by Tom Clancy
Ms. Cameron stopped at the doorway on the plastered side of the hall, extending her arm and trying a smile. She wore thick wool pants and a heavy, severe coat; despite the smile, she reminded Gorrie of the woman in charge of payroll and expenses at the Constabulary area, a grouchy and disagreeable woman who was suspected to routinely apply fingerprint and DNA tests to chits that came across her desk.
“I apologize for the dust,” said Ms. Cameron, following him into the sitting room. He guessed she was about thirty, though her pudding complexion and heavy eyes could easily belong to someone ten years older. “My brother’s maids—you understand.”
Two couches faced each other in the center of the room, each flanking a pair of elaborately carved mahogany tables. Various pieces of furniture were arrayed around the outer edges. All seemed very old, but none looked the least bit dusty.
“There’s news?” asked Ms. Cameron.
“Ah, no news about your brother, I’m afraid.” Gorrie hadn’t explained the reason for his visit when he called. “I’m here on another matter. To my ken at the moment it is unrelated, though I may revise my opinion. It is a coincidence to be investigated, you understand.”
“I’m afraid I don’t, Chief Inspector.”
“It’s just Inspector, miss,” said Gorrie.
A slight young woman appeared at the door with a tray of tea and store-bought cookies. Her red hair flowed down her shoulders; she wore a white sweater that stopped about an inch above the waistband of a long, blue skirt. She seemed to glide into the room, moving as no servant would ever move in a house.
“Inspector Gorrie,” said Miss Cameron, emphasizing his title. “This is my friend, Melanie Pierce.”
“Hello,” said the woman. Even when she spoke the single word, it was obvious she was a Yank. “Tea?”
“Aye,” said Gorrie.
As Melanie poured the tea, Miss Cameron raised her hand gently to the young woman’s side, and suddenly Gorrie understood.
Well, to each his own, or her own, as the case may be, he thought. Nessa would have had something to say about this, were she still his partner. Certainly the American was a beauty, with a face that would shine for decades before fading to a soft, misty glow. A more poetic mind would compare her to a fairy goddess come down from the hills.
Aye, and Nessa would have snorted at that, for all her talk of artists and paintings.
“I am working on another case, a murder and suicide,” said Gorrie after a sip of the tea. “A sad one. Left a baby.”
He told them about the Mackays, running out the main details and then getting to the meeting Payton had mentioned.
“A drink in the pub?” said Miss Cameron. “My brother?”
“It seemed odd, their gettin’ together,” said Gorrie. “It’s a wee bit out of the way for Mr. Mackay to come up here. They were not chums, were they?”
“Chums, Inspector?”
“I would nae think they were acquaintances,” offered Gorrie.
The dead man’s sister obviously didn’t know her brother well enough to account for all of his friends. The thought occurred to Gorrie that perhaps homosexuality ran in the family, but he dismissed it; there seemed no chance of that on Mackay’s account. The man was hetero to a fault.
“Your brother was never married?” Gorrie asked.
“No. There were some, a few women, but gradually I think Ewie came to decide he liked the single life.” Miss Cameron slipped her hand onto the couch, lacing it over her friend’s.
“Perhaps there’s an address book?” Gorrie prompted. “Or if it was on official business of some sort—”
“We can look in his study,” said Miss Cameron, rising. “My brother was very organized, Inspector, so if it was a formal contact, I’m sure it will be recorded in his appointment book.”
It was not; the book indicated his night was free. Edward Mackay’s name was not in the large Rolodex of contacts on Ewie Cameron’s Victorian-era desk, nor could any reference to him be found in the collection of white pads in the top right-hand drawer where the council member apparently kept notes on current business.
“Maybe this man ran into him in the pub and asked about getting a traffic sign or something,” suggested the American.
“He’s not a constituent,” said Gorrie. “Different district.”
“Maybe for the power plant,” said Miss Cameron.
