A couple of days later Sidney was summoned to the office of the Capuchin Mining Company, where he was asked to take certain papers to the company’s drill site near the shores of James Bay and make some arrangements with the boss of the site. Mr. Ledley had worked well. Sidney could leave on a Friday and return on Sunday, and he would receive a fee of five hundred dollars as well as his traveling expenses.
Miss Semple was terribly worried about his flying off into the wilds among a lot of tough mining men and wanted him to get a complete survival kit, a revolver and a battery-operated electric blanket. Sidney compromised by getting a fur hat with ear flaps and a pair of fleece-lined fur mitts.
He moved off from Malton in a TCA Viscount on the milk run to North Bay, Earlton, Rouyn-Noranda and Val d’Or-Bourlamaque, where, on expert advice, he purchased half a dozen forty-ounce bottles from the Quebec Liquor Commission and went on by taxi over a well-swept road to Senneterre.
It was all very new and wonderful to the city-bred Sidney. The air terminal at Senneterre was set beside a snow-covered frozen lake. It was crowded with all sorts of bush types—prospectors, drillmen, Indians, geologists and engineers—and bush planes of many types were loading up with strange cargoes and winging off into the wilderness.
Sidney embarked in a DeHavilland Beaver, flown by a veteran pilot about nineteen years old, and loaded with machine parts, sleigh dogs and mining men. He was lucky enough to sit beside the pilot and get a superb view of the countryside, which consisted of spruce forest and small lakes stretching off to a far horizon. Fights broke out among the dogs in the rear, and some of the men were airsick.
“Don’t worry,” the pilot said. “When the men fight and the dogs get airsick, you’ve got real trouble.”
They landed on an airstrip bulldozed out of the solid spruce forest, and Sidney finished his strange journey in a caterpillar snowmobile.
He was accommodated, along with the young pilot, in the camp’s executive suite, a prefabricated hut with eight bunks, a fat Quebec heater, a two-way radio and a large collection of pinups, records, paperbacks, playing cards, chessmen and cribbage boards. He was given a royal welcome, partly because of the refreshments he had brought.
He had his meals in a cook shack where the drillmen, who spoke a French that was incomprehensible to Sidney, wolfed vast quantities of food amid an obbligato of weird ingestion noises. He had pie for breakfast and heard learned arguments about the specific gravity of the crust. He heard many tall tales of the north, including one about a sample of the cook’s pie crust being sent to the assay office by mistake and causing the Capuchin stock to shoot up forty cents a share. The rumor got out that a natural substitute for vinyl floor covering had been discovered. He heard about a diamond drill head breaking off far underground and being drawn fifteen hundred feet to the surface by means of a poultice which contained over two hundred pounds of mustard. He sang songs and drank whisky far into the night with the engineers, in a flimsy shack in the remote bush, with no other human habitation between him and the North Pole.
He completed his legal business with considerable efficiency, and he met Tex Wicklow, a somewhat disenchanted geologist. At first Wicklow got the idea that Sidney was representing his erring wife, and the geologist swore that he wouldn’t pay her a cent, not even on a court order, but Sidney convinced him that all he wanted was to locate the lady.
“Well, good luck to you, boy,” Wicklow said. “And when you find her, keep her. She left me last September and took everything I owned that wasn’t screwed to the walls. All she left really was bills, and plenty of them.”
Her maiden name, Wicklow said, was Swann, and she had come originally from Saskatoon. Her mother, a widow who had remarried, still lived in Saskatoon, but Janice Wicklow had not communicated with her for years. Wicklow had met her during a wild furlough in Montreal and had married her on impulse.
“I was bushed,” he admitted. “All marriages of guys coming out of the bush ought to be purely provisional for six months. I keep marrying the damnedest women every time I get back to civilization.”
Janice had indeed known Gadwell before her marriage and had welcomed him as a long-lost lover when they met in Toronto. “High Grade Howie was in the chips,” Wicklow explained. “Money has a fatal attraction for that gal, and this guy Gadwell is quite a hand with the wenches.”
Wicklow had not heard a word from his wife since her departure. He suspected that she had gone to join Gadwell. “But that guy won’t be nearly as keen on her when it comes to supporting her,” he said.
Sidney asked for a picture of Janice Wicklow, and the geologist was able to produce a large selection from the Gladstone bag under his bunk. Janice had been a model in Montreal, and there were shots of her modeling furs, dresses and lingerie. There were even some of her modeling something invisible, like perfume.
“Mrs. Wicklow doesn’t appear to have been a prude,” Sidney said.
“No, that was never her problem,” Wicklow agreed. “Don’t let these hyenas see those artistic poses, or they’ll want to pin them up.”
Sidney picked out half a dozen shots which Wicklow was happy to let him take, and then the two men rejoined the other inhabitants of the executive suite, who were singing to the accompaniment of a five-string banjo.
On Monday morning, somewhat bemused, but back in Toronto, Sidney laid a selection of model photographs, obtained for the purpose, in front of James Bellwood, the lawyer who had defended Wes Beattie on his theft charge. “Identification parade?” Bellwood said, looking the pictures over carefully. “Well, here you are.”
He put his finger on a photograph of Janice Swann Wicklow. “That,” he said, “is Mrs. Leduc, the witness who said that Wes Beattie stole her purse.”
“Well, I’m blowed,” Sidney said. “I lightheartedly agreed with Dr. Milton Heber that I would track her down, but I had no idea how elusive she was going to be.”
“And now you’ve done it. Nice work, Gargoyle,” Bellwood said.
“No, I haven’t found her. But at least I know who she is,” Sidney said. “And I can put Missing Persons on the trail, as well as the Canadian Association of Credit Bureaus, so we should be able to interview her soon. If anybody can find her, the credit boys will. She’s as addicted to shopping as Lorelei Lee.”
The Crime and the Crystal Page 22
