COPYRIGHT

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

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, 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

For my brothers

Geoff and Gordon

with love

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

Author’s Note

A Very Partial Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Also by Laline Paull

About the Author

About the Publisher

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

1

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.

Someone shouted out: there! that puff of snow higher up the glacier – surely too far and they had not seen him run – but they focused in hope. They gasped in wonder as a hundred hidden chimneys below the surface puffed out more sparkling ice-smoke. The air clenched and the sea sighed. The Vanir lifted as a great pressure wave passed through the water.

And then it started. First a distant boom, a detonation deep inside the glacier. Nothing, for a few long seconds, then a huge tearing, cracking sound that shook the air, before time stretched and the blue snout of the glacier, sliding belly down from the ice cap, moaned and pushed out over the water – and then with thunderous bangs like car-crashes it exploded all along its front, hurling shards of ice into the air and seismic bursts into the water so that the reinforced steel hull of the Vanir vibrated with the charge.

Wraiths of glittering ice-dust drifted over the sea. The passengers gripped each other as the Vanir lifted and fell again, and the shards of ice so small as they splashed, rolled out into the fjord as icebergs tall as the ship.

And then, as they watched, something happened that made no sense at all.

In front of the still-shuddering glacier, an invisible hand pinched a fold of sea like cloth then pulled it high into the air in a fistful of waterfalls. Out of the dazzling torrent emerged a great sapphire castle with turrets and minarets, throwing sparkling foam and mist as it cleared the water for one long stupendous second.

The passengers on the Vanir screamed and shouted as their eyes brimmed with wonders – some saw the streak of gold glowing deep within the frozen blue, some the detail of the minarets, some saw gargoyles’ faces in the ice – but their voices were lost in the roaring sound as the vision leaned and fell, making a great bowl of the sea in which it twisted and rolled over, completely inverting itself.

All they saw now was a dark blue ice floe the size of an ice-rink, its pinnacles and spires forever hidden. Like a sentient thing, it glided towards the Vanir, a peculiar ridge of water pushing the ship aside as if to clear its way. Unearthly and real, the great floe followed the other icebergs out towards the mouth of Midgardfjorden, and the open sea beyond.

The passengers of the Vanir had no more words, but one, a woman, was making a convulsive, almost sexual sound. Oh, she kept whispering, still filming everything, the calving ongoing within her. Her lens followed the newborn icebergs, the whirling eddies in the water, and back to the glacier face. She filmed the water slapping and rocking at its base, and the cave of deepening blue ice where the water surged and circled. Something swirled at its centre, making the current waver. Something that had not been there a moment ago.

Without taking her eye from the viewfinder, she reached out a hand for her husband. She pulled him towards her and gave him the camera, still recording. She pointed to the red shape rocking just below the surface.

‘My god,’ she said softly, ‘is that a body?’

There is one place on the coast of which they stood in some dread – the great glacier of Puisortok. Travelling in early summer in their umiaks, they necessarily hug the coast, and utilize the narrow leads that exist between the pack-ice and the glacier. The literal meaning of the name is “the thing that comes up”, as this peculiar glacier often calves by huge pieces breaking off underwater, which come to the top and shoot like breaching whales into the air. Instant destruction is the penalty for misjudgement or mere bad luck.

I remember an old hunter saying: “Do not speak, do not eat, until Puisortok is passed.”

Northern Lights: The Official Account of the British Arctic Air-Route Expedition 1930–31 (1932)

Frederick Spencer Chapman

2

The calving of the Midgard glacier was a tiny stitch in a larger pattern. While the male corpse it disgorged was already in Tromsø and under autopsy, all around the Arctic Circle scientists were recording calving events of unprecedented magnitude. This apparently synchronised new behaviour of the ice was strongly active for about seventy hours in Greenland, Nunavut Arctic Canada, Alaska and Russia, before stopping as abruptly as it started.

Twenty-seven degrees south in London, the Saharan dust storm that had blown over Europe for the last three days also ceased, leaving a fine red film over the whole city and adding respiratory patients to overcrowded A&E departments and private surgeries alike. Entrepreneurial Londoners sold white paper masks by tube stations and only the reckless still went running.

Age fifty (but looking younger) and mindful of his mental state without hard exercise, Sean Cawson was one of them. Although his knees now protested and his thoughts clawed at him for the first two or three miles, afterwards he felt good, and that was rare. He left Martine sleeping, or pretending to, and slipped out of the apartment. Last night’s conversation was only on pause. He would have to deal with it before long.

He jogged past the neighbour’s door, smelling coffee and hearing their new baby crying. His daughter Rosie was almost grown up, and hated him. At the beginning, Martine had said she wasn’t interested in family life, and he’d been relieved: one conspicuous failure was enough. Now she’d changed her mind, and he felt betrayed.

He pulled the heavy black door shut and stood for a moment on the empty street while he chose his running music. It was early but muggy, the sky was grey and no birds flew. The white porch pillars of the houses were shaded with the ochre Saharan dust, which also gave an autumnal cast to the plane trees of the communal garden. As he chose a random mix and set off to the park, London looked and felt wrong.

The music matched it – harsh declamatory rap in African-inflected French that fitted the dislocated feel of the city. His feet caught the hard pounding rhythm and as he entered the park by the Kensington Palace gate he felt the spasms in his knees but ignored the pain. He was good at that. As if in reward, there ahead of him was one of his favourite sights, one of the privileges of early risers in certain parts of London: a troupe of army horses being exercised. Sometimes he’d pause to watch them cantering on the sand track that ran alongside Park Lane, a powerful river of satiny chestnut and bay muscle. The heavy rhythmic vibration of their hooves into the earth had risen through his feet into his body and connected him to some elusive feeling he could not name.

It was a crazy thought and the horses would easily outstrip him, but he wanted to run alongside them. He pushed himself harder. He could smell the fragrance of the animals as he cut across the grass, a wolf heading them off as they turned on the sand track for their canter – he would sprint and burn himself out until they left him behind—

His phone buzzed from his arm holster. There were only two people he set to bypass his Do Not Disturb – Rosie, who never called, and the other whose name now flashed on the screen, his mentor Joe Kingsmith.

‘Joe!’ he panted. ‘I’ll call you back.’ The riders were gathering up their horses, the animals were stamping, knowing what was coming.

‘Don’t, Sean, stay: it’s an emergency.’

Sean stopped short.

‘I’m here.’

‘Are you home?’

‘I’m in the park – what’s happened?’

‘Sean boy, I’d have called you at home but no one has a landline any more. I want someone there with you.’

Sean stood still. ‘Tell me.’

There was a silence, and by its quality, Sean guessed Kingsmith was airborne. He tried to slow his breathing. The kind tone frightened him.

‘Sean, I am so, so sorry. I’ve just spoken with Danny at Midgard. Tom’s body washed out of the Midgard glacier two days ago—’

‘Tom’s body?’ Sean heard the words clearly, but his mind rejected them.

‘They had the positive ID this morning. It’s definitely him. I’m so sorry, Sean. I wanted to be the one to tell you.’

The park vanished. Sean’s world contracted to Kingsmith’s voice. ‘Out of the glacier?’ He felt stupid and slow.

‘Shit. I knew I shouldn’t have told you on the phone, but how else? I don’t know that much. There was this huge calving almost in front of Midgard Lodge – that’s when his body came out. Some cruise ship was down there and saw it all. Danny got sent away by the coastguard when he went to look, they were holding it as a crime scene—’

‘A crime scene?’ Sean came back into his body. ‘There was no crime, everyone knows that!’ He was shouting but he couldn’t do anything about it.

‘Sean boy, I’m trying to tell you, will you please listen? They call it that for protocol when they want to record everything. Of course there was no crime. Now I know you haven’t been up there for a while, but Midgard is still a business and this could have a PR effect, so we need to handle it right.’

‘They’re sure it’s Tom?’

‘One hundred per cent. They had a good idea it could be and they matched DNA with a family member, apparently.’

‘No one told me. No one’s rung. They’ve known for two days?’

‘I guess you haven’t been in touch so much lately. We knew he was dead but … this is still a big shock.’

Sean walked away from the people coming towards him, out onto the great grassy plain of the park, the horses forgotten. He sank to his knees on the dry ground.

He felt the fingers in his right hand start to burn, as if they still had frostbite. He stuffed them into his left armpit and felt his chest trembling.

‘Danny should have called me.’

‘I wanted to be the one. I only know because I had to call him about something.’

‘What thing?’

‘Look: I completely get why you haven’t been up there. But you’ve got a lot of catching up to do, and now isn’t the right time. I’m glad you’re interested again, but you’ve got an awesome team taking care of things so don’t even worry.’

‘I should be helping bring him back, I should be there.’

‘You can’t do anything: it’s all in progress. You weren’t next of kin, but I guess they’ll be in touch with you, they’ll be able to have a funeral at last. And an inquest, but that’s separate.’

‘An inquest?’ The word was so ugly. ‘But we know what happened, I’ve said it all, we’ve been through it.’

‘I know, but it’s what happens when someone’s brought home. Same in the States as in the UK – just a formality. I’ll be there to support you, I promise … Sean, can you hear me?’

‘Yes.’ The grey sky pulsed above him.

‘You get yourself home, get back to Martine. She’s got a good head on her shoulders, she’ll know what to do. Sean, say something.’

‘What were you talking to Danny about?’

He heard Kingsmith’s bark of a laugh.

‘Boy, are you persistent! But I’ve always liked that. OK, mea culpa, I put in a retreat, very small and last minute, a favour for a pal. I saw a void in the schedule and he’s paying top dollar. But this is hardly the time—’

‘I’m still the CEO. Everything goes through me.’

‘And if you are thinking like that at a time like this, you are the right man for the job. Point taken. Sean? You’re breaking up but I hope you can still hear me: you need to speak to your friend in Oslo, about keeping traffic away from Midgard – it’s important—’

The phone connection dropped out – Kingsmith’s signature goodbye. Sean stood alone on the dusty red plain of Hyde Park, barely able to breathe.

He started to run.

Martine was in the wet-room shower when he came in, sweat-soaked like it was raining. Still in his clothes, he walked into the torrent and held her. She smiled, her eyes closed – and then she looked and saw his stricken face.

‘Oh my god, what’s happened?’

Sean hit his forehead against the streaming wall. ‘They’ve found Tom.’

‘Stop! Come here.’ She held him to her, keeping them under the streaming hot water, undressing him until he was naked. She kicked the clothes away from the drain and held him until he stopped shaking, then she turned off the water and helped him out and into a robe. As she put on her own, he went into the kitchen. She followed, watching while he took a bottle of vodka from the freezer and poured a big slug into a tumbler.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Handle it without that. You don’t need it.’

He knocked it back. Then he told her, in the barest detail, about Kingsmith’s call, and the facts he knew, including the fact of the inquest. Martine nodded slowly.

‘I’m so sorry, my darling. But Joe’s absolutely right: this is closure at last, and if there’s an inquest we’ll get through it. I need to plan how we handle it. First thing is I’ll work on a statement on your behalf, and then we’ve got a bit of time.’

Sean listened to her as she walked around their dressing room preparing for work, thinking aloud. Joe was right, she had a good head on her well-set shoulders, working out which journalists could be trusted, how she would cancel certain invitations so they were not seen out enjoying themselves for a while …

He wished she had burst into tears. He wished she cared more about Tom, and less about damage control. Her voice went on as he stared at the rails of his clothes. Abruptly she was beside him.

‘I’m staying with you.’

‘No,’ he said, getting up. ‘Go to work. I’ll be OK.’ He pulled open a deep drawer and took out his Arctic travelling clothes, alien with lack of use. ‘I’m going to Midgard.’

Martine held his arm. ‘That’s crazy. You’re in shock. Look at yourself.’

He did. The mirror showed him a beautiful young woman standing there half-dressed, her dark hair wet, beside an older man who stared back at him, eyes haunted and dangerous. Sean turned away.

‘Joe put in a retreat. Without telling me.’

Martine frowned. ‘Really? He shouldn’t do that.’

‘It’s because I haven’t been there. I’ve dumped everything on the team.’

‘No. You’ve delegated. You can’t personally run every single one of your clubs, you pick right then you trust people.’