“Very possible,” said Gorrie. He looked over the white pads. The notes were rather cryptic, perhaps taken in response to phone conversations. The top pad, for example, had something to do with lights:
Lts. 3x
Fifty yards- 100.
No budg
Croddle Firth
Gorrie guessed it had to do with a request to add lights along a roadway in a small village about a quarter mile from here—a guess aided by his memory of a recent news item to that effect.
The second pad down had a phone number from London above the words “Lin Firth Brdge.” Halfway down the pages was another line, a question. “Hgh Spec Trprt?”
A small, stone structure that stretched the definition of bridge, Lin Firth Bridge had been repaired six or seven months before. It had been the subject of several news items itself, as the delays there had managed to snarl traffic considerably. The roadway had been completely closed off. Drivers traveling from Black Island south or west had to first go north and east, adding in most cases a good hour if not more to their travels. A headache that, and sure to have caused the poor council member assigned to the oversight committee a fair sight of grief.
Another pad had a note about an upcoming fair. The last two were blank. Gorrie returned the pads to the drawer. He looked through some of Cameron’s files and the rest of the desk without finding anything of note. There was no obvious connection between Cameron and Mackay, save for the alleged sighting in an obscure pub by a man who under other circumstances might be judged a suspect in the murder.
Miss Cameron had left Gorrie to explore the study on his own. He closed the desk, glancing around the room at the bookcases with their neatly aligned leather-clad volumes. Here and there a framed photograph stood in front of the books—Ewie with his parents, Ewie with a dog, Ewie receiving a certificate of some sort from a local vicar. Unlike the sitting room, here there truly was dust; obviously the maids were not allowed to enter.
A man’s life ran to this—dusty photographs, odd notes on a pad, an empty house. Gorrie made sure he had closed the desk drawers, then went to say good-bye to Miss Cameron and her friend.
Inverness, Scotland
Running late to his appointment with Cardha Duff, Inspector Gorrie stopped at a pub near Walder Street to ring her and tell her of the delay. The phone rang and rang, which made him uneasy; he hadn’t thought she’d supply much in the way of information, but wouldn’t know what to think if she skipped the interview. Maybe the whole thing would be too much for her, he thought—cause of the murder and suicide, all that—but she hadn’t sounded particularly distraught on the phone the other day.
The coroner wouldn’t be preparing his report on the deaths for another few days yet, but the head of CID had left a note on Gorrie’s desk asking when the case might be wrapped up. The tabloid chaps had come up from London as well as Glasgow and Edinburgh, and now were calling him every few hours to see if there were new developments. At least he shielded Gorrie from the rabble.
Gorrie wended his way from Rosmarkie through Inverness, off toward Clava Cairns and the hamlet where Cardha’s flat lay. He turned off the main road into a small set of apartment buildings, then took another turn and found his way blocked by an ambulance.
“Inspector—we were just sending for you,” yelled a voice from the other side of the ambulance.
It belonged to Robertson, the constable who had changed the nappies on the Mackay child.
“What’s going on here, Sergeant?” he asked the constable.
“Another suicide, looks like, Inspector, according to the ambulance people. Been dead sinc
e sometime last night, they think.” Robertson frowned deeply and shook his head. Handling three deaths in less than a week might rate as a record for a constable in the Inverness Command Area as far back as the war.
“Wouldn’t be at 212?” said Gorrie.
“It is, sir. A Cardha Duff, going by the license. Not a good photo.”
“Rarely are,” Gorrie told him, walking up toward the building.
The thing that struck Gorrie immediately was that Cardha Duff could in no way be considered beautiful, especially in comparison to Claire Mackay. Few people looked good in death, and this woman looked especially bad, her nose and eyes swollen red, her mouth frozen in what might have been an agonized shout for help. But even allowing for all that, it was clear that she offered no challenge to Ed Mackay’s wife in the looks department. The most attractive thing about her was her red hair, which even Gorrie, no expert, could tell spent most of the week frizzed into unmanageable odds and ends.
