White Heat

by Melanie McGrath

  He swung open the door to the detachment to find Stevie peering into the back of his computer.

  'Oh hey there, D. Damn machine's bust. You'd be doing me a favour to take a look.' As Derek paced across to the constable's desk he saw quite clearly what the problem was. During the course of Jono Toolik's visit, someone, probably Toolik himself, had inadvertently kicked the power cable and the plug was half-hanging out of the electrical socket.

  'Go check for dogs, Stevie, I'll have a look at this while you're out.'

  The constable got up and Derek sat down in his chair, pretending to inspect the computer. He waited until Stevie had left then nudged the plug back in the socket with his foot. The machine pinged awake and started rebooting. When Stevie returned not long afterwards Derek was back at his desk finishing his spring patrol report.

  Stevie said: 'You got that sucker rumbling.' He gazed at the screen. 'Picture's even back.'

  'It just needed a boot,' Derek said.

  Stevie sat back down. 'Damn right it did. A jackboot.' A sudden thought came into his head. 'Oh, D, I forgot. While you were out, that strange woman came round.'

  'Edie Kiglatuk?'

  Stevie nodded. 'Yeah, that's the one.'

  'What did she want?'

  Stevie shrugged. 'She seemed to think we'd ignored her messages. She was pretty mad, said she would be doing some fishing down at Inuak for two sleeps and you'd better go visit or . . .' He tailed off.

  'Or what?'

  Stevie stared pointedly at the back door. Misha was back from her studio, a stormy expression on her face.

  'Hey,' he said.

  She said: 'Where have you been? I needed help with my sculpture. Now is ruined.' She sliced through the air with her hand.

  Derek remembered that slicing motion from before. He also remembered he didn't like it much. He heard himself heave an involuntary sigh and felt his stomach clench. Stevie shot him a look of solidarity. Misha specialized in three-dimensional representations of clouds that she sculpted first in modelling clay then had forged in bronze. According to her, the work was a postmodern exploration of the terrible lightness of being, whatever that meant. Recently she'd experimented by modelling the clouds in fox fur stretched over wire, but this was a two-person job, requiring a helper, in this case, Derek, to hold the wire frame while Misha stretched the pelt.

  'Well, I guess I'd better be getting on home,' Stevie said, pulling his outerwear over his jacket. 'You two have a lovely evening.'

  'Uh huh,' Derek said, forging a fragile smile.

  It was not a lovely evening. Having been locked out of the apartment by Misha, Derek spent the night in his office chair and woke up early, stiff as frozen seal meat and about as lively. Rubbing the circulation back into his legs, he recalled first that Edie was expecting him at Inuak, then that she'd tried to contact him several times while he'd been out on patrol. In all the excitement of Misha's arrival he'd completely forgotten to get back to her. He guessed she'd found out about Joe's little horticultural business and wanted to make sure Derek didn't intend to stir anything up over it. In any case, it would be a relief to get away for a day or two.

  He packed the police skiff with camping gear and emergency kit, poured hot tea into the Nashville Predators flask and set off west, leaving Stevie a note not to expect him back for a couple of days. Aside from answering Edie's call and having some time on his own, there was something else pushing him towards Inuak. The river there fed sedge meadows on either side, which were in turn protected from the prevailing easterlies by a rocky outcrop. These meadows were home to a large population of lemmings. If there was a swarm brewing it might well begin there.

  He set off in the skiff in a gentle mist, feeling more purposeful than he had since returning from patrol. The mist reduced visibility to a few feet but Derek knew the Ellesmere coastline so intimately it slowed him only a little and once he was around the headland and into Jakeman, where the glacier cooled the air, the cloud disappeared completely and he jacked up his speed.

  It didn't take him long to reach Inuak. Just to the east of the estuary, he spotted a white duck canvas tent glowing in a flash of sunlight and, on the cliff top, the tiny figure of Edie Kiglatuk. He waved. The figure stopped for a moment then waved back. A little burst of good feeling spread through him. It surprised him how glad he was to see her.