Sean threw some clothes into the bag and zipped it. ‘I’m letting everyone down.’

Martine tried again, embracing him and pressing herself into him from behind.

‘You’re not! Forget about last night, forget all that. Just come back to bed and let me look after you.’ She ran her hand down his chest and closed it over him. ‘Be sad in my arms. I won’t go in today.’

‘No, go. I’ll be OK.’ He kissed her, to deflect the rejection. She stared at him in the mirror as he went out into the bedroom and found his car key. She followed.

‘You can’t drive, you’ve just had a huge vodka. And if you’re on the afternoon flight you’ve got plenty of time – where are you going?’

Sean looked out into the square garden.

‘It’s bad to hear it on the phone.’

‘Oh.’ She moved away. ‘I see.’

‘Martine, please, you know how fragile she is.’

‘Actually no, I don’t think she is, not at all.’

‘She loved Tom as well.’

‘Fine. But I think she was prepared to pull any stunt to try to stop you leaving. I think she’s manipulative and angry and she’s turned your own daughter against you, and me, and it’s totally a mistake to keep being sentimental about a marriage that was over long before I came along.’ She sighed. ‘I’m sorry. That sounded harsh. I just want to protect you from more pain at a time like this. You shouldn’t go.’

‘You’re right.’

‘Yes, I am. But if you don’t want me to stay with you today, or to come with you to Midgard, if you want to just be alone with the bad feelings—’

‘Yes! I’m a fucking mess, I told you I was a bad deal—’

‘I never make bad deals.’ Martine pulled back and looked in his eyes. ‘But if you want healthy boundaries you’ll have them, and if you want to put yourself through the wringer, you’ll do that too.’ She kissed him on the lips. ‘So I really care that you’re so sad, but as you won’t let me help you, I am going to work. Let me know when you’re back. I’ll be here.’

He listened to her light step down the outer hall, then the click of the front door. He went back to the freezer, but stopped. Martine was right, of course. He was in no condition to drive.

The easiest way to learn, of course, was to inquire of an angakoq (wizard), and in the course of my long conversations with Igjugarjuk I learned many interesting things. His theories, however, were so simple and straightforward that they sound strikingly modern; his whole view of life may be summed up in his own words as follows:

‘All true wisdom is only to be learned far from the dwellings of men, out in the great solitudes; and is only to be attained through suffering. Privation and suffering are the only things that can open the mind of man to those things which are hidden from others.’

Across Arctic America: Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition (1927)

Knud Rasmussen

3

Sean once knew the sequence of lights so well that he never got caught on red. Now the route had become as alien as his old home and he misjudged every stretch. To keep his mind away from thoughts of Tom, he focused on driving impeccably and not as if he had gulped three fingers of vodka in the last hour – but the morning rush-hour traffic was infuriatingly slow and he suddenly felt self-conscious in his car.

It was a beautiful Aston Martin Vanquish in a custom missile-bronze colour, and part of its appeal three years ago – the longest he had ever kept a car – were the looks he caught as he flashed past other drivers. But today, passing slowly made him uncomfortable. Perhaps he should change it for a Tesla to show what a good, upright, ecologically concerned citizen he was, as well as a flash bastard.

Perhaps the lights were stuck. The white van alongside him made little feints forward, and he glanced over. Two schoolboys in green uniforms clambered over each other like puppies, waving at him and pointing in admiration of his car. They tugged at their driver dad, a tough-looking young man with a shaven head, who stared straight ahead.

Red-and-amber – the white van surged ahead the very instant the lights changed to green, and Sean saw the boys cheering and goading their father faster.

He drew alongside then fell back a couple of times, pulling faces as if he were striving and failing to overtake, so that the boys screeched with joy and bounced up and down on the bench seat. As he saw the filter lane for his exit, Sean pretended he was giving up, and the boys pumped their fists in triumph as he let the white van surge past him. The tough young dad flashed him a grin and he felt a wave of good feeling. Then he indicated, tipped the wheel and the feeling frayed like a thread as he wound back on the roads of his old life.

He drove slowly for the last few miles, surprised to see it had rained heavily. There was no sign of the red dust of London and the fields were green. The track to the house was badly potholed and he felt irritated – it wasn’t as if Gail couldn’t afford to get it graded. The thought of the settlement still pricked him. He would have been generous had she let him, instead of taking out her anger against Martine in financial terms. He had not thought her capable of being so petty. But put that aside: he was here to deliver a terrible blow.

Gail, I’ve got some bad news. Gail—

Something on the track ground against the undercarriage and he cursed and slowed down. He would go out the other way. The grading of the lane was not his business and this would be the last time he would come here, so it didn’t matter. But still, his eye ran over the orchards in some dismay. The fruit was retarded and the leaves too heavy. All the rain without the sun.

Instead of the old blue Saab in the garage, there was a new silver BMW four-wheel drive. Only now did he consider the possibility that Gail might not have been home, or not been alone. He pulled up, blocking the garage, the way that always made them look out. And there she was, coming to the kitchen window. To his surprise, she waved. He walked down the path, hoping she had not got the wrong idea. No flowers, no bottle, a bad time of day to visit. He brought bad tidings of great pain. Gail, I’ve got some bad news …

She opened the door before he knocked. One year younger than Sean, the glaze of youth had cracked into a filigree of lines around her eyes. Her face was softening and dropping and she wore her clothes sexlessly loose. But she was still wearing perfume.

‘Sean, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘Are you OK?’

‘You know?’ He stared at his ex-wife. ‘How? I only just found out.’

‘Ruth called me.’ She stood back to let him in. ‘Crack of dawn.’

‘They told her first?’ Sean was assaulted by the smell of home. The old oak floors and stairs, the extortionate beeswax polish. He noticed a bowl of orange roses on the table. ‘You cut the Whisky Macs.’ They always left them blooming on the path, for visitors to enjoy their scent.

‘Saves them from the rain. Someone called her from Svalbard: Tom named her next of kin, apparently. But you already knew that.’

Sean touched a rose and its petals dropped. ‘I don’t remember every single detail of that time.’

‘I do … But they saw each other, didn’t they? That one last time.’

‘Yes, but I didn’t realise she was officially … next of kin.’

Sean winced at the idea of Ruth Mott relating her version of that last night. But that was the only way Gail could know, because at the time they were in the final throes of nisi to absolute, and only their lawyers were speaking. He looked up the stairs. Someone else was in the house, he could feel it.

‘Whose silver car is that out there?’

‘The colour’s called mineral white. And it’s mine.’

‘You said you wanted to keep the Saab forever.’

‘Out with the old. Apparently this new one’s attached to a satellite, so I’m tracked from space if I want and even if I don’t, unless I sit down online for hours and work out how to switch it off. It’s got this inbuilt—’

‘I’m glad you’ve got yourself a good car.’

She’d moved the pictures around. There was a new light on a table. Tom was dead, that was why he’d come. So that Gail could express his grief. She wasn’t doing that properly.

‘You and Ruth have made up then.’

‘I was unfair to her.’

‘She shouldn’t have meddled.’

‘I should have listened.’

Alarmed by the tremble in her voice, he went into the kitchen. A muscle memory prompted him: dump the coat, dump the bag – he looked down at the settle. The newspapers and the big tabby cat that slept there were gone.

‘Where’s Harold?’ He looked around, making the sound that called him.

‘He died too. Last year. Tea? Coffee?’ Gail filled the kettle, her back to him.

‘You didn’t tell me.’ He couldn’t help himself, he looked around. Each thing he recognised was like an accusation. ‘Isn’t this place too big for you now?’

Gail turned. ‘Sean, why did you come? You could have phoned.’

‘That’s what Martine said.’

‘Ah. She’s so thoughtful.’

‘You don’t even seem upset about Tom. Aren’t you upset? You could have called—’ He stopped. It was obvious she was upset.

‘Yes. I’m upset. But I don’t call you any more, about anything, unless it’s Rosie. I assumed you knew.’ She did not cry. ‘So, there’ll be a funeral, what else? Your knighthood’s finally arrived?’

‘Not yet, but it will.’ He felt bewildered. Gail wasn’t like this. She was soft.

‘Your services to British business. One in the eye for my father.’

‘Here’s hoping.’ He felt the trembling ghosts of parties and dinners, the familiar plates he’d eaten off, the cupboards that held them. The bunches of herbs hanging up. ‘The lane,’ he said abruptly. ‘It’s in a shocking state, do you want me to make a call? You’ll never get round to it and it’ll just get worse. I don’t mind.’ He had not meant to say that.

‘I know you’re a master of the universe and all that—’

‘Those are bankers, I’ve never been a banker—’

‘—but in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s been raining solidly for a month.’

‘It hasn’t rained a drop in London.’

‘I don’t care what happens in London! You can’t grade a flooded lane, you have to wait for it to drain. It’s all organised. But thank you for pointing it out.’

‘So you’re OK then. Not – clinically depressed.’

‘Sorry to tell you, I’m absolutely fine.’ She wiped her eyes, her back to him.

‘Is that Sean?’ His daughter Rosie swerved round the kitchen door in a long T-shirt that said OCCUPY, and her honey brown hair ruined into dreadlocks. Her ears were multiply pierced, and to his dismay, he noticed another tribal tattoo on her upper arm.

‘Rosie,’ he groaned. ‘What have you done to yourself?’

‘Grown up without you? Why is Mum crying? Sean, why are you even here?’ Rosie put her arm around her mother and glared at him.

‘I’m fine,’ said Gail, ‘really. We’re just talking.’

‘And I don’t like you calling me that,’ he said. ‘I’m still your father.’ The way she looked at him broke his heart.

‘Uh-uh, you sacked yourself. A father is someone you’re supposed to be able to trust, who gives his word and keeps it, who doesn’t cheat and lie again and again, when they’ve promised not to. Mum cries every day you know.’

‘Oh for goodness sake, I do not—’

‘My god! Why does everybody lie the whole time?’

‘Some day, Rosie,’ he said, ‘you might understand that things are not always black and—’

‘White,’ she finished for him, ‘I know. They’re in the grey, and in the grey, Rosie, is where people like me make their money and tell their lies and generally screw up other people’s lives. In the grey. I’ve got it. Sean.’

‘She doesn’t know,’ Gail said quietly.

‘Know what? Ugh: you’re expecting a little bébé with her. Well it’s never going to have anything to do with me.’

‘No, that’s not why I’ve come, and I didn’t know you were here, I thought it was term time. I came to tell your mother that Tom’s body has been found. And in person, Rosie, not to be insulted by you but to break it gently to her. Except she already knew.’

Rosie stared at her mother in shock.

‘Ruth called me this morning.’ Gail put her arm round her daughter. ‘I’ll tell you all about it.’ She looked at Sean over Rosie’s shoulder. ‘Thank you for coming. I appreciate it.’

He stared at his crying daughter, and his stranger of an ex-wife. He was being dismissed from his own home. Ex-home. But still his child.

‘Rosie,’ he said gently, ‘if you ever wanted to see me—’

‘Why would I want to do that?’ She didn’t look at him.

‘Because you’re my daughter and I love you.’

‘Don’t hold your breath.’ She ducked out from under her mother’s arm and ran upstairs, her face crumpling.

The Vanquish blinked an electronic greeting. Sean drove carefully down the rutted, waterlogged private lane, then into the long single-lane road. The numbness was definitely gone, the encounter had left him raw with failure.

A short sharp blast of a horn ahead returned his attention to the narrow road, where a battered red Land Rover pulling a trailer was upon him. A man and a woman in matching jackets – James and Emma Goring. OK, he could do this. He’d only just gone by a passing place so he waved then reversed, shaking himself out of his funk, ready to greet them. The shattered bones of the past, knitting back together. He would tell them what had happened.

James and Emma – he couldn’t remember their children’s names – but over nearly a decade they had eaten at each other’s houses, bought rounds at the Acorn, gone to firework parties, shared New Year – the stuff of life that slowly accretes into friendship. But they did not appear to recognise him. In fact, James raised a casual finger of thanks and was about to drive on, until Sean called out.

James did a double-take, and stopped. ‘Sean!’ he said. Emma lowered the phone she had been checking, and just that second also officially recognised him too, with a bright smile.

