'Fuck off.' Derek sent the phone clattering back into its cradle. The graffito sprang to mind. Asshole.
Stevie left it a few minutes before calling across: 'Like a brew, D?'
A while later, the computer pinged to announce the arrival of an email. The research office in Ottawa hadn't found any close living relatives for Andy Taylor. No record that he was ever married or had any kids. His next of kin seemed to be a forty-six-year-old man in British Columbia, a third cousin. Derek dialled the number. A woman answered and said the cousin had moved on and no, she didn't have any of his contact details.
Derek punched in the number for the mayor's office in Autisaq, then thought better of it, and looked up the number for Mike Nungaq in the Northern Store instead. Mike answered after the first ring.
The voice on the end of the line sounded spacey. Derek chewed his lip. His gut told him not to start anything public that could be misconstrued as an investigation. He summoned a tone of casual professionalism. 'Can you get a message to Edie to call me? I'm working on the report into Joe's death. Just need to check a couple of things.'
A long time later, the phone rang in Derek's office. It was Edie.
'How are you doing?' Derek said, then kicked himself. The woman had just lost her stepson. How did he suppose she was doing?
She hesitated for a long moment. 'I'm guessing this isn't a social call.'
Derek picked a cigarette butt out of the ashtray and began turning it around in his fingers. He felt slightly affronted by Edie's tone.
'Edie, can you tell me what you know about Andy Taylor?'
'What, like, he was nutaraqpaluktuq, bad-tempered, hysterical?'
'I was hoping for something more specific. He tell you where he came from? Ever mention a girlfriend, family?'
'Nope and nope. Guns N' Roses fan's about all I know. Can't you get this stuff from some police database?'
'Maybe. Listen, do you think that Fairfax fella might know a bit more about him?'
'I have his number somewhere, you want to give him a call.' She sounded pleased that he was investigating. Evidently, it hadn't occurred to her that her stepson might be implicated in Taylor's death. He heard her rooting around somewhere. Moments later she came back to the phone and rattled off a strange configuration of numbers.
'That Canadian?'
'Uh nuh . . . Overseas. London, I think.' Edie hesitated. 'Derek, you really think Joe killed himself?' He felt her willing him to be on her side.
He paused. 'I guess so,' he said. 'Yeah.'
'I have to go,' she said stiffly. Evidently she was having a hard time accepting what had happened. He didn't blame her for that. He wasn't finding it so easy himself.
Derek spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to draft his preliminary report, but over and over again his mind wandered back to the conversation with Simeonie. It was a pretty good offer. Put the whole Joe and Andy Taylor thing to bed with the minimum of fuss and be rewarded with a brand-new detachment building and some proper back-up. Most likely Taylor's body would never be found and even if it was, animals or snow would have made sure it was impossible to determine the cause of death anyway.
Later, after Stevie had left for the day, he took himself for a walk to help chew things over. As he turned out onto the street the bony dog he'd seen earlier appeared, this time in the company of another, larger husky with a brown patch over one eye and notched ears marking fights the animal itself had long since forgotten. The two were bent low, hackles up, smiling ugly smiles, locked in some kind of peripatetic confrontation. The large one lunged and caught the other in the tenderness of the neck. A fully fledged fight started up.
Derek reached for his gun then hesitated. Thirty years ago a bunch of Mounties had shot every last sled dog in Kuujuaq after a rogue animal mauled a kid to death. The act had caused a world of pain, revenge attacks, families pitted against one another. It was this more than anything that led to the setting up of the High Arctic indigenous police force. The sergeant reholstered his weapon, moved into the fray, grabbed the smaller of the two dogs by its ruff and hauled it off.
For a while he walked along the edge of the shoreline then, returning, set his usual supper of noodles and tinned steak on the table and, while it was cooling sufficiently to eat, he pulled on his shitkickers and went out to the lemming shed. He was bothered how much the conversation with Edie had unsettled him but he couldn't quite put his finger on why. Being with the lemmings sometimes shifted his thinking. Almost always made him feel better anyhow.
He reached the door and found it slightly ajar. This was odd. There had been no reason for anyone to go into the shed while he was away. He entered. It was dim inside but there was light enough to see the bodies of a dozen lemmings scattered about the floor in grotesque formation.
