Edie Kiglatuk's Christmas

by M. J. McGrath

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  _

  EDIE KIGLATUK’S CHRISTMAS

  _

  EXTRAS

  From WHITE HEAT

  Chapter 1

  From THE BOY IN THE SNOW

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  EDIE KIGLATUK’S CHRISTMAS

  M. J. MCGRATH is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books of nonfiction, including The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic, and she made her fiction debut with White Heat followed by The Boy in the Snow, the first two books in the Edie Kiglatuk mystery series. She was awarded the Mail on Sunday/John Llewelyn-Rhys Award for best British writer under thirty-five. Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Evening Standard, and Conde Nast Traveller. She is a regular broadcaster on radio and has been a television producer and presenter. She lives and works in London. The Bone Seeker, her third novel featuring Edie Kiglatuk, will be published by Viking in summer 2014.

  Visit www.melaniemcgrath.com

  Also by M. J. McGrath

  ■ ■ ■

  The Edie Kiglatuk Mystery Series

  WHITE HEAT

  THE BOY IN THE SNOW

  THE BONE SEEKER

  (Summer 2014)

  About the Book

  It’s days before Christmas in the vast Arctic landscape of Ellesmere Island and the sun hasn’t come up for nearly two months. A hunter comes upon a body in the snow: head crusted with frozen blood, bruised fists, half dead. What others might have dismissed as a case of drunken misadventure, sometime-detective Edie Kiglatuk sees as a clear scuffle turned fatal.

  When the battered victim doesn’t pull through, the alleged culprit goes into hiding and the victim’s three-year-old daughter goes missing with him. For Edie, the ties to the accused are personal, and it’s up to her to find him before a rifle-slinging search party beats her to it, taking justice into their own hands.

  A stunning short mystery with a magical and heartrending twist, Edie Kiglatuk’s Christmas also includes excerpts from the first two novels in the series, White Heat and The Boy in the Snow.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

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  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published in Great Britain by Mantle, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2012

  First published in the United States of America in Penguin Books 2013

  Copyright © 2012 by MJ McGrath Ltd.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN 978-0-698-15554-1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  EDIE KIGLATUK’S CHRISTMAS

  The shortest day of the year didn’t count for much up on Ellesmere Island. By the time 21 December arrived, the sun hadn’t come up for two months and it would be another two before it managed to scramble over the High Arctic horizon. Objects, animals and even people could disappear during the Great Dark without anyone much noticing.

  Which was why no one reported Tommy Qataq missing until a hunter came upon him on his way to check his trap lines, by which time the fella was half-dead, his part-open eyes like marbles, and the wound to his head crusted with frozen blood. The nurse on duty at the medical station said it looked as though he’d fallen over and hit his head on a rock, while loaded on cheap whiskey. He might pull through, but then he might not.

  At first, most folk in the tiny Arctic hamlet of Autisaq assumed it was misadventure. Tommy Qataq was young and reckless and he liked a drink. But then they found the bruising on his fist and the dark welt on his solar plexus, which still bore the marks of knuckles, and rumours began to circulate that Tommy Qataq was feuding with another boy by the name of Willie Killik over Tommy’s girlfriend, Nancy Muttuk.

  News of Tommy’s sorry state reached the nearest policeman, Sergeant Derek Palliser of the Ellesmere Island Police, who was based out of the Kuujuaq Detachment. His immediate response was to get on the phone to part-time teacher and ex-polar-bear hunter, Edie Kiglatuk. The two were old friends. Over the years Edie had morphed into Palliser’s unofficial eyes and ears in Autisaq. More to the point, she knew the dead boy and his supposed enemy, having taught them both in high school, and she’d had dealings with Willie Killik for a long time after.

  ‘I’ll fly over when the weather lets up. Meantime, I’d appreciate it if you could tell me something about those two young men,’ Derek said.

  Tommy Qataq had always been a straightforward kind of kid, someone who, in the south, might have been thought of as a jock. No genius, but big into sport and girls. He’d been living with Nancy Muttuk at her parents’ house. Rumour had it that Tommy had taken his fist to Nancy a couple of times recently. They had a kid, a little girl called Aggie. A three or four-year-old, Edie thought.

  The other boy was a different case. Willie Killik was one of those young, lost souls the Arctic seemed to specialize in, a statistic-in-waiting, tough on the outside but wounded and somehow fragile.

  ‘Willie’s parents are drinkers, given up on the boy,’ Edie told Derek. ‘He has other family, but they got their own problems.’ Willie, it seemed, shared the family’s addiction curse, he was a self-destruct type. Petty thief, carouser, all round pain in the ass, but he’d never been known to be ser- iously violent. Leastwise, not till now.

  ‘For him to do this, something or somebody must have pushed him real hard,’ Edie said.

  ‘How’s about you check out the boy for me, let me know what you think?’ Derek said.

  ■ ■ ■

  Edie phoned ahead to the halfway house, then went by the scruffy little unit squeezed between the town hall building and the Northern Store. Having been kicked out of his own home years before and having outstayed his welcome with various relatives, Willie had been living there a few months now.