  He'd reached the spot where the river bled into the sea. The freshwater ice was for the most part melted now, and the shoreline was a mess of sea-ice boulders bobbing in river runoff. He jumped into the shallows in his waders and began to head for the shore, pulling the skiff behind him. Edie Kiglatuk was making her way down the low cliff to greet him, striding along the naked slick rock as though it were some gentle alpine meadow. She looked good, Derek thought, the early summer air suited her.

  'I was just about ready to give up on you and find someone more intelligent to talk to,' she said.

  He palmed one hand in a gesture of surrender. There was no excuse, really, for ignoring her, least of all forgetful- ness. He still owed her one, after all.

  'I'm sorry, Edie, I've been real busy,' he began.

  'You're here now,' she said simply. 'I was about to go for char, just upstream, where the river widens into a little lake, but now you've come we could go seal hunting.'

  'Fishing would be cool,' he said, glad that she wasn't in any hurry. Right now, a spot of fishing sounded just the thing.

  He followed her across the shale to where she'd set up camp. She handed him a cup of the sweetest hot tea he'd ever tasted.

  'I just realized,' he said, 'I don't have a leister, or any jigs, come to that.'

  She slipped inside the tent and came out with a well- worn leister and a jig made from what looked like an old coffee tin.

  He took them. 'What will you use?'

  'I thought I'd come along and look decorative,' she said.

  He laughed and they set off up the low cliff. He had to increase his speed to keep up with her.

  Before long they came up over the brow of a small incline. Before them the land stretched flat and wide, a carpet of tiny flowers and cotton-head grasses, striped here and there with low, wind-torn eskers. Human life hadn't penetrated the crust here, Derek thought. It was the antithesis of the south, where the harder and deeper you searched the more you uncovered. Down there, human stories lay buried under the weight of eons. Here, everything was so much simpler. You dug deep, all you found was ice.

  He sighed and she turned and smiled at him.

  'Quite something, isn't it?'

  They reached the lake and walked around to the sunny side where the fish were most likely to be closer to the surface, feeding on zooplankton and the tiny invertebrates that collected in the warmer water. Derek went over to assess the likelihood of catching anything. After a while he returned to where Edie was sitting on a willow mat and announced his intention to begin jigging over by a large rock. The sun had heated the rock and the water directly below would be slightly warmer. The difference would be minimal, but it would not be lost on the fish. He returned to the place with the jig in his hand.

  The world in which dope-smoking and zero tolerance mattered seemed as distant as the tiniest star, and in the passing of the hours Derek forgot that Edie had come wanting something from him. He had become, simply, a fisherman.

  The fish in this part of the river were used to the attention of human beings, and wary as a result, but after he had no idea how much time, a large male char came up to the jig long enough for Derek to spear it. He pulled it out, killed it and placed its mouth next to the water, to let its soul go home. As he was clambering back to the spot where Edie was sitting, the fish dangling from her leister, it occurred to him that, for the first time in as long as he could recall, he was completely happy.

  Back at the camp, they set up a fire with dry heather, and nibbled on walrus meat while they waited for the fish to cook, then they divided the head, the most delicious part, each sucking out an eye and crunching content
edly through the bones. When they were finally done, Edie said:

  'Now I'll tell you what I've come to say.'

  She related the story of finding Andy Taylor's bones, about the knife cuts, the bullet hole in the skull which seemed to suggest Taylor had been shot from above, about Felix Wagner and the pizza takeout place called Zemmer to which the two qalunaat were connected.

