'Better than GPS. No LED screens to freeze up.'
Etok's voice floated in from outside. She had returned from the cargo hold at the strip and was giving instructions to someone about where to put the boxes.
'I got a friend I could send this to. He's a nut for space rocks. He could give you a value on it. Do it for free, too, I'll bet.'
'Value?'
'Sure, I mean, it's not like a diamond or anything, but space rocks are usually worth a coupla hundred loonies.'
Edie flicked a hand in the direction of Etok's voice. 'So long as it won't get you into trouble.'
Mike carefully wrapped the rock, pocketed it and winked. 'What the eye doesn't see.'
Edie said: 'It's a shame Etok hates me. You and I could be better friends.'
'That's exactly what she's trying to avoid,' Mike said.
At the door Edie turned back and pointed over at the sealskin parka, wanting to lighten the atmosphere.
'Hey. That's a beautiful piece of needlework.'
Mike said: 'Yeah.' He began to follow her out of the office. 'Minnie Inukpuk made it.' He lowered his voice. 'During one of her good spells. Never got paid for it though. That hunter guy, Wagner, he ordered it.' Mike shrugged. 'We're hoping one of the scientists up for the summer might buy it but Minnie made it to the fellow's specifications. Such a waste.'
Edie went over to the coat, ran a finger down the exquisite fur patchwork, then noticed the hand-written label pinned to it. Instantly she recognized the writing as the same as that on the note clipped to Fairfax's diary. So it was Wagner, not Taylor, who had written the word 'salt'. Then how had the pages got into Taylor's hands?
'Wagner wrote out his measurements, wanted it to be exact. Fussy fellow.'
'Mind if I take it?'
'The coat?' Mike looked confused. 'I don't know, Edie, that's a pretty valuable coat.'
She unpinned the label, held it up for him to see, then slipped it into her pocket, remembering as she did so Taylor's hands fumbling through Wagner's parka right after he got shot. Taylor could have taken the pages from his boss as he was dying. This was beginning to get interesting. It seemed more and more likely that it was something in the pages, the stone or both that got Wagner killed. Maybe Andy Taylor too.
Just then Etok appeared. Mike nodded reassuringly at his wife then lowered his voice. 'Edie, what are you up to?'
'Oh you know, the usual: trouble.' She smiled politely at Etok as she slunk past.
Mike raised his eyes.
Edie said: 'The Wagner fellow, he buy any salt from you?'
'Why would he buy salt?' Mike stared into the middle distance, thinking back. 'Uh nuh, don't think so. That would have been weird. Pretty weird question, come to that.'
Edie pressed a finger to her nose: don't ask. 'Mike, I owe you one. Election comes round, I'm voting Elijah.'
As she walked back to the house she saw John Tisdale waiting for her at the top of the steps and her heart suddenly felt as heavy as an old whalebone.
'Can I come in for a moment?'
'Sure,' she said, ushering him into the front room. She took a while unlacing her boots and taking off her parka. She was trying to imagine what Tisdale might want. He'd never come to her home before.
'A brew sound good?' she said, putting on a bright, brittle little smile.
He nodded. He seemed on edge, she thought.
A few moments later, when she came back with the tea, he was staring ahead, chewing on the cuticle of his right index finger. He thanked her rather too effusively.
He said: 'I've come with bad news.'
'I guess that's why you look like you've been trampled by a herd of stampeding caribou.'
He held up his hands. 'Edie, I think you're great.'
'But?'
'But we're having to make some budget cuts at the school and . . .' He tailed off. She sensed what was coming next. He was about to 'let her go'. She felt for him. He'd woken up to find himself in Simeonie's pocket. A lousy place for any man to be.
'You know,' he said, 'you don't do yourself any favours with the drinking.'
There didn't seem much point in telling him she'd decided to stop.
'I've always supported your wild ideas, well, I've turned a blind eye anyway, but taking the kids to protest outside the mayor's office?' He gave a little laugh. 'I mean. Are you crazy?'
She leaned over and put a hand on his arm.
'It's funny you should say that,' she said.