Ignoring his cooling supper, he grabbed his dog catcher from the snow porch and went back out into the night.
Kuujuaq's three streets were empty. Those who were going out hunting after work had already gone. People were inside eating or else watching TV. Gradually, one by one, he rounded up the huskies. It took him four hours, at the end of which, he had twelve huskies in the pound. He went to his equipment shed, fetched some dog chow and threw enough into the cages to keep the dogs quiet until morning. Then, his anger sated a little by sheer exhaustion, he took on the dismal business of cleaning up the lemming shed.
This was just the first act, he thought. It was his own fault, for being so passive. Unless he found some way to reassert his authority Silliq and Toolik would go on and on exacting revenge on him until he was eventually driven out. He thought about Simeonie's offer again. What the mayor was asking him to do was wrong. It was his duty to investigate all the possibilities surrounding Andy Taylor's fate. Right now, though, the prospect of a move to Autisaq had never looked more attractive.
He reheated the noodles in the microwave then took a long, hot shower. By the time he was done, it was half past two and brilliant sunshine. Knowing he wouldn't sleep, there seemed no point in going to bed. Instead he went back into the office, made some tea, switched on his computer and keyed in Misha's name. He waited for what seemed like an age for the page of search results to load, then reached down and switched off the CPU.
For a few moments he leaned back in his chair, feeling his self-respect return. By now it was nearly three, not far off eight o'clock in the morning London time. Taking a deep breath he dialled Bill Fairfax's number. A voice answered.
Derek Palliser ran through in his mind just what an investigation into Andy Taylor's fate might achieve. Then he replaced the phone in the cradle, tore up the number and threw it in the trash.
* * *
Chapter Six
The tests on Joe Inukpuk's body confirming his death from an overdose of Vicodin had been back a week when his family took his body out to Craig Island and laid it under a cairn on the cliffs overlooking Jones Sound.
The burial had created the usual battles between tradition and modernity; Minnie had wanted Joe buried in the cemetery by the airstrip, Christian-style, but Sammy had overruled her: his son's body would be left out on the land in the old-time way. Edie was pleased about that. She'd often spoken with Joe about his beliefs and though there were elements of the Christian story that appealed to him, like her, he'd never been wholly convinced by it.
Joe had believed in what he saw all around him: nature, spirits and the land. It tended to be the older generation, the ones who'd been born on the east coast of Hudson Bay, nearly three thousand kilometres to the south, and forcibly removed in the 1950s to populate Ellesmere, who clung most fervently to Christianity. It was no wonder, Edie thought, that these new settlers found particular comfort in the old biblical stories of banishment and exile; they had been through many of the same things. Joe, on the other hand, belonged to a generation of High Arctic Inuit who saw themselves as Ellesmere Islanders, natives of Umingmak Nuna, or Musk-Ox Land, as they preferred to call it. Stories of expulsion and promised lands had no real
hold on him. For Joe, Ellesmere Island was the promised land. It was incredible that he should have killed himself in the place he so loved.
The men of the family went to Craig together to build the cairn and settle the body, leaving the women to content themselves with a church service after the event. On the morning of the service the weather was undecided, the sun taking refuge in a sky patched with high cirrus. By the time the opening tune of the breakfast show crackled through the radio, Edie had been up hours already. She'd showered, then oiled and plaited her hair, tying the plaits at the back with rick-rack and a ribbon sewn from Arctic hare. Though she had no appetite, she made herself eat a breakfast of tea and seal blubber, then she donned her best outfit, a dress of embroidered knitted musk ox, her sealskin parka and kamiks, stood back and looked in the mirror. The wind had weathered her face - she didn't look twenty-five any more - and the events of the past weeks showed in her eyes if you looked hard enough, but she passed muster. In her traditional garb you wouldn't even know she had a qalunaat for a father. The small, slightly fierce woman staring back at her looked one hundred per cent Inuit and she liked it that way.
Mid-morning she walked up to the church alone. Neither Minnie nor Willa wanted her there, but she'd decided to go anyway and stand somewhere at the back where she wouldn't be noticed. They couldn't deny her that.