Just now the hair lay matted to one side of her head, a twisted dirty tangle that pointed away from her ghost-white face. Cardha Duff’s body sprawled face-up in front of a TV, a few feet from the couch. Her left arm lay out as if in supplication. She had a bandage at the inside joint of the elbow; she’d obviously given blood the day before she died.
A final act of charity before death.
“Has forensics been called?” Gorrie asked the constable who’d been watching the door.
“On the way, sir. Sergeant Robertson took care of it straightaway.”
The ambulance people stood at the side of the room, waiting to hear what they should do. Gorrie wanted to know how the body was when they found it; they assured him they’d only moved it a little, ascertaining she was dead.
“The neighbor, she saw us,” volunteered the driver.
“Which neighbor was that, son?”
“Gray-haired woman, Mrs. Peters. 213. She thought something was amiss because she didn’t answer to the knock. Came in with us.”
Gorrie nodded. “Now tell me why you think it’s a suicide.”
“Pills on the floor, one near the radiator and another under the sink,” said the other attendant quickly. She had a stud in her nose and spoke with a Lowlands accent—Gorrie wasn’t sure which prejudiced his mind worse.
“And how d’you know that, lass?”
“I’m not your lass now, am I?” She’d flushed, though, and Gorrie waited her out. “I went to use the john and I saw it. I didn’t touch a thing. Not a thing,” she said finally.
“How long have you been on the job?” he asked her.
“A few weeks. What is it to you?”
Gorrie went to the bathroom. Though the scene was now obviously contaminated, he used a pencil to flick on the light, peered in a moment, then lowered himself to his knees and looked around. He could see a small capsule below the edge of the towel rack, near the molding and radiator. Another sat below the baseboard casing.
Cold capsules, he thought, but the lads at the lab would be able to tell. Best to leave them to be photographed for position.
If they were cold medicine, most likely they would match the bottle at the bottom of the empty waste bin—Talisniff. Wife used to give him that for the sniffles. There was another bottle of tiny pills that seemed to be for a thyroid condition, along with the usual feminine paraphernalia.
“Wait in the ambulance would you, both of you,” the inspector told the attendants. “Don’t go until I release you—myself, no one else.”
They would end up staying well past dinner, and Gorrie would feel sorry for being so peevish.
SEVEN
ABOVE MCMURDO SOUND, ANTARCTICA (77°88’ S, 166°73’ E)
MARCH 12, 2002
PETE NIMEC FELT A HAND TOUCH HIS SHOULDER, AND came awake at once. In his home, always within quick reach of a weapon, he could succeed at something more than light sleep. Now he straightened up with a start that jostled his sling seat on its rail.
He blinked away scraps of a horrendous dream brought on by fatigue: Gordian dead on a concrete floor, the killer who’d butchered four of Tom Ricci’s men in the Ontario raid standing over him.
In his dream, the killer had again done his bloody work like a precision machine, but the savage pride in his eyes was all too human.
Nimec tried to imagine how Ricci had been affected by Ontario, imagine what private anguish it had left him to wrestle down in the depths of night.
He took a breath to relax and settled into the canvas webbing of his seat. Master Sergeant Barry, a loadmaster with the Air National Guard’s 109th Airlift Wing—and more specifically, its flying component, the 139th Tactical Squadron—stood before him in the cabin of the Hercules ski bird. He was mouthing words Nimec couldn’t hear.
Nimec held up a finger to indicate he needed a second, then popped out the foam earplugs he was given at the Clothing Distribution Center in Christchurch.
The ceaseless noise and vibration of the engines throbbed into his auditory canals.
Barry leaned forward, cranking his voice above the racket. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Nimec. Captain Evers is a huge booster of UpLink International, and he’d like to show you the view from the flight deck. This close to touchdown it’s really impressive.”