* * *
Chapter Ten
Derek Palliser shook himself awake, scanned the room and glanced at the clock. It was just after six and he was lying in a pool of his own rapidly cooling sweat. Normally he'd have been up by now sipping the first brew of the day before doing his early morning rounds, but he was sleeping later on account of having his nights disturbed by the heating in the room. When she'd first arrived, Misha complained about the cold, but the heat left him restless and feeling as though he'd barely slept.
Today of all days he needed to feel on top of his game. He was expecting a visit from Jim DeSouza over at the science station on Devon Island. It was a courtesy call, DeSouza said, though Derek didn't quite believe that. DeSouza wanted something. Still, Derek liked the fellow and felt he was someone he could work with. There was mutual respect there. In the three—or was it four?—years he'd been heading up the science station the professor had always been meticulous about consulting Derek on anything that might stray into police territory. And even though it was way out of his area of expertise, DeSouza had always been supportive of Derek's lemming research, promising to help him with media contacts if he ever needed them.
It was a matter of pride that the hamlet and the detachment were looking their best. In particular Derek was worried about loose dogs. The problem was better than it had been, but there remained one or two families who persistently failed to control their animals. He or Stevie would need to pay special visits to these folk.
He took one last look at Misha. It was as much as he could do not to get back between the sheets. There was something about that woman. He reached out for her long, honey-coloured hair.
'Derek, don't be annoying.' As she pushed his arm away with her hand, he felt at once aroused and abandoned.
He washed, shaved and dressed then slipped out of the apartment into the office. He put some coffee on to perk (Misha didn't like tea) and while it was brewing, took a quick turn around Kuujuaq.
When he returned to the office, Stevie was already poring nervously over the computer screen on his desk.
'Dog round?'
Derek blinked a yes.
'Get any?'
A no.
'Which reminds me, D, the kids are loving having the Pie stay. Come over for ribs one day this week, say hi to the old fellow.'
Derek acknowledged Stevie's offer with a flicker of a smile. After Misha had complained about his barking, Derek had sent Piecrust to live with his deputy. He told himself it was stupid, but he missed that dog like crazy. At the same time, he had no intention of paying the Pie a visit. Couldn't bring himself to watch his erstwhile Best Friend going through his hysterical welcome routine only to have to abandon him again. Still, it was good of Stevie to suggest it. Man had his heart in the right place.
He made his usual round of radio check-in calls. Nothing had happened to require his attention. It seemed that the events at Autisaq of a few months back weren't up for discussion. The path lab results had been signed off, the reports written, the forms filed. The official line had stuck. Wagner had died in a hunting accident, Taylor was lost in a blizzard and Joe Inukpuk had taken his own life while confused by hypothermia and distressed about the loss of the men in his charge.
Misha appeared at the door in a quilted top and tight jeans then sashayed past towards the kitchenette, reappearing a moment later with a mug of coffee in her hand. She smiled at Stevie. The constable cracked a grimace and returned to his screen. The hostility was mutual.
Just then the door to the outside bu
rst open. The detachment wasn't yet officially open but Jono Toolik didn't care. He tore in, his face meaty with rage, his right arm swinging a plastic bag like a mace, and emptied the contents of the bag across Derek's desk. Several dozen condoms skittered across the woodwork, each one wrapped in a little cardboard envelope featuring the head of a musk ox. Derek picked up a pack, pretending to inspect it.
'Gee, Jono, I didn't know you cared.'
After the last confrontation, he had run out of reasons to be polite to Toolik and suspected him of allowing his dog to kill Derek's lemmings. He hadn't been able to prove it but he wasn't going to be adding Toolik to his Christmas card list any time soon.
Toolik's face twisted with anger. 'Aitiathlimaqtsi arit, Palliser. Fuck you too. I'd sooner dip my stick in a beluga's ass. The point is, these don't work.'
Derek shrugged. 'Maybe musk ox is the wrong size for you.' He paused for effect. 'Have you tried ptarmigan?'
