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The Ice: A gripping thriller for our times from the Bailey’s shortlisted author of The Bees
Laline Paull
An electrifying story of friendship, power and betrayal by the bestselling, Baileys-prize shortlisted author of The Bees.It's the day after tomorrow and the Arctic sea ice has melted. While global business carves up the new frontier, cruise ships race each other to ever-rarer wildlife sightings. The passengers of the Vanir have come seeking a polar bear. What they find is even more astonishing: a dead body.It is Tom Harding, lost in an accident three years ago and now revealed by the melting ice of Midgard glacier. Tom had come to Midgard to help launch the new venture of his best friend of thirty years, Sean Cawson, a man whose business relies on discretion and powerful connections – and who was the last person to see him alive.Their friendship had been forged by a shared obsession with Arctic exploration. And although Tom's need to save the world often clashed with Sean's desire to conquer it, Sean has always believed that underneath it all, they shared the same goals.But as the inquest into Tom's death begins, the choices made by both men – in love and in life – are put on the stand. And when cracks appear in the foundations of Sean's glamorous world, he is forced to question what price he has really paid for a seat at the establishment's table.Just how deep do the lies go?
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COPYRIGHT (#u1b75fc5e-d142-5edc-b835-59ffca4567e6)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017
Copyright © Laline Paull 2017
Cover design by Heike Schuessler
Cover images © plainpicture/Mira/Conny Ekstrom
Interior engravings © Chris Wormelll
Map © Joy Gosney
With grateful thanks to the following for their permission to reproduce copyright material: Extracts from Arctic Adventure by Peter Freuchen by permission of Echo Point Books. Extracts from Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen by permission of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. Extracts from Lost in the Arctic by Ejnar Mikkelsen, published by William Heinemann. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © Ejnar Mikkelsen 1913. Extract from Polar Bears by Nikita Ovsyanikov by permission of Quarto Publishing Group. Quote from Judge Rüdiger Wolfrum courtesy of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Extract from ‘Century of the Wind’ from The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, copyright © 2009 by Wade Davis and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Reprinted by permission of House of Anansi Press, Toronto, www.houseofanansi.com (http://www.houseofanansi.com), and the University of Western Australia Press. Extract from Northern Lights; The Official Account Of The British Arctic Air-Route Expedition by F. Spencer Chapman, published by Chatto & Windus. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and would be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in future editions.
Laline Paull asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007557776
Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780007557769
Version: 2017-12-21
DEDICATION (#u1b75fc5e-d142-5edc-b835-59ffca4567e6)
For my brothers
Geoff and Gordon
with love
CONTENTS
Cover (#u25be6ae6-6517-5d7e-87a9-e491a19b8ba8)
Title Page (#u9853056d-196b-51e8-892b-7d37d6f67e4a)
Copyright (#u3f3a2ced-662f-540e-8f79-5e2aeb2a1cc2)
Dedication (#uf0cd4f83-536e-593c-ad07-d9779858738e)
Map (#ub3649396-e35c-5795-bf6e-bc213097ccbf)
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Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
A Very Partial Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Laline Paull (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
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Among dogs are found characters almost as various as among men. Some dogs do not give a damn what they eat; some will eat their own mothers, as I have often witnessed, and others will starve to death before touching the bodies of their team-mates. Again, some refuse to eat the meat while it is still warm, but perhaps after it is cold they forget what it is and devour it greedily.
Arctic Adventure: My Life in the Frozen North (1936)
Peter Freuchen
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They were rich, they were ready, they were ravenous for bear. Nine days into their fourteen-day voyage on the Vanir, the most expensive cruise ship in the Arctic, the passengers’ initial excitement had turned to patience, then frustration, and now, a creeping sense of defeat. As sophisticated travellers they knew money didn’t guarantee polar bear sightings – but they still believed in the natural law that wealth meant entitlement. Ursus maritimus sightings very much included.
‘Realm of the Ice King’ stated the brochure, featuring competition-winning photographs of sparkling ice and polar bears with cubs and kills, taken by recent passengers on this very route. But now instead of high blue heavens, the skies were overcast. Instead of a crisp and exhilarating minus three or even ten degrees (they were eager to test their new clothing), they suffered a vile gusty swelter that turned the Arctic dank as an English summer, and for which no combination of clothing was right. Plus the endless daylight was oppressive – medication schedules went awry and watches became meaningless.
There were several lawyers among the passengers. They invited the tour leader to the bar to look at the brochure and hear their formal complaint. The voyage was misrepresented. They had been mis-sold. Enough with the beach landings to stare at derelict huts and piles of whaling junk. Enough birds too, that didn’t fob them off. What they’d all paid for were sightings of live ice-obligate mammals. That was the primary focus of the text and image of the brochure, a sales document with a legal duty to accuracy. No icebergs either, just some dirty glaciers. They were considering a class action for compensation.
The passengers repaired to the salon and put on the compilation film that had become their envious obsession. With the blinds down to keep out the bullying daylight, they stared avidly at the on-screen polar bears; the one standing on a crimson mat of ice ripping flesh from a red rack of seal carcass, then the mother and her yearling swimming between the floes. Best of all was the large male standing on his hind legs, staring into the camera, his muzzle bright red. That was what they wanted.
The tour leader ran to the bridge to confer with the captain and the ice-pilot, who by law they were still required to employ, even though the summer sea ice was two years gone. They stared out at the grey chop of the Barents Sea. All knew, though they would not say for fear of their jobs, that the animals had all but vanished and the footage in the salon was several years old. There was one solution, prohibited, but every tour company knew it as a last resort. Send up a drone and find a bear.