Engines running, they exchanged enthusiastic concerns about the weather and the state of the lanes, and Sean told them about the dust storm, which they’d seen on TV but only got a little of here, weren’t they lucky with their microclimate? And then the awkward pause.

Sean knew they wanted to go. He felt angry, he kept them talking, anything, about all the new vineyards, the farm, while he absorbed the fact they hadn’t wanted to stop. Pretending they hadn’t recognised him. People got divorced, people moved on – he looked pointedly at their trailer, where big sound speakers were covered with a tarp.

‘Of course!’ he said. ‘Your solstice party – here’s hoping for sunshine!’

‘Oh,’ James said quickly, ‘very small this year.’

‘Big speakers, for a small party.’

‘Not really.’

They looked at each other, their smiles fading. They were not going to invite him.

‘I came down to tell Gail a dear friend of ours died.’ Sean had to look up at them from his lower vehicle. ‘We’re still friends.’

‘Best way,’ said James. ‘And sorry for your loss.’

‘Absolutely,’ Emma said. ‘So sorry. Take care, Sean.’

James put the Land Rover in gear and the loaded trailer rattled dangerously close to the Aston as they passed, attention fixed on the lane ahead. Then they were gone.

Sean stared after them in the rear-view mirror, his heart pounding like he’d been in a fight. He’d thought of them as friends – he’d brought out his best wine and put up with their tedious company in the hope that they would surely reveal themselves at some point – he presumed it was just that English reserve—

No. They had never been friends; they had always been cold to him. It was Gail they’d liked, he knew they thought she’d married down. The loss of Tom burned through him again: Tom who had been a true friend and a gentleman, always showing the same kindness and self-respect whether he was talking to a tramp or a billionaire. Sean heard Kingsmith’s voice in his head, from the old days, when he’d taken a business loss. Learn, and don’t look back. He checked the time, and told the satnav Heathrow.

There is a power that we call Sila, which is not to be explained in simple words. A great spirit, supporting the world and the weather and all life on earth, a spirit so mighty that his utterance to mankind is not through common words, but by storm and snow and rain and the fury of the sea; all the forces of nature that men fear.

When all is well, Sila sends no message to mankind, but withdraws into his own endless nothingness, apart. So he remains as long as men do not abuse life, but act with reverence towards their daily food.

No one has seen Sila; his place of being is a mystery, in that he is at once among us and unspeakably far away.

Across Arctic America: Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition (1927)

Knud Rasmussen

4

Sitting in 1F, crammed against the plastic wall, the smell of his neighbour’s duty-free aftershave in his nose, Sean remembered Tom’s grim prediction that Svalbard would become the Ibiza of the north. The midnight sun, exotic locale, and public awareness of the fragility of the region had created the strongest driver for tourism the Arctic had ever seen. Now Longyearbyen even had its own club scene, a Mecca for outward-bound hen and stag parties and rich kids bored of skiing.

Sean watched the stewardess and her cart coming closer. The clink of ice made him swallow in anticipation. He must reframe the shock as closure. A stone – a literal heavy headstone, could be laid on Tom’s recovered body in its grave, and on the hope he would return.

‘Sir, any drinks or snacks?’ the stewardess repeated, with an economy-class smile. She passed him his two miniature vodkas, tin of tonic and a plastic cup with a single ice cube and moved on quickly before he could ask for more. He didn’t bother with the tonic, just poured in both vodkas and knocked it back. No matter what Kingsmith and Martine said, in his heart he knew this was anything but closure. He’d learned to live with the idea of Tom lost in pristine obscurity – that was how many Arctic heroes ended their story. His reappearance was unscripted, as if the glacier itself had moved against him.

Another shadow fell on his thoughts, provoked by Gail’s reference to his still-imminent knighthood. The New Year and Birthday honours had come and gone three times, but there was always a good reason he had to wait – bit of a backlog, wheels within wheels, don’t worry—

He guessed why it hadn’t yet materialised: there were questions about the accident. All right then, let the inquest lance that boil of suspicion. He’d tell them whatever they wanted to know and as he publicly cleared his name, he would also remind the world that risk and danger were at the very heart of exploration and even to this day the fittest and best-prepared polar adventurers still sometimes died. Surviving was not a crime, nor was making a fine living from Midgard Lodge, where the beloved Tom Harding had died. An aggrieved journalist, turned down for membership at Sean’s other clubs, had written about Midgard and called it ‘Dirty Davos’. This was not entirely untrue. Sean Cawson’s group of membership clubs around the world catered to a global elite, but Midgard Lodge was different. The northernmost hostelry in the world and converted from an old whaling station, it was inaccessible to all but its guests, and provided for those who valued discretion, whose reputations were not the holiest, but who wanted to improve their standing in the world as well as their profits. These were the people about whom the World Economic Forum felt squeamish, who would never be invited to actual Davos, but whose decisions were of great economic and political import. If they were excluded from the best business society – publicly, at least – they were welcome to meet, and talk, and explore different business models in the stunning environment of Midgard Lodge. Sean believed and Tom had agreed that it was pointless preaching to the converted; also that honey caught more flies than vinegar. A luxury retreat in a uniquely inspiring location, security assured, was part of the realpolitik of environmental progress.

The stewardess was at the rear of the plane. Sean felt anxiety coursing through him but he didn’t want to arrive blunted by alcohol. A delicate thing, for a CEO to re-establish the chain of command after so long an absence – but Danny Long was slipping up as general manager if he was reporting to Kingsmith first. Kingsmith might have recommended him, but he was only Sean’s sleeping partner in Midgard, not an official shareholder like Martine and her clean-tech investors, nor Radiance Young and her friends in Hong Kong. Sean always smiled at the thought of Radiance and her bare-faced insistence she was investing all her own renminbis, not those of the People’s Republic behind her. Fine, if that was what she needed to say. But she certainly brought the Party with her.

It would probably be a few days before details were released to the press and then the news cycle and the eulogising would start up again. ‘Glacier gives up the ghost’, or more soberly, ‘Body of missing British environmentalist discovered’. As if Tom Harding were Franklin’s lost expedition, the subject of national mourning for decades. And then, of course, there would be the pictures. Tom shaking hands with indigenous protestors at the line of jungle they had saved. Tom swimming with that bloody whale shark, as if he were the only person in the world ever to do that. Tom with actors draped on his shoulders, celebrity trading for rugged moral virtue.

The prospect of reliving the cult of Tom was as irritating now as it had been while he was alive, but the worst of it was, Tom had disliked it too. Sean couldn’t even call him on his ego – or his looks, which were not his fault. Women adored him, men admired him, and this idolisation was a large part of why Sean had so doggedly courted him for Midgard, refusing to take no for an answer. But it wasn’t the whole of it. Despite their years of distance, Sean knew that if Tom believed in Midgard, then he had truly created something of real value to this world. His old friend’s approval had really mattered – and Kingsmith was right, he must get out in front of all this and use the drama positively.

‘Up in our country we are human! And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. If I get something today, you may get it tomorrow. Some men never kill anything because they are seldom lucky or they may not be able to run or row as fast as others. Therefore they would feel unhappy to have to be thankful to their fellows all the time. And it would not be fun for the big hunter to feel that other men were constantly humbled by him. Then his pleasure would die. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves, and by whips one makes dogs.’

A hunter, to Peter Freuchen

Arctic Adventure: My Life in the Frozen North (1936)

Peter Freuchen

5

Fourteen nations signed the Svalbard Treaty of 1920, giving each of them the right to settle, purchase property and conduct business on the archipelago, provided that, in the words of the legislation, it was ‘not for war-like purposes’. By the time Sean Cawson was writing draft after draft of his purchase proposal for the old whaling station, the Treaty had forty-three signatories and seven new-formed states seeking approval. But treaties and laws are as subject to ageing as the hands that wrote them and the times to which they applied.

Family firms likewise. The derelict structures he bought by consortium and rechristened Midgard Lodge were built and owned for two hundred years by a wealthy Norwegian family: the Pedersens.

The youngest generation rejected their elders’ pride in their whaling past, instead feeling shame that their family fortune was built on the near-genocide of several cetacean and pinniped species. It was like inherited wealth from slavery – no bar to public office, as Great Britain proved, but something they felt a debt to repay. In karmic offset, they embraced diverse environmental causes to distance themselves from the documented accounts of their forebears, of the joyful slaughter of pregnant beluga whales in Midgardfjorden, and the flensing of live walruses on the beach they still owned. The surviving elders, who still used the candelabra made of narwhal horn on Sunday nights, mourned many aspects of the past under the safe code word: Tradition. The middle generation just wanted the money, and made discreet inquiries about the old lodge on the shores of Midgardfjorden. The price it might fetch, the complications.

In Svalbard, Oslo, Bergen and Tromsø, each realtor charged with this investigation broke into a sweat at the prospect of the kill: private property for sale in Svalbard, demesne to encompass landing beach, deepwater access, and a plot reaching right back to the mountain. Of course all land permanently belonged to the Crown of Norway – but the most demurely conservative estimate of the value was stratospheric.

For once the family agreed: it was time to let Midgard go. They chose a single agent, Mr Mogens Hadbold. Very discreetly, he dropped a hint of that possibility into international waters. The feeding frenzy was almost instantaneous. First came the Norwegian government itself, who brought much patriotic pressure to bear on the family agent, who duly passed it on – noting that two Russian oligarchs (bitter rivals) had more than doubled the government’s best offer. Both were ready for a bidding war, but one was ruled out for his rapacious extractive activities in the Laptev Sea, albeit carried out by a Romanian proxy company. The other, a prominent Siberian landowner, had airlifted every polar bear within three hundred square kilometres to create a private reservation close to Moscow ‘for conservation’ where he was reputedly breeding cubs for sale as pets. He too was ineligible.

The still-patriotic Pedersens paused to consider. The property was worth far more than the Norwegian government was willing to offer; why did they not understand? Their agent explained: if the government paid the premium the Midgard property commanded, they might then find themselves hostage to any Norwegian landowner north of 66 degrees, keen to leverage large amounts of cash. This truth caused the Pedersens’ patriotism to somewhat fade.

But other bidders – from the US, Canada, Russia, China (the most) and India, were numerous. Seventy-five per cent were ruled out in the first round of investigations, but then the British-led consortium returned, demanding (‘begging really,’ said the family agent) to be reconsidered. This was because of the new involvement of one Tom Harding – a name that rang discordant bells (Greenpeace?) for the older Pedersens, but chimed most harmoniously (Greenpeace!) for the younger. He had led the charge to clear the Plastic Sargasso and driven the investigation into clinical trials corruption at more than one chemicals giant. The older generation, emotionally blackmailed by their children, allowed that the British consortium could re-submit its proposal – so long as they knew that the odds were against its success.

Long odds were what Sean Cawson had beaten all his life. The sale went through, Midgard Lodge was built and still running despite the terrible accident that had marred its birth – and three and a half years later, here he was disembarking into the sharp mineral air of Longyearbyen once more.

It was good to see Danny Long standing waiting on the tarmac. Behind him was the familiar yellow and blue Dauphin helicopter in which they would fly to Midgard, and standing by his general manager’s side, a Longyearbyen airport official ready to conclude the briefest of passport formalities.

He and Danny greeted each other warmly. There was no difference in Long’s appearance, or his comfortable quiet manner. He was everything you wanted in a pilot, and though Sean had intended to broach the difficult matters straight away – as they rose up over the slopes of the coal mine behind the airport then veered away from the town, he found he could not speak. Silently, he absorbed Svalbard’s stark beauty. This time, there was none of the churning panic of his last visit, unwisely made too soon after the accident. He was here to put that failure behind him and lead with confidence again.

Not until they had left the black peaks and steely water of Adventfjord behind them, and were beating their way over the whiteness of the von Postbreen glacier, up to the razor-tipped ice plateau of King Olav’s Land, did he clear his throat. He heard the tiny answering click and, to Sean’s surprise, the pilot spoke first.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t call you, sir, about Mr Harding. But Mr Kingsmith called, so I told him – then he wanted to tell you himself.’

‘Yes. He told me he’d put a retreat in. You know that—’

‘Yes, sir. Everything to go through London, he set me straight on that earlier today. If you don’t mind my saying, Mr Cawson, it’s good to see you again.’