Nimec was relieved. He’d been ready to learn they’d boomeranged again. Air travel from New Zealand to Antarctica took eight hours by turboprop, slightly under that if you caught a nice tailwind. The previous day a heavy fog over the continent had forced his flight to double back just short of the point of safe return—about sixty degrees south, two thirds of the way there—resulting in seven wasted hours in the sky. The day before that one wasn’t quite as bad; his plane had returned to Cheech only an hour out.
Nimec looked up at the young loadie. The Herc’s cargo hold was a crude, bare space designed for maximum tonnage rather than comfort, windowless except for a few small portholes at the front and rear. He felt as if he’d gotten stuffed into the barrel of a rumbling cement mixer.
“Tell me the deck’s got soundproofing,” he said. “Please.”
“New acoustical panels, sir—”
“Lead the way.”
Nimec rose stiffly in his cold-weather gear. The red wind parka, jump suit, goggles, mittens, bunny boots, and thermal undergarments were his own, as were the extras in his packs. At the terminal prior to departure, loaners had been issued to passengers whose clothing and equipment hadn’t met the emergency survival specs mandated by the CDC under the United States Antarctic Program’s rule book.
The same guidelines had required Nimec to be physically qualified before leaving San Jose. This meant a complete medical checkup, which included bending over an examining table for a latex-gloved finger probe, that truest and most humbling of equalizers. He’d also needed to visit the dentist, who’d replaced a loose filling and informed him he was charmed to have already gotten his wisdom teeth yanked, since no one could be PQ’d with any still rooted in his mouth. Because medical facilities on the continent were thinly spread—and pharmaceutical stores limited—a minor health problem like an impacted molar or gum infection could easily become the sort of crisis that required an evac in perilous weather. It was a dreaded scenario that USAP took great pains to avoid.
As Barry led him to the forward bulkhead, Nimec saw that several of the twenty-five men and women who shared the hold with him were stretched out against the supply pallets jamming the aisle, their duffels and bedrolls tossed loosely atop the wooden planks. The majority were American researchers and support workers traveling to MacTown. There were also some drillers headed for Scott-Edmondson at the Pole, an Italian biological team on their way to Terra Nova Station, and a group of boisterous Russians hitching a partial ride to Vostok, located deep in the continent’s interior at the coldest spot on earth . . . which seemed curiously appropriate given their national origin. The rest were extreme skiers from Australia who’d somehow arranged for slots aboard the flight and had occupied five consecutive seats to his right at
takeoff.
Out to make the first traverse of some polar mountain range, the Aussies annoyed Nimec despite their attempts to hobnob. He had trouble with people who took frivolous risks with life, as if its loss could be recouped like money gambled away at a casino. He understood the competitive impulses that drove them, but had seen too many men and women put themselves in jeopardy—and sometimes die unlauded—for better reasons than seeking thrills and trophies.
Barry ushered him into the cockpit and then ducked out the bulkhead door. Occupied by a pilot, copilot, flight engineer, and navigator, the compartment was lined with analog display consoles that showed the true age of the plane, although they’d been gussied with some racked digital avionics. As promised, its sound insulation dampened the roar of the Allisons, and the field of view offered by the front and side windows was magnificent.
The pilot turned from his instrument panel to glance at Nimec.
“Greetings,” he said. “I’m Captain Rich Evers. Enjoy the scenery, we’ve got ideal approach conditions.”
“Thanks,” Nimec said. “I appreciate the invite.”
The pilot nodded, turned back to his panel.
“Wouldn’t want you to think I’m trying to sway anybody about my niece’s job ap with your company . . . it’d be at that new satellite radio station UpLink just launched,” he said innocently. “Her name’s Patricia Miller, super kid, graduated college with honors. A communications major. Her friends call her Trish.”
Nimec looked at the back of his head.
“Trish.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m sure she’ll get a square evaluation.”
Evers nodded again.
Nimec moved to a window as they descended through wisps of scattered, patchy clouds. Soon the ocean came into sight beneath the Herc’s nose, its calm ice-speckled surface resembling a glass tabletop covered with flaked and broken sugar cubes.