  There was something on Craig, she said, something so valuable it was worth killing for. She didn't know what it was, yet, but the clue lay in three excised pages of Sir James Fairfax's diary and a small piece of meteorite, a stone Sir James had swapped with her great-great-great-grandfather for a penknife more than a century ago. She was pretty sure now that whatever was on Craig, Wagner and Taylor were after it and someone - or some corporation perhaps - didn't want them to have it. Whoever had taken a shot at Wagner couldn't have known then that Taylor had the same information, otherwise surely they would have shot him then too? In any case, she was beginning to think they had caught up with Taylor the second time he came looking. She recalled Joe saying that not long after losing Taylor he'd seen a plane, but by that time he was doubting the evidence of his senses. It wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility that Taylor had been shot from a plane and someone had cut up the body to make it look as though the qalunaat had died of hypothermia and foxes had got to the corpse.

  Derek held up a hand. She was going far too fast for him. 'Edie, there was no visibility out there in that blizzard. How could anyone have landed a plane?'

  'I know, I know,' she said. 'What I'm saying makes me sound crazy.'

  Derek thought about Kuujuaq, and saw the prospects for his ever leaving it and moving into a brand-new detachment building in Autisaq diminishing by the second. This was incendiary stuff, stuff he wasn't going to be able to ignore, whatever Simeonie thought about it.

  'I don't see what this has to do with Joe taking his life,' he said.

  'Right now, Derek, nor do I. But supposing Joe saw something, supposing he saw whoever it was who shot Andy Taylor. Supposing, oh I don't know, he blamed himself, or maybe someone threatened him.'

  'Edie, has it occurred to you that Joe might have shot Taylor himself?'

  Her face froze, then she took a deep breath.

  'I'm assuming you said that as police, Derek, not as a friend.'

  What little remained of the heather spluttered among the stones.

  'It's what people might say.'

  It was as though she hadn't heard him. 'I want you to hold off on this.'

  'Why tell me, then?'

  Listening to Edie's story had felt like watching a hole opening up into the past. Compared with this, the glasshouse really was nothing. He didn't want to think about what it all might mean, for the police, for the settlements, for the families. He wished then that they were still out on the lake fishing.

  She shrugged: 'I needed to tell someone.'

  'Thanks,' he said drily.

  Edie went inside the tent and began arranging bedding. She came out with a small square made of stitched hare pelts.

  'Since you haven't set up your tent, I'm guessing you're planning on sharing mine.' She waved a cloth and a toothbrush at him. 'I'm going to the river to wash. If you're getting in with me, you will too.'

  Later, he woke needing to pee, and went outside. The breeze was icy but the sun had some warmth to it. Feeling oddly protective of his modesty, he trudged across the muskeg to where the river bank sloped down and unzipped his waterproofs. He peed, shook himself and readjusted his trousers. When he looked up he saw a wolf bitch standing on the other side of the bank, watching him. Beside her was a single cub. For a while he didn't move and the wolf went down to the water's edge to drink, not once lifting her eyes from him. Gathering the cub to her side, she turned back up the bank and the pair loped away over the rocks.

  When he returned Edie was already up and brewing tea. He walked back to his skiff, unhitched the tarp and took out Joe's thermos. She recognized it immediately and he saw by her expression that she didn't know anything about the glasshouse. He hesitated, unsure whether he was doing the right thing by telling her, then decided she had a right to know the truth.

  Her face began to fall as he told her what he knew. By the time he was done, she seemed to have shrunk in size. He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder.

  'Edie, your boy was in a whole world of trouble.'

  The instant the words came out he regretted them. They weren't the consolation he'd hoped they might be. She shrugged him off and threw him a long look that made him feel like a whipped dog.

  'You can say what you like,' she said. 'I already lost my kid and my job. I've got nothing left to lose. I'm a hunter, Derek, I intend to hunt this one down.'

  'I'm sorry,' he said, 'about the job. About Joe, too, of course.'

  They drank another mug of sweet tea in silence, then he offered to help her break camp. They worked through a light fug of hostility, their labours accompanied only by the sound of rushing wind and the crackle of shale underfoot. Derek tried to think of a way back to her, but she seemed obscured and remote. It wasn't all about his tactless remark, he thought. There was something still lingering from having spent the night together.