‘And you, Danny. It’s been far too long.’

The pilot looked straight ahead. ‘I still feel very bad.’

‘Not your fault, Danny.’ Sean looked down at the ice.

‘But if I’d been in there with you …’

‘You were needed on watch. But thank you.’

He remembered how much he liked Danny Long. In his late forties, he was blunt-featured, of average height and stocky build, and his modest manner belied his high competence – but that was probably part of the protocol of close protection. Kingsmith had told him he had saved his life, but the details were private. Sean admired him for not turning it into a drinking anecdote.

He stared down at the ice cap, filling up on its peculiar charge of beauty and fear. Today it was glittering white velvet, strewn with lozenges of emerald and turquoise lakes. He did not remember so many of them, nor the line of five white radomes on a plateau of tundra. They had not been there the last time he was here.

‘Indian,’ said Danny Long, in answer to his unspoken question. ‘In the last year. Over on Barentsoya there’s another new construction going on. Telecom, or meteorology.’ The pilot smiled. ‘Improving our broadband.’

‘Good broadband is a valuable asset.’

‘Indeed, sir.’

Sean did not speak again until they were over Hinlopenstreten, where a convoy of cruise ships made white dashes on the dark water. He remembered Kingsmith’s admonition about his friend in Oslo.

‘Have there been many ships in Midgardfjorden? Before that one?’

Danny Long shook his head.

‘Sometimes they stop at the mouth – for photographs, I believe. Then they go round the other way. But the Vanir came right down deep. When it all went off on the radio – not the calving, when they went out and confirmed it was a body – the coastguard were close across at Freyasundet, in that new fast boat of theirs.’

‘Joe said they held it as a crime scene.’ Sean kept his tone neutral.

‘They did, sir, but they told me and Terry not to worry about the words, it was just so they could take all the phones and such from the passengers. Then we were ordered to stand down – return to the Lodge – by the coastguard. So that’s what we did.’ He paused. ‘We had Mr Kingsmith’s guests to look after.’

‘And what did you tell them?’

‘Facts, sir: a body had been recovered from the water. They didn’t know anything until they came down for breakfast. The coastguard had gone by then.’

‘How were they? The coastguard.’

‘Very polite, sir, as always. It was Inspector Brovang, he was out on their new boat, that’s why he was in the area.’

Sean imagined the heavy medevac cradle swinging in the air, trails of water falling behind. Tom’s dead body netted and trussed beneath a helicopter, as high as he was now. Less than forty-eight hours ago.

He put his right hand under his left armpit and pressed down on it. The tingling had come back. Nothing physically wrong with his hand, no nerve damage. Brovang had saved it, with his own body heat. He had taken Sean’s statement as he recovered in the Sickehaus in Longyearbyen, but they had not spoken since that time. Nor had he taken up the standing invitation to either visit Midgard Lodge with guests, or any of Sean Cawson’s other clubs around the world, though he had declined courteously. Sean cancelled out the obscure bad feeling that gave him, with a large annual donation to the children’s charity which Brovang supported and mentioned on his Facebook page. Brovang had never accepted his Friend request.

‘Well, at least he had all the details. He didn’t want to speak to the visitors?’

‘No, he was keen to get going.’

‘Who exactly are they?’

‘Excuse me, sir, I’m not good at names, especially foreign ones. Faces, I never forget. But you can meet them, they’re still at the Lodge.’ He banked the Dauphin over the great crumpled blue-white sweep of a glacier – that stopped short of where Sean’s eye expected it to turn.

He must have misremembered the glacier, it could not have retreated so far in a year and a half. Everything seemed different. ‘Danny,’ he said, ‘remember something: Midgard Lodge is my company and I am your CEO. Not Joe. You report to me.’

‘Yes, sir. I know. I made a mistake. I should have informed you first.’

‘Good, then we’re sorted. How’s everything else?’

‘All good, sir. I was in town a week before the Tata-Tesla retreat, and there were some Russian boys from the new place.’

‘The Pyramiden hotel? Or the one in Barentsburg?’

‘Oh those are long finished, and two more as well. This new one’s called the Arktik Dacha. They were joking with us about it, but in a friendly way. I reckon they’ve had a look at us.’

‘How would they do that?’ Sean’s stomach lurched as they suddenly rose up over the last peaks that pierced the ice cap.

Danny Long grinned. ‘Same way we don’t, at them.’

Although I had joined the Royal Geographical Society some years earlier, under the misapprehension that by so doing I would obtain Sunday tickets for the Zoo, I had only the haziest idea as to what a glacier was. I did not know at what temperature water froze. I had no head for heights, was not used to handling large, fierce dogs, could not row or ski or splice, and knew nothing of the working of an internal-combustion engine, or even a Primus stove.

But none of these considerations sobered my high spirits. I had enlisted for Adventure, and that was all I asked for. I had no responsibilities or misgivings and was as carefree as a kitten.

Sledge: The British Trans-Greenland Expedition 1934 (1935)

Martin Lindsay

6

They landed on the narrow strip of cobbled beach. The boathouse doors were ajar but all was quiet. The Lodge itself looked better than Sean remembered, the wood more weathered, the structure even more camouflaged. He waited for the bear all-clear signal then went in to greet the mystery guests. The discretion of Midgard Lodge did not extend to its founder and CEO, and absent or not, he had a right to know who he was hosting.

Two men were waiting in the lobby and jumped up to greet him. The first of Kingsmith’s pals was Benoit, from the Central African Republic. He was tall and broad with a winning open smile, and he pumped Sean’s hand warmly.

‘You don’t remember me? I came to all your parties on Spring Street!’ He looked to his companion, a young elegantly dressed Asian man, also smiling politely. ‘Jiaq, our host gave the best parties in Manhattan, didn’t you?’

‘You’re very kind.’ Sean smiled over his confusion. He had no memory of Benoit, but he had indeed lived in a loft on Spring Street in New York, owned by Kingsmith, in his first year after graduation. Kingsmith had him running errands and apprenticing for him, while he learned what he called ‘housekeeping’. Spring Street marked Sean’s first experience of making real money through his mentor’s generous guidance, and he had never looked back.

Jiaq complimented Sean on Midgard Lodge and apologised for not personally knowing Miss Radiance Young, though he had certainly heard of her.

‘Your facilities are a credit to you,’ Benoit smiled. ‘We feel very safe!’

‘Excellent. I’m glad it’s all going well for you.’

Benoit apologised for their unscheduled visit – the result of a chance call to Joe, who suggested that if they were in the neighbourhood …

‘The neighbourhood?’

‘Of Iceland.’ They broke into peals of laughter. They explained they had been showing off their new ice-class yachts to each other, comparing anti-pirate protocols. Now the Arctic was open for business it was good to be prepared, like boy scouts!

Their high spirits grated. Sean said he was very pleased to have them there, and excused himself.

He pulled on waterproofs and went back down to the beach. The Dauphin rested at one end, facing down the fjord in readiness for their return. At the other, Danny Long had pulled one of the smallest Zodiacs from the boathouse, alongside the single kayak Sean had requested. This was his manager’s mute comment on the safety infraction of Sean’s stated intention to go out alone. A breeze glittered the water of the fjord – and carried the faint beat of rock music. He looked around. It came from the building beside the boathouse.

Sean looked at Danny Long in question, then walked towards it. His manager came with him.

‘I’ll tell them to keep it down, sir. But now might be a good time for them to meet you, if you’re happy with that?’ He hurried alongside as Sean pushed through the vestibule doors.

Twenty men jumped to attention off their bunks, their eyes down. Sean stared in surprise. No one said anything. He had never seen any of them before, and did not remember there being so many of them on his last trip. But everything about that visit was confused. He would check when he got back.

‘The new detail, Mr Cawson – they’ve only been in a week, but they’re all good.’ Danny Long’s voice changed as he addressed the men. ‘This is your CEO, Mr Cawson.’

The men looked at Sean and saluted. They wore dark clothing and looked very fit.

‘At ease.’ Sean had no military training, but apparently it worked because the men sat back down and resumed looking at their screens, or lying on their bunks. Danny Long seemed to be waiting for him to say something.

‘Good,’ he said, to cover his surprise. He went out into the open air. A retreat was in place he knew nothing about and a new detail of men – he had forgotten that part of the arrangement – were gathered in that dark cavernous room.

‘All good, sir.’ Danny Long was watching him.

‘Right then.’ Sean took out his own binoculars and stood back to back with his manager, sweeping the rocks and peaks of the bay with hi-mag scrutiny. He could not – would not – ask Danny Long questions that would reveal his ignorance and completely undermine the authority he was there to resume.

The manager’s radio crackled. From the upper lookout in the Lodge, his second in command Terry Bjornsen was also scanning for bears. All clear.

‘Waiting,’ Long said into his collar, as he completed his own slow survey. He raised his arm to the Lodge. ‘All clear below.’

Sean lowered his kayak into the water, climbed down the steel ladder and slid into the seat. He took the paddle from Long, coiled the red tethering rope into the cockpit and pushed off with a long slow glide. There was no wind. Midgardfjorden was a black mirror, the only movement was the undulating wake behind Sean’s kayak, and the slow rise and fall of his paddle, hissing softly as it cut the water.

He skimmed out towards the centre, the rising shimmer of light around him showing that the sky was drying as the sun burned through. His consciousness fused with the subtle motion of the kayak and the long ripples of sunlight. He kept his eye on the jutting inner point of the M. He knew the current that circled the inlets and made a little area of turbulence close to the shore that could capsize the unwary – but here it was now, all the way out in the centre.

Dipping his blade, he felt the pull from the water, the tug all the way up into his arm, as if it had caught on something. The current swirled like a water snake but Sean had good upper body strength and kept his head. He judged its velocity and angle, then twisted his paddle blade into its force. He felt the energy from deep in the water travel up his paddle, his hand, his arm, into his shoulder, neck, and face. He held the strain – and the hook of the current released him in the right direction. Only five or six seconds – but long enough to go in if he’d panicked. But he hadn’t – and in that instant of instinctive reaction, in that correct response, his feeling of power came flooding back – and he was embracing that beautiful and terrifying lover once again: the Arctic.

His heart pounding with joy, he glanced back. Danny Long stood on the jetty, a tiny figure beneath the rearing mountain, his rifle above his shoulder like a tribesman’s spear. Sean rounded the point and moved out of sight.

From the air the glacier was one thing, but approached in humility by kayak, she revealed another nature. Sean lifted his paddle and slowed, poised in the water. The towering blue and white face of the ice filled his vision, the Arctic silence his ears and mind. Sometimes it was so intense it almost formed into a sound; sometimes he had heard the bumping and scraping of the pack ice form abstract fragments like music.

The silence gathered around him so that he could almost hear the squeeze and suck of his heart in his chest. He felt his sweat blot his base layer, and the bracing of his tendons far away inside the kayak shell. Below him the dark depth of the water; above, a thread of breeze that dried the molecules of sweat. His vision filled with the deep blue strata of the most ancient compressed ice, forty thousand years old.

When Sean was eleven and in the care home while his mother was recovering from yet another attempt, he saw a huge oil painting of icebergs on one of the off-limits staff landings. It was so beautiful he started using this longer route, despite the punishment when he was caught, just to gaze at the space and the colours of this pristine frozen world. While he stood before it, he forgot his distress, and threw his consciousness into the ice.

There was a mast from a shipwreck in the foreground, and he imagined himself the sole survivor. Everyone else was dead but he must find a way to keep going. As he gazed at it one day it came to him like a truth – his father was on that ship, or one like it – he had gone exploring and been shipwrecked, that was why he’d never known him, why his mother wanted to die. The ice had taken his family and he must go there to get them back.

The iceberg painting grew in his imagination, even when his mother returned from the hospital and reclaimed him to the ugly council house where she struggled on in depression and drinking. Sean fixated on his lost explorer father, and everything to do with the Arctic, and he had bolstered his fantasy with such authentic details, backed up with angry fists for doubters, that it became fact.

His fighting was a problem until a social worker intervened. Sean was in danger of serious delinquency but clearly bright, and the social worker goaded him into agreeing to sit the scholarship exam for The Abbott’s School.

