The Ice: A gripping thriller for our times from the Bailey’s shortlisted author of The Bees. Laline Paull
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
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.’