White Heat (44 page)

    She
flipped on the light switch in the room, went in and was met by a surreal
sight. In places the floorboards had been forced upwards until they formed taut
little slopes and hillocks. In other places, they seemed to have sunk into the
supporting beams beneath them, or perhaps it was that the supporting beams had
risen up to meet them. The ice had heaved up the supporting stilts and they in
turn had pushed the beams up towards the floorboards. Clots of yellow foam
insulator had been forced up through the cracks in the boards, giving the floor
a diseased look, as though it had been attacked by some virulent fungus. It
must have been this movement, she thought, which had caused the creaks and
rattles she had for many months attributed to the
puikaktuq.
She'd been
too drunk or too hungover to put the pieces together.

    Aside
from the floor, which, admittedly, was pretty bad, the room wasn't far off how
Joe had left it; his nursing textbooks still sat on the shelves, his
stethoscope was there, too, along with the nurse's electronic thermometer Edie
had bought him for Christmas. The bedclothes had long since been stripped and
burned, but the mattress and the frame remained. She hadn't touched it since
Joe's death but now she went and sat down on it. In all the tumult of wood
against ice, the frame had shuffled forward and wobbled on the uneven floor.
For the first time, Edie was looking around the walls of his room from his
perspective. It was from here that Joe saw the world.

    Standing
up, she began to push the bed into the corner, but the front leg nearest the
corner jarred against some warping of the wood. Getting down on her knees she
peered under the bed at the stuck leg, meaning to lift it over the warp in the
boards. She was about to heave the bed frame when she felt something crackle
under her little finger, a wrapper, perhaps from a packet of cookies or a candy
bar. She pulled at it, but it seemed to be stuck in the crack between the
floorboards and would not move.

    Edie
withdrew her arm and cursed her lack of domestic care. She dragged the bed away
from the corner. As she'd thought, there was a piece of transparent cellophane,
some kind of wrapper, sticking up from the wood. It must have fallen through
the crack when the boards moved. She bent to pull it up, but it was as
immovable as before. There was nothing for it, Edie thought, but to work the
wrapper from its hiding place. Moving closer, she saw that, just in the spot
where the wrapper protruded, the wood had warped into a mound about the size of
a tea cup. The wrapper must have fallen through before the ice heave, then been
pushed back out again. Edie leaned across and pinched the corner between her
thumb and finger and pulled. She thought to get her knife and simply cut it
off, but something stopped her. In any case, it was giving way now, the corner
growing larger bit by bit until she could see it was a piece of plastic film,
Saran Wrap perhaps, folded several times into a neat square with the remains of
something inside. Out of simple curiosity she held it closer to her face.
Inside there were smears of what looked like chocolate and, in among them, a
few deep brown flakes. Holding the wrapper up to the window, she could now see
several strands of blue-black hair: hair so unmistakeably Joe's that she
dropped the film momentarily. Then, picking it up again, she put it in her
pocket, and moved the bed back into its usual place. Taking stock of the room,
it seemed to her that the walls themselves had distorted, as though she was
looking at them through a fairground mirror.

    An
idea was forming in her mind, a huge, unstoppable idea, growing less fragile
minute by minute, like a great ice field at the moment just before it sets
hard. Someone else might have called it a hunch but to Edie this was no work of
her own, but a notion that had been planted in her head by whatever was with
her, what had come to her in Joe's room.

    She
stumbled into the store room and took out her telescopic rifle lens, the same
one she'd used to read the diaries. Part of her wished Derek Palliser was
around, but she also knew that she needed to do this alone. Trembling, she
switched on her desk lamp and held the film close to the light, but her grip
was so uneven that getting a focus on the contents proved impossible.

    Growing
impatient with herself, she stood up after a short while, went to the DVD
player and switched it on. In a few moments, she felt calmed. Taking a bulldog
clip from the desk drawer, she attached the film to the light and used two
hands to steady the lens. The brown flakes resolved in the scope into a series
of papery fragments, not brown close up, but a kind of mottled purple, and
criss-crossed with a series of fine lines into tiny and uneven geometric
shapes.

    Human
skin, she thought, but of an odd, unusual colour, not simply skin that had long
since been discarded or rubbed off, more like skin left out on the tundra. She
moved the scope over the square. Human head hairs, blue-black and dead
straight, and towards the middle of the wrap two of another kind, shorter and
with white follicles at the ends, too short to be pubic, too thin to be from
the eyebrow. More like nostril hair.

    Fumbling
about in the cupboard under the sink, Edie drew out a pair of vinyl washing-up
gloves and pulled them over her hands. She knew that at some later date, a
defence lawyer standing in some southern court might say she had tampered with
the evidence after what she was about to do, but it seemed to her that she was
on the brink of something irreversible, some irrefutable proof written in hair
and skin, and that in the light of this, the inflated to-ing and fro-ing of
some abstract system suddenly seemed impossibly distant.

    Returning
to her desk, she pulled out a piece of paper and laid it across the surface,
placing the square of film carefully on top. Then slowly, painstakingly, she
began unwrapping it, fold by fold. It struck her how neatly it had been done,
with an almost origami-like precision. Nothing Joe did was ever this neat. With
the exception of his nursing textbooks, which he'd always set aside and treated
as though they were made of some delicate, membranous fabric, the remainder of
his few possessions had always been stacked in shaggy piles into which he'd dig
tunnels from time to time, like a lemming.

