White Heat (16 page)

    Still,
there were a number of oddities to the story, the first of which was Taylor
himself. Why did he return so quickly after the Wagner business? Edie said he
needed the money and maybe he did, but why then had he seemed so nervy? Edie
mentioned he'd been drinking the night before they went out. Then there was the
fact that Joe had skied all the way from Craig to fetch help. Usually an Inuk
would wait out a storm, even if there
was
someone missing. If Joe had
killed Taylor, accidentally or otherwise, would he have gone for help? Except
as a cover, perhaps?

    Maybe
Joe had buried the body under rocks? That might explain why they hadn't found
any trace of Taylor. On the other hand, Robert Patma had said Joe had been
rambling and incoherent. Surely, in his confusion, he would have given himself
away.

    Derek's
train of thought was interrupted by the phone ringing. He didn't feel like
talking but he picked up anyway. It was the mayor.

    'Hey,
Derek. Flight back OK?'

    Derek
shifted the papers on his desk around. 'I'm guessing you didn't find the body
already.'

    There
was a noisy pause and what could either have been interference on the line,
very common up at these latitudes, or a cough of irritation.

    'Martie
and Sammy will be flying out to Craig just as soon as the weather improves.'

    Simeonie
had a way of making you feel you were the sled dog and he held the tracing.

    'You
tell the family yet?' he said.

    'Not
yet. I'm waiting for confirmation on next of kin.'

    'Be
sure you don't get their hopes up.' That little cough again, held back just
enough to communicate the effort Simeonie was making to seem reasonable. 'Best
all round we just be honest, eh? It's four days now since the man went missing.
Qalunaat
couldn't take a piss on his own without assistance. He's
inuviniq,
a dead man. It might be more helpful to the family to know that we'd
seen the body from the air but couldn't land to retrieve it. That way family
gets closure and we don't have a missing person on our hands.'

    So
that was what the call was all about. Simeonie had a point: finding Taylor
alive was about as likely as a branch of Prada opening up in Kuujuaq. Whether
there was a body or not, Simeonie wanted Andy Taylor buried. Missing persons
made longer headlines than dead ones. Any uncertainty might send a flush of
southerners up to Autisaq asking awkward questions. All the same, in the law's
eyes Andy Taylor wasn't officially dead until a body had been found or a lot
more time had passed.

    The
line crackled and all Derek could hear was the wailing of some Chinese opera.
Then Simeonie's thin, insistent voice returned. The mayor was in the middle of
saying something about his nephew.

    'There's
money for this kind of thing. Suicide prevention. One of the things I'm
thinking, it might help the initiative to have more of a police presence. Build
a brand-new detachment right here in Autisaq, expand on the existing facility,
install all the latest equipment, budget for travel. Set up a cadet force,
boys' club kind of thing, roll it out across the region, nail this suicide
stuff.'

    'Strictly
speaking,' Derek said, 'we should fly in a pathologist, examine Joe Inukpuk's
body directly.'

    The
mayor barked instructions to someone in the office then he came back on the
line.

    'Look,
the kid was my nephew.' A bleeding-heart tone now. 'I just want to make sure other
families don't have to go through this and I think, with the right funding, you
could be at the heart of that.'

    The
mayor was trying to bulldoze his way back to normality.

    Derek
had to hand it to him. He was good.

    The
sound of distant voices came on the line. 'I have to go,' Simeonie said
suddenly. 'Development consultants. Derek, we're on the same page here. Write
your report: an accidental death and a suicide. Do the right thing. Let Joe's
family bury his body.'

    The
line went dead. Derek swung violently on his chair. He wanted to punch someone.
Instead, he lit a cigarette. He'd hardly taken his first drag when the phone
rang again.

    'Let
me speak to the other fellow.' Derek recognized the voice immediately. Tom
Silliq.

    'Fuck
off.' Derek sent the phone clattering back into its cradle. The graffito sprang
to mind. Asshole.

    Stevie
left it a few minutes before calling across: 'Like a brew, D?'

    A
while later, the computer pinged to announce the arrival of an email. The
research office in Ottawa hadn't found any close living relatives for Andy
Taylor. No record that he was ever married or had any kids. His next of kin
seemed to be a forty-six-year-old man in British Columbia, a third cousin.
Derek dialled the number. A woman answered and said the cousin had moved on and
no, she didn't have any of his contact details.

    Derek
punched in the number for the mayor's office in Autisaq, then thought better of
it, and looked up the number for Mike Nungaq in the Northern Store instead.
Mike answered after the first ring.

    The
voice on the end of the line sounded spacey. Derek chewed his lip. His gut told
him not to start anything public that could be misconstrued as an
investigation. He summoned a tone of casual professionalism. 'Can you get a
message to Edie to call me? I'm working on the report into Joe's death. Just
need to check a couple of things.'

    A
long time later, the phone rang in Derek's office. It was Edie.

    'How
are you doing?' Derek said, then kicked himself. The woman had just lost her
stepson. How did he suppose she was doing?

    She
hesitated for a long moment. 'I'm guessing this isn't a social call.'

    Derek
picked a cigarette butt out of the ashtray and began turning it around in his
fingers. He felt slightly affronted by Edie's tone.

    'Edie,
can you tell me what you know about Andy Taylor?'

    'What,
like, he was
nutaraqpaluktuq,
bad-tempered, hysterical?'

    'I
was hoping for something more specific. He tell you where he came from? Ever mention
a girlfriend, family?'

    'Nope
and nope. Guns N' Roses fan's about all I know. Can't you get this stuff from
some police database?'

    'Maybe.
Listen, do you think that Fairfax fella might know a bit more about him?'

