White Heat (6 page)

    They
opened the door into the council chamber and went in. Sammy was already there,
beside him on one side Pauloosie's grandfather Samuelie and on the other,
Sammy's cousin, Otok. Three or four others Edie knew by name, but not well
personally. The driftwood and sealskin chair at the head of the table that had
once been taken by Edie's grandfather, Eliah, was now occupied by Simeonie
Inukpuk, who pointed Edie and Joe to a couple of office chairs brought in
specially and motioned for quiet. The only other woman in the room, Simeonie's
assistant, Sheila Silliq, was taking notes.

    Simeonie
began by thanking them for coming. The council simply wanted to hear from each
of them their version of events, he said. Perhaps, since Edie was present when
Felix Wagner had his
accident,
she might begin.

    Out
of the corner of her eye, Edie saw Sammy glaring at her.

    'Sure,'
she said, 'the
event.'
Thinking,
toe the line.

    Till
the moment the shot echoed out across the sea ice, the day had in fact been
pretty uneventful. In the morning, the party had gone after hare,
unsuccessfully as it turned out. They'd had lunch and in the early afternoon, a
couple of hours before it happened, she had left the two hunters on the leeward
side of the esker at Uimmatisatsaq on Craig Island, within sight of the char
pool. The men said they wanted to try their hands at ice fishing and promised
to start putting up camp. Since the party was low on drinking water and Edie
knew of a nearby berg, she left them to go and fetch freshwater ice. Both men
were carrying rifles, she hadn't seen any bear tracks en route and when she
left them the weather was clear, so she wasn't worried for their safety. She
took her bear dog, Bonehead, with her and, in any case, she reckoned she'd be
gone no longer than an hour or so.

    Edie
paused momentarily to check the expressions on the faces of the men sitting
round the table but Inuit were brought up to be good at hiding their feelings -
you had to be, living in such small communities, where each was so dependent on
the others - and no one was giving anything away. She took a steadying breath
and carried on.

    Afterwards,
Simeonie congratulated her on her recall. She sat back, expecting questions,
and was bewildered when the mayor merely summarized her account, added in a
couple of editing notes for Sheila Silliq then moved on to Joe. Already, then,
she sensed the outcome. Nothing she or Joe could say would make any difference;
the elders were just going through the motions.

    Joe
began to run through his version of the day. He had been in the mayor's office
picking up a consignment of Arctic condoms that had come in on the supply plane
a few days before. The condoms were wrapped in cute packets made to look like
seal or musk ox or walrus, some well- meaning but patronizing southern
initiative to encourage Inuit in the eastern Arctic to have safe sex, as though
everyone didn't already know that the only way to make sex safe In the region
would be to decommission the air-force bases.

    Sometime
in the early afternoon, Sammy had called him through to the comms office. He'd
found his father standing by the radio and doing his best not to look anxious.
Sammy outlined what had happened on Craig, or the bare hones of it. While he
went to check the weather forecast, Joe skimmed down the planned flights log
book to see if any planes were likely to be in the area and could pick up the
party, but there were no flights listed. In any case, when he met Sammy again
briefly in the corridor and exchanged information, it became clear that the
weather was going to make flying out to Craig impossible. That was when Joe
first suggested he head out to the scene by snowmobile.

    The
journey out to Craig had been tough because the winds were gusting and every so
often a blast caught the snowbie and threw it off balance, but the new snow was
at least dry and Joe had ridden the route only last week so he knew where most
of the drifts and open leads were likely to be. When he got near, his
stepmother's dog met him and led him directly to the camp. Edie was calm and
purposeful, clearly in control of the situation. By contrast, Andy Taylor
seemed withdrawn and shaky. Joe described Wagner's condition in some detail. He
was keen to emphasize that Edie had already taken appropriate action, stemming
the flow of blood and covering the wound with plastic to prevent air filling
the thoracic cavity and collapsing the lungs. The bullet had shattered part of
Wagner's collarbone and shredded the flesh beneath and there was what looked
like an exit wound through the scapula. His pulse was racy and weak and it was
clear that he had lost a great deal of blood. More worrying still, he was
showing all the signs of advanced hypovolemic shock. He reckoned at the time
that Wagner's chances of survival were small but he hadn't said so for fear of
discouraging Edie and Andy Taylor, as well as Felix Wagner himself. He knew it
was important that everyone was agreed they were on a mission to save a man's
life.