    She
brought the scope to focus on the purplish brown flakes again. When he came
back from Craig, the skin on Joe's nose and two of his fingers had been
slightly frostbitten from his journey. Frostbite usually made the skin mottle,
then darken, and peel. She prodded the plastic with a gloved finger until she
could see a flake clinging to it, then slowly pulled the wrap open a little
further, mindful of keeping its contents from spilling, until there was before
her on the table a large rectangle, serrated on one side where the plastic had
been torn from the roll.

    Like
the folding, the removal of the sheet had been done with care, she noticed, an
almost perfect serration. Whoever had excised it from the roll had been
meticulous about it. Nothing about this suggested Joe. She spread the sheet
out, and then noticed the hole. It was small, less than the circumference of a
cent, and the edges were relatively smooth, as though it had been sucked out.
Beside it, only a centimetre or so away, there was an indentation of about the
same size and shape, but here the film was still present, though it had been
distorted by stretching. Between these two marks, or rather, very slightly
below them, was another, larger and more uneven impression in the film and it
was here that that the greatest concentration of skin flakes clung to what
looked like grease. Inspecting it more closely, Edie could see a band of stretched
film lying above the hole, running the length of the hole and its twin
indentation. She gazed for a while at the configuration of stretches and
tension marks until she was conscious of a dull ache running along her neck and
realized that she had twisted her head around forty-five degrees to the
horizontal. She straightened up until the ache stopped and slowly turning the
plastic a hundred and eighty degrees she saw it, clear as a good spring day. It
was unmistakeable. Imprinted onto the plastic film was the impression of a
face, with a hole where the left nostril would have been.

    She
was hit by an odd sound then, somewhere between the cry of a baby and the howl
of a wolf, realizing only an instant later that this was her own voice letting
loose the months of grief. Here it was, proof incontrovertible: someone had
murdered Joe Inukpuk and the murder weapon was clinging to her hand.

    The
moment the warning alarm on the instrument panel started beeping Derek Palliser
knew the plane was going down. There was nothing to be done about it because there
was no knowing where the damned pilot had got to and Derek didn't know how to
fly. From where he was sitting, in the co-pilot's seat, the interior of the
plane seemed to disappear off into a deep gloom. The warning bleeps continued
and Derek suddenly found himself transported into a darkened room. It took him
a moment to realize he'd woken up.

    He
brushed his hand over his face, reached out to the clock on the bedside table,
hit the snooze button and deduced from the flashing LED that the power must
have cut sometime in the night. In reaching for his watch he managed to sweep
it off the bedside table onto the floor, so he tried pulling open the drapes,
then remembered it was dark more often than not, now, in September. Soon, the
last sunset of the year would be upon them.

    The
beeping continued; someone was trying to get through on the radio. Derek got
up, turned on the light, pushed on his mukluks and pulled on his down parka,
then picked up his watch, read the time and cursed. There was only one person
who would radio him at four thirty in the morning.

    The
temperature differential hit him full in the face. He made a note to himself to
turn up the thermostat, then remembered that it was Misha who liked to keep the
place overheated, whereas he preferred it cool. Just one of the many ways in
which he didn't miss her. Though it was painful to admit, he'd been having his
suspicions about the timing of her arrival, only a day or two after his
indiscreet conversation with the Russian scientists at the Eureka weather
station. The woman had tipped him completely off-orbit. Was it too fanciful to
imagine she was some kind of spy? He smiled grimly to himself.
Paranoia,
he thought.
Where did I pick that up from?

    In
the comms room he leaned into the mike and greeted Edie Kiglatuk.

    'How
did you know it was me?'

    'Male
intuition.' He was still pissed off at her for treating him as though he was
some kind of personal assistant, to be drafted in at her convenience. 'Is this
about Saomik Koperkuj? I talked to Toolik and Silliq. Nothing doing.' Much
though he disliked the dismal duo, he didn't have anything to link them to the
old man's disappearance.

    'Derek,
you need to get back here.' He noted the tension in her voice.

    'Edie,
I just got home. Stevie's still in Autisaq. Whatever it is, he can handle it.'
He was sick of her telling him what to do. She was beginning to sound like a
bully.

    'I
need you.'

    Wasn't
that what most men wanted, to be needed by a woman? Why, then, did it make him
feel a sudden desperate desire to be somewhere else? He fumbled about in his
pocket for a cigarette then remembered he had his pyjamas on.

    He
said: 'I guess you already know what a crackpot you are.' Reaching into the
desk for one of his many caches of emergency Lucky Strikes, he took one out and
lit it. He waited for the nicotine to hit.

    'Right.'
There was a pause. 'You don't want to help, that's fine. I'll do this on my
own.'

    Derek
said: 'Yes.'

    'Yes
what?'

    'Yes,
you've been doing it on your own since the spring, remember? And some time soon
I'm going to have to come in on it.' She cut him off with a little wounded
sounding 'uh huh' which made him feel bad. 'And yes,
unofficially
I'll
help. I'm in Autisaq in a couple of days anyway for the election.' He looked at
his watch. 'Tomorrow, I'm there. You can tell me what you've got up your sleeve
then. If it still fits up your sleeve, that is, what with the giant tangle of
paranoia already there.'

    There
was some interference on the radio for a moment, then Edie's voice came through
mid-sentence,'. . . so it has to be later on today.'

    Dammit,
the woman could be maddening. She was like some appalling avalanche. He sat
back and thought about it. What difference would a day make? He could put his
foot down, but then she'd keep at him. He had finished his business in Kuujuaq
for the time being and planned to fly over anyway. He guessed a few hours
earlier wouldn't make any difference. He could camp down in the detachment
office in Autisaq overnight and be ready to supervise the ballot box first
thing on Wednesday morning. The more he thought about it the more he realized
it might actually work out better that way.