Toolik's hands balled and he would have thrown some punches had Misha not appeared and stood between the two men. Immediately, Toolik's stance softened. Misha approached Derek's desk and picked up a condom.
'Someone brought us present, how sweet,' sweeping her hand across the pile. 'But these won't even last us a week.'
Jono Toolik wheeled round, unsure how to proceed. Was this some kind of joke?
'I am needing some civilization,' Misha continued. 'You find me in my sculpture studio.' She walked across the room to the back door, turning momentarily to give a flirtatious little wave before letting herself out into the yard where Derek had made her a studio from what had once been his lemming shed.
The instant she was gone there was a tangible sense of relief in the room, as though a blizzard had begun to move off.
Jono Toolik was already backing towards the door with his hands in the surrender position. 'You know what? Just forget it.'
Not long after he left, the science station plane wheezed overhead and Derek grabbed his parka, pulled on his police baseball cap and went outside to the detachment All Terrain Vehicle, ATV, following the Otter's progress through low cloud towards the landing strip.
DeSouza beamed and greeted him like an old friend.
'Nice little settlement you got here.'
Derek nodded. He didn't think the professor meant to sound quite so patronizing.
'We aim to please,' he said.
DeSouza laughed.
Over a lunch of caribou steaks, in the detachment's little dining nook, DeSouza filled the two policemen in with the science station's plans for the summer season. As he talked, his mood grew sombre. The news was all budget cuts and cancelled programmes. Now that NASA had abandoned its plans to send a manned flight to Mars, he said, it would be much more difficult to secure funding in future.
'Years and years of hard work and when we're this close to some significant breakthroughs.' He drew the finger and thumb of his right hand into a pinch.
Stevie shot Derek a look that said: this visit is less fun than I expected.
They finished up lunch and Derek lit a cigarette.
'I guess you never found that hunter guy,' DeSouza said. It was part question, part statement.
Derek shook his head. 'Officially he's missing, presumed dead.'
'Any links to the other guy, Wagner, was it?'
'Andy Taylor worked for him for a while but if you're asking me if the deaths are connected, I'd have to say no, except in so far as the High Arctic's a dangerous place to be clueless.'
DeSouza flicked his head at the pack of cigarettes on the table.
'Mind if I have one?'
Derek pushed the carton across and held out a light. He had the feeling they were about to hear the real purpose behind the professor's visit.
DeSouza sucked in the smoke. 'Reason I came.'
Doing his best to sound casual, Derek replied, 'And there was me, thinking it was for the mental stimulation.'
DeSouza smiled and got back to business. 'No major crisis, nothing like that, only something we need to sort out. Between ourselves.'
Derek and Stevie exchanged glances. Derek took a last drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out. He wanted to look more serious, focused.
'It's the glasshouse.'
The house had been erected a few years back, before DeSouza's time, to investigate whether crops could be grown up beyond the 70th parallel using nothing but solar energy and a water recycling system. The experiment had been a failure and after a few years, the project had been abandoned, though it was still officially part of the station's programme.
'I guess it would have made sense to have taken it down. I thought about it but the logistics sucked.'
The glasshouse stood on an inaccessible bluff overlooking the Colin Archer Peninsula, looking like some freakish transplant from another world. It was miles from the main station complex. Someone must once have thought the bluff was a good place to put it, but no one was going to own up to that now.
'Thing's a bit of an eyesore, but it doesn't represent any significant kind of environmental contaminant, so I'm cool about it,' Derek said.
'When did you last visit?'
'Up on the peninsula there?' Derek thought back. It must have been years ago. 'A while,' he said.
'That explains a lot,' DeSouza said.
Derek wasn't following. 'Like?'
'Like why some loser was able to set up a weed factory in there.'
Derek tried not to look as stupid as he was feeling. He'd had no idea about any factory. Weed wasn't a huge problem on Ellesmere, in the sense that it didn't cause any public order problems, but it did keep young men stuck inside instead of going out on the land and for that alone Derek felt its use was to be discouraged.
DeSouza tipped his head. 'Hydroponics, the lot.'