  The super, a thin man in his fifties, who went by the name Freddie rather than by his real, Inuktitut name, showed them into the office, muttering under his breath. His wife had some kind of illness, which prevented her from doing much, and Edie put his crankiness down to living with an invalid and existing on a diet of Doritos and overpriced soda. Willie was slouched in a chair beside the desk.

  ‘You tell me how you came by that black eye?’ Edie said.

  ‘I fell over,’ Willie replied, sulkily.

  ‘C’mon Willie, what you and Tommy fight about?’ Edie rocked back in her chair and caught the boy’s eye. ‘You still sweet on Nancy, that it?’ Willie and Nancy had dated when they were at high school, a long time ago now. Edie remembered trying to be the boy’s advocate just before the head
master closed the door on his education for good. The kid is among the brightest I’ve taught. Been attending class almost regularly, got himself a steady girl.

  ‘I ain’t given Nancy a thought,’ Willie said. When he saw that wasn’t going to wash, he added, ‘Me and Tommy had a scrap OK? He fell back but then he got up. I swear he was on his feet when I hoofed off.’

  ‘Tommy’s pretty sick, so I’ll ask again. What you two fight over?’

  ‘Nothing, like I told you. You gonna arrest me for scrapping now?’

  ‘Who said anything about arrest?’ Edie let that sit for a moment, hoping to catch the boy on the back foot. Instead, Willie sunk deep inside himself and let the light in his eyes go out.

  ■ ■ ■

  An hour and a half later Tommy died and no time at all after that Willie Killik went missing, failing to show for supper at the halfway house, breaking the terms of his juvie order.

  The super came over to advise Edie of this fact and found her in the outhouse in her backyard, taking advantage of the bad weather to chalk up some routine maintenance on her snowmobile.

  ‘I checked all the usual places,’ the super said, his breath in great geyser gusts. He listed the names of a few trouble- makers Willie sometimes hung out with: a dope den, a couple of well-known local moonshiners. ‘Came up empty. Went round to his folks too, but they seem more bothered about the snowbie he took from their port.’ He blew through his nostrils to unfreeze the hairs. For a moment he watched her wipe the grease off her hands, then he went on.

  ‘I called Derek but the weather’s still too bad out there to muster an air search. Anyone else, the elders, would have got a ground search party together.’ The super stamped the blood back into his feet. ‘But this is Willie and the wind’s taken all the tracks and it’s nearly Christmas, so …’ He shook his head in a disapproving manner. ‘Everyone knows that boy’s a suicide waiting to happen. He got nowhere to go.’

  Throwing the oily cloth over the stovepipe to stop it freezing, and pulling on her wolf-skin mittens, Edie saw the truth of this: boys, young men, turning on themselves at an alarming rate. ‘Suicide epidemic’, the news channels were calling it. You couldn’t argue with the stats. Young Inuit men were forty times more likely to kill themselves than their compatriots in the south.

  ‘Now that Tommy’s dead, maybe that’s the best way out for Willie right now.’ Freddie sighed. ‘Derek said you’re about the only person who’d give a damn.’ A mean glint came into his eye and he let out a little chuckle. ‘Tell the truth, he also said you’d be about the only one who wouldn’t have anything better to do this near Christmas than go out looking for a suicide.’

  Edie saw the truth of this too.

  ‘So, I’ll leave it with you?’ Freddie said in a tone that implied it wasn’t really a question.

  She picked up her tool bag and slung it over her shoulder. ‘Does a walrus shit in the sea?’

  The super’s forehead vee’d and he scratched his head. Edie held open the door. The air blew in ice crystals, gritty and dry as sand, and caught the super off-guard. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. ‘Can’t say I’ve seen a walrus shit. Had one piss on me once, though.’

  ‘My point exactly.’

  ■ ■ ■

  Back in the house, Edie sat down to a bowl of hot blood soup and allowed her mind to scroll through all she knew about the missing boy. Somewhere, she’d have the school yearbook from that time stored away, a sentimental habit. An easy find, too, as it turned out. She opened up the book and found Willie’s picture, the tell-tale distortion of his right pupil, a little outgrowth in it, the blackness seeping like a tiny hand reaching out. You could easily miss it, most likely you would miss it, but once you noticed, it stayed with you. Likes: hunting, sledding. Voted boy most likely to graduate.

  He’d started getting into trouble at school not long after the picture was taken, turning up loaded or failing to turn up at all, then he dropped out. Before then, he’d been a sweet, conscientious kid, a little on the shy side, maybe. Not the most obvious candidate for teenage rebellion. His generation were the first to grow up with TV and computer games. While many spent their teens piling on the pounds, Willie had taken care to stay lean and fit and kept himself that way in the winter by tending trap lines and, in the summer, by paddling out in his kayak. What happened to that kid? Edie rubbed a finger along the image. The old, two-to-the-penny lethal cocktail of a bad family and teenage hormones, she guessed. At the time, she remembered hoping he’d somehow grow out of it.

