Free Last Gasp by Trevor Hoyle

find.”
    “How’s it going with you and Angie?”
    “Never better.” At that moment the lady in question came into the room barefoot wearing a blue bathrobe with a fluffy white towel wrapped turban-style around her head, her face shiny clean, and Chase went blithely on, “Of course she’s a pain in the arse sometimes, but then what woman isn’t?” He clapped his hand over his mouth as if caught in the act. Angie smiled sweetly and stuck her tongue out at him.
    “Sorry, Nick—what was that?” He’d missed what Nick was saying. “The Russian, remember? He kept going on about Stan or Nick and we couldn’t figure out what he meant. I was looking through the conference brochure and one of the delegates is a Professor Stanovnik. Get it? Stan-ov-nik.”
    “Is he Russian too?”
    “Yeah, think so.” There was a riffling of paper and a tuneless whistle, and then Nick said, “Professor B. V. Stanovnik of the Hydro-Meterological Service, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Moscow. Perhaps Stanovnik and the guy we found were colleagues.”
    Chase gnawed at his thumbnail, trying to make the connection between the two of them. The Hydro-Meteorological Service was certainly in the right area. Oceans. Climate. But who was Stanovnik? More to the point, what was he? Climatologist? Oceanographer?
    “Is Stanovnik giving a paper at the conference?” he asked.
    “He’s on the list of speakers, but it doesn’t say what subject or give the title of his paper.” Nick chuckled over the line. “Do you want me to ask him what he knows about the absorption of carbon dioxide in seawater? That was it, wasn’t it?”
    “Yes, that was it,” Chase said slowly. “But you’d be better off asking him what he doesn’t know about it. If the Russian was carrying out research, then presumably it was to fill in a blank somewhere—something the Hydro-Meteorological Service was keen to find out. That’s assuming there’s a link between them, which is unlikely.”
    Nick said he’d keep it in mind, that he was sorry Chase couldn’t drag himself away, and they said their good-byes.
    The conversation ran around his head while he showered, almost absentmindedly hunting for the soap, which Angie always managed to misplace, even in the damned shower. Women of certain breeding, he had come to learn, were congenital slatterns, as if expecting as of right that a posse of servants was there to scurry after them, clearing up, tidying away.
    At idle moments he had pondered the unsolved antarctic “mystery.” Nothing had ever appeared in the newspapers about the man who had died of a brain hemorrhage, and why should there? It was one of those odd incidents you witnessed or heard about, you puzzled over for a while, and then forgot. But for Nick bringing it up, he most likely wouldn’t have brought it to mind again, except perhaps as a curious incident to enliven a dull conversation down at the local pub.
    Stan-ov-nik. Is that what he’d been trying to say? Stan or Nick. Stan-ov-nik. Stan or Nick. Stanovnik. Well ... yes. Stan or—
    “What the hell are you mumbling about in there?”
    Angie’s face appeared around the edge of the frosted shower screen, hair damp and tousled from being rubbed. Through the steam he could see the soft swell of her breasts at the bathrobe’s overlapping V neck. “Remember what I said about the walrus?”
    “Yes?”
    “Look at this,” He reached out and fastened on her wrist.
    “No!”
    “No?” Drawing her in.
    “My robe—it’ll get wet.”
    “Then take it off.”
    “Oh, Gavin, we’ll be late!”
    “Not the way the walrus does it.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Like this.”
    In the first hour Chase had three stiff whiskeys, lost sight of Angie, nodded distantly at three or four people, and wandered in a mellow haze from room to room of the large old house. Everything was stripped down to the bare wood. Their host had greeted them at the door attired in a plum-colored velvet jacket, faded denims, and