    'I
have his number somewhere, you want to give him a call.' She sounded pleased
that he was investigating. Evidently, it hadn't occurred to her that her
stepson might be implicated in Taylor's death. He heard her rooting around
somewhere. Moments later she came back to the phone and rattled off a strange
configuration of numbers.

    'That
Canadian?'

    'Uh
nuh . . . Overseas. London, I think.' Edie hesitated. 'Derek, you really think
Joe killed himself?' He felt her willing him to be on her side.

    He
paused. 'I guess so,' he said. 'Yeah.'

    'I
have to go,' she said stiffly. Evidently she was having a hard time accepting
what had happened. He didn't blame her for that. He wasn't finding it so easy
himself.

    Derek
spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to draft his preliminary report,
but over and over again his mind wandered back to the conversation with
Simeonie. It was a pretty good offer. Put the whole Joe and Andy Taylor thing
to bed with the minimum of fuss and be rewarded with a brand-new detachment building
and some proper back-up. Most likely Taylor's body would never be found and
even if it was, animals or snow would have made sure it was impossible to
determine the cause of death anyway.

    Later,
after Stevie had left for the day, he took himself for a walk to help chew
things over. As he turned out onto the street the bony dog he'd seen earlier
appeared, this time in the company of another, larger husky with a brown patch
over one eye and notched ears marking fights the animal itself had long since forgotten.
The two were bent low, hackles up, smiling ugly smiles, locked in some kind of
peripatetic confrontation. The large one lunged and caught the other in the
tenderness of the neck. A fully fledged fight started up.

    Derek
reached for his gun then hesitated. Thirty years ago a bunch of Mounties had
shot every last sled dog in Kuujuaq after a rogue animal mauled a kid to death.
The act had caused a world of pain, revenge attacks, families pitted against
one another. It was this more than anything that led to the setting up of the
High Arctic indigenous police force. The sergeant reholstered his weapon, moved
into the fray, grabbed the smaller of the two dogs by its ruff and hauled it
off.

    For a
while he walked along the edge of the shoreline then, returning, set his usual
supper of noodles and tinned steak on the table and, while it was cooling
sufficiently to eat, he pulled on his shitkickers and went out to the lemming
shed. He was bothered how much the conversation with Edie had unsettled him but
he couldn't quite put his finger on why. Being with the lemmings sometimes
shifted his thinking. Almost always made him feel better anyhow.

    He
reached the door and found it slightly ajar. This was odd. There had been no
reason for anyone to go into the shed while he was away. He entered. It was dim
inside but there was light enough to see the bodies of a dozen lemmings
scattered about the floor in grotesque formation.

    Ignoring
his cooling supper, he grabbed his dog catcher from the snow porch and went
back out into the night.

    Kuujuaq's
three streets were empty. Those who were going out hunting after work had
already gone. People were inside eating or else watching TV. Gradually, one by one,
he rounded up the huskies. It took him four hours, at the end of which, he had
twelve huskies in the pound. He went to his equipment shed, fetched some dog
chow and threw enough into the cages to keep the dogs quiet until morning.
Then, his anger sated a little by sheer exhaustion, he took on the dismal
business of cleaning up the lemming shed.

    This
was just the first act, he thought. It was his own fault, for being so passive.
Unless he found some way to reassert his authority Silliq and Toolik would go
on and on exacting revenge on him until he was eventually driven out. He
thought about Simeonie's offer again. What the mayor was asking him to do was
wrong. It was his duty to investigate all the possibilities surrounding Andy
Taylor's fate. Right now, though, the prospect of a move to Autisaq had never
looked more attractive.

    He
reheated the noodles in the microwave then took a long, hot shower. By the time
he was done, it was half past two and brilliant sunshine. Knowing he wouldn't
sleep, there seemed no point in going to bed. Instead he went back into the
office, made some tea, switched on his computer and keyed in Misha's name. He
waited for what seemed like an age for the page of search results to load, then
reached down and switched off the CPU.

    For a
few moments he leaned back in his chair, feeling his self-respect return. By
now it was nearly three, not far off eight o'clock in the morning London time.
Taking a deep breath he dialled Bill Fairfax's number. A voice answered.

    Derek
Palliser ran through in his mind just what an investigation into Andy Taylor's
fate might achieve. Then he replaced the phone in the cradle, tore up the
number and threw it in the trash.

    The
tests on Joe Inukpuk's body confirming his death from an overdose of Vicodin
had been back a week when his family took his body out to Craig Island and laid
it under a cairn on the cliffs overlooking Jones Sound.

    The
burial had created the usual battles between tradition and modernity; Minnie
had wanted Joe buried in the cemetery by the airstrip, Christian-style, but
Sammy had overruled her: his son's body would be left out on the land in the
old-time way. Edie was pleased about that. She'd often spoken with Joe about
his beliefs and though there were elements of the Christian story that appealed
to him, like her, he'd never been wholly convinced by it.

    Joe
had believed in what he saw all around him: nature, spirits and the land. It
tended to be the older generation, the ones who'd been born on the east coast
of Hudson Bay, nearly three thousand kilometres to the south, and forcibly
removed in the 1950s to populate Ellesmere, who clung most fervently to
Christianity. It was no wonder, Edie thought, that these new settlers found
particular comfort in the old biblical stories of banishment and exile; they
had been through many of the same things. Joe, on the other hand, belonged to a
generation of High Arctic Inuit who saw themselves as Ellesmere Islanders,
natives of Umingmak Nuna, or Musk-Ox Land, as they preferred to call it.
Stories of expulsion and promised lands had no real hold on him. For Joe,
Ellesmere Island
was
the promised land. It was incredible that he should
have killed himself in the place he so loved.