This was the grand, grey-stone public school where Sean had often joined the townie gang in attacking boys who wore the strange uniform – but now he was to be one of them. He’d listened outside the door after his interview – ‘Oh, the poor boy, think of what he’s gone through, yes, yes let’s extend a helping hand.’

So Sean Cawson received the academic scholarship and the sports bursary and the charity award that topped up the rest and meant he could go for free. By the age of fifteen, he had become a chameleon at Abbott’s, sloughing off the misfits who would have been his natural friends and gravitating instead to the leaders of the pack, in sport and academic excellence. There he worked out the answer to the question he’d always pondered, about fairness and beauty and ugliness and justice. It was wealth.

Sean blinked. Not eleven in the care home, not in the dorm at Abbott’s. In the kayak, frozen. The current had taken him closer to the ice face – how long had he been zoned out, thinking of the past? A few seconds – a couple of minutes? The temperature had dropped and the light was that milky veil that can suddenly appear in Arctic air like a spell, blanking out contours, hiding crevasses, wiping out direction.

His heart slammed. In the few seconds he had mentally drifted, the current had taken him directly in front of the mouth of the cave into the glacier from which Tom’s body emerged. It was deep; the ice was the darkest blue he had ever seen, and as he paddled backwards, he could hear the echo of his blade striking the water. His ears blocked as if he were airborne and his mouth was dry. The new cave was the source of the pull in the water, it had changed the current pattern of the fjord.

He felt a terrible urge to go in, but he knew that was crazy, like standing on a high cliff and thinking of jumping. Of course he would not do it. He braced his feet and bladed back, admiring the cobalt twists in the ice, the darkest sapphire catching flashes from the water. There was nothing more beautiful than Arctic ice.

Something touched him. Not physically – but he felt it in the prickling of his scalp – something was there, around him or under him. He stared into the cave but saw nothing; he looked down and the water was grey-green translucent. Then he looked up.

Standing on the lip of the glacier, staring down from directly above him, was an enormous male polar bear. It was close enough for Sean to see the duelling scar that twisted his black lip, giving the impression of a cynical smile. It must have stalked him while he was years away, and now they had come together.

Sean dug his paddle to move away from the cave but caught another current that pushed him closer to the ice face. The bear watched with interest and slowly walked along the edge above him, keeping pace.

Sean knew not to take his eyes from it. He felt it most distinctly – the bear was pondering leaping in now, or waiting a little longer. If he came closer, if he lost control and capsized, it would take the chance and jump. Bears had been known to go for kayakers before, but always from the shore.

This glacier was high – but the bear was enormous and highly intelligent; it knew the currents – it was standing waiting for him. When he met its gaze, he felt it willing him to panic and make a mistake. He stared back with equal force and ignored the jolt of fear down both legs.

The current was a muscle of water writhing around his paddle, tugging it under the kayak. The light glittered and the mountains reared up black and strobing around him, locking him in. The bear lowered its head, looking for where to jump. He wanted a knife – why had he not brought a knife with him? He might have done something with a knife …

As the bear gathered itself, a sharp growl bounced against the granite walls of the fjord, and it looked up in irritation. The vibration of the Zodiac engine came through the water. Sean did not take his eyes away – the bear would still strike, even now. Man and animal felt each other’s stare. Advantage animal – but man was lucky. The bear turned and loped away up the glacier and out of sight.

Danny Long slowed the Zodiac as he approached, his rifle on his back. Benoit, Jiaq, and two young blonde women were his passengers, all wearing bright orange survival suits and busy photographing the scenery. They had not seen it.

‘Excuse me, sir: the guests wished to come out.’

Sean reached down into himself for human speech again.

‘Of course.’

Long carefully circled the Zodiac around behind Sean, giving him the benefit of the wake to help him out of the current. ‘How is it, in the kayak?’

‘Great,’ Sean said over his shoulder. ‘But no one else out alone. The current.’ He scanned the slopes. The bear had vanished and he was glad.

‘Yes, sir. It’s changed, I noticed as well.’

Sean left Kingsmith’s guests exclaiming over the colour of the glacier and paddled back. Only as he boarded the plane that evening did he realise he had not thought about Tom for a moment out there. He had gone to see where he’d died, and mourn, but instead the confrontation with the bear had made him feel truly alive, and even joyful. Sitting on the plane coming back, he missed Tom with a fierce longing for that friendship, and for everything else he had lost.

This snowless ice-plain is like a life without love – nothing to soften it. The marks of all the battles and pressures of the ice stand forth just as when they were made, rugged and difficult to move among. Love is life’s snow. It falls deepest and softest into the gashes left by the fight – whiter and purer than snow itself. What is life without love? It is like this ice – a cold, bare, rugged mass, the wind driving it and rending it and then forcing it together again, nothing to cover open rifts, nothing to break the violence of the collisions, nothing to round away the sharp corners of the broken floes – nothing, nothing but bare, rugged drift-ice.

Friday, 15 December 1893

Farthest North: The Norwegian Polar Expedition 1893–1896 (1897)

Fridtjof Nansen

7

London, four years earlier

Sean had found out about the Midgard sale, put together the proposal and finance, and fought to stay in negotiations. He was at the decisive final round of talks when it looked like Tom’s puritanical ego would destroy the whole venture.

‘I don’t want to do this.’ Tom hadn’t even waited for the meeting to officially start. The Pedersen family agent, Mogens Hadbold, their lawyer and their accountant, stared at Sean in confusion.

‘Wait.’ Sean felt like he was in a bad dream. ‘Tom, what is this?’ They were in a penthouse suite at Claridge’s, and Tom was holding up Sean’s bid proposal in its embossed leather cover.

‘I do not want the Pedersen family to sell their property,’ he said, ‘because it’s in such an environmentally sensitive location. The Arctic ecosystem is already massively stressed by warming seas. There is no more summer ice. Politicians pay lip-service to bringing the temperature down while quietly drawing dividends from their fossil fuel investments. We’ve got government ministers on the boards of oil companies. I don’t want that either, but that’s reality.’

Sean consciously relaxed his hands so they did not make fists. What an absolute fucker, telling him one thing and waiting until now—

‘But,’ Tom continued, ‘we’re here because someone is going to be chosen as the new owner. Someone is going to become responsible for that corner of the Arctic, at a most critical moment for its safety. I’m here to tell you that, if this sale is going to happen, I stand with this man to buy it. We’re here because the numbers are right.’

‘Certainly in the correct area,’ confirmed the family agent. ‘But above a particular threshold that Mr Cawson has passed, the family are even more concerned to select the correct buyer.’

‘I led Greenpeace for two years,’ Tom said. ‘I’ve been involved in environmental issues my whole life and I will continue to be. I’ve known Sean since we were at college together. I’ve learned a lot from him, and as I’m now in this room, I hope it’s become a two-way street. I used to turn my nose up at people whose main interest was money, because they didn’t seem to care how they made it. Now I’m less naïve. The only way the world will change for the better is if it is precisely those people who start thinking differently about profit.’ He looked at each of them in turn.

‘Last year’s coup in the Maldives cost every hotel group there untold sums as well as several lives. Many people saw it coming, the hotels were warned, they absolutely knew what was going on, but profit blinded them. Climate change means the poorest people suffer first – people who don’t buy organic or vote for liberal democracy. The Maldives is happening all over the world, in every poor country where the sea level is rising and the land is flooding.’

‘Mr Harding,’ Mogens Hadbold smiled patiently, ‘we all care—’

‘Caring is meaningless without action. We must stop the economic apartheid that is killing this planet.’

‘Tom, for pity’s sake!’ Sean was on his feet too. It was appalling, Tom was like a mad man, he hadn’t seen him like this before.

‘Sit down, Sean. You wanted me here, you wanted me on board, so let me continue. I’m nearly finished. Look at the world – a great big band of drought or flood that just happens to coincide with mineral resources, with political instability and then with foreign intervention by the very powers that benefit from the extractive rights. Powers that do not give a shit about the cost, human or natural, of that resource exploitation. What we’re looking at is a global environmental sacrifice zone – and the Arctic is just the latest part of it.’

Sean sat there, his face burning. Tom’s ego was out of control. How could he not have seen it? What was he doing now, with the mineral water? Holding it up to the big mirror on the mantelpiece. He looked mad, speaking to the flowers.

‘Bottled at source in the Alps. Where the shrinking snowline means only the highest resorts still exist, and their prices make even the rich feel poor. And if they’re starting to think about climate change, you know we’re in the last-chance saloon.’ He turned and came back to them. ‘When that chunk of Venice collapsed into the lagoon, the dead included guests at the Cipriani, as well as refugees.’

He drank again.

‘So if you’re not worried, you’re not paying attention. And if you are, then it is your moral and civic and patriotic duty to either keep your property and be vigilant stewards of the Arctic, or, ensure that you only sell to a buyer who will use it to be a vigilant pain in the arse to any and everyone who is trying to make a killing up there. I don’t know, you might be those people yourselves. I don’t know you, but I do know this man.’ He pointed to Sean.

‘Arctic obsession started our friendship. We’ve gone our separate ways, but that’s still our bond. He might have become a capitalist pig – but he’ll never do anything to destroy the Arctic, in any way. I know that. He’s clever or crazy enough to invite me to be a board member, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that people hear you better if you’re in the room, not yelling through a loudhailer from the street. That’s why I’m in with Sean: he knows the very people I want to reach, the brokers between governments and mining companies, the shipping people, the people who make things happen, or make things disappear. I’ll be in the room with them on this.’

He laid down the bid proposal on the table. ‘How can people say what they really think at places like Davos? It’s about being seen to do good, and someone with a vested interest in the outcome is always playing the host. Sean’s plan takes that layer away. A luxurious private retreat in Arctic grandeur – who doesn’t want to go there?’

Sean had to admire him. He was such a showman. No – that wasn’t fair. Protecting the environment was Tom’s life’s work, he had the broken bones, scars and jail time to show for it – as well as the adulation of thousands of people. He’d put all his money into it too, though his family had tried to stop him; Sean remembered hearing that.

‘Enough with the bleeding-heart liberals crying over the polar bears. I want the greediest, ugliest-thinking, most short-sighted, ego-crazed politicians and plutocrats we can find to stay in the place Sean will build on the shore of Midgardfjorden. There’s a reason men have risked their lives again and again for the Arctic; it shows you your soul, even if you think you don’t have one.

‘I’m naïve: I still believe you can reach people through their hearts. But I’m battle-scarred: profit speaks louder. Sean’s plan combines both those things. So that’s why I say that my first position is still no more development in the Arctic. But as it is happening, from all sides, as the summer ice has gone – twenty years ahead of government projections, and as it is a free-for-all, no matter what people say, then let us be there, let us try to guide development to do the minimum harm, and protect the life of this fragile, sublime, vulnerable environment. You can only lose it once.’

Tom walked round behind Sean and put his hands on his shoulders. ‘I know my friend and I trust him.’ He took his seat again.

No one spoke for a long moment. The atmosphere had shifted. The lawyer and the accountant were staring at Tom with that star-struck look Sean had seen on people’s faces before. Mogens Hadbold’s laptop pinged, two, three, four times, breaking the spell. Hadbold looked across to the mantelpiece and waved. Only then did Sean spot the tiny camera in the flower arrangement.

‘Yes,’ said Mogens Hadbold. ‘I’m sorry that I did not tell you the meeting was streaming live. They wanted to be present, but discreetly.’

He turned his laptop to face Sean and Tom, and the quartered screen showed different Pedersens on Skype.

‘That was very impressive,’ a female voice said, out of the screen. ‘We will let you know. Tak, Mogens.’

He replied in a rapid burst of Norwegian, and closed the laptop.

‘Mr Harding is something of a hero to the younger generation, you know this. They are the ones making all the big noise about the right buyer. The older ones – well, you know how we are as we get old. We like security. And money! But the young have the power.’ He stood up, as did the lawyer and accountant. ‘Thank you very much for returning.’ The meeting was over. Sean stood too.

‘You don’t want to ask me anything?’ He looked from one to the other. Mogens Hadbold shook his head. ‘We have looked into your partners, Miss Martine Delaroche and Miss Radiance Young. We are satisfied of your financial commitment. And of course we know Mr Harding’s environmental work. And you know Midgardfjorden, so there is no more to say on that. Everyone is clear what is on the table.’

