No Cherubs for Melanie (33 page)

The familiar unpleasant odour guided him the last hundred yards or so, but thankfully the frost had rendered torpid both the stench and the bugs. Retrieving the stout stick he'd used the previous evening, he jabbed the ground until he found the edge of the pit and without concern started tearing at the matted covering. The intensity of fetor increased nauseatingly as the hole developed, but he stuck to the task and within a minute had pulled aside a sizeable chunk.

Bliss had given the probable contents of the pit a great deal of consideration since finding it and, although he was fully braced to encounter the mouldering carcass of a dead bear, nothing could have prepared him for the carnage he actually found. Shrinking back, he steadied himself against the nearest tree while he vomited and mentally fought against horrific images.

At least half a dozen partially decomposed bear carcasses had been flung willy-nilly into the pit and were heaving with maggots and insects, as if the food chain had been slammed into reverse. He slumped to the ground and stared in horror as the bloated white grubs crawled in and out of eyeless sockets and greasy looking beetles clambered around gaping wounds. This is the life of death, he thought, feeling sorrow for the once giant creatures. In life, the bears would have easily clawed away the revolting bugs, but in death the roles were reversed. The tiny predators had nothing to fear from these bears' paws — they were clearly missing, all roughly chopped off at the wrists.

But his eyes and mind had reserved the most sickening sight for last, hoping perhaps that it would go away. It would not. Dumped atop the rotting heap was the body of a bald eagle — Eddie, without a doubt. Bliss easily
recognized the stout beak and the blood-spattered, lolling head, but someone had ripped out all the raptor's wing and tail feathers, reducing the magnificently plumed predator to a scrawny battery hen. He shook his head in horrified disbelief, wondering how Margaret might attempt to rationalize such butchery. No wonder she discourages visitors, he thought, and vomited again.

If ever Jung needed proof of his theorem of synchronicity, this would be it, thought Bliss, as he recalled how, just a week or so earlier, he had been wandering the deserted concourse of Toronto's airport late at night, scavenging for reading material as he waited to get hold of Samantha. Bored, willing to read anything, he'd been through a stack of tourist information pamphlets (settling on a visit to Niagara Falls when his mission was accomplished), and had studied the airport bylaws and fire regulations in full, twice. In desperation, he had picked up an environmentalist group's leaflet about the illegal trade in wild animals. Casting his mind back, he recalled what he'd read about bears. “Bear paw soup is sold for as much as $2,000 a tureen in specialist Korean restaurants,” it had claimed. Written by a bunch of lefty apocalyptic enviro-holocaust types in torn jeans, he had assumed as he sceptically scanned the article, but now one sickening glance down into the chamber was all the confirmation he needed.

“Bear's gall bladders,” the pamphlet had disparagingly reported, “are wizard aphrodisiac according to some Chinese, and are imbued with magical abilities to cure sclerosis of the liver and dislodge gall-stones, according to others who pay $45,000 or more for each one.” The bears' hacked open stomachs, now fly-blown and blackened by decay, were all the proof he needed that Margaret's father had not been conned — this island was indeed a gold mine.

Samantha and her companions landed for breakfast at a small airfield an hour and a half north of Toronto, just as the sharply angled sun was becoming unbearable through her side window.

This looks like a scrap yard, she thought, noticing that one corner of a rust-streaked corrugated iron hangar appeared to be dissolving back into the ground, and several small planes with chunks missing had been abandoned where they had fallen. As they walked across the crazy-paving runway to the old wooden crew hut, Samantha wondered aloud if the Wright Brothers might still be around.

“This is Canada,” said the pilot huffily. “Not the States.”

They were expected. The detective sergeant had radioed ahead and ordered breakfast.

“I'll pay,” offered Bryan, feeling that he owed them.

Phillips refused with a dismissive wave. “It's taken care of.”

Samantha, overwhelmed by lack of sleep, jet-lag, post-partum blues, and the trauma of dealing with a delinquent parent, folded her arms on the table and crashed out for the entire twenty minutes. The bulky detective sergeant, clearly a happy eater, concentrated on his four fried eggs, deck of sliced ham, and a mountain of French toast while begrudgingly responding to Peter Bryan's attempted conversation.