    Simeonie
wanted to know if waiting for the plane had affected Wagner's chances. Joe was
sure it hadn't helped, but to what degree the wait for the plane had affected
the outcome he couldn't say. It was possible Felix Wagner would have died
anyway.

    The
elders listened to the remainder of Joe's testimony without comment. When he
finished, Sammy Inukpuk asked Edie and Joe to step outside and wait in the
administration office.

    To
pass the time, Edie went into the office kitchen and made tea. While Joe sat at
one of the workstations picking at his nails, Edie sat cradling a hot mug.
Neither felt relaxed enough to talk. Why were they there? As witnesses?
Suspects? Defendants? Edie thought about Derek Palliser. She'd been thinking
about Derek a good deal over the past twenty-four hours, assuming there would
have to be a police investigation into Wagner's death. Now she wasn't so sure.
The mayor usually handled any small community disturbances - drunkenness,
domestic squabbles, petty theft hut this was bigger than that. Any unexpected
death, Derek was automatically called in, wasn't he? She tried to recall the
number of times in the past few years. Only twice, she thought. The first time
was after Johnnie Audlaluk beat his little stepson to death, which must have been
eight or nine years ago. The elders had wanted to deal with the situation
internally, but news of the boy's death reached a relative in Yellowknife and
she had called the Yellowknife police who had in turn alerted Derek Palliser.
Audlaluk was held for psychiatric assessment, later tried and found guilty of
manslaughter. He was still lingering in some secure psychiatric unit somewhere.

    His
case illustrated precisely why the elders preferred not to involve police
unless they had to. Almost everyone in Autisaq, including Johnnie's own
parents, thought it would have been more humane to deal with him the Inuit way;
lake him up to the mountains and, when he was least expecting it, push him off
a cliff. No one said this to the then Constable Palliser, of course, but he'd
picked it up anyway. His insistence on bringing the case to trial had made him
enemies.

    Though
Edie had disagreed with Derek's actions, she had a lingering respect for the
man, which was probably why she had helped him out in the Brown case five years
ago. Everyone else had been in favour of burying that one too. At the end of a
particularly harsh winter a passing hunter had found Samwillie Brown's dead
body out on the land. The foxes had made a meal of him. The council of Elders
had put the death down to an accident or natural causes and the whole thing
would have been buried along with the remains of Samwillie Brown had it not
been for the fact that the arrival of Brown's body back in Autisaq happened to
coincide with one of Derek's routine patrols. The policeman had made himself
extremely unpopular by insisting on another investigation. Samwillie Brown had
been a cheat and a bully and most people were glad to see the back of him. The
only person who seemed genuinely upset by his death was his wife, Ida, who was
also the one person most frequently at the business end of Samwillie's fist.
But that was how it was sometimes. No doubt some southern shrink would label it
co-dependency. Up here in Autisaq it was known as loyalty. Ida had asked Edie
to accompany her to the formal identification of the body. They were friends of
a sort. Ida had stayed over at Edie's house a few times when Samwillie was
drunk enough to be dangerous.

    The
moment Edie saw what remained of the dead man, she was struck by the
parchment-coloured sheen on the skin. After Ida left, she stayed on at the
morgue on the pretence of using the bathroom, returned to the body and lifted
the one remaining eyelid. The eye looked like a lunar eclipse of the sun, the
greyish jelly rimmed by tiny yellow flames, the classic symptoms of
vitaminosis. She went directly from the morgue to Derek's room in the police
office to tell him that, in her opinion, Samwillie Brown had died of an
overdose of vitamin A, which in the Arctic could only mean one thing: the man
had eaten polar-bear liver.