They were both silent in the lift going down. Only when they were out on the street did Sean explode.

‘You knew there was a camera!’

‘Yep. Want a drink?’ Tom grinned. ‘I’m gasping.’

They went into the first place that smelled of beer. It was the middle of the afternoon, a strange time to be in a pub, but everything was strange. Sean had taken Tom to the presentation as his mascot; Tom had taken control. Sean had said almost nothing. Tom put his arm round his shoulder.

‘I wasn’t so bad, was I?’

‘You were an utter, utter bastard. They loved you.’

‘Didn’t overdo it?’

‘You chewed the furniture – I wanted to throttle you.’

‘You’re very welcome.’ Tom ordered two pints without asking what Sean wanted. Sean wasn’t a pubbish sort any more, certainly not any old boozer on a midweek afternoon. Not that he was in any state to do business – he was fizzing with energy and outrage at Tom’s hijacking of his event.

‘You are the most egotistical fucker I have ever met, Tom, you know that?’

‘If I’d gone in there all mealy-mouthed, you’d be dead in the water.’ Their pints came. They clinked.

‘Bastard.’

‘Bastard.’

They drank hard and talked lightly of current affairs, excluding the one with Martine. Tom thanked Sean for the picture. They discussed the latest closure of the Suez Canal, the skinhead revival, and remembered a mutual friend from college, recently killed reporting from Ukraine.

‘We underestimated him,’ Tom agreed. ‘A hero in our midst.’

‘Like you,’ Sean said. ‘You’re a hero. I mean it. Your life counts.’

Tom drained his pint. ‘Sean, so does yours. You can move mountains. You’ve pulled yourself up by your bootstraps.’

Sean felt a glow that was more than the beer, and the afternoon sun coming in through the sand-etched windows. Putting the world to rights with Tom, boozing an afternoon away. What a rare pleasure. He was about to tell him that; he might even have been about to tell him how much he’d missed him, after ordering another pair of pints, when the door opened and a beautiful girl walked in.

She was about twenty-five, fresh-faced, casually dressed. Without realising, Sean pulled in his belly and sat up straighter. She looked across and walked over. Her smile was lovely. Perhaps she’d been in one of his clubs, and recognised him. He prepared himself. Tom put his arm round her. They kissed.

‘I’m ready,’ he said.

‘Then hello and goodbye.’ She smiled at Sean, playful and polite.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Tom, she’s the image of Ruth.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘Is that a good thing?’ The girl looked from face to face. ‘Who is Ruth?’

‘Mutual friend,’ Tom said. ‘A brilliant woman.’

The girl’s smile lit her up. ‘Then I don’t mind at all.’

Sean gazed at her until Tom punched him lightly on the shoulder.

‘Let me know how much they hated me.’

Sean watched them disappear out onto the street, and into their shared afternoon. He found himself alone, quite drunk and acutely bereft.

The lovely girl was young enough to be Tom’s daughter, if he’d had one. This brought the image of his own sharply to Sean’s mind. Rosie, the angry sad child who could not understand how her father needed to feel like a man more than a husband. How her mother had changed into a woman who saw him as he really was, instead of the hero he wanted to be.

Sean knew he was drunk, but maybe that was the best way to tell Rosie how he felt. He wanted to say sorry, for so much. There at the bar he took out his phone. The call went straight through to her voicemail. At least it didn’t ring several times, as often happened, before going dead. That meant she knew it was him, and didn’t want to talk. This time, she was just busy. Then he called Martine, and the same thing happened.

Why did they not pick up? Sean left his pint unfinished. Only sad old men drank pints on their own in daylight. Tom had done this to him.

A bright burst of laughter seemed aimed at him and he turned. Two girls sat at a corner table, they looked away when he caught their eye – but not before flashing him a quick smile. He did not know what to do with himself; it was that awkward time when the pub was just filling up with the early after-work crowd, the low earners who couldn’t wait to get away. One minute he was enjoying a liberating freedom with Tom, drinking pints in an unfashionable pub at the hour they felt like doing it – and the next he was beached on the shores of other people’s lives – like some loser.

The girls sent arcs of laughter up through the air, they were lassoing him and drawing him over, they wanted to play. He looked in the mirror behind the bar, where he could see them angling their thighs towards him, rearranging their shiny hanks of hair.

Before he left, he spoke to the barman and bought a bottle of champagne to be sent over when he’d gone. Their faces fell as he went out, and he felt a grim satisfaction that he had not fallen for it, drunk as he was. He could have gone over and within a couple of drinks – maybe not even that – adjourned to somewhere more comfortable. A hotel. An hotel. He had learned to always use that weirdness, to demonstrate his adherence to the right set of rules. Inviting people for ‘a kitchen supper’, never ‘dinner’. Repeating ‘how do you do,’ instead of ever answering the question. In English society, nobody cared – that was something he learned too – and they would be horrified if you told them. But they always cared that you were rich.

Standing outside, Sean watched the girls receive the champagne. They were suitably over-excited and he drew back as they scanned the pub for him. What a strange thing to have done. It gave him no pleasure, he was just acting out the anxiety of waiting, of being compared and judged after the presentation. He should have just said that to Tom, but he’d been too busy struggling with the feeling of inadequacy because of how brilliant Tom had been. If they’d only had longer, and more to drink, he would have blurted it all out, they could have talked again like they used to – he could have told him about how it had gone wrong with Gail. Tom was kind, he was always kind, he would have known what to say. Instead, he’d gone off with that girl, who did look like a young Ruth. Tom had fucked things up too. Sean wasn’t the only one.

He slammed into the wall of the pub, drunker than he’d thought. When he and Tom had been drinking together, he’d been happy in a way he had forgotten, relaxing into that long-lost feeling of comradeship and solidarity. Only now did he realise he’d been looking forward to talking about their Greenland trip again, to indulging in a full-blown nostalgia fest, to drinking more, to calling Martine drunkenly to say he was having dinner – supper – with Tom, that it didn’t fucking matter what happened with the Midgard deal, at least they’d reconnected.

He peered through the pub window. To feel so disappointed was pathetic. Nostalgia was for people whose lives were over. Tom had a date, and those girls in there had been joined by two meaty-looking boyfriends. Sean watched some animated talk about the bottle and the boys jerked their necks and squared their shoulders in ritual male display for the rich sod who’d undercut them.

Aimlessly drunk, emotionally disorderly, he decided to clear his head and walk back to Devon Square through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, in the hope of seeing the cavalry.

But it was too late in the day for the horses, and Sean sat on a bench with a coffee from one of the kiosks, trying to sober up. Vodka he could skilfully calibrate, but pints of beer somehow sidestepped that control and made him too emotional. From deciding as he walked away from the pub that he would park the whole Greenland nostalgia trip, he was now flooding with memories of it. He’d been there on three separate expeditions, the first with Tom, on the Lost Explorers’ Expedition when they were twenty. They had been racing partners on the ten-dog sled, and both had imagined that reading about it was tantamount to expertise. They had made complete fools of themselves and had never had a better time. The next couple of times had been for Kingsmith, investigating some mining tender that came to nothing; he had spent time in the capital Nuuk – but it had still been Greenland, still the Arctic.

The first time was the best, despite their incompetence. Because of it, perhaps. He and Tom sweating and stumbling about in the snow, desperately trying to wrestle ten dogs into their harnesses, the air snapping and flashing with the frenzy of excited barking, the dogs fully aware they had novices to deal with. One by one they got them in, resorting to both of them grabbing one dog and managing at last to work out which leg went through which bit of harness – exhausted before they even set off, but the dogs howling and leaping with the thrill of it, as if they’d never done it before either.

It was a shock when his phone rang, in Hyde Park. It was Mogens Hadbold, and he had good news.

One is often asked what is the attraction and what are the joys of Polar exploration. The answer is – Adventure – going where man has never gone before. Achievement – discovering something of value to mankind, such as the whale-fishery of South Georgia; or ramming your way through ice or any difficulties under steam or sail. The wonderful pure beauty of these regions, the healthy invigorating life; and last but not least – comradeship – the comradeship of men. Men who fight alongside you, toil with you, laugh with you, and chaff you. Pals who rack their brains for abuse and epithets to hurl at each other, and who fight for their absent chums. Pals who stand by each other through thick and thin; who share trials, hardships, joys, dangers and food, and are determined, at all hazards, to ‘see it through’ together. For such men you feel a great affection, and the results are teamwork and loyalty of the finest, highest quality, with joy of memory that never fades away.

Under Sail in the Frozen North: The Log of the 1926 British Arctic Expedition (1927)

Frank Arthur Worsley

8

From his park bench, Sean sent emails to Kingsmith, Radiance and Tom. He phoned Martine and said he would be over soon, then he called Gail, to say he wouldn’t. He told her the news and first she congratulated him then asked for a divorce. She knew that Martine was part of the consortium and not one of his silly little girls, and she understood that now his relationship with her would become paramount. Gail wanted the dignity of immediate separation. She told him her lawyer’s name and hung up. Sean was shocked that she was so prepared.

When he arrived at Martine’s apartment she had a spare key and a bottle of chilled Krug waiting. This was the moment they had imagined, and though he enjoyed seeing her blaze with their triumph, he felt oddly detached. Perhaps this was a sign of success; when vintage Krug became a fizzy drink. Not a noble pint in a fuggy all-comers pub, with a mate who kept you level.

Martine slid down onto her knees in front of him and smiled, in the way he understood. He closed his eyes. The effort was over, success was his. The strain of living a lie with Gail was also gone. And Tom had come in and done exactly what Sean had brought him in to do: make him the winner. But he did not feel happy. After a while Martine looked up, concerned. He wound her hair in his hands and tried to surrender to her skill. He tried harder, thinking of the two girls in the pub, of recent porn – an appetite no woman would ever wean him from. Still nothing. Gently he lifted her back up to him. He held her.

‘Why am I not happy?’

‘You got what you wanted. Now you feel empty.’

He nodded. It was true, and her insight made him feel tender. He stroked her hair, in silent consolation for their first erotic non-event. Later they watched television together, also for the first time.

‘A decent man’s content with profit,’ Kingsmith used to say to him, in the early days. ‘Only fools want more – and fools are tools but never partners.’ And Sean, or Sean boy as Kingsmith called him, had laughed and watched the money rolling in, and worked seven days a week if necessary, as it often was, learning his mentor’s particular ways, travelling with him, growing familiar with the Russian dolls of his financial habits, and Kingsmith’s migratory routes: the Caymans to Panama, Monaco to Jersey, to Zurich – to thin air. Very often a scrap of a percentage point of profit fell under the table to Sean, sometimes as a cash bonus, but more often as a last-minute allocation of some IPO, some hitherto obscure company Kingsmith had carefully cultivated up to its stock market debut, usually but not always connected with mining, one of his major interests. Sean proved himself an excellent steward of his financial good fortune, using part of his profit to grow his property portfolio, and always reinvesting in something else Kingsmith recommended.

Both knew Sean would never be in the same league, but he was a quick study and had become personally wealthy beyond the dreams of his twelve-year-old, or even twenty-year-old self. Wealthy enough to acknowledge that money was not enough. What he’d always dreamed of was his name on the map. Literally. Like Barentsz or Bering or – well, OK, not like Cecil Rhodes – but to be a man of daring and discovery and honour, whose explorations could name mountains and seas.

Now, after the Pedersen deal, that secret glory-seeking part of him rejoiced like never before. He, Sean Cawson, owned a tiny piece of the Arctic. The ice was receding and the TransPolar sea route was busier every day, moving global markets from supermarket checkouts to construction contracts as the price of goods went down. Untold mineral wealth was newly within reach. There was something magical in the air; it was a new golden age of trade and opportunity, and he was a very modern buccaneer, in it for positive influence, not plunder. Surely that was worthy of some sort of recognition?

Midgard was Sean’s biggest coup, but somewhere deep inside he had always known he would succeed. Several months ago, and in the face of the heavy odds against him winning the bid, he had placed a large retainer on the services of his chosen Norwegian architect, in order to capitalise on the narrow time window for the work. The morning after the Pedersen decision, and after Martine had left for work, he made that call from her apartment, and the sound of jubilation in the Oslo office buoyed him in happiness all the way across Kensington Gardens.