“The plane crash…What sort of plane; how many passengers?” asked Bryan, imagining something the size of an Airbus.

“Prop,” said the detective, circling a loaded fork in the air. “Four.”

“Fatalities?”

“Humph.” Which could have meant yes, no, one, or two, but Bryan let it go.

“One, for sure,” interpreted the pilot helpfully after a two-egg silence.

“Possibly two, maybe more,” the detective added in between bites of ham.

They were soon back in the air, heading north, leaving behind the red carpet as the northern forests yielded to the approaching winter.

“I brought some croissants and coffee,” said Bryan to the drowsy Samantha as they took off, but she was already asleep, having shrewdly switched seats without a word.

Four days earlier Bliss, gagging continuously, fished out a lump of rotten bear flesh from the open grave and smothered himself with it, then covered the pit and made off toward the bear trap into which he had almost stumbled just three days earlier. Three days that now seemed a lifetime. The bear trap, he had decided, would provide an ideal hiding place, but to find it he had first to locate the cove where he had skipped pebbles.

With a hunk of rotten bear flesh dripping from one hand and his suitcase in the other he painfully lurched from tree to tree, dragging himself over promontories and jutting headlands, and crawling across beaches until coming to the sign in the sand warning of fatal consequences to trespassers. Standing lopsidedly on the shoreline he sought the groove in the lake bed, which, he now realized, had been made by the keel of a boat æ Margaret's boat, perhaps. The clearly cut trench was as he remembered it, but now there were additional tracks and he saw that a boat trailer with treaded pneumatic tires had been wheeled across the dry sand to the place where a boat had been launched. Following the tracks
back up the shallowly sloping beach he discovered a trailer concealed in a thicket of brush. No wonder Margaret tried to guide me away from the cove, he said to himself. Although that still didn't explain the cigarette butt he'd found — maybe it did. She couldn't have caught and butchered the bears on her own; some of them were twice the weight of a man.

Then the whole picture clicked into place. Margaret was in cahoots with the Indians! In hindsight it was obvious: they'd had a sedated bear in the bottom of their canoe. That was what was under the tarpaulin. Margaret buys captured bears from the Natives, pays them wampum, and they help her with the slaughter and disposal of the bodies. Then she makes a killing from the sale of the paws and gall bladders on the Asian market. It is so obvious, he thought, when you know the answer.

The solution to Melanie's murder had also been obvious, he now realized, as he sat brooding, staring out over the darkening lake, wondering where Margaret could be. If only he had looked for the answer twenty years earlier, how different life would have been, and not just for Margaret and her parents. Looking back on it now, it would have been so simple to crack the case. Just two minutes with the twelve-year-old Margaret would have been enough to alert him to the probability of her guilt. Gordonstone knew that of course, hence his determination to keep Margaret out of harm's way. In retrospect it was so obvious. Who was the only witness? Margaret. The two girls were supposedly playing together prior to Melanie's disappearance, yet he had dismissed her involvement as lightly as brushing off a Mormon at the door.

“Never dismiss anything,” he had been taught at detective training school and had even quoted this maxim to Peter Bryan, yet he had done it again and again. He'd
never stopped doing it. He'd dismissed Margaret as a suspect on her father's say-so, dismissed the glaring evidence that Margaret's house and island sanctuary were a sham. Even where his own family was concerned, he'd dismissed Sarah's concerns that Samantha needed his guidance. And he'd dismissed Sarah altogether. She didn't flee to Gangly George because he was better looking, or even a better lover (he liked to think). She went to him because he had shown her more attention, that was all.

Intrigued by the discovery of the trailer, he rose to scout further into the bushes just off the beach and uncovered the entrance to a cave. The entrance was concealed behind a closely woven mat of slender branches and in the encroaching gloom, even uninjured, he might have balked at entering without a flashlight. Mentally tossing a coin, he won — or lost — and ventured inside.

By Tuesday afternoon, as Samantha and Peter Bryan were landing for fuel at the last airstrip for five hundred miles, Superintendent Edwards sat at his desk building steam.

Bryan's impromptu excuse had backfired when Edwards, with just a hint of suspicion, had pulled his chief inspector's personnel file and called his aging mother — his next of kin — to offer condolences for the injured relative.

“I'm sorry to hear of his Aunt Maud,” he had started, unsure to which branch of Bryan's family she belonged. Sister, or in-law, he wondered.

“Thank you, Superintendent,” she replied, confused. “But my sister's been gone three years now.”

“In the Himalayas?” he asked with feigned innocence.

“No… Hillingdon crematorium,” she replied, nonplussed, assuming he had misspoken. “But she was ninety-four, so our dear Lord gave her a good long stretch.”

Not as long as I'll give Bryan, Edwards thought, then quickly recovered. “Do you happen to know where Peter is?”

“Canada, I think.”

“Canada,” he breathed as a small alarm bell sounded somewhere deep in his mind.

“Yes — I think that's where he said they were going.”

“They? Mrs. Bryan,” he queried with growing distress, “I don't suppose you know who he's with?”

That, she hadn't known. In fact she would not have known anything had her son not needed a plant-sitter at short notice. “I'm not sure,” she continued, then added sotto voce, “Although I suppose it was a young lady. He thinks just because I'm eighty-three I've forgotten what a dirty weekend's like —”

Edwards, impatient, cut in. “How long has he gone for?”

“A few days, maybe a week, he said, but the state he left his place…” she tutted. “I would say he was in a tearing hurry. Wouldn't surprise me if he hasn't eloped with the woman. Mind you, like I was saying to —”

Edwards butted in again, too querulous for idle chitchat. “Did he give you a phone number or address?” Then he added gravely, in case she had been cautioned against revealing information, “It is something of an emergency,”

“No, I've no idea,” she replied guardedly, indignant at being checked. “Who did you say you were?”

“Just a friend,” he said, dropping the phone as if it were a fizzing firework.

The bottom drawer of his desk lay open. Betty-Ann Gordonstone glowered accusingly out at him in the guise of a dog-eared folder. His shredder buzzed briefly, grated reluctantly on the hard-to-digest file, and she was gone.
As Margaret's island drifted into the sunset on Thursday evening, Bliss pressed his eyes against the curtain of blackness in the cave and inched forward, gripping himself against the desire to run, anticipating that at any second some giant snarling creature — or maybe Margaret herself — would lunge at him from the dark depths. Concentrating fearfully on what lay ahead, he stopped and held his breath. The noise of his heartbeat was deafening as, motionless, he strained to hear the slightest scuff of a paw, or the controlled breathing of a creature readying to pounce.

With his fists held at the ready, he froze and waited for the sinister shroud of darkness to lift. A low black mass solidified out of the void in front of him, and he was forced to gasp for air as a shape gradually formed in the blackness. The square corners of a giant steel table protruded out of the murk. With a tremendous sigh of relief his eyes took in the fact that the cave was shallow, no more than a scrape in the rock, and the table occupied most of it.

With his vision adjusted, and fear of imminent attack removed, he searched around the table top and found huge steel shackles chained to each corner. He understood immediately: the environmentalist leaflet had explained, “Buyers of bear's gall bladders usually insist on having a video showing the bladder being removed from a living bear as proof of provenance.”

“So would I,” he had mused at the time, “If I were paying $45,000.” Now he shuddered with the realization that he had found Margaret's killing field, complete with the instrument of butchery — a large knife jammed into a fissure. Grabbing the weapon by its curved bone handle, he turned to retreat, but was stopped by a chilling rebuke. “You could have prevented all this,” said something deep inside him.

Shooting back outside, with the ghosts of a dozen bears in his wake, he was appalled to discover how suddenly the day had dissolved. Another night was falling and the cove was already deep in shadows.

The bear trap, with its promise of shelter and safety, turned out to be trickier than he had imagined. A drop the height of a bungalow's eaves would have been daunting to a man with two good legs in broad daylight. For an injured man in twilight it was fearsome. But, thinking quickly, he knotted a rope of the sheets and blankets taken from Margaret's cabin and anchored one end to a tree root on the lip of the crater and lowered himself and his suitcase.