still there. But heels cannot be flexed, and it was at the heel that cold was likely to strike first. Eleven. Four more would be about halfway. Re-fixing the clip 1 pulled the line, and this time only a yard or two came up. Ahead of me it ran taut and at an angle, to a point well down beneath the surface. I knelt then, and began to dig rapidly in the snow with my mittened hands, flinging it aside in a spray of dry particles. Why hadn't I brought the spade from the hovercraft? The usual reasons: lack of thinking power, lack of foresight, lack of concentration! If the snow had been even lightly compacted, it would have been impossible to dig like that, but it wasn't compacted and I was swiftly two feet down, then three, scrabbling like a dog with his forepaws until.., my hands touched something hard in the snow, something that became dark in the surrounding white as I swept the powdery flakes from it. I knelt for a moment then, sickened by yet another death. But I was sure now. Sure except that one small yet critical point remained to be confirmed. I grabbed the line again, ran my hand along it until it touched not only the body but the hard, metal shape of a dog clip. The line ran through the clip and away, and when I reached beyond and pulled, it cut upwards through the snow to run tight and straight to the next anchor post. I stood then, knowing it was true. The innocent cause of all Camp Hundred's problems lay here in the snow at my feet . . , feet that were becoming colder inside my dampened felt boots. Quickly I bent and pushed back into the hole the snow I had dug away, then smoothed it as well as I could. Even when I'd finished, it stood out a mile, rough and disturbed among the surrounding smoothness. But as I looked, I realized it was already being covered; ten minutes more and it would begin to blend into the endless snowscape. I thought of trying to uproot the anchor posts to make the killer's search more difficult, but realized it couldn't work. Only by severing the line could the body be hidden, and in severing the line, I'd be destroying the evidence. I turned and began to work my way back the way I had come, along the line, knowing he was out there somewhere -probably waiting to see if he'd been followed - and that somehow I must stop him before he could reach the spot and at last conceal the continuing proof of his guilt.