He was walking towards Selfridges, to kill a bit of time before meeting Joe Kingsmith for lunch. As yet he did not know the venue or the hour – but that was typical. Sean hadn’t even known he was in London but found the email when he woke, saying he’d be at the Wallace Collection, then they could grab a bite. He liked to look at the old weapons collection, Sean remembered. It was the older man’s indulgence to himself, and usually meant things were going well.

The sky was an empty blue and it was so hot for February that although the trees were bare the joggers were dressed for summer. Sean walked across the park, repressing a feeling of irritation at how his mentor, affectionately though he felt towards him, still seemed to think of him as the callow and grateful undergraduate, willing to dance attendance on his whims. That was a lifetime ago, but if Kingsmith still treated him like a kid, then that was the price of access to his capital. One hundred and fifty million dollars in this case, which, along with Tom’s participation, had got him Midgard Lodge. Once Sean had referred to him as ‘the old man’ and people had thought Kingsmith was his actual father. He had not corrected them; he felt much more Kingsmith’s son than his own unknown father’s. And though wild horses wouldn’t have dragged it out of him, in Sean’s heart he was sure the old man had some paternal affection for him too. So fine, he would kill some time in the Watch Room at Selfridges, and wait for his call.

This was a place long soothing to Sean’s spirit, and he had visited it many times before he could afford the things he wanted. It was always the same, the dawdling wealthy shoppers, sparkling vitrines and his own enhanced reflection in the tall apricot-lit mirrors.

He should commemorate his journey from staring at the painting of the icebergs on the care-home staff landing, to standing here, the legal owner of a piece of the Arctic, with a watch. A new time in his life, something that fitted his new role of merchant prince and environmental champion. Nothing vulgar. Sean had no idea what that would be. It amused him that as he went from case to case, the glittering dials, exotic straps and satin-draped plinths jostling for his attention, he gathered sales assistants like iron filings to a magnet. There was a new display since he had last come in, ‘The Hall of Fame’ case. And in it, a platinum Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, with its ice-blue dial the colour of a glacier. He tried it on and looked at his reflection. He didn’t want to take it off so he bought it and slipped his Patek Philippe into his pocket. Collecting beautiful watches went with his self-image; even if the price made him slightly nauseous.

Perhaps he should buy a watch for Martine too. No more philandering. Marriage to Gail had not worked, but he still wanted a mate – not to be like Kingsmith, who for all his wealth and rosters of willing beauties around the world, seemed to lack the centre of gravity that a relationship gave. He had no children, no regular partner, but a different gorgeous woman was always available, wherever he was. Once Sean had thought this highly desirable, but now it seemed increasingly sad, though that was one emotion he’d never seen Kingsmith display.

Sean browsed the women’s watches. He wanted to buy something for Rosie, but the idea of calling her and asking what she liked, and the possibility of her being vile to him on this day of triumph – he shrank from the pain of that. What about Radiance Young then? This was also her triumph. She had brought China to the table and he wanted to show his appreciation – but she was so eccentric. Who knew what sort of inappropriate behaviour a gift from him might trigger? She kept her Facebook page frequently updated and either referred to herself as ‘Bi-Polar Babe’ due to her extraordinary feats of endurance at both Poles, or, ‘Simple Girl Looking For Love’. Sean had yet to meet another thirty-four-year-old single Chinese woman with hundreds of millions of dollars at her disposal. Or a chain of specifically Chinese-friendly hotels in hitherto untapped markets (most of Europe), a portfolio of interests in several African countries, and her own shipping line, a wharf in the port of Dalian included. Radiance was bumptious, exuberant in her appetites, driven, tactless and generous: but simple she was not.

‘That’s so pretty, would you like to see?’

A smiling sales consultant was already unlocking the case before him, and lifting out a black ceramic watch with a diamond bevel. Sean took it from her.

‘Is it waterproof?’ He imagined it dripping on Martine’s wrist when she wore a black bikini. He knew she wanted to be invited onto Kingsmith’s beloved yacht Brisingamen, the nearest place he had to a home. He would ask him about it over lunch. As if by telepathy, his phone trembled in his pocket and he grabbed it at once – Joe never let it ring more than three times before hanging up.

The name Rupert Parch flashed on the screen. Sean knew him vaguely, he was not quite sure how, but apparently he had given him his number.

‘Rupert.’

‘Is that the famous polar explorer?’ said an enthusiastic voice. ‘I said I’d get you. I’m testing this amazeballs app from the MoD, locates your contacts. Asymmetric intel, heard it here first. Probably not though, you’re well clued up. DQM, though.’ Which in Parch-speak meant: don’t quote me. ‘That’s a nice watch, by the way, you should get it.’

Sean spun round. Parch’s voice was in his ear, and also coming up behind him in person, a big smile on his beaming face, his hand out-thrust. Sean took it and Parch pumped enthusiastically.

‘You – are – the coming man! Massive congrats!’ He looked around conspiratorially. ‘Ah, but maybe you’re still keeping the schtum-powder on it? Shouldn’t bother, everyone’s talking about you. Sean Cawson has never been so sexy. True dat.’

Somewhere in his early forties, Parch still looked like a naughty schoolboy, with bright colourless eyes that sparkled, pale brown hair he wore to one side, a slim frame and a rapid, confident delivery. Sean was never quite sure what Parch actually did; he seemed to move around a lot, like some kind of cleaning fish, his exuberance commensurate with the status of his current host. Large, by his manner.

‘Have you just traced me, illegally?’

‘Illegally? As if! I just happened to be in the area. Although sadly not dropping sixty grand on man-candy like the plutocrat I’ll never be, hashtag sighs. No, definitely not illegally. But you have correctly sussed that Parch has gone up in the world. And my master is terribly impressed with your latest news.’

‘What news?’

‘Don’t freeze me out.’ Parch looked even more innocent. ‘Anyway, he desires me fetch you to him for a spot of luncheon, were you available at such short notice.’

‘And your master is?’

‘Philip Stowe. I’m his new private secretary. Proud to say I’ve already outlasted my predecessor. Very talented man.’

Sean had heard many other things too. Stowe had seized the post of Defence Secretary after a vicious and decimating Westminster rumble of his own creation. Sean waited for his payment to be processed. Stowe had sent for him? He felt Parch’s eyes on his back and smelled his soapy cologne.

‘Might you be free? Offers like this don’t tend to repeat. Unlike my master, but I shall never mention that. By the way, there’s a car waiting outside, on a double yellow. Only if you had no other plans. I’ll run along if you do.’

Sean’s phone buzzed again, this time Kingsmith. He had never before dropped his call. But the money was banked, the deal done, and Midgard Lodge was his. The buzzing stopped, and Parch turned from the display case over which he’d busied himself.

‘Nothing vital?’

‘I’m free.’

‘Good man! Hope Indian’s OK? One of those pop-ups, all the rage. And if you don’t mind my saying, you look like you could kill a Cobra.’

Inouarfigssouak, Grand Massacre Bay

Grand Massacre? Kratoutsiak explained it in a few words. The story, though old, is worth telling. It remains in all memories.

Two boys were fighting on the shore of an island – the island where we were. A little brutally perhaps, like most children. One of them fell over. He shouted. The other, to keep him quiet, pummelled him with feet and fist. By chance, the grandfather of the fallen boy saw him. He ran up and joined them as he ought. There was a battle. Full of anger he hit so hard that one of the boys fell dead upon the rock. The other grandfather was furious and intervened. So did fathers, shrieking mothers, mothers-in-law, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces. The whole camp was fighting. Injuries, invectives, horrors. All were in a state of unspeakable fury. They threw stones and bones at one another’s heads. Someone pursued a woman with a bloodstained harpoon. They destroyed themselves. Of the whole village only one person was left.

The story does not say how the survivor died.

The Last Kings of Thule (1956)

Jean Malaurie

9

As the ministerial car with darkened windows headed south, Sean assumed he was meeting Stowe at Westminster, and all this cloak-and-dagger stuff was Parch’s misplaced sense of drama, intended to impress Sean with his own command of perks. But they skirted Parliament Square and sped east along the Thames, and Parch begged Sean’s forgiveness in not saying more.

By the time they were passing the Tower of London, Sean guessed they were en route to Docklands, and by Canning Town and the highly visible police presence on the streets, he remembered seeing some protest on the news about the bi-annual arms fair, held at ExCel Centre. Parch rolled his eyes.

‘Word to the wise: we say Defence Expo.’ They looked out. A dense crowd of respectable-looking businessmen, and a few women, waited at the main entrance. Many had flight cases. ‘The British Government would not dream of sponsoring something as mercenary as an arms fair. Oops, don’t say that either.’

‘What, mercenary?’ Sean enjoyed his temporary Whitehall gravitas, reflected in the faces of the armed police waving their car through security. ‘Or Arms Fair?’

‘I’m serious. I can’t tell you why you’re here because all I know is that Stowe’s keen to meet you, so I crow-barred some daylight in his diary then chased you down, like the good dog I am. I’m guessing it’s a one-shot opportunity, but who for I don’t know. DQM, or poor Parch will be thrown off the gravy train.’

The car passed through tall steel gates and into the shadow of a line of battleships, moored outside the conference centre. As they got out they paused with a small crowd, watching a black-clad commando team demonstrate how they would take a ship, from a rigid inflatable boat several storeys below on the brown water of the Thames. Six men in balaclavas shot lines that attached to the freeboard of the ship, which they then scaled with extraordinary strength and dexterity. Sean felt soft and inadequate.

‘Here’ – Parch slipped a lanyard over his head – ‘you’re an MoD consultant for the day. Anyone asks if you’re a journalist, leave them in no doubt. One weaselled in yesterday under false pretences, then refused to leave. Started shouting about freedom of information. Like he’d know what to do with it. Come on, I’m starving.’

Parch’s ‘super-cool pop-up’ was in the Officers’ Mess of the Indian naval destroyer Kali. At the top of the gangplank a phalanx of dazzlingly starched officers waited to welcome them and Parch was as airy in his greetings as if he were the British Defence Secretary himself. He led Sean through to the source of the delicious aromas – a buffet hidden behind a wall of tall and broad khaki, navy and black backs, gold braid abundant on their shoulders. There was no getting through for a while, so he and Parch accepted samosas and bottled Cobra beer from passing waiters. Parch looked wistful.

‘We did one on ours, yesterday. A lunch. Friends, allies and countrymen, poached salmon and Coronation effing chicken, who thought of that? I wouldn’t say the tumbleweed blew, but it was nothing like this. Waft a bit of curry around, et voilà! Prey and predator at the watering hole. Spend on the catering, that’s the motto.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Problem with old Team GB is, their tastes were formed at public school. No gristle in the custard, they send it back.’

Sean tried not to stare. The mess looked like a fancy-dress party before people had had enough to drink. The bristling moustaches did not look real, and the braid and ribbons were comically bright. Out of a porthole he could see a golf-buggy full of men in Arab robes stopping at the bottom of the gangplank. One had a large hooded bird on his wrist.

At that moment, a volley of laughter burst from a nearby group and Sean saw the face of the British Defence Secretary, animated at its centre. The Indian commodores and generals around him were vastly amused.

‘Probably just mentioned Coronation Chicken,’ Parch murmured, smiling deferentially at his boss. Stowe nodded to Sean and held up his finger. Like Kingsmith, he thought. Sit, stay, up for a biscuit. But … good biscuits.

‘Before I go,’ Parch said in a low voice, ‘he’s very pro your price. For what you’ve pulled off, everyone thinks you deserve it.’

Sean took a slow pull at his Cobra.

‘My price?’

‘Come on.’ Parch looked at him sideways. ‘A Special K. You said you wanted one.’

‘Wasn’t that some kind of old nightclub drug?’ Sean knew exactly what it was, slang for a knighthood. But how on earth did Parch know he wanted that?

‘I believe it might have been. Didn’t you mention it at that brilliant party after Wimbledon last year? Or was it Royal Ascot? Land of Hope and Glory ring any bells?’

‘Not really.’ Sean looked at his new watch. He remembered all too well. It was at a post-racing party in Berkshire held on the Last Night of the Proms. Things had been very bad with Gail – or rather, he had behaved extremely badly yet again and only a massive bender could anaesthetise his shame.

