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
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