  But the only direction Willie grew was wilder. As the drinking took hold of him, he spent less time out on the land and more time exercising his fists. By the time he hit fifteen he’d morphed into an all-round troublemaker. Went to live with his aunt, but she kicked him out and, after a year or so sleeping on floors, he wound up alone and homeless. This low point in the kid’s life happened to coincide with Edie’s own time of struggle. She’d sworn off booze, left her marriage and gone to live alone. When Willie was made homeless, she took him in on the strict understanding that they each respect the other’s need to stay clean and sober; so when Willie reneged on his side of the bargain and came home boozed up one day, she’d reluctantly asked him to leave. She’d spent so long trying to fix the kid, she realized, that she no longer really knew him. The boy must have hit rock bottom then because the next she heard, he’d found himself a place at the halfway house on the other side of the settlement and for a few months it looked as though he’d managed to pull his life around. The drinking stopped, he started a twelve-step programme and was even showing his face at the church.

  But that was a few months ago. The only time she’d seen him since then was when he’d turned up at her door several weeks back after the halfway house had thrown him out, loaded and refusing to talk about it. During the few days he’d stayed with her, she’d sent him to old man Koperkuj to pick up some Qaujimajatuqangit, old-timer Inuit ways, while she worked on Freddie, the super, to take him back. She had some back history with Koperkuj, had rescued him from a bad situation one time. He’d not forgotten.

  Willie had returned from the old man’s schooling brighteyed and babbling at all the traditional knowledge he’d picked up and anxious to get himself back on track. A couple times she’d seen him heading out on foot on the track which led to the old man’s house and he’d smiled and waved. This time she really thought he’d cleaned up his act.

  And now he’d gone missing, four days before Christmas, with a possible murder rap and temperatures hovering on the wrong side of -45°C, or -55°C if you accounted for the wind chill.

  It was hard not to draw the conclusion that Willie Killik was one righteous fool.

  ■ ■ ■

  The snowmobile ride out to old man Koperkuj’s cabin wasn’t far, yet by the time she arrived, Edie was breathless and out of sorts, the super-frozen air boiling in her lungs, the hair in her nostrils pinching, little rocks of ice sitting at the openings to her tear ducts. The old man was slouched in front of his stove smoking a pipe and carving something from a block of soapstone, completely unrattled by the din of the window frames trembling in their sockets, the shriek of the wind roaring across the roof.

  ‘Willie Killik’s gone missing. You any idea where he might be at?’

  The old man put down his awl and puffed a few times on his pipe. His eyes were rheumy and red-rimmed from decades of open fires and tobacco fumes.

  ‘No.’ The old man went back to carving.

  ‘I think he might be in real trouble.’

  The old man sucked his teeth disapprovingly.

  ‘Check out back, in the outhouse. He goes around there sometimes, got something he’s working on. I don’t always hear him come.’ Koperkuj went back to his soapstone, indicating that the encounter was over. He waited until she was at the door then, shaking his head, he added, ‘You young folk never look further than your kneecaps.’

  The outhouse was an old-style qarmait sod house, long since abandoned as a re
sidence, but still perfectly serviceable as a workspace or shed. To get inside, you literally had to walk the plank, a four-by-two balanced precariously on the edge of a rocky ledge, which led downwards to the partially subterranean house. Edie trained her flashlight along its length and trod carefully so as not to slip on the ice. As she reached the door, a piece of corrugated material which looked alarmingly like asbestos, no doubt cannibalized from a construction site, she shouted Willie’s name. No reply. She let herself in, strobing her flashlight around the room. At the far corner she could just make out a work bench. Assorted tools were hung on nails along the back wall. She took a step forward and her foot hit something hard. The flashlight illuminated an arc of wood, immaculately sanded and planed to a gleaming finish. She outlined the object in light. Another arc, parallel to the first, around five feet in length and connected by slats elaborately laced together with what looked like plaited strips of seal hide. A komatik: a beautifully crafted, traditional Inuit sled.

  Stomping the snow off her boots she went back inside Koperkuj’s cabin.

  ‘It’s gorgeous but it doesn’t tell me where Willie Killik might have gone.’

  Koperkuj looked up, unimpressed, grunted and went back to his pipe.

  ‘Then you’re not listening carefully enough,’ he said.

  Edie eyed the old man beadily but it was clear she wasn’t going to get any more out of him.

  ‘You’re lucky we still respect our elders around here,’ she said. ‘Or there’d be one or two I can think of who’d be talking riddles from their assholes.’

  ■ ■ ■

  By the time Edie got back into the hamlet, the place was buzzing with the news that Nancy and Tommy’s baby, Aggie, had been taken. No one was in any doubt that Willie Killik was responsible. After the bad news about Tommy’s death hit, Nancy’s mother, Alice, had put her little granddaughter to bed and gone back to the living room to console Nancy. When she went to check on the child a while later she found the window prised open and the toddler dis- appeared. Her lover gone and now her kid, Nancy had become so deranged with grief that the nurse, worried for her safety, had given her a sedative. The women were at home now, Nancy staring ahead, hands trembling, eyes empty from the Ambien. Her mother sat by the phone biting her lip. When Edie reached out a consoling hand, she cringed and shrugged it away, finding the touch unbearable.