    Derek
listened, then shrugged the information off, pointing out that Samwillie Brown
was a drunk and looked jaundiced most of the time. Edie had been startled by
his casual indifference. Until that moment, she'd had Derek Palliser down as
the old-fashioned type — dedicated, something of an outsider, perhaps, but a
by-the-book kind of man. But now he seemed to be quite determined to abnegate
responsibility. She wondered if something had rattled him, if he'd become
temporarily unhinged. Inuit often said that was what happened when you spent
more time in an office than out on the land; one by one you lost your senses.
After that, you lost your mind.

    Eventually
they went back to the morgue together, Edie lifted Samwillie's one good eye and
Derek Palliser agreed: the flames did seem to indicate vitamin A poisoning.

    A
couple of days later Derek flew in a pathologist who ran tests which confirmed
that Samwillie Brown had died of hypervitaminosis, the deadly overdose of
vitamin A that comes from eating bear liver. Knowing no Inuit, even a drunk
one, would ever be so stupid as to eat bear liver voluntarily, Derek went back
to the house Samwillie and Ida shared, taking Edie's bear dog with him. She
tried to recall which Bonehead it had been. She thought back to the date.
Bonehead the Second most like.

    In
any case, when Derek Palliser insisted on defrosting some hamburger he found at
the back of the meat store, Bonehead Two went crazy at the smell of fresh bear
meat. Not long after that, Ida confessed. What else could she do? The
circumstantial and forensic evidence meshed up. Unable to tolerate Samwillie's
violent and brutish behaviour any more, she'd started feeding her husband raw
hamburger tainted with bear liver. No one seemed to notice him getting sicker
because no one liked him enough to care. Derek Palliser had been promoted to
sergeant for 'an outstanding investigation', but he and Edie realized they'd
both been naive. Autisaq didn't exactly thank Derek Palliser for what he had
done but, with the exception of a few hardliners who hadn't forgiven him for
progressing the Johnnie Audlaluk case, the inhabitants grudgingly accepted he
was just doing his job. They weren't so understanding of Edie.

    Edie and
Joe finished their tea in silence. Pauloosie Allakarialak came skating by the
building, followed by Mike and Etok Nungaq, fresh from closing up the store.
Joe began chewing his nails again. Edie tried not to pull on her pigtails. The
clock swung round to 9 p.m. The sun continued to burn. They could hear muffled
voices coming from the council chamber but couldn't make out any words. After
what seemed like an age, the door to the chamber swung open and Sammy Inukpuk's
weathered face appeared, looking grim. There was something sly or perhaps
evasive, Edie thought, in the speed with which he withdrew back into the room,
as though he were signalling that his loyalties were to the men inside.

    Edie
and Joe followed him in. The elders watched them in silence as they sat. No one
smiled. After a moment Simeonie Inukpuk began to speak in oddly formal tones,
the kind Edie associated with the feds and do-gooders from down south.

    'The
council of Elders has considered the circumstances surrounding the death of the
hunter, Felix Wagner,' Simeonie began, 'and has determined his death was caused
by a bullet fired by him from his own rifle ricocheting off a boulder and
hitting him in the collarbone. There were two witnesses to the accident, Edie
Kiglatuk and the white man, Andrew Taylor, who will confirm this.'

    For a
moment, Edie and Joe sat in astonished silence, then Edie heard Joe gasp,
stiffen, and open his mouth to speak. She elbowed him under the table and shook
her head minutely. Whatever he had to say now would make no difference.

    'The
dead man's family will be informed immediately of the accident. As a matter of
form, Sergeant Palliser will be sent a written report from the council. Given
that the two witnesses to the event are happy to sign an affidavit to the
effect that Felix Wagner's death was caused by a self- inflicted wound, we do
not consider it necessary to ask the police to investigate the matter further.'