White Heat (43 page)

    Willa
shrugged. 'The guys in Kuujuaq, Toolik and Silliq.'

    She
wasn't surprised by the names. Toolik and Silliq had a reputation, even as far
away as Autisaq. 'Any case,' Willa continued, 'why are you so concerned about
me all of a sudden?'

    She
held her hands up in a gesture half borne of frustration, half of surrender.

    'I
thought the glasshouse was over.'

    'It
was, it is.' Willa sighed. 'What can I tell you?'

    'The
truth would be good.' Edie tugged on her tails. 'That is, if it's not too much
trouble.'

    Willa
raised his eyes to heaven but he went on talking. 'The old man did a bit of
gardening for a percentage of the crop. Saved us from going out there all the
time, drawing attention. Toolik and Silliq moved his product on. I don't know,
maybe they got sore when it all came to a stop, thought Koperkuj had cheated
them out of a profit. Ask me, the old man's gone AWOL. Now, can I have some
peace?'

    She
stood silent for a moment, trying to think of a way to reach him.

    He
turned back to his Xbox. 'That means fuck off, Edie.'

    She
backed away and found herself on the street heading towards the police office.
Someone needed to tell Derek Palliser to check out Toolik and Silliq when he
got back to Kuujuaq. He'd stayed in Autisaq to direct the search for Koperkuj.
It was only fair on the old man and, besides, a warning needed to be sent to
the two men not to go after Willa. She didn't want to wake up one morning to
find that something had happened to him too.

    Derek
Palliser was on the sat phone. When he was done with the call, he made a note on
a map and turned to her with a wary look.

    'Derek,
I've got a lead on the old man. You need to arrest Willa Inukpuk.'

    Derek
shook his head in astonishment. 'Hell, Edie, I do believe you've finally
cracked.'

    She
passed on the information Willa had given her.

    'So
you see, I need him out of harm's way.'

    Derek
Palliser raised his eyes to heaven and reached into the drawer for his gun and
cuffs.

    'Sometimes,
Edie, I wonder what terrible things I did to you in the last life, I really
do.'

    'You
think Toolik and Silliq could have hurt the old man?'

    'You'd
asked me that a month or two ago, I'd have said no way. Now, I don't know.
Something dark is blowing through this island, damn me if I know what.'

    Edie
opened the snow porch into her own house and heard a whistling sound. A hunting
knife landed with a
thunk
in the door frame beside her head.

    'I
gave that knife to Koperkuj myself when we were doing what we were doing.
Recognize it anywhere.' Martie walked over and retrieved the knife, then,
inspecting it, added: 'There's a fault in the first and second serrations. Mike
let me have it for fifty bucks. The old man was a cut- price fuck, even in his
glory days.' She frowned. 'What you doing with it?'

    Edie
made a gesture of surrender. 'I dropped by his cabin, just a social call, some
time past. The old walrus met me with his .22. Thought I might have to defend
myself.'

    'You
took his knife?'

    'Don't
sweat it, Auntie Martie, he'll get it back.'

    'Oh.'
Losing interest. 'You see Palliser?'

    'Yeah.'
A sudden thought struck Edie with the force of a whirling wind. 'Martie, can
you wait here?'

    Martie
rolled her eyes. 'Right, I ain't got nothing else to do.'

    Edie went
out to the meat store, plucked the tin of Andy Taylor's bones from the shelf
and poured them out onto the living-room table, rooting around until she found
a piece of femur that bore knife marks and held it to Koperkuj's blade. The
match was exact.

    'Here's
a thing.'

    Martie
chuckled. 'The old walrus always hated
qalunaat,'
she said. Her face
grew serious once more. 'You don't think. . .?'

    'Uh
nuh. Andy Taylor was shot in the head. But it explains why there were no
snowplane tracks.' Also why the Russians had come back for their 'eider
hunting', though Edie decided to keep that fact to herself.

    Martie
shrugged and lifted her palms in the air: 'I have no idea what you're talking
about.'

    Edie
said: 'A thermal scope.'

    'No
clearer.'

    'Andy
Taylor could have been shot from the air with a thermal scope.' That way the
target didn't have to be visible to the eye. The scope could lock on to body
warmth. But the poor visibility meant the hunters couldn't land. After the
Russians shot Taylor, the old man must have found his body and cut him up.

    'What's
that got to do with the price of fish?' Martie said. She was genuinely
bewildered.

    Edie
shrugged. She didn't know. Not yet.

    Not long
afterwards, Derek Palliser came round to report that Willa was safely locked up
in the police cell. He was flying back to Kuujuaq to question Toolik and
Silliq, leaving Stevie in charge of the internee. Once Pol had dropped him at
Kuujuaq, he'd carry on with the S&R for Koperkuj.

    As he
was about to leave Edie asked him to wait two minutes while she heated
something in the microwave. When it was done, she got out a thermos and poured
in the contents of the jug.

    'For
Willa. It's his favourite. Blood soup.'

    The
following morning she got up early and made bannock bread and hot tea for
breakfast, remembering, as she loaded syrup on her bread, that today was the
day of Simeonie Inukpuk's talk on the future of Autisaq. For as long as she
could recall, Simeonie had been talking about converting the tiny settlement
into some kind of High Arctic commercial hub, a rival to Resolute, which
currently pulled in all the polar expedition business. Most people in Autisaq,
the majority of Autisaqmiut, considered his ideas to be a pig flight, but more
recently, Edie noticed, something had shifted. Autisaqmiut were beginning to
accept that the Arctic had a limited lifespan. When the ice melted and the
waters rose, they wanted to be sure of their place on the liferaft.