A big crowd of familiar faces had already gathered. Most of the aunts, uncles and cousins returned her greeting. A few held back. There was still a feeling among some that if Edie hadn't sent Joe out with Andy Taylor he'd still be alive. She understood the feeling, shared it almost. People had forgotten it was Sammy who had first put Joe and Andy Taylor together and Sammy obviously hadn't seen fit to remind them. Not that it would have made much difference.
He now stood with Minnie and Willa, each doing their best to put on the united front they had spectacularly failed to achieve when Joe was alive. Although when it came to family solidarity, Edie could hardly claim the high moral ground. Hadn't she abandoned Joe and Willa when she'd left Sammy? Willa certainly thought so.
The vicar waffled on. Land of Snow, blah blah. He'd arrived in Ellesmere from Iqaluit three years ago and hadn't yet noticed that above the 76th parallel snow didn't count for much. Up here, it was all about ice. Locals often said the difference between Inuit and southerners was that southerners thought of ice as frozen water, whereas Inuit knew that water was merely melted ice. Edie resolved to have a chat with the man about it sometime.
She waited until the sermon was in full flow then slipped away. Starting back home, she'd reached the steps up to her house when an idea suddenly came to mind and she turned and made her way back towards the Town Hall. Inside, the offices were deserted. Everyone had been given the morning off to attend the church service. She used Joe's old keys to open the comms room, radioed the police detachment at Kuujuaq and was acknowledged by a weary- sounding voice.
'Oh, Edie, it's you.' Derek seemed cheered. 'Simeonie let you use the radio?'
'Joe worked the comms room's rota, remember? I put his keys on my key ring. For a rainy day. Derek, I was wondering, did you speak to Fairfax?'
She heard Derek take a deep breath and shift about in his chair.
'Man didn't have anything to add.' He sounded evasive. She wondered if he was lying and, if so, why.
'Did you ask him about Felix Wagner?'
'Why would Fairfax know the other guy?'
'Wagner. I don't know. It's just a feeling.'
'The lab results on Joe were pretty conclusive. The mayor wants a line drawn under the whole business as quickly as possible.'
'In good time for the start of his re-election campaign.'
Derek sighed. She'd got him on the defensive. 'Look, we flew right across Craig twice. If Taylor had been alive, we'd have seen him from the air.'
The weary sound had crept back into Derek Palliser's voice. Sometimes she wished she could just shake the man. Banish the degree of his cynicism, his indifference to the world, to himself.
'What's your interest in this guy anyway?' he said. 'I thought you hated him.'
Edie ignored the jibe. 'You mean you didn't land?'
'There was no need.'
'I thought you said a band of low cloud came down?'
Did he imagine she'd forgotten the conversation they'd had the night after Joe died? He was underestimating her, which was unlike him, and it bugged her all the more for it.
'Man, you have a nerve, Edie, you know that? In any case, Simeonie sent Martie out after, remember?'
For an instant, her hackles rose, then a little burr of shame blossomed on her face and tears begin to run hot down her cheeks. She bit her lip hard so he wouldn't know she was crying. Ever since she'd found Joe on the bed, she'd had a hard time keeping control of her emotions.
'Edie, I know you're upset,' he said. His voice was emollient, soft. 'Isn't it best for everyone if we just put all this behind us, get back to normal?'
She hooted with what she hoped was the right amount of impatience. 'Oh yeah, I forgot, let's celebrate our marvellous community and pretend it's not full of fuck-ups and drunks and high school drop-outs.' She took a deep breath and gathered herself. 'Derek, you ever consider where your lemming brain might be driving you?' They cut off the call.
Too agitated to settle, she took herself to the stretch of shore-fast ice where she kept her dogs tied, quietened them down, clipped on their tracings and set the komatik running, with Bonehead trotting along freestyle by her side. Like most people, she still kept a dog team for those trips, especially across the mountains and into the interior, where the going was too rough for snowbies or just for when she wanted to feel closer to the land.
Plus this way, she could sneak out without anyone hearing her.
