LITMIR.BIZ

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‘You’ve never grown up, have you, Jud?’

      He tensed; to Kathrin, it was as though he had raised a loaded gun to his shoulder. Clipping off his words, he said, ‘Don’t you dare tell me what I’m like! You know nothing of what’s happened to me the last few years. Nothing.’

      ‘And whose fault is that?’

      ‘Oh, you have your share of the blame,’ Jud said viciously. ‘Don’t play the innocent with me, Kit.’

      Kathrin shivered, feeling the cold invade her flesh and the stones bite into the soles of her feet. He had become a stranger, she thought, an accusatory, angry stranger. Yet he was worse than a stranger. For hidden in the man’s body was the memory of the boy she had known, who had laughed with her and taught her to climb trees and fish for trout in the brook. ‘We know nothing of each other’s lives,’ she said tightly. ‘I’m not sure we ever did.’

      Then, because she could not bear to prolong a conversation that seemed the very opposite of communication, she began wading to shore, moving with a grace that came naturally to her; and the whole time Jud watched her. Once she had climbed the rocky steps to the sauna door she was hidden by the wooden screen. Crouching low, she stepped inside.

      Swathed in a towel, Pam was waiting for her. ‘You actually got in the—what’s wrong?’

      Cursing her giveaway features, Kathrin said, ‘Stay behind the screen when you go outside—Jud’s out there.’

      Pam scowled. ‘Garry must have forgotten to tell him.’

      ‘Garry shouldn’t have to. Spying on us like that, it’s loathsome!’

      ‘It could have been an honest mistake, Kathrin.’

      ‘Sure—muskoxen can fly.’

      ‘You’ve really got it in for this guy.’

      Her body was tingling from her swim and perhaps that was what shocked Kathrin into indiscretion. ‘I trusted him, Pam! I would have trusted him with my life. And all along he was acting a lie, stealing from his own father.’

      ‘Maybe he didn’t do it.’

      ‘They proved it in court,’ Kathrin said shortly. ‘And besides, he admitted it, I told you that. We’d better get out of here, the others are waiting for their turn.’

      She and Pam got dressed behind the screen, then walked back to the camp together. Jud was nowhere to be seen. Pam said, when they reached the kitchen, ‘Come on in and I’ll stoke up the stove. We’ll make hot chocolate while the men are getting cleaned up.’

      Kathrin wanted nothing more than to hide away in her own little hut. But her hair was wet and it was extravagant to light her own stove when the kitchen was so warm. ‘OK, but I won’t stay long,’ she said.

      To her great relief only Garry and Karl were in the kitchen; once they had gone, she began brushing out her hair, and by the time she had finished her cocoa and helped Pam clean up the supper dishes it was dry. ‘I’m going to get out of here,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got the energy to face Jud again tonight. ‘Night, Pam, and thanks for listening.’

      The road between the two rows of tents and buildings was empty. Kathrin hurried across it and into her own hut. She pulled both the outer and the inner doors tight shut, and for the first time since she had come here wished she could lock them. After drawing the curtains across the windows, she hooked the room’s only chair under the doorknob. If Jud made up his mind he was coming in, it would not stop him; but it did make her feel a little safer.

      It was well past midnight. She should go to bed.

      She prowled around the room, sorting her dirty clothes, putting her notes and camera equipment on the desk, then changing into her fleece pyjamas. Finally she put dark plastic refuse bags over the windows to give at least an illusion of darkness. She did this only rarely, for usually she had no problem getting to sleep; but tonight, she knew, was different.

      In the artificial gloom Kathrin lay flat on her back, staring up at the roof of the hut. Consciously she tried to relax her muscles one by one, starting at her toes and working up to her head. But, when she had finished, her fists were still clenched at her sides and her neck corded with tension.

      Jud’s going to knock on the door. And if he does, I have nothing to say to him. Nothing. I want him to get on the first plane out of here and disappear from my life as thoroughly as he did seven years ago.

      Because I’m frightened of him.

      Her eyes widened a fraction. That was it, of course. She was frightened. Not for anything did she want to plunge back into all the pain and confusion of her love for Ivor, or the horror of Jud’s trial, or the dreadful day when she and her mother had left Thorndean. The past was over. She could not bear to live through it again.

      From the direction of the sauna she heard men’s voices in a jocular chorus that grew louder and more distinct. The kitchen door opened and shut. Pam called something to Garry.

      But no one knocked on her door.

      * * *

      In the morning Kathrin woke suddenly, with the sensation of having been dragged too rapidly from the depths of an ice-cold lake up into the air. Then the sound that had woken her came again: a peremptory rap on her door. She sat up, her heart racing, not sure whether she was awake or dreaming, and called out uncertainly, ‘Hello?’

      ‘Kit? I need to talk to you.’

      The knob was turning on the inner door. ‘Go away!’ she cried.

      Jud pushed against the panels and the chair that she had rammed under the knob scraped against the floorboards. ‘Open the door,’ he demanded. ‘I want to talk about our plans for the muskoxen.’

      The chair clattered sideways to the floor, the door swung open, and Jud strode into the room, which immediately seemed to shrink. After he had closed the door behind him, he picked up the chair, straddling it and resting his arms on its curved back. He looked large, immovable, and—once again—angry.

      Kathrin leaped out of the bunk and stood at bay, her cheeks still flushed with sleep, her hair a chestnut tangle on her shoulders; and perhaps if she had been fully awake she would not have spoken so hastily. ‘You’ve got one hell of a nerve,’ she seethed. ‘Bursting in here like a common crimin—’

      As she broke off in mid-sentence, horrified by her choice of words, Jud snarled, ‘In your eyes that’s all I am, isn’t it? A common criminal.’

      Striving for some semblance of dignity, which was difficult when she was clad in baggy pyjamas, Kathrin said, ‘I shouldn’t have said that—but you did wake me up and you did burst in uninvited. Jud, we can talk at breakfast once I’ve had a cup of coffee. Not that there’s anything to say. Because we don’t have any plans. I’m going back to the valley—you’re not coming with me.’

      ‘That’s not what Garry said yesterday afternoon.’

      ‘It’s what I say!’

      ‘Oh? I wasn’t under the impression that you ran the camp.’

      Her breast rising and falling under her fleece top, Kathrin fumed, ‘I didn’t invite you up here, it should be entirely obvious that I don’t want you here, and there’s no way I’m heading out into the tundra with you. Have you got that straight? Now will you please get out of here so I can get dressed?’

      Jud gave her a leisurely survey. ‘I won’t see anything I didn’t see last night.’

      Like a hare startled by a wolf, she froze, every nerve taut, and again was aware of fear. ‘You know what? I don’t like what you’ve become,’ she said in a small, clear voice. ‘I never used to be afraid of you and now I am. So just leave, will you? Garry’s around somewhere, and he’ll tell you that you’re not going out with me.’ Unwisely she added, ‘He’s changed his mind since yesterday.’

      ‘Now

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