It had all culminated at this party. At first all was well – the beautiful horses in their stables and the Union Jack bunting, the strangers who shared their coke, the cocktails – and then out of nowhere he was talking about his marriage, any marriage, surely everyone knew marriage was hard, surely everyone needed help?

The coke grabbed him by the lapels and announced through his drunken mouth that he didn’t mean to be such a shit, he was going to fix that just like he’d fixed himself his whole life, he wasn’t finished yet, and one day it was his ambition – he was up on a table by this stage – his ambition to serve his country and do something that mattered. He would show the world that he was a man of honour and the proof would be that he, Sean Cawson from nowhere, would win a fucking knighthood. For his country. He loved his country even if it didn’t love him. People had clapped, someone had helped him down. No. He had fallen. He shuddered at the memory.

‘I was totally fucked up too,’ Parch confided, ‘much worse than you, don’t even worry. I only remember it because it was such a rousing speech. You were like Russell Crowe in Gladiator when he’s going to kill the one with the twisty face. I thought, aha now, there’s a man to watch. And wasn’t I right? By the way, I even heard you mentioned at Chatham House the other day, in the same breath as the words: paradigm shift. Before you won the bid. Certain people have been watching you very closely. Obviously I can’t reveal who.’

‘Obviously.’ Sean went to drink his beer and found it empty. While Parch wittered on, name-dropping the latest world leaders and giving the impression he was almost on sleepover terms, Sean kept an eye on Philip Stowe. The new Defence Secretary paid smiling and intent attention to each of the Indians in the circle. Sean could not decide which way the interview was going – or if it were a circle of wolves deciding whether they would eat the creature in the middle. As he looked at his watch, Stowe disengaged from the group and came over.

‘Go away, Parch.’ Philip Stowe had a pleasant voice and twinkly eyes, which he kept on Sean. He offered his hand. ‘Good of you to come.’

‘And you to ask.’ Sean shook with equal brevity and firmness. Stowe had asked for the date, let him lead.

‘How’d you do it?’ Stowe didn’t mess around. ‘Midgardfjorden. Not the biggest, not the prettiest, ruled out weeks ago – but suddenly you’ve got the ring on your finger.’

‘Charm?’ Sean picked up his beer again. Parch was already on the far side of the mess, hooting with laughter at someone’s joke. Stowe didn’t smile.

‘Well done. However you did it. Wanted to congratulate you in person, not bloody email.’ His smile flashed. ‘So, the Midgard Consortium—’

‘Trust. It’s a trust.’

Stowe’s eyes flickered at his misinformation.

‘A trust. Registered in Tortola, administrated through Jersey?’

Stowe was guessing. He had no legal power to compel Sean to shed more light, and was himself known for many obscure directorships. He knew all the routes. Sean smiled. Stowe looked irritated for a second.

‘So that’s your management company for the consortium. Private British equity with some foreign partners, correct?’

‘Correct, sir.’ Sean intuitively added the sir, not from respect but because he’d sized up Stowe as not nearly as rich as he was grand – and therefore likely to resent the far greater wealth of the self-made man. Whatever deal was on the table, Sean wanted him to feel superior. That was when people revealed themselves.

Stowe’s eyes were also recording Sean. ‘You got, what? Forty, forty-five per cent majority?’

‘Fifty-one.’ That much Stowe could discover; he would save him the trouble. ‘The balance shared between my foreign partners, one of whom has dual Swiss-American citizenship. But in both law and cultural perception, Midgard Lodge will be a British enterprise.’

‘You’re the CEO. Buck stops with you.’

‘One hundred per cent. The work has begun and should be completed next year. The season is very short.’

‘So soon?’

‘I commissioned the plans when I made the proposal to the vendors. I’ve had the architect and contractors on retainer.’

Stowe raised an eyebrow and Sean knew what he was thinking. How expensive. But instead the Defence Secretary looked thoughtful.

‘Midgard. Norse mythology. The world of men.’

‘That’s the name of the fjord, since whaling days. Maybe because the mountains are in the shape of—’

‘Fascinating political environment, Svalbard.’ Stowe looked up as the Middle Eastern golf-buggy passengers with the hawk entered. He paused to catch their eye and raise his hand, before turning back to Sean.

‘Our Norwegian friends are relieved it was bought by a British citizen.’

‘Rather than …?’

Stowe twitched a smile. ‘The Russians still believe Svalbard is theirs. Svalbard and a large part of the Arctic up to and including the North Pole.’

‘Because of the Lomonosov Ridge.’

‘Exactly. We’d do exactly the same if we could. Shetland doesn’t quite cut it.’

‘But don’t Norway and Russia have an amicable relationship on Svalbard?’

‘Amicable is a word that only ever implies tension.’

Sean thought of the email from Gail’s lawyer, waiting in his inbox first thing that morning. The word ‘amicable’ had been used. The Arab group were moving closer, the bird now unhooded and staring around with fierce golden eyes. A nervous waiter came up with a saucer of raw meat. The bird turned away.

‘Don’t worry about them,’ Stowe didn’t look. ‘They’re early. Bringing the falcon’s a good sign. We’ve got too many pigeons. Tell me the real reason they chose you.’

‘Tell me why I’m here.’

‘You’re attracted to power. You’re curious.’

Sean decided he liked Stowe after all.

‘OK: the money was right, but we’re small, British, environmentally committed – we’re not a threat.’

Stowe leaned forward.

‘Bullseye. No flags on the seabed, no subs turning up unannounced with two hundred men for an unscheduled sleepover, no new settlements under construction. You’re a legitimate British business with an environmental champion at your helm, a clean tech hedge fund filling in, and a Chinese partner bringing stability and responsible investment to Guinea Bissau and the DRC.’ The eyes twinkled again. ‘Or do I mean the Central African Republic?’

‘Both.’ Sean didn’t smile. ‘It’s like you’ve read the confidential bid proposal. It’s like you can see my emails.’

Stowe waved that away. ‘You’ll offer different security details for each retreat?’

‘I’m anticipating we’ll have VIPs, I hope political as well as corporate.’

‘Bit of a faff, isn’t it? All that bureaucracy with the Sysselmann’s office each time, all those different permits?’

‘We’ll manage.’

‘And you trust all your partners.’

‘Of course.’

‘Even though you know Greenpeace does more to ruin brand GB than—’

‘That’s contentious. Anyway, Tom left Greenpeace over five years ago. I trust him with my life and his participation is the reason we closed the deal.’

‘And in so doing, created a unique opportunity to serve your country.’

Time slowed for Sean. The great door was opening at last – to what, he didn’t know. But the Defence Secretary of Great Britain was definitely offering him something.

‘To serve would be the highest honour, sir.’ This time the sir was unforced.

Stowe held his eyes.

‘And an honour, your fitting reward.’ Stowe’s tone became casual again. ‘Lot of interesting stuff at the fair, especially the Scandinavian pavilion. Care to take a look?’

Sean felt the impatience of the Arab contingent, waiting close behind. ‘Don’t you—’

‘Oh no, not with me. Completely under your own steam.’ And with a nod, Stowe pivoted into his next meeting.

As Sean came down the bright gangplank, his sense of surreality was heightened by the sight of fighter jets and Chinooks parked as close as space permitted outside the vast hangar of the ExCel. The little boy and kit fetishist in him very much wanted to go and have a look, but he understood Stowe had given a cryptic instruction, and he went directly in search of the Scandinavian pavilion.

At least, he intended to – but there was simply too much to look at. Each of the four sections of the conference centre was designated a compass direction, and each was the size of a sports stadium. Presentation arenas were cordoned off for military speakers of distinction, and military men and associated suits were crammed in, standing-room only.

The sound in the halls had a curious booming underwater quality, and the ambience evoked something of a cross between Selfridges and a souk of death, with all the bright display cases holding bullets, pistols, rifles, RPG launchers and missiles. If Sean looked too long at the carpeted seating areas, the huddles of men would pause in their discussion and look up with undisguised hostility. But the vendors avoided his eye. He was not their customer, they would not waste time.

Like all trade shows, the best pitches were bought by the big companies, and the independents who could afford it, lined the edges. Sean avoided the village-hall-style cheap tables featuring ‘non-lethal crowd control’ utilities and rubber bullets, and gravitated towards the massive gleaming rocket launchers at the centre. Here was space to breathe, amidst pleasingly designed and spotless military hardware. Some looked familiar from news broadcasts in war zones, others were of exotically futurist design.

Sean picked up a programme and located the Scandinavian pavilions – on the far side. He paused to take a complimentary orange juice from the stand of an upright British company whose earth-moving equipment was unremarkable on any building site – except here, where large mounted photographs featured it demolishing settlements on what looked like the West Bank. Sean pocketed an exact miniature of a digger from the give-away bowl and moved on into the crush.

The crowd looked either military or business, and seemed to consist of small groups that flowed around a dominant individual who carried nothing. Sean continued through the tanks of the Land Arena, where he was barged aside by meaty men in tight-fitting uniforms and contemptuously sidestepped by brisk-paced officers of the upper echelons. Only the unhealthy middle-management types lugging flight-cases scanned him with cold eyes and he instinctively disliked them. He should have been at the Scandinavian pavilion by now, but he must have taken a wrong turn, because he found himself in the Medical Arena. He stopped short.

Under a big sign that read ‘Follow the Care Path!’ a young soldier lay on the ground, his bleeding shattered legs stretched out in front of him. Sean could not look away from the obscene sight of the bloody white cartilage and spikes of bone, and the dark clotted gore between them. Then a nurse with a tool box sat down on a stool by his side, and began reapplying the gore. She pulled at a bone shard to make it more prominent. Sean felt faint.

‘Lovely,’ the soldier said admiringly. He looked up at Sean. ‘Just like it was, you can see it over there.’ Sean looked where he directed, and saw a body on an operating table. A theatre nurse in a Union Jack mouth-and-nose mask went through the motions of the field-hospital operation, footage of what he assumed to be the real event, playing on a large HD screen to one side.

‘There I am,’ the soldier on the ground called out. ‘Lucky or what? That’s me on the table too, up close and personal, and this is me here on the ground – still waiting for my Equity card. Job for life – travel the world, legless!’ He looked very pleased with himself. ‘What’s it with you then, PTSD? No shame, mate – all in it together, aren’t we? Sometimes you find yourself right where you need to be. Just admit it. You’ll feel better.’

‘I don’t,’ Sean said. ‘I don’t have PTSD.’

A large man in a white coat loomed up beside him, his smile deep and cold.

‘Can we offer you support? It can be hard to accept. Denial is the first stage.’

‘Nah, you muppet,’ called the legless soldier. ‘It’s the bloody injury!’

‘I’m looking for the Scandinavian pavilion.’ His mouth was dry.

‘I can show you.’

Sean turned at the friendly female voice, with its faint Norwegian accent. A tall blonde woman, her beauty plain as new bread, smiled at him with white teeth and pink gums.

He followed her past the disappointed pastor of the Medical Arena, and into the frenzy of the Scandinavian pavilion, where thrash metal deafened from the Finnish stand. This was inadequate to contain the colossal green-and-black tank jutting out into the walkway, which also starred in its own wall-mounted music video.

Sean and his new friend paused to watch for a moment, as, to the apocalyptic soundtrack, the tank crashed through a pine forest, breaking trees like matchsticks, before the film cut to an urban setting where it rumbled down a deserted city street, raising clouds of white dust. It pivoted with amazing dexterity before ploughing into, then over, a row of shops. The crowd roared approval.

The woman smiled wryly. ‘Finland is not in fact in Scandinavia, but is a Nordic country. I am surprised the Expo did not differentiate.’

‘Me too.’ Sean said it knowledgeably, though this was also news to him. He walked on with her and they entered a serene and spacious area marked Dronningsberg, the centrepiece of which was a snowy missile launcher whose base was the size of a large tractor, and whose barrel protruded so high over the surrounding stands, that Sean had seen it from halfway down the huge hall, but assumed it was part of the building. The name Dronningsberg rang a bell – yes, it was in his architect’s plans – they were the provider of broadband on Svalbard. They also did missiles.

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