Read Online Zodiac Station by Tom Harper - Free Book Online Page B

sparkling in the light. Greta held me a few metres back.
    ‘Do you see any bear prints?’
    ‘I wouldn’t know what to look for.’
    She took off her glove and pressed the heel of her hand into the snow, making a rounded kidney shape. Spreading her fingers, she poked five holes just in front of it for the toes.
    ‘That. But bigger, like a soup plate.’
    I didn’t see any. ‘Couldn’t the wind have covered them?’
    ‘You see your prints?’
    I did. Softened by the wind and half filled with blown snow, but still clear enough from the day before.
    ‘A bear weighs up to a thousand kilos. He makes a deeper print than you.’
    I did a slow scan of the snow, right the way around Hagger’s safe area.
    ‘Point taken.’
    Greta advanced to the crevasse. I followed – and almost walked straight into a hole. Not a natural hole: an almost perfect cube cut out of the snow and ice, straight-sided, flat-bottomed, about a metre and a half deep. I’d seen it the day before, with a shovel standing next to it. The shovel had blown over in the night.
    ‘What’s that?’
    Greta barely looked at it. ‘Snow pit. To measure layers in the glacier.’
    ‘Martin’s work was on sea ice, not glaciers.’ Notwithstanding the glacier core I’d seen in the freezer in his lab.
    ‘He said he’d come to get samples.’
    ‘Isn’t there a glaciologist at Zodiac who does that?’
    ‘Dr Kobayashi.’
    I remembered her. Annabel, the only other woman on base. Slimmer, taller and – some would say – more attractive than Greta. Perhaps that explained the sourness that had crept into Greta’s voice.
    Greta knelt and scrabbled in the loose snow, about ten feet back from the crevasse. Her hand came up holding a black mitten.
    ‘He dropped his gloves.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Stand here,’ Greta told me, pointing at a spot on the ground next to where she’d found the mitten. ‘Now take a step back.’
    Feeling silly, I did what she told me.
    ‘You see your footprints.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And the ones next to it?’
    Now that she said it, I did. Side by side with mine, softened by the wind and slightly longer.
    ‘Those are Hagger’s.’
    I took her word for it.
    ‘What do you see?’
    Even with the outline eroded, I could make out the heel and the toe. Pointing the opposite way to me.
    ‘He walked away from the cliff.’
    Greta gave an impatient sigh. ‘Really?’
    I thought about it for a moment – and reached the obvious conclusion. ‘He was walking backwards.’
    ‘You think it’s a good idea to walk backwards in a crevasse field?’
    ‘He would have had to go backwards to climb down into the crevasse.’
    ‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘Except he wasn’t clipped on to the rope.’
    Greta walked to the edge. ‘Martin was roping up. He put the harness on. Then someone came. They threatened him. Martin backed off; he was scared enough to get out his gun. He took off his gloves so he could pull the trigger. But he’d gone too far.’
    I came up beside her and looked down into the crevasse. At the bottom, I could just see the impression in the snow where Hagger had landed. The abandoned rifle lay a few feet away.
    Had he really been chased to his death by someone from Zodiac?
    ‘It’s too sick to think about,’ I said out loud.
    Greta’s look made me cringe.
    ‘Is that what they taught you in science school? Don’t ask difficult questions?’
    ‘I don’t even know what questions I’m supposed to ask.’
    She started to walk back to the snowmobile. ‘Who’s got big feet?’ she called over her shoulder.
    ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
    She stopped and pointed. In a clean patch of snow, I could see another set of footprints. Bigger than mine; bigger than Hagger’s. They tracked Hagger towards the crevasse – then stopped, a couple of metres back from the edge. Probably about the time Hagger realised there was nothing under him but air.
    ‘Who’s got big feet?’ I repeated. I traced the tracks in the snow, wondering how