  Once they were all packed up, they agreed to go to where the river snaked out from under the cliff to take water for a brew. After their exertions, they would cool quickly and would need hot tea to keep them warm on the journey home.

  She brought Joe's old thermos. As she was bending to fill the container, she gave out a yelp, stood up straight and, rubbing her head, said:

  'Yow, something fell on me.'

  Derek said: 'A rock?' They both directed their gaze to the cliff, but there was nothing that might account for the object. Derek scanned the shingle around him but that, too, gave no clues.

  'Must be,' Edie said. 'It was kind of soft though.'

  Returning to the water, they filled their containers and screwed on the tops. The instant Derek went to make his way back to the campsite, he saw something sail through the air. At first he thought it was a ptarmigan, then something else arced over.

  An unmistakeable sound reached them on the breeze, a high-pitched chorus, a million little squeals, conflating into a single, pixellated buzz.

  He fixed his gaze on the line of low cliff. This time he knew what he was looking for. Above them, on the plateau, the lemmings had started swarming.

  He slung his water canister across his shoulders and raced for the rudimentary path that led up through the moraine, all his energies focused on reaching the high point, everything else forgotten. Below him Edie headed up the path. He felt his heart thrumming. This was the thing he had been waiting for, and the final few moments of anticipation were almost overwhelming. Reaching the top, breathing raw in his chest, he steadied himself. He closed his eyes and waited for the patina of light and dark to fade. Then he took a breath and opened them.

  All around him, the muskeg was on the move for as far he could see; a mass of reddish grey pulsed and throbbed across the willow, south towards Jones Sound and west across the Inuak River, obscuring everything in its inexorable progress forward. He knew now that it was a lemming that had fallen onto Edie, another he had seen tumbling through the air. Here it was, the swarm. Not suicide, as the myth had for so long had it, but a great swell of life, the survival instinct in its purest form, thrilling in its intensity. From where he stood, Derek could see, in the frazzled water of the river, bodies swirling and kicking, struggling frantically to reach the other side.

  Edie came up beside him, laughing, exhilarated by the swarm and they moved towards the pack, standing firm for a while to feel the rodents flowing over their feet like molten rock, the racket of squeals and the musky smell of lemming droppings overwhelming.

  'Edie,' he shouted over the cacophony. 'I've thought about what we said last night. You're a hunter, I get that.

  You want me to hold off, I'll do it. Not for ever, but for a while.'

  He'd bee
n prepared to let the deaths in Autisaq go. Now, he knew that, sooner or later, he would have to act. For her sake, he would make it later.

  'We got a deal?' she said. She looked at him with those fierce button eyes of hers.

  He nodded.

  'Another fine mess, right?' she said, but she was smiling.

  Hours afterwards, when he finally arrived back at the detachment, he found Misha waiting for him. He went to her and kissed her cheek.

  'You're late,' she said.

  He told her about the swarm.

  'You're still late.'

  He looked at her and suddenly felt incredibly clear. I have no idea what I am doing with this woman. The thought saddened him but he felt relieved of the burden of loving her, too. She seemed to sense the change in him. He saw her back away a little.

  At last he said: 'I think you should leave.'

  'Yes,' she said. Her voice was resigned, not at all vindictive as he might have imagined it would be. 'I was going anyway.'

  'I don't know why you came.' The words sounded crueller than he had intended.

  'Tomas split with me. I was on my own,' she said. 'I thought maybe I loved you.'

  'But you didn't?'

  She smiled ruefully. 'No.'

  * * *

  Chapter Eleven

  Edie found Willa at Sammy's house, watching TV with Sammy's new on-off girlfriend, Nancy. Beside them sat a bowl of popcorn and there was something heating in the microwave but no sign of Sammy.

  'Hey,' she said, aware that she shouldn't mind seeing her ex-family reconstituted into something new, but minding anyway. Nancy looked up and smiled. Willa didn't.

  'What do you want?' he said. 'I'm watching this.'