Two miles away around the coast, down a deep M-shaped fjord, a large silvery wood cabin blended with the dark cobble of its beach. Modern extensions at its rear and sides were made of the very rock of the mountain that rose up behind it, and a close look would reveal several windows that reflected sea, sky and rock. But no one did look, in that intrusive unwelcome way, because this was Midgard Lodge in Midgardfjorden, and by direct intervention of Oslo, to the Sysselmann’s office in Svalbard, special rules applied.
Most outraging to those who knew of it, was the one which flouted a major conservation regulation and allowed Midgard Lodge helicopter flights between Longyearbyen airport and the tiny beach in front of the Lodge, which was just large enough to land a twelve-person Dauphin.
The second was that no cruise ship penetrate the Wijdefjorden system past a certain point, thereby closing the spectacular rock stratification of Midgardfjord and its peculiar forked glacier Midgardbreen, one side blue, one white, off to tourism.
The third, which caused the autocratic Sysselmann the most disquiet, was that these diktats were verified at the highest level but relayed verbally, via a female assistant defence minister. She refused to confirm them in writing and though the Sysselmann had not heard of her, she was rather too well informed about him. He duly made sure Mrs Larssen’s requests were observed, and in consequence, Midgard Lodge was not.
Except for today, when general manager Danny Long, on duty in the cabin office looking down the fjord, felt his instinct tweak him to take another look at the AIS radar screen. He had just checked it at mid-scale, taking in the little coloured arrowheads that showed, variously, pink and purple for fishing and sailing vessels, green for cargo, and god forbid, red for tankers coming in too close. He looked at the screen more closely. Something was off.
He clicked on the green arrows and saw what he expected – Asian cargo ships on the new TransPolar route. He clicked a couple at random: the Hao Puren: Rotterdam to Shanghai. The Zheng He, going the other way, Dalian to Algiers. A couple of others – everything moving smoothly.
Then he studied the dotted blue arrows of the cruise ships. Now the ice-free and liquid North Pole was just another bit of sea and offered no photo opportunities, Svalbard’s stunning coastline was clogged in the summer. All captains tried to stagger their route to minimise bottlenecks, but because of the rarity of animal sightings, the tour operators had an agreement to share the information with each other on Channel 16 – despite this leading to what amounted to a cruise ship race to be second at the kill. The coastguard policed what it could, and was glad of Midgard Lodge’s ability to offer search and rescue – but both knew that would be a last resort.
There: he saw it. The tiny blue cursor which had crossed into Midgard’s unofficially restricted area. He clicked. Passenger cruise ship Vanir, he knew it. High staff-to-passenger ratio, regular circuit – except today. Probably after a bear. There was a huge male passing through, he’d seen it standing in silhouette on the fjord’s bone.
He would report the ship’s transgression later, but for now the protocol was to ensure front-of-house was neat and clean, everything quiet. Keeping an eye on the Vanir’s position, he hit a speed-dial on the iridium phone never far from his hand. A moment later, the phone flashed back at him. Message received, they would stay out until further notice. Then Long called down to reception and was pleased to hear everything was in hand. He returned to the screen, watching the little blue cursor slowly blinking around the headland, coming closer.
When the bear was young and the snow fell clean and white, his fur showed creamy, even pale yellow at times. Now the snow had a greyish tinge, causing him to shine even brighter against it. He had grown long yellow guard hairs on his massive forelegs, increasing his appearance of power, and when the sun shone through them it gave him a gold aura. He was following the scented track of a female in oestrus who had passed by, but paused to watch the ship heaving into the narrow mouth of the fjord, its engine thundering the water, its fuel stinking the air.
The deck was crowded with people, bare-skinned faces with shiny black insect eyes turned towards him. Their human body smells mingled with the smell of food from the ship, and metal, and fuel. The engine sound died down and the vibrations slowed then stopped. The voices faded.
The black walls of the fjord held the Arctic silence, until the bear lifted his white anvil of a head, black nostrils flaring for more information. His every move drew clicks and whirrs from the ship, becoming a frenzy as a curl of wind tickled him with a clue, and he lay down and rolled in the female’s trail.
On the bridge with the captain, the tour leader looked down at the entranced passengers, and relaxed. The bear was massive by any standards and on the most photogenic blue side of the Midgardbreen glacier, where the ice terminus formed a cliff above the water. On the other side of the black bone of rock, the glacier was younger white ice and debouched in a relatively gentle slope down to the cobbled beach. With a start, the tour operator noticed the silver-grey wood cabin, extending back into the mountain.
‘Is this the British guy’s place? I heard it’d been sold – what goes on here?’ Neither the Norwegian captain nor ice-pilot replied. They had crossed a line to find her passengers their bear. Svalbard had many enigmatic structures. No comment.
Crowded at the rail, excited as schoolchildren and all thoughts of class actions gone from their minds, the passengers of the Vanir were busy changing lenses and exclaiming in wonder. The bear was as huge and charismatic a celebrity as they could dream of, they guessed him at eleven or twelve feet, nearly a ton, maybe more. Through powerful telephoto lenses they saw his duelling scars, and the way he stood up on his hind legs, the edge of his pelt shining gold around him. He stared straight back with knowing black eyes, and they felt a euphoric jolt of fear. He could kill them.
Without warning the white god dropped to all fours and changed into a frightened animal, running for the edge of the glacier. In consternation the passengers watched him stagger and clamber into the shadows, where he vanished. They groaned in disappointment, they scanned around for what had scared their bear, but though their hi-mag lenses probed the darkness of the lower crags and pored across the bright rock striations, nothing moved. They stared at the layers of colour and tried to appreciate the earth’s history laid bare. But they felt angry and tiny.