She had a feeling of wrongness, nothing she could put a finger on, but unsettling all the same; something told her that from now on she had to be careful. It wasn't just the way the deaths of the qalunaat had been hastily swept away, it was the ease with which everyone seemed prepared to accept Joe's suicide. She felt in her bones that there was some kind of connection she didn't understand yet between the death of Felix Wagner, the disappearance of Andy Taylor and Joe's suicide. It was just all too much of a coincidence. Simeonie sensed that too, she thought. That was why he was so keen to keep a lid on the thing.
The day had decided to clear now and the sun had hauled itself as high as it was going to in the southern sky: perfect mirage weather. Edie tied up the dogs, made a note to herself to watch out on the return trip, and walked over to the snow porch of Martie's cabin.
The woman had never been able to settle in the new government prefabs. If she'd wanted central heating, she said, she'd have gone to live in a volcano. She'd built the cabin herself one summer from a pile of two-by-fours a construction team working on the mayor's office left behind. She'd double-walled it and Edie had helped stuff the cavity with a mixture of moss and musk-ox hair. A primus sat in one corner, an old coal-fire stove, a hangover from the fur time, in the other. Caribou skins lined the floor and walls and made the place cosy. Very unusually for an Inuk, Martie lived alone.
A thick stench of cheap whisky filled the tiny living area and there were mugs lying on the table that were too clean inside to have been used for tea. Edie called out and Martie appeared from behind the curtain marking off her sleeping room, looking like a musk ox in a bad mood.
'Oh, it's only you, you crazy little bear.' She waved her favourite niece to a seat and shuffled to the kitchenette. 'Shit, I could use a brew,' she said, lighting the primus and sticking a pan of water over the flame. 'What are you doing here anyway? Aren't you missing Joe's service?'
Martie hadn't shown up at the church, which wasn't much of a surprise since she didn't wholly approve of Christianity, one of the many things she and Edie had in common. Growing up, Edie had taken comfort in Martie's reassurances that to be different was OK.
The water in the pan began to boil. Martie picked up the two mugs
on the table and, reaching up to a shelf, she pulled down a large bottle of Canadian Mist. As she watched her aunt pouring a large slug into one of the mugs, Edie found herself hit by a terrible and familiar need. Not a drop of booze had passed her lips in two years, but not a day had gone by when she didn't miss it. Sitting here, now, with her aunt, she was suddenly struck by an absolute conviction that she could not go on a moment longer without a little taste. Martie noticed the direction of her gaze.
'Aw, shit, Edie.'
'Martie, they're burying Joe.'
Her aunt gave her a look, then poured a shot of Mist into the second mug.
'I wanted to ask you about the S&R over in Craig.' As
Derek had reminded her, Simeonie had sent Martie out a couple of days after his own recce.
'We didn't see zip.' Martie lit a cigarette. 'I was all for landing, but we had instructions.'
Edie looked up in surprise. Martie caught her expression,
'What? Simeonie's instructions: fly-over only.'
Edie took a big gulp of boozy tea. The whisky felt good, warm and homely, like a cuddle, only simpler and purer. Two years of sobriety gone in an instant. Right now she didn't regret it.
'Martie, see how bizarre that is? You're sent out to look for someone who could have been sheltering in an ice cave or fallen down a crevasse. How you going to find that person without even landing the plane?'
Martie shrugged and offered her niece a top-up.
'Listen, Little Bear, I just do my job.'
Edie recalled the time, many years before, when she'd done just this, turned up without warning at Martie's door, though for other reasons. She and Sammy had been drinking all day, all evening. Willa and Joe were in bed. A fight had broken out, she could no longer remember what it was about, except that it was about what it was always about - the booze. It had got pretty nasty. At one point she'd picked up her gun and Sammy had picked up his. They'd stood staring at one another, guns in hand. It was ridiculous, looking back on it, like a scene from a Buster Keaton movie. Just as she was wondering what to do next, the boys' door creaked open and Joe's face peered out, Willa behind him. It still pained her to think about what those boys had witnessed. Edie had grabbed her parka then and fled out here, to her aunt's cabin. Martie had made her a large flask of tea and some caribou soup, locked her in the cabin and left her there for three days to sober up and cool down.
White Heat Page 11