For a moment Derek felt as though DeSouza might be questioning his competence, then he remembered that the glasshouse was officially the station's thing. This was on DeSouza as much as it was on him.
'Any idea who's responsible?'
DeSouza shrugged. 'Two of ours in it for sure. We did a spot search at the station. They've already been sent back down south, contracts cancelled. But they couldn't have got as far as they did without local help.' His lips pursed, projecting regret. 'We've cleared out the marijuana plants, the hydroponic equipment. It was all quite primitive. But I guess that's no surprise up here.'
'Anything to go on?' Derek asked.
DeSouza leaned into his daypack and drew out a large, tatty-looking metal flask. 'Found this among the plants. Someone's repaired the shoulder strap, used sealskin ties. Kind of a giveaway, don't you think?' He handed it across for inspection.
Derek turned the flask over in his hands and felt his heart take a break. There was no mistaking it. This was the Nashville Predators thermos he'd given Joe Inukpuk a few years back. Still, he wasn't about to tell DeSouza that. He liked the fellow, but he was still qalunaat.
'We'll see what we can do,' he said. 'The two employees, your guys, any police action down south?'
DeSouza shook his head. 'Counterproductive. Far as I'm concerned, it's been dealt with at our end. But one thing I want to be clear about, I won't have drugs around the station. They mess with motivation, everything. I won't allow it.'
Derek didn't much like the way DeSouza was today, telling him how to do his job. Not after the last time, and the professor's ill-tempered lecture about wanting to be left alone to work without interference. He put DeSouza's attitude down to stress. The fellow clearly had a lot on his plate.
'Uh huh,' he said non-committally. 'I got that.'
He waited for DeSouza to leave then went out on the land to give himself a chance to think. The visit had left him antsy and irritable. Chasing petty drug dealers wasn't what
Derek had in mind for himself. And he didn't appreciate any qalunaat telling him how to be native police. You couldn't just go around arresting people or sending them down south. It didn't work that way. Besides, he already had a pretty good idea who
the culprit was and the kid wasn't about to cause any more trouble.
He decided to check on the build-up of moraine around the edges of the small outlet glacier that pushed into the sea just to the east of Kuujuaq. The snow had blown or melted off the land and the breakup was in full swing out on the sea ice. The glacier had shrunk so much that heaps of loose rock were left dangerously exposed on either side. Most Inuit would avoid going anywhere until the ice cleared in August; those who had a particular reason to go to the interior might be tempted to risk travelling on the glaciers until they reached one of the major ice fields or the two or three trans-island passes. This particular glacier, though, was a killer. But, for now, there was nothing Derek could do except to post some notices around town warning travellers to give the place a wide berth, at least until the moraine was more settled.
While he was out, Derek thought he would clamber up to the plateau to check what was happening with the lemming population. Misha's arrival had taken up so much of his time and energy that he'd had to put off the idea of writing the feature for one of the southern newspapers.
Over the past few weeks he had wondered whether he'd done the right thing, welcoming her back. He was beginning to come to the conclusion that during their period apart he had allowed himself to spin stories about their romance that didn't altogether fit the facts.
As he reached the top of the plateau, his eye alighted on movement in the willow. A handful of ptarmigan rose up and fanned out over the Sound. The willow itself appeared restive, in constant motion, and the ground beneath the twigs was littered with lemming droppings and the tell-tale fragments of sedge leaf where the rodents had been feeding. He could feel his interest in the swarm reviving and made a mental note not to allow himself to get so slack again. He needed to be ahead of the pack on this.
On the journey back across the muskeg to Kuujuaq, he made up his mind to take no further action in the matter of the glasshouse. It might have been Joe's flask on the scene but Joe wasn't the sort to have come up with the idea by himself. His brother, Willa, probably had some hand in the operation. But what did any of it matter now? Joe was dead, the glasshouse had been emptied and the distributors sent back where they came from. Next time he was in Autisaq he'd have a word with Willa, but that was all. In a week or so, he'd radio DeSouza and let him know he'd sorted the problem.
White Heat Page 18