    Plus
people were beginning to look around for someone to steer it, and a number,
among them the man himself, had decided that Simeonie Inukpuk might be
Autisaq's best hope. Only yesterday John Tisdale had been round to let Edie know
that Simeonie would see Edie's attendance at the event as a 'positive sign',
hinting that he might even consider giving her back a few hours at the school.

    It
went without saying she had no intention whatsoever of going. Instead, she
spent the early hours cleaning and loading her rifles and hiding them in secret
places around the house. The Russians might be out of the picture for now, but
that didn't mean their trigger man was. She took the stone from her bedside
table, emptied out the sugar tin, put the stone at the bottom and buried it in
sugar.

    Mid-morning,
she pulled on her outerwear and slunk out into the deserted streets. Making her
way up to the store she found Mike Nungaq hunched over the entrance- way. He
had the glove of his right hand in his mouth and was working the key of the
door with his ungloved hand.

    'How
was the talk?' she said.

    He
shrugged. 'I've heard it all before.' He stood up and cracked open the door.
'We're not all like you, Edie.' There was a hint of irritation in his voice.

    He
began stomping the new-fall snow off his boots and smiled a little to remind
her that he was still her friend.

    'I've
got to open up,' he said. 'Will you be at home later?'

    'I
did think I might go to the opera, but if you're coming round . . .'

    Mike
registered the joke but let it slide over him. 'I've got something you might
find interesting.'

    'Sure,'
she said. 'Can you bring a large bottle of pancake syrup? I'm all out. Pay you
when I see you.'

    He
elbowed her. 'Old Mikey's not sweet enough these days, huh?'

    Needing
space to think she took a hunting rifle, went down to the shoreline, jumped
into her kayak and headed west towards Jakeman Fiord. The snow geese, jaegers
and dovekies had already disappeared south. The few summer weeks of sun and
flowers and new life were gone, but, she realized now, she had barely noticed
their progress.

    As
she was pulling the kayak back up onto the beach at Autisaq, she saw Mike
Nungaq coming down to meet her. They went up to the house together. He put her
groceries down inside the snow porch and continued to hover by the door.

    'My
rockhound friend,' he began. 'The one who identified your meteorite?' He delved
into his pack, brought out a small wad of printed papers and held it out to
her. 'He sent me this. Thought you might like to take a look.'

    Edie
took the paper from him, began scanning it.

    'Good
luck, Edie.'

    She
watched him leave, almost running down the path to get away from her. Was it
really so difficult to be her friend these days?

    The
paper turned out to be an excerpted article from the
Geologist,
entitled
'Iridium enrichment in astrobleme-type formations', written by several professors
or researchers from some of the more prestigious American universities. She
began the first sentence, got to the second and felt hopelessly lost.

    A few
brews later she was beginning to understand the abstract, though she'd not had
the courage yet to delve into the main body of the article, let alone to look
at any of the bewildering array of graphs and tables associated with it. The
gist of the piece, she thought, was that iridium-rich meteorites embedded in a
sodium chloride substrate were known to act as a kind of vast geologic plug,
preventing the escape of gas reserves beneath. Remove the plug and the gas was
there, just waiting to be tapped.

    What
she hoped the article confirmed was that her hunch had been right all along.
The stone Beloil and Zemmer had both pursued across the Arctic bore traces of
salt. All anyone who had it needed to do was locate the exact spot from where
Welatok had taken it and they would find gas reserves lying somewhere below the
surface. She imagined the whole of Craig Island sitting on one great tank of
gas. How much would that be worth? Three men's lives? Dozens? Hundreds even?
And what else would have to go? A way of living? The Arctic itself, maybe?

    Pulling
down the sugar tin from the shelf, she dug about for the stone, sitting with it
for a while, moving the weight around between her hands, exploring every little
indentation with her fingers until the pads of her fingertips were sore. This
was why Felix Wagner seemed so indifferent to hunting, why he and Andy Taylor
were so hopeless at it. Wagner had a pretty good idea of where Welatok had
first found the meteorite and was trying to locate the spot without raising too
much interest from others in the same game. He'd covered all bases by playing
Zemmer and Belovsky off against each other. And it had got him killed.

    Edie
went over to the door to the room that would always be Joe's, afraid of what
she might see there, but needing to see it all the same. She pushed the door;
it gave a little, and then jammed. Determined, she pushed harder, first with a
hand, then, when that didn't work, by leaning into it, but the wood seemed
stuck just outside the frame. Then she remembered Sammy mentioning ice heave.
It must have lifted the floorboards. She'd need to take the door off and shave
it a little. Of course, it would be easier just to leave it. She didn't need
the room and she couldn't afford any repairs right now. All the same, even
though she hadn't been in the room since May, to abandon it like that felt
intolerable, an insult to the one who had once inhabited it.

    She
fetched her strongest hunting knife, the one she used to butcher walrus. It
took a while; the hinges had never been oiled and they were gummed up with
paint and, where the paint had peeled, rusted, but Edie was assisted in her
task by the ease with which the wood gave way. It was the first time she could
ever remember being glad for the cheap temporariness of the fittings. Once
she'd got the hinges off, it was a small matter to heave the door away from its
frame and lay